Category Archives: word tasting notes

distaff

Posted on March 8, 2017 | 1 comment

This isn’t a word you see as often as you once would, but some writers seem to like it for some purposes. Here are a couple of recent hits from The New York Times:

Her apple-cheeked robustness seemingly hollowed out by the final curtain, Ms. Piper vaulted in a single performance to the top ranks of distaff talent in a town where women across the spectrum of age and experience reigned supreme in 2016. —Matt Wolf, “In a Year of Surprises on the London Stage, Women Held Pride of Place,” January 3, 2017

Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency. —Maureen Dowd, “Girl Talk at Trump Tower,” October 1, 2016

Another recent NYT hit refers to Batwoman as “a distaff crimefighter.”

Distaff is an old-fashioned or newspaperese word for ‘woman’ or ‘female’ or that sort of thing. Sometimes you’ll see references to “the distaff side.” Those who use it likely see it as a handy synonym to enlist in that texturbation they like to think of as “elegant variation” (also known as tawny-gourd-ism; see pontiff and temblor). It seems to be lacking in negative connotations or connections. I mean, what, exactly, is this word distaff anyway? What does it mean? Where does it come from? I’m here to ’splain it for you.

First off, the staff in distaff is the staff in staff, as in shepherd’s staff and flagstaff.

Next, although it is pronounced with a “short” i as in dis (so not “Di staff”), the di is not short for dis- or de-. Which means that distaff does not mean ‘without a staff’. No, it’s from Old English dise (also spelled dis), which is an old Germanic word referring to a bunch of flax for spinning. “Here, spin dis!” A distaff is a staff about 3 feet long that was used for holding flax or wool for spinning into thread. The spinner held the staff under the left arm and drew the flax or wool through the left fingers, and twisted it into thread with the right thumb and forefinger as it was wound onto a spindle.

Oops! Did I say spinner? Sorry, the word is spinster.

Does that sound familiar? Like, hmm, a word for an “old maid”? Yeah. Spinning, you see, was woman’s work – or, anyway, work for women who didn’t have a husband to take care of. Starting in the 1600s, spinster was even the official legal designation in England for a woman who was still unmarried. That was how her name was to be written: “Elizabeth Harris, of London, Spinster.” And of course every spinster had a distaff – after spinning wheels were brought in, the distaff was mounted on the spinning wheel rather than being held under the arm.

Have a look at the shirt you’re wearing. Presumably it’s made of fabric that is composed of threads woven together. Imagine every one of those threads being spun by hand (and then woven together with a loom, and the resulting fabric cut and sewn together by hand). Until the Industrial Revolution, that’s how it was done. It required a lot of very dull work. Badly paid dull work, if clothing was to be at all affordable. Work for women who had nothing better to do – because they weren’t allowed to do anything better. Like, you know, work on rockets.

That’s an anachronistic ha-ha, but the irony is that they did have rockets back when distaffs were used. Remember that spindle that thread was wound onto from the distaff? It was called a rocket. The space projectiles that came later were so named because of the resemblance of shape. (The distaff was also called a rock – different origin than rock as in rock climber or rock as in rock the cradle.)

Well, now women can work on the newer kind of rocket on the staff of NASA. Or, if they want, they can work on the older kind of rocket and rock. Or whatever else. I’m sure a few women – and maybe some men – spin because they like the craft of it. I’m also sure far more now go to “spinning classes” involving stationary bikes. Women have infinitely more things they can do than carry the distaff’s burden and be known as spinsters.

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fog

Posted on March 6, 2017 | 1 comment

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
—Edmund, in Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill

When I was a young aspiring actor, that was one of my favourite audition monologues. Edmund is a young man whose life in no way resembled what mine was or is – his family life was dreadful, and he was dying of tuberculosis. But I could understand the desire to be alone, out in the fog, where all is peaceful, colours are soft, sights fade in and fade out, and you can only see so much at once. Such a soft aloneness, a world that coalesces and evanesces like anticipations and memories. And the smell, the rich cool humidity. For a boy who grew up in dry Alberta, humid air is a treat. For a person who has a low noise limit – sonic, visual, social – the fog is where I want to be, when it’s there. To be at the glowing light as trees and shadows loom in the mist, where a tapestry of light and shadow is woven by a loom of mystery. So little there, and none of it sharp, just like this ancient northern word, fog, bequeathed to us by Scandinavians.

And yet. Fog is not your friend either. When you are out where you can’t see what’s land and what’s sea, the fog will make a ghost of you. When you are driving in fog… well, don’t drive in fog. Not being able to see is peaceful if you have nowhere you need to go and nothing you need to avoid. If plans and memories are of no great matter, you can dissolve them in fog-get-fulness. But you will not find meaning in fog. Fog gives the impression of light spreading in the dark – such a glow – but all you see is the glow, not what the light would otherwise show.

The Fog Index is a simple measure of how much a text is obnubilated by obfuscatory sesquipedalian paraloquies. Long words and long sentences may have their beauty when well handled, but the clear sense is hard to hear in them. Too many pulses of sound dissipate the energy. This is why foghorns are low: the low notes push through. Make a lower note with the same energy input and there is more energy per sound wave, just as that two-hundred-pound panther looming just out of view in the fog will hit you so much harder than twenty ten-pound house cats, which will hit harder than two hundred one-pound kittens.

But two hundred one-pound kittens would be delightful. All those small padded feet with their innocuous claws.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
—Carl Sandburg

This is what the fog is, and more: a near-infinity of tiny feline water nymphs, lightly brushing you, delighting and de-lighting. Every droplet deflects the light so you see it rather than seeing through it. The means of vision hides life from vision. But it purrs coolly as it wraps you. So soft, so glad to forget in, such a welcoming suffocation. A relaxing cocktail, an opiate.

An opiate. That is what Edmund’s mother has turned to. As the one long day in four acts of Long Day’s Journey into Night rolls into its night, she embraces the fog of morphine, and truth becomes lies and she can see neither future nor present; she is lost once more in a mist of the far-back past.

We all have our ways of forgetting and our things we want to forget. The fog makes a lovely invisibility while it lasts. Just us and a phantasy of ghosts of things.

The things will still be there when it lifts. They are still there even in the fog. And we may encounter them if we go wandering.

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peccary

Posted on March 5, 2017 | 3 comments

A peccary is not a pessary. (And neither has anything to do with a cassowary.) I suppose a peccary would eat pecorino and piccalilli and pickles, but only if you picked it and packed and left it out. Otherwise a peccary eats what’s available, but will prefer a prickly pear. I won’t say its diet is precarious, though its habitat is occupied.

Well. They live in a lot of places, some of them well forested still. And they can be expected in packs of up to 100. But they’re not big space hogs or food hogs. They’re not big hogs at all. They’re not big: they’re about a metre long, and they weigh 20 to 40 kilograms (much of which appears to be the head and not too much of which appears to be the prancing, spindly legs). And they’re not hogs. But, boy, do they look like them.

Here are some peccaries.

Don’t they look just like pigs? Well, they do until you inspect the dentition. Pigs have curved tusks. Peccaries have straight ones and they’re shorter. Also, they snap them together to make a sound indicating irritation at any particular peccadillo. Also, peccaries are not closely related to pigs.

They’re not! Oh, they are related. They belong to the same suborder, Suina. But they belong to a different family, Tayassuidæ (the Old World pigs are Suidæ). They came over to the New World a long, long time ago. So they’re New World pigs. They’re also called javelina in Spanish. (The name peccary comes from a Carib word.) They’re also called skunk pigs. Because they smell. They have scent glands, which they use to mark their territory and each other.

But smell notwithstanding, people still eat them. I presume they taste porky. I’m sure they’d make good paprikash or pörkölt.

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margate

Posted on March 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

The margate, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “a deep-bodied grunt . . . found in the western Atlantic.” Moreover, the black margate is a “largely nocturnal grunt.”

Um… great? Let’s see, would that be like the deep grunts and growls of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, attacking seaside leisure-trippers?

Wait, how about these guys by the seaside? They’re called Margate.

But they’re in California. The original Margate is in England. That’s the one Conventional Weapons were singing about in that first video, where Cthulhu is marring the gates – and other things.

But that’s not how Margate got its name. It also was not governed by a margrave, and it is not known for a population of margays. No, it was originally Meergate, where meer means ‘lake’ or, in this case, ‘sea’ and gate means, in this case, apparently ‘gate’. It’s been a popular seaside destination in Britain since the dawn of forever. JMW Turner lived there and made a number of lovely paintings with all the sharp detail he’s known for (i.e., none). See this one of Margate jetty, for instance (made available without restrictions by Wikipedia):

And TS Eliot spent some time nearby recuperating, and wrote these lovely lines:

On Margate sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

But speaking of connecting with nothing, Margate is in Kent, not far from Canterbury; it is nowhere near the western Atlantic. And what is all this about grunts?

Grunts are fish. Here’s one:

Sounds like it’s snoring, doesn’t it? That’s a sound those fish make when they’re about to die. I was going to say “sleep with the fishes” but no, exactly not. They also apparently make that sound at other times. They’re bottom-feeding predators. (Not drawing any connection to those low-ranking army men also called grunts.)

Anyway, a margate is a kind of grunt. We established that, remember? It belongs to the family Hæmulidæ. But why would a fish from the western Atlantic be named after a Kentish seaside town? One possibility is that there were people in the Bahamas originally from Kent. The fish has other names, including market fish, maggot fish, and Margaret fish, all of which could at least as plausibly have been reanalyzed from Margate as the other way around.

One way or another, the margate is apparently delicious, though not caught all that often. Which sounds reasonable enough for nocturnal grunts. Speaking of Lovecraft, though, I would watch out for Cthulhu, in case he awakes from his dream. It might take more than a little margate to satisfy him.

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vexatious

Posted on February 26, 2017 | 3 comments

There are those among us who oft wax litigious, not because they wish to convey justice or even because they carry a flag for a cause, but just because they wish to harass, harry, shake, and generally wear their opponents down. It may be a means of asserting personal dominance – the world has a back-drawer infestation of such pests – or it may be a way of silencing opponents or winning in business by draining the resources of others. Such cases, and such people, are vexatious.

That’s the recognized word, and it’s a good one. You know what vex is, I’m sure. In its shape and sound it even suggests the cross, squinty face one makes when subject to annoyance. We often use it to refer to objects and situations that senselessly annoy us, but in its first sense vexing is deliberately causing annoyance: a good synonym is harass. It is done to shake the person up and rub them the wrong way, disturb them, agitate them – that’s what Latin vexare means. It is most likely related to vehere, which means ‘carry’, which we see in convey and convex and also in vexillary ‘of or relating to flags’.

Those of us who think of vexation as a reaction to some irritant might assume vexatious means ‘disposed to be vexed’. In fact, it means ‘disposed to vex’ – i.e., ‘tending to cause vexation’. Certainly insensate objects and situations may be vexatious, for example the dreadful weather in which I recently drove to Montreal from Mont-Tremblant, the dreadful traffic on the roads, the dreadful lack of ploughing on the highways, the dreadfully unhelpful signage, the pasta-plate of roads around the airport, and the apparently pilgarlic “winter” tires on my rental car. But the word is best used for people who are deliberately obnoxious.

There are many ways a person may be vexatious; it is the quotidian sport of internet trolls and those “free speech” advocates who insist on their right not to convey the truth or bear the flag of justice but just to insult and irritate and maximally vex those they disdain, especially ones who can’t easily fight back. But vexatious has a special legal stature. It is an established term of art, and in some courts a judge may declare you to be vexatious and in so doing prevent you from bringing further suits unless you get express permission.

Of course courts are formal establishments with formal rules; speech in them is subject to explicit conventions and enforced restrictions. Other areas of interaction in society are not as explicitly governed; we communicate using courtesies and conventions that we tacitly agree on and cooperate in. Vexatious people abuse the cooperation and subvert the agreement; in the dance of communication, they are the ones wearing spike-soled shoes that damage the floor. Their “free speech” destroys the basis of speech in society; it claims a right to that which it negates. It insists on the cooperation of others while it is utterly uncooperative; it demands goodwill serve badwill; it breaks faith. Since the point of the right of free speech is the preservation and reinforcement of communication in society, vexatious communicators work to destroy what they claim to be building. Speech is like building bridges on bridges on bridges on bridges; vexatious speech is like driving demolition equipment onto those bridges to damage them. Speech is like a ball game; vexatious speech sets out to break the balls.

Most parts of society are not courts of law; we can’t, in declaring someone vexatious, force them to get permission before they can speak again. But though we may not be able to stop a vexatious person from talking, we don’t need to give them an audience. We don’t need to let spike-shoed dancers onto our floors, demolition machines onto our bridges, or ball-breakers onto our playing fields. Freedom of speech not only lets but expects us to nix the vexatious.

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ramifications

Posted on February 24, 2017 | 1 comment

In one of my essays for one of my seminars when I was getting my PhD, I wrote something about “ramifications accruing.” The professor, Laurence Senelick, wrote a comment there: “Can ramifications (branches) accrue?”

It was at that point that I learned what the literal reference of ramification was. This word had taken root in my mind years earlier, but its reach, as it spread through my synapses and along my neurons, had not before touched the tree its seed had come from.

That’s not so surprising, really. We always see it in phrases such as “the ramifications of this decision” and “this will have ramifications we can’t anticipate” and… let me pull some quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary: “The extensive ramifications of a conspiracy long prepared” (Walter Scott, Rob Roy); “Like all central truths, its ramifications are infinite” (G.D. Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law); “Such are the ramifications of this complex civilization of ours” (P.G. Wodehouse, Bill the Conqueror). So inference tells a person that ramifications are implications, consequences, perhaps the ramparts and fortifications of a castle built on the foundations of our actions. What in ram would tell the average Anglophone it had anything to do with branches?

But branches it is, and we know that branches are not usually tidy and predictable. They fork off in all directions, and crook and curve and break like bronchioles, as though trees were the lungs of the air breathing the earth, and each splits into smaller ones, and those into still smaller, and you don’t know just where they will and won’t touch, or which will green and bear fruit.

There is something wild about branches; the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but sometimes they are forbidding and always they are unruly. We have an adjective ramage (sounds like rummage but with ram) meaning (per OED) ‘wild, untamed, unruly, violent’ of an animal or a person – or a shrubbery. But branches can be trained and tamed too; they can be cut into topiary, but they can also be woven or swirled or…

A ramada is, after all, an open shelter made with branches. It comes from Spanish: rama ‘branch’ plus –ada a past participial suffix used to derive an adjective. I’m sure that however many of you have been in a ramada, quite a few of you have been in a Ramada: a chain of hotels with branches widely distributed. Sleeping in a Ramada is rather more ordinary and interior than sleeping in a ramada, which may have… ramifications.

Ramifications are everywhere. Not just trees have them; your lungs and nerves and circulatory system do too, as does lightning, as do rivers (when you view them in reverse), as do many more metaphorical things. We do not always appreciate them, but they appreciate – they increase over time. They compound. They crack like earth lightning – darkning, perhaps – into our squared-away worlds.

But they do not just reach. Although they stand relentlessly stark in winter, every spring is re-leaf time, and they fill the air with glories of green. Likewise with our figurative ramifications: every page of a book or a legal brief, every greenback, every piece of printed paper is a leaf of a ramification. Someone did something and it has come to this.

And this comes to you. As you go about your life, not noticing what you leave behind, what seeds you plant, they grow outside your window, tap on the glass, fill the air, send forth leaf after leaf, and when they are the most colourful, that is when it all will fall and the ramifications be laid bare. Do you see it there?

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aloft

Posted on February 21, 2017 | Leave a comment

I live aloft, not in a loft apartment but in a lofty one: three times three times three floors above the pavement. I’ll often look up to my window as I approach from the street, and when I am up in my apartment I’ll often look up from the same window at still taller buildings nearby. Being aloft gives me a lift (as it should, since loft and lift are related); the regular hubbub below is left, and I am aloof as one afloat in the Luft (air, in German). The higher the fewer, you know.

What is aloft? It is relative: it is whatever is loftier than you. Look at the picture above: there’s a lamppost, its pinnacle reachable by an ambitious drunk; there’s a peak of a theatre building; there are towers, some higher than others, some closer than others. You can’t tell from the photo which is highest, so I’ll tell you: it’s the corrugated one on the far right, barely peeking in and summarily bested by the lamppost… until we change our point of view. From where I sit as I write this, I can step to the window and look far down at the lamppost, or tilt my head almost equally up to see the top of that tallest tower. (There’s a taller building, but it’s hidden. Taller still that that is a true tower, a half-kilometre in height; the tip of its needle top is barely perceptible in the photo, like a long blade of grass at the crook in the theatre roof.)

Half of the buildings you see there – the ones towards the right – are offices. But the other half, starting with the tall knife-shaped one, are dwellings.

Aloft, here, half a village shines, arrayed
In golden light; half hides itself in shade

That’s Wordsworth, waxing on an alpine hamlet, but these downtown mountains that we live in here are made of the same minerals, just more carefully arranged. And at the golden hour of dusk they do indeed shine half in golden light.

Such a word as aloft deserves a lofty diction, think you not? As we mount, striving against gravity, we separate ourselves from the quotidian; so too might we take it as cue to adduce lexemes and syntagms that are seldom seen in the street. This is the choice we make, we are told by Ronald Ross:

Heav’n left to men the moulding of their fate:
To live as wolves or pile the pillar’d State—
Like boars and bears to grunt and growl in mire,
Or dwell aloft, effulgent gods, elate.

(He says nothing of women; they were probably beyond his ken.)

But however lofty you are, there are others still loftier, less tied to the ground: larks, “the pear-shaped balloon,” “sailing clouds,” and “Thou orb aloft full-dazzling!” – those last three all from Whitman. Even other humans have untied and levitated. As aloof and alone as you are, there will still be another one who is beyond you.

Look again at that photograph.

Click on the picture, so you can see it at fuller size. Click again on the web page that opens. Look, there, just past the spire of the TD tower that grows its soft little fleece of steam: in the heart of the sky, there is a small airplane, straight-winged, scudding above the dusty downtown dollar-piles, aloft.

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turn the other cheek

Posted on February 20, 2017 | 22 comments

OK, this isn’t a word. It’s a phrase. But it’s a phrase that can serve as an excellent illustration of the value of historical research and awareness of cultural context.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase turn the other cheek. It’s a popular admonition to forgive wrongs and not to fight back. Someone does you dirty? Turn the other cheek. You often get this advice from people who have not likewise been wronged, and sometimes from people who are the wrongdoers. It is open to abuse because it seems to give carte blanche to abusers. And, on the other hand (ignore the pun), you get instances like a particularly stupid one I once accidentally saw in a terrible TV show where Michael Langdon played an angel. Some bad guy punches him in the side of the head. Langdon turns his head and gets punched on the other side. Then he says, “I turned the other cheek,” and belts the bad guy. (Of course bad guy punches never knock a good guy out, but good guy punches usually knock a bad guy out. But I digress.)

The phrase comes from the Bible, from the Gospel According to Matthew, the part popularly called the Sermon on the Mount. Here’s the line from the King James Version: “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” But let me give you a bit more context, and let me give it to you in a better version. (The King James Version is a 400-year-old translation of the Hebrew and Greek sources. The state of scholarship and research has advanced much in the intervening four centuries, and the language has changed too. We think the KJV is elegant because it – and Shakespeare – is held up to us as examplary of beautiful English: it’s what we learn to judge beautiful English by, so of couse we revere it. But it’s no longer a truly accurate translation, if it ever was.) Here, Matthew 5:38–41 in the New International Version:

You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.

That seems plain enough, doesn’t it? Well, that’s the problem. We see words we understand, referring to things we can picture (even if we don’t experience them much), so we assume that we can take it at face value. We treat the cultural context of the Bible as effectively identical to our own cultural context.

“We,” I am happy to say, does not include scholars like Walter Wink. Walter Wink was a minister and professor. He wrote several books, and coined (among others) the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence.” Walter Wink did the hard legwork on this passage. He looked at the history and the cultural norms at the time. The time and place in which Jesus lived was a Jewish nation under Roman occupation, a nation subject to its own laws and norms as well as to an imposed Roman occupying law. Walter Wink also worked through the physical implications of this passage.

Jesus didn’t say a cheek or your cheek. He said the right cheek. Say someone slaps you on the right cheek. They’re facing you. How do they do that? With their left hand, right? No, wrong. The left hand was unclean. It was not to be used for touching other people. No matter what. (This rule still stands in some cultures.) So they’re backhanding you with the right hand. This was a kind of slap of rebuke given to a social inferior. It wasn’t a fighting blow; it was a reprimand. Master to slave. Father to son. Husband to wife. Roman to Jew. Anyone who struck a social equal that way was subject to a fine. The rule of law was important!

Now, if someone struck you that way, and you invited them to strike the left cheek, you were inviting them to an open-handed blow. That’s an entirely different kind of slap. It was not a rebuke to an inferior. It was a challenge to an equal. You’re inviting them to hit you again, but you’re inviting them to hit you as they would hit an equal. If you are their equal, the first blow was improper. If they are your social superior, the second blow would be. You’re forcing them to be open about the imbalance, the injustice. It’s not violence. It’s peaceful. But it’s resistance. It’s a dare. It’s cheeky.

How about if someone sues you for your shirt? Let’s not forget that they didn’t wear three-piece suits then. They wore an inner garment and an outer garment. These have been translated as shirt and coat, but actually they were khitona, or tunic, and himation, or toga. The coat, the toga, was the outer garment, but it was actually more essential, because it’s what you slept in at night. Deuteronomy 24, verse 13, lays down the law that if someone gives you their coat – himation, toga – as a pledge, you must return it by nightfall so they can sleep in it.

So, now, they’ve demanded from you the shirt off your back. Literally, that’s what they’ve taken you to court for. You push it. You get cheeky. You give them the coat too. They’ll be required by law to return it. Oh, and if they have both your shirt and your coat, what are you wearing? …Nothing. Which exposes you to shame – at their instigation – but also exposes them to shame for viewing it. So you’re really pressing the point. You’re not letting them get away with a halfway villainy, a socially allowable injustice. You’re making them commit to an obvious injustice, to face the full force of their actions: “Stop, why are you doing that? You’re making me feel like a bad person.”

Now. How about that extra mile? We know that “go the extra mile” line too. But this isn’t a running club buddy asking you. It’s not your aunt saying “Can’t we stroll a bit longer.” It’s not your friend saying “Dude, help me move this sofa to my new place.” Judaea was under Roman occupation, and Roman law permitted Roman authorities to require any inhabitant of an occupied territory to carry messages and equipment for the distance of one mile – but prohibited forcing them to go any more than one mile. They could be punished for making you go farther. So. You’re walking along the road in your country , which is occupied by these Romans, and a Roman comes along and says you have to carry something for him. This blows your lunch plans a little bit, maybe, but it’s not terrible; a Roman mile was a bit shorter than a modern mile, and might take a person 20 minutes or less to walk. It’s just an indignity, an injustice. But it’s one permitted by law, so it’s OK, right?

So at the end of the mile you keep going. “No,” says the Roman, “you don’t have to go any farther. You can hand it over now.” “Oh, no problem,” you say, smiling. “I can do two.” Why not? You’re keeping someone else from having to do that mile. And you’re putting this occupier in an uncomfortable situation. “You’re making me look bad!” “But I thought you wanted me to carry this for you!” Cheeky.

So you do not return violence for violence, no. That would compound wrong on wrong. It would also make you lose. They could have you arrested for it. Instead, you turn the other cheek, go the extra mile. But, in its historical origins, that is also not meek acquiescence. It’s pressing the point. It’s making the injustice plainer to see. It’s making it awkward. Politeness lets injustices pass. But pushing politeness can expose them, too, without giving any excuse for further injustice. You just have to turn… cheeky.

The phrase turn the other cheek is well ingrained in the language, of course, as is go the extra mile. It would be far too much to expect people to instantly change the usage to refer to a kind of meekness that presses the point and exposes the injustice. Still, it’s worth knowing, to appreciate historical context and to reconsider the value of the usual intention of the phrase.

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tipple

Posted on February 18, 2017 | 1 comment

I have been known to take a tipple or two. A quick quaff. A wee dram. A shot of hooch, a bit of booze, a tiny toddy, a sip of the sauce. I have a taste for the hard stuff; if there’s a problem, I can offer a solution… of 40% ethanol. I take not just firewater, of course, and similar spirits (a mug of moonshine, perhaps? but skip the rotgut); much as I like the malt, I will take that malt-and-hops beverage too. Who doesn’t like the pint? Or fizzy by the flute or bumper, or other sorts of Bacchus’s favourite beverage – set out the stemware and replenish it with juice of the grape. There are just so many ways to drink.

How fortunate that there are so many synonyms for drink. Or perhaps how unfortunate.

Something so loved yet so louche is bound to accumulate synonyms and euphemisms. We want to talk about it without talking about it; we want to be coy. A while back I said offhandedly that there must be more than 365 synonyms for drunk, and I have long since validated that claim (see? include the comments).

Which does not mean we have to use them all incessantly. We can talk about alcoholic beverages without using a different word for them every time. There is a fear in some circles of using the same significant word twice in close proximity (within a paragraph or two, say), and it seems so… writerly… to toss in variants. Some of these words seem to be in the language just so people who are afraid of repetition have another word (see temblor).

Tipple shows up when a writer wants a fresh word for ‘drink’, noun or verb. It has a bit of a different tone to it, but it has some cross-currents. It can sound as prim as a steeple, or as bare as a nipple; it may make you a bit tipsy (just a sample) or it may make you topple. It shows up more in certain kinds of context: favourite tipple, tipple of choice; a tiplpe or two, the odd tipple, the occasional tipple; a local tipple, a summertime tipple, a sunset tipple. If you search newspapers, you will probably note a preponderance of noun usages.

Which is entertaining. Because it’s a kind of backwash. In real life we could say the tipple makes the tippler, because until you’ve tippled you aren’t a tippler and you require tipple to tipple, but in the history of this word the noun shows up last – in the later 1500s – and the verb shows up a bit sooner – circa 1500 – but the word tippler is the earliest of the three, dating as far back as the late 1300s.

But… that –le suffix… and the agentive –er that’s obviously tacked onto it… how can you go backwards through that? Well, to be fair, the sense of tippler meaning ‘drinker’ has been dated back only to 1580. The earlier instances all refer to a retailer of ales and other intoxicating liquors. A tippler was first a person who sold alcoholic beverages. And tipple meaning ‘sell liquor’ is the sense that showed up in 1500; the sense meaning ‘drink’ appeared around 1560. So we may have had a backformation from tippler in one sense, and then a forward formation in the other. If there is a tippler, then there must be tippling; but tipple sounds like a verb of action (get to tip a bit now and again, for instance), so…

…so where does tippler come from? It’s not completely clear, but it’s not formed from tip. It can’t be, unless tip was around in common use for quite a while before anyone got around to writing it down. More likely is that tippler comes from a Norse dialect word relating to drinking little bits. But we’re not really sure. It’s all rather hazy.

And now we have this word in our collection. It’s not the standard word; it’s become a quaint curio, a cute toy, a fun little thing to trot out for guests or just when we want to feel a bit more… special. The English lexicon is like a liquor cabinet, and a very well stocked one at that. And every now and then you just want to bring out that odd little bottle of liqueur. It serves its intoxicating turn (with the extra kick for the synonym addict), and it has a different flavour too, and on top of all that it marks you out as a sophisticated collector and tippler.

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fnarr fnarr

Posted on February 16, 2017 | 6 comments

I challenge you to read today’s word and not snarf or snicker.

Oh. Too late?

What does fnarr fnarr look like it might be? You may be inclined to imagine that, notwithstanding its chortling appearance, it’s really the name of a fruit or other food, or perhaps a folk dance of some sort. Or some furry little arboreal critter.

Well nope. It is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, an interjection “representing lecherous or half-suppressed laughter,” or an adjective describing something “characterized by crude sexual innuendo; vulgarly or salaciously humorous.”

Do we wonder whether this is some obsolete holdover from 18th-century Scotland or Restoration England? It is not; it is one of the newest entries in the OED, with a first citation from 1987. And the source is clearly identified (and not just by the OED): It’s a British comic for adults named Finbarr Saunders & His Double Entendres. The title character is a youth who finds something off-colour to snicker at in absolutely everything (a dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste!), and the adults around him give him more than enough material to work with. He emits a wide variety of sounds of suppressed laughter in reaction; examples include (in all caps since the lettering in the comic is, as in most comics, in all caps) GRA! GRA!, YOOP! YOOP!, SNIT! SNIT!, WURP! WURP!, FOFF! FOFF!, AROOGA! AROOGA!, BIP! BIP!, YURK! YURK!, SPROOF! SPROOF!, PLEEB! PLEEB!, BOOF! BOOF!, and of course FNARR! FNARR!

The emotivity of the utterance is conveniently expressed with reduplication (in the ordinary tongue, that means you know he’s excited because it comes twice). Nearly all the words have some indication of stifling: a back vowel (/u/ or /o/ or similar), a retroflex (/r/), a lip-biting fricative (/f/).

These expressions haven’t all equally caught on. But fnarr fnarr has. It probably doesn’t hurt that fnarr can be contracted from Finbarr, but it is particularly effective in its expression; it’s a very good representation of a partially stifled snorting chuckle of a basely lecherous kind, a har that can’t be smothered by a pillow. It has a certain animality to it, too – dog owners probably recognize it as a sound their pet has made while contending with a chew toy or other plaything. It has made various appearances in the British popular press (music review magazines, for instance), and was helpfully noted by the Guardian in 1990. It sometimes shows up reduced to fnar fnar or just fnarr.

Not every double entendre is fnarr fnarr, though, just the obviously crude and crass ones. I have often said that a word isn’t much good if it can only mean one thing at a time. I do love a good double entendre. But good is the word to watch here. It is possible for innuendo to be refined. Wit is like cane syrup: it can be heavy and sticky and hard to swallow, the sort of thing you can’t wait to rinse off, but if you refine it and dry it out you will get some sugar.

Oh, go ahead and say it.

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