Category Archives: word tasting notes

ignorandum, ignoranda, ignorandus

Posted on February 21, 2016 | 2 comments

Some things are best left aside. In the business of daily life, we have multiple memoranda (things to remember) and a full agenda (things to do), and so many people demanding our attention. And if you’re on a social network, some of those people might be real ignoramuses too, but somehow they still think they merit interaction; they may even provoke it. Somehow we need to need to do a triage. Never mind things to get around to. We need to make a list of things not to get around to. Things to ignore. And people to ignore.

So. A memorandum is a thing to remember; the word memorandum is a Latin singular neuter future passive participle of memoro ‘I bring to mind’; it means ‘to be remembered’, as in ‘a thing to be remembered’, i.e., ‘a thing to remember’. The plural is memoranda. Similarly, agenda is the neuter plural or feminine singular meaning ‘thing(s) to do’.

So what would be a thing to ignore?

That’s easy enough if you’re no ignoramus on Latin roots. The Latin verb ignoro means ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know about’ or ‘I ignore’. The first person plural conjugation is ignoramus ‘we don’t know; we ignore’. That word was pressed into service as the name of a lawyer in the 1615 play Ignoramus by Georges Ruggle, and from that has come to be the English noun we all know. (You can’t pluralize it as ignorami because it’s not a noun in Latin.) So if ignoro is the verb, the future passive participle will be ignorandus, ignoranda, ignorandum in masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Since we normally use the neuter – memorandum, originally plural agenda – we can go with ignorandum for a single thing to ignore, and ignoranda for a list of things to ignore.

We can, if we really want to be exact, use the masculine for a single male who needs ignoring: ignorandus (plural ignorandi). This is most likely to be of use on social networking sites, where one may encounter randos – random dudes who just butt in and expect unearned attention to their obnoxious opinions. It works especially well because it is so close to ignoranus. Should that be ignoramus? No, it’s a popular wordplay: an ignoranus is a person who is both an ignoramus and an anus (you may more likely use the English equivalent for the latter). We may say with confidence that every ignoranus is an ignorandus to add to the ignoranda.

And, as an added bonus, the masculine accusative plural is ignorandos, which means that “Just ignore the ignorandos” is actually using proper Latin. The singular dative and ablative are ignorando, so “I want to get away from that ignorando” is also using proper Latin. (The whole declension is on Wiktionary.)

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clarty

Posted on February 20, 2016 | 7 comments

If you’re looking for some clarity, I’m afraid I can’t help you see clear to that this time. Today’s word is a dirty, dirty word, and a rude thing to say. Oh, it’s not crude language; your churchgoing grandmother could say it, and might if she’s Scottish or northern English. But it has a certain unpleasant clatter to it, and while it’s as plain as day, it’s also as clear as mud – and as filthy, too. Clarty means ‘dirty, muddy, sticky, nasty’; it has a related noun clart meaning ‘mud, filth’ and a related verb clart meaning ‘smear with dirty, make dirty’. If you’re in Scotland, you may well hear the word used today, but if you do, it will not be with a positive tone (see this article in The Scotsman). It has been in the language for most of a millennium, but its origins are – sorry – unclear.

If language is a window on the world, it takes only an iota to make the difference between gleam and grime, between purty and dirty, between clarity and clarty. The merest misplacement can make a mess. I’m reminded of a joke – a meta-joke, because it’s a joke about someone telling a joke. A fellow hears the joke “Did you hear the one about the dirty window? Never mind, you wouldn’t see through it.” He thinks it’s funny, so next time he’s at a church social, he tells a few people present, “Did you hear the one about the window you couldn’t see through? Never mind, it’s too dirty for you.”

Which makes me think about the time I cleaned the shower door in our last apartment. We had moved in perhaps a year earlier. I finally got around to using some CLR on the shower door and cleaning all the accumulated minerals off it. Aina came home, looked at it, said “It’s clear!” and, after the briefest of moments, pulled a face of horror and disgust: “Ewwwwwww.” She had thought it was frosted glass. She just realized she had been showering all year next to an incredibly filthy piece of glass (well, minerals, but you know). Its lack of clarity was because it was clarty. And that, ladies and gents, is how you get from pane to pain.

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etaonrish, Etaoin Shrdlu

Posted on February 15, 2016 | 7 comments

Etaonrish, dlf. Cm, ugyp! W b vkx, jqz…

That is a listing of the letters of the alphabet, in descending order of their frequency of use in English. I learned it in grade 5 from a book on cryptography. I memorized it by pronouncing it with a sound sort of like “Eat your own rice, Dolf. Come, you gyp! Will be vexed, Jacuzzi…”

It was knowledge. It was a thing I had learned, a thing I knew, a master key to special understanding. If I was faced with a long and complex cipher to decrypt, I could start by counting the frequency of the letters and starting to work out which was which from that…

In grade 6, one of our exercises in class was actually to decipher a sentence or two that had been encrypted with a simple replacement cipher. You know, something like this: Ksvl smf Koaa ermy iq yjr joaa yp gryvj s qsoa pg esyrt. So right away, I knew what to do: Count the letters! Figure it out from the frequency! Ah, ha!

What was truly vexing was that other students worked it out rather quickly while I was still stuck in the mud. How did they do that? Well, to start with, there are only so many one-letter words in the language, so that gives you an edge. Commonly used three-letter words are also a limited set, and if you see one repeating, that’s a good hint. And so on. Once you’ve gotten a sense of what is a and what is t, h, and e, it gets to be like solving Wheel of Fortune (which, however, did not exist at the time). But I hadn’t approached it like that.

So my knowledge got in the way of actually using my brain. I was using a screwdriver to pull nails.

But still… I knew this thing! It was the real order of the letters! And when, one day in grade 10, a substitute teacher mentioned about how we all knew what etoanirsh was – she wrote it on the board – I was incensed. I didn’t stand up and say something, but I knew she had it wrong. I may have muttered to the person next to me. How can everyone know it? And how can they know it wrong? It’s etaonrish, not etoanirsh! Fool.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring.

Not just that, though. My pride in my learning had turned it into a dogma. It was the One True Way, to be used wherever it could, and I was on the right team. Those who thought otherwise were fools. Fools!

It’s just the same sort of thing you see in politics, and social issues, and religion, and grammar. We use our minds to set the world in an order that gives us mastery over it. It’s not a coincidence that comprehend can mean both ‘understand’ and ‘take in, include’. A comprehensive exam is so called not because it tests your comprehension but because it includes everything. We join this desire to comprehend with a desire to dominate, to win, to be better – basic human insecurity. Many people learn one little thing and use it as an omni-trump card, as proof that others are fools. Ha! We own their sorry butts! Lincoln was a Republican, so the Democrats are the real racists! (I’ve actually seen that argument made.) You can’t tell the difference between discreet and discrete, so you must be an uneducated idiot!

And we join this to our tribal instincts to decide who’s on the right team. Dogma, ideology, tribalism. Some people want to blame all of this on theism, but it’s evident in many spheres that have nothing to with religion: politics, sports, social mores, grammar… We decide what is good and what is bad, and from that who is right and who is wrong, and we make our lives – and the lives of others around us – needlessly worse than they could be. Using screwdrivers to remove nails.

Fortunately for me, I had just enough self-doubt and curiosity to want to find out more about this other version. Well, naturally, your frequency distribution will vary according to your sample. There are different dialects, different genres, different times.

In the 1920s, a well-known frequency listing started with etaoinshrdlu. In 1923, the playwright Elmer Rice gave a character in his play The Adding Machine the name Etaoin Shrdlu.

The Adding Machine is an expressionist play, full of the mindless small talk of repetitive unthinking existence. It’s about a man, Mr. Zero, who has been working adding up numbers in a department store for 25 years. On his 25^th anniversary of working at the company, the owner calls him in to talk to him. Not to give him a raise, a promotion, or a pen – just to tell him he’s being replaced by an adding machine. He snaps and kills the owner. He surrenders, goes to jail, is executed. He finds himself in the Elysian Fields, where he meets Etaoin Shrdlu, a proofreader who always tried to live a moral existence, always did just what his kind, sweet, patient mother wanted, never disappointed her, always fought his sinful nature. He tried to run away once and join the navy but she stopped him, so he just went on working the right job and living with her and trying to overcome his sinful nature, until one day when he was going to carve a leg of lamb he slit his mother’s throat instead.

Why are these two murderers in the Elysian Fields, where everything is so nice? Shouldn’t they be in hell? Well, they won’t remain, Shrdlu explains. Only the most favoured remain. Anyone who likes may remain, but only the most favoured do. Who are these favoured people, Zero asks? Shrdlu says, despairingly (that’s the stage direction – despairingly),

I don’t know, Mr. Zero. All these people here are so strange, so unlike all the good people I’ve known. They seem to think of nothing but enjoyment or of wasting their time in profitless occupations. Some paint pictures from morning until night, or carve blocks of stone. Others write songs or put words together, day in and day out. Still others do nothing but lie under the trees and look at the sky. There are men who spend all their time reading books and women who think only of adorning themselves And forever they are telling stories and laughing and singing and drinking and dancing. There are drunkards, thieves, vagabonds, blasphemers, adulterers. There is one—

Zero cuts him off and says “That’s enough. I heard enough.” He leaves. He doesn’t want to stay there “with a lot of rummies an’ loafers an’ bums.” He goes and finds himself an adding machine and works on it until he is told his soul is to be recycled, since he’s just taking up space.

We come up with our knowledge, our ideas, our rules, to help us master the world. But if we’re not aware, they master us. Sure, we’ve put everything in order, but is it the right order? Are we putting it to good use? Or are we just using it to hurt others and ourselves? If we don’t check the basis of our rules, consider the premises and evaluate the results, we may just join the cult of etaonrish and find ourselves with – or like – Etaoin Shrdlu.

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kufungisisa

Posted on February 14, 2016 | 13 comments

“James,” my acupuncturist said once, “you think too much. You need to think less.”

Apparently my brain is sort of like the Macbook Air I’m typing this on: it occasionally overheats. I can be prone to what might be called “binge thinking.” Have you ever had a piece of fish that had lots of tiny bones that weren’t removed, and you’ve spent your whole meal dissecting it with fork and knife to find the bones, and chewing each mouthful carefully and thoroughly and probingly to find and remove any hair-thin bones you missed, lest they puncture your intestine? My thought processes can get like that from time to time.

Not that I think thinking is bad. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can think they ever stop thinking. How can you not constantly be thinking? I don’t mean being lost in thought all the time, but at least always considering everything before, during, and after, and – when nothing else is going on – having lengthy mental dialogues with yourself or imagined others. When is there ever a space where there’s nothing going on? I remember the line from Billy Joel: “Should I try to be a straight-A student? If you are then you think too much.” Ha! If you think you’re ever not thinking, then you’re just not paying attention. Right?

But overheating is bad. Brooding is bad. Fixating. Spiralling. Forming mental centres of gravity that become black holes. It can be a key feature in depression and anxiety disorders.

Which is where kufungisisa comes in. Kufungisisa has nothing to do with kung fu or ISIS or fungus or the Kurfürstendamm. The word kufungisisa means ‘thinking too much’ in Shona, a language (and culture) of Zimbabwe. It’s a cultural view of a particular set of mental disorders – or, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) puts it, “an idiom of psychosocial distress.” If you have it, you’re ruminating on various upsetting thoughts. It is associated with various conditions, including “anxiety symptoms, excessive worry, panic attacks, depressive symptoms, and irritability.” Which means that I, and many of you too, have had kufingisisa. Or would have had I (and you) been Shona.

Mental illness diagnoses are culture-bound, after all. Expression of mental illness can be strongly culture-bound too. Some cultures have names for culture-bound syndromes where, for instance, a person just “snaps” and runs amok – in fact, amok is from a Malay term for just that culture-bound syndrome. Japan has a disorder called tajin kyofusho that is “characterized by anxiety about and avoidance of interpersonal situations due to the thought, feeling, or conviction that one’s appearance and actions in social interactions are inadequate or offensive to others.” Cultures with strong expectations regarding body image will give rise to mental disorders related to those body images, never mind that other cultures – or that same culture at other times – may have entirely different views on body image.

But people are people, and some things are fairly common at the underlying level. Depression, for example, appears to happen everywhere, though not necessarily with the same incidence and certainly not with the same interpretation. The DSM-5 notes that “thinking too much” is a common way of describing certain kinds of mental distress in many cultures. Indeed, “In many cultures, ‘thinking too much’ is considered to be damaging to the mind and body and to cause specific symptoms like headache and dizziness.” In Nigeria, excessive study is thought to cause damage to the brain, “with symptoms including feelings of heat or crawling sensations in the head.”

Maybe it is possible to overheat the brain. Intense thought can be different from ordinary thought, after all, and if there are strong emotions involved, well, this is not exactly some kind of Spock thing. But I rather suspect that much of this is focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause. Brooding doesn’t cause depression; depression causes brooding.

It’s like calling nausea or earache a condition. They’re just symptoms. So is binge thinking. I think.

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scaevity

Posted on February 11, 2016 | 2 comments

And what then if you are left with a word such as scævity? What viatic will you take to vaticinate its sense? Its very presence on the page scatters meaning – ay, evicts it, leaving a vast cavity that you scavenge for sense. You seek perhaps to reap significance, but the scythe cuts from the other side, and it is you who are grimly reaped. How can you get the upper hand? Look up.

Look it up.

But even then you are unlucky. It is not a common word. You can find the main meaning, but nothing will tell you how to say it. Go figure.

Go figure it out for yourself. Here: it comes from Latin scævitas. So if you were saying it in Latin, it would be /ske vi tas/. But you aren’t. It’s no longer a Latin word; the itas is now ity. And I’ll tell you for free – though you might have guessed as much, given the assimilated form – that it was borrowed into English a few centuries ago. In the 1600s, in fact, if not earlier. So the pronunciation will conform to the long-established English way of saying such things: æ like /i/ (“ee”) as in encyclopædia; this also makes the sc “soft,” just like the c is “soft” is cæsar and cæcum. So: /si vɪ ti/.

But what is scævitas? It is a noun form of scævus. Which means ‘left-sided’. And also means ‘awkward’ and ‘perverse’ and ‘unlucky’. Our word scævity (you can consciously uncouple the æ to ae if you wish) means ‘unluckiness’ and also ‘left-handedness’. Which is a rather left-handed thing to say.

Or, actually, not. It’s right-handed, and obliviously so, because why is it so bad to be left-handed, aside from everything catering to right-handed people? Some of the finest people I know are left-handed. Half of the American presidents in the last century have been left-handed, including Obama, Clinton, and Bush senior (not W, though). As far as I can tell, left-handedness increases the odds of a person being interesting. But of course it is in a way unlucky: You have to put up with all those oblivious right-handed people and all their oblivious right-handed stuff. (Try this: Find a camera with the shutter button on the left.)

Thanks to @tonythorne007 for suggesting scaevity.

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dulcacid

Posted on February 10, 2016 | 2 comments

There is something simultaneously sweet and sour about this word. Sweet? Or delicate. Or just dull? Yet somehow lucid, clear like the cacophonous claxon of a cicada. But undeniably acid.

We do like contrasts, so long as they’re well balanced. Nor do the contrasts need to be of things utterly unlike; a simple adjustment can be enough sometimes, like the difference between the shapes of d and ci – just a little erosion. Or i and l. Or between the sound of c and the sound of c when one is before a and the other before i.

This word nearly balances. It has d and d as bookends. In the heart is a, flanked by c and c, and then beyond those l and i – so similar in shape, but not the same. But what disrupts the perfect symmetry of the experience? U, of course. As soon as we see u come into it, it has a skew – but it simply could not exist without u.

Without you. De gustibus and all that, yes; of tastes. Tastes are individual. Every word has its taste, but a different taste for each person, and for each person a different taste for each word at each moment. Nothing stays the same. It cannot be reduced to tidy numbers on a balance sheet: there is no accounting for taste.

But it can balance, even if it is not opposites (the opposite of sweet would simply be not sweet). Pick two extremes and put them together. We taste sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami; you can have sweet and bitter, like Italian sodas or many a romance. Or you can have sweet and sour, to pique and to please.

‘Sweet’, in Latin, is dulcis. ‘Sour’ is acid – yes, acids are sour, and sourness is the flavour of acid. Citric, ascorbic, lactic, you name it: tart. Put them together and you have lemon tarts or many a Chinese chicken dish, and you have dulcacidus. In Latin that was said like “dool ka kee doos,” but it trips differently off our tongues now as this word dulcacid, the English equivalent.

Inasmuch as it trips off tongues at all, that is. It is not much used now. We could use an erudite-sounding single word for ‘sweet and sour’, yes, but somehow this word seems a bit… dull. And acid. To us English speakers, that is. Taste may be individual, but it is also affected by your culture, after all.

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smilax, sarsaparilla

Posted on February 7, 2016 | 1 comment

Sometimes life seems like an impenetrable thicket of brambles. The more you try to push through, the more scratched up you get, and at the end of your efforts you don’t get what you want and you get what you don’t want. What is left for you? Smilax. Vegetate with sarsaparilla.

Smilax. Does that look like a portmanteau for smile and relax? That’s how you say it – there’s nothing tricky about the pronunciation. I suppose you could smile and relax with smilax, but that’s not what it means. It also doesn’t mean ‘smile and use an ax’, though you could do that with smilax. But it would be the smilax that you’re smiting with the ax: it’s a dense briery plant, in fact a whole genus of them. If you want to get to the root of the problem, though, eradicate it – e ‘out, from’ radic ‘root’ ate: pull it out by the roots. And then you may get to the sarasaparilla, if you take roots and make root beer.

Yes, Smilax is a genus with more than 300 species, and they’re all ornery little shrubs, the botanical equivalent of that dreadful project you’re stuck with at work. They include greenbriers, catbriers, prickly-ivys, various plants just called smilaxes, and sarsaparilla. What’s sarsaparilla, aside from a kind of smilax? It’s the plant whose roots give much of the flavour to root beer. Sometimes you’ll see root beer called sarsaparilla.

Kind of a classic-looking name, isn’t it, sarsaparilla? It seems to me to be a cross between a laid-back Southern something-or-other and a truculent simian or towering Japanese lizard. But it’s soft and liquid with a little pop, an ideal name for a carbonated beverage. You might be more energized by the sight of the Spanish version: zarzaparilla. It means ‘little brambly grapevine’: zarza ‘bramble’ and parilla ‘little grapevine’. Does that zarza look familiar? Yes, it’s the same one that shows up in Zarzuela, which is named after a place that’s named after brambles. And where does this zarza word come from? Basque sartzia.

Fair enough. Many are the days one may wish to lie back and bask in the sun with a glass of sarsaparilla and just… smilax. And think of what might have been. Which might have been Smilax.

Smilax, you see, was the name of a nymph: Σμῖλαξ. She was the object of unrequited love by a human youth. He pined for her, but his love was not evergreen; in the end it did not flower, but he did: he was turned into a flower that bears his name. He was Κρόκος; we know him as Crocus. And Smilax, the poor lass, was also turned into a plant, all because she wouldn’t Netflix and chill (or IMAX and climax). But she wasn’t turned into what we call smilax. She was turned into bindweed, a flowering vine. That’s what the Greeks called σμῖλαξ. Somehow more recent botanists managed to switch the name over to a less friendly, albeit tastier, plant.

Poor nymph. Just minding her own business when some random dude she couldn’t care less about develops a thing for her, and next thing she knows, she’s turned into a plant, just because she was pretty. And then she doesn’t even get to keep her name! Think about her next time you think you have troubles. A briery thicket? Pah. It’s nothing. Have a glass of root beer. And as you sip your sarsaparilla, raise it in memory of Smilax.

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discreet, discrete

Posted on February 3, 2016 | 4 comments

If you do not use your discretion in keeping words discrete, your lack of discernment may result in indiscretion – and it won’t be discreet.

Let’s be honest: discrete and discreet seem like the sort of word pair that just exist to be a sand trap in the golf course of the language, don’t they? They’re pronounced the same way and they have related meanings. But if you mix up the two, someone is sure to hold it up as evidence of a woeful lack of education. The English language is like a secret society where there’s a new password at every door, and sooner or later you’ll get one of them wrong and be stripped of your disguise and your power – your discretion and your discretion. And those who get it right will mock you indiscreetly. (Come to think of it, it’s more like an elementary-school secret club, isn’t it?)

Let’s start with the difference between the two words. One means ‘separate, distinct’, and it keeps its two e’s separate with the t: discrete. The other means ‘unobtrusive, prudent, secret or good at keeping a secret’, and it keeps both e’s hidden behind the t: discreet. So you see that the spelling suits them to a t and, remembering that, you can spell them with e’s. I mean ease.

But how did these words come to be so similar? Indeed, the noun form of the one is discretion and of the other is discretion. Which is to say there is no way to keep them discrete.

The reason for this is that they were originally the same word. The Latin source is discretus, which comes from the past participle of discernere, which is dis ‘apart’ plus cernere ‘decide, separate’. So if keeping things discrete and keeping things discreet both require discernment, now you know why. The connection between distinction and secrecy comes through prudence: knowing what’s what.

The two words were kidnapped into English in the late 1300s as one word with the two senses already in use. The spelling shifted around for the next couple of centuries as all English spelling did – discreyt, disgret, dyscrete, discreate, discrite, dyscrete, discreete – but it was only in the late 1500s that the spellings became discrete. English users sensed that there were two senses and thought it sensible to keep one for one and the other for the other. And so, almost discreetly – certainly it’s still difficult for many to see the difference – they became discrete.

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verdigris

Posted on February 1, 2016 | 1 comment

When I was a kid, we sometimes did long car trips. We would pass through city after city and state after state (provinces, too, but not as much) on the kind of itinerary normally plied just by those who drive rigs. One thing that stood out to me when we passed through capital cities was that their capitol buildings tended to have green domes. I don’t mean a verdant green; more of a turquoise. I just assumed, being a kid, that this was something that went with important architecture. I had no idea that they were once bright, shiny, and copper-coloured.

Copper-coloured because, of course, copper. What colour does copper rust to? Green – that turquoise-y green. You will see it on other formal things: pennies, of course, though regular handling keeps if off most of them, but larger declarations of worth too, such as plaques and church steeples:

This green patina is verdigris. The state house domes were green because they were covered in a fair degree of verdigris.

Oops. Was that meant to be a wordplay? Fair degree and verdigris? The problem is this: the word is properly said like “verdigriss.” Hmm. The word looks like French, no? Yes. But it’s not directly borrowed, spelling, pronunciation, and all. It has changed and acquired a patina over the years, and is vulnerable to being reinterpreted through misconstrual.

Wouldn’t be the first time, though. Its French forms go back through history: modern vert-de-gris, which has a related adjective form vert-de-grise meaning ‘greyish green’ or ‘green of grey’ because that’s what it literally means, and it does look like that too; 14^th-century vert de grice; 13^th-century verte grez; and back to 12^th-century vert de Grece: ‘green of Greece’. Yep, Greek green; the Latin equivalent is viride Graecum. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that “the terminal syllable at an early date was no longer understood and hence underwent various corruptions of spelling and pronunciation.”

Various? Here are some of the spellings it’s had since it showed up in English: verdegrez, verdegreys, verdegrease, verdegreece, verdygresse, verdygrace, verdegrise, and, somehow, vargrasse. Well, what the heck, it was used for grass in some paintings.

Paintings? Yes, verdigris is seen in paintings as well as patinas; it used to be used as a pigment. But just when you want to rely on it, it turns out that it changes. Well, it goes from turquoise to a truly verdant green over about a month, which is good. But then it can keep changing. It holds its colour in oil, but not in other media, and if the pigment is made by boiling verdigris in a resin, it can turn brown even in oil paints. I’d like to quote Wikipedia on this, for reasons that will soon be apparent:

This degradation is to blame for the brown or bronze color of grass or foliage in many old paintings, although not typically those of the “Flemish primitive” painters such as Jan van Eyck, who often used normal verdigris.

So they painted the grass and leaves green, but, like the real thing, they went brown in time.

But not van Eyck. Who was van Eyck? Here, I happen to have a photo of his statue in Brugge:

There you have it: appositely (not ironically; iron rusts red) colourfasted into nobility by verdigris, changed by time like a word.

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telephoto

Posted on January 30, 2016 | 4 comments

How can you tell a photo from a telephoto lens?

You… can’t, actually. You can spot some photos that are almost certainly not from a telephoto lens, and you can spot some that very likely are from a telephoto lens. But the thing that makes a telephoto lens a telephoto lens is not discernible in a photograph.

For those of my readers who are not notably enthusiastic about or well versed in photography, let me say first that any lens that is a telephoto lens is a lens with a relatively long focal length – but (and this will surprise some camera buffs too) the converse is not true.

What is focal length? Imagine looking through a cardboard tube from a toilet paper roll or a paper towel roll or a wrapping paper roll. The longer the tube is, the narrower the angle of view at the other end. Camera lenses are like that, except that whatever you see at the other end fills the whole picture, no matter how long the lens. Perspective narrows. So long lenses make far-away things look closer because they enlarge them. But they also compress perspective: buildings at different distances can look like photos stacked together.

What is long, by the way? If you’re using a 35 mm film camera (named after the width of the film, not any lens), or its digital equivalent, a “full-frame” sensor, a “normal” lens has a focal length of 40 to 50 millimetres (50 is the usual standard length). Anything shorter than that is at least a bit “wide” and anything longer than that is at least a little “long.” 85 mm is a “portrait” lens (good for taking head shots of people because their features are not distorted by perspective and because the background is blurred out a bit – oh, no, I am not going into depth of field today), and real “long” lenses start at 100 mm or so and go on quite far, increasing in price as they go (there are other factors that also increase the price and no, I’m not digressing into them today). Smaller sensors or film will have a correspondingly shorter focal length for the same angle of view, and longer ones (medium and large format) will have longer focal lengths.

I’m going to give an illustration of all this below.

Since you’re reading this, you’re probably a word buff, and that means you almost certainly recognize tele and photo. That’s tele from Greek meaning ‘far’, as seen in television, and photo from Greek meaning ‘light’ as in… oh, come on, you know as in what. If you’re a photography buff, you may well think of telephoto as another way of saying ‘long’ as in ‘long lens’ because long lenses let you see far-away things better, like a telescope. But it’s not. It’s really a way of designing a lens so that the light paths telescope in, so to speak. That is, the lens acts like it’s longer than it really is. It might be a lens with a 135 mm focal length that’s physically less than 130 mm from front to film (or sensor). Considering that focal length is nominally the distance to the back of the glass in the lens, not the front, you can see that this lens is somewhat shorter than a simple design would make it.

So if you’re in a camera store and someone’s trying to sell you a lens that’s comparatively long, and they keep calling it a telephoto lens, should you point out that not all long lenses are telephoto lenses? No, you should not. They probably know that, and anyway, nearly all modern long lenses are telephoto lenses, because why have a lens that’s physically larger than it has to be? Telephoto lens designs have been around since the late 1800s. So unless you’re buying a lens for a bellows-based camera (a large-format camera or certain medium-format cameras), the salesperson is not wrong. And what do you care about anyway? Taking pictures you like or making sure everyone knows you know the exact meaning of something?

Now. That was the words part. Here’s the photo part. I took a few photos out my bedroom window tonight with three different lenses. Here are the lenses.

The one on the left is a 20 mm lens. Since my camera has a “four thirds” format sensor, which is smaller than a full-frame sensor and so cuts down the angle of view in the picture, this lens has about the same angle of view as a 40 mm lens on a full-frame camera would. The middle lens is that 135 mm lens I was talking about above. When I put it on my camera, it’s like having a 270 mm lens on a full-frame camera. The one on the right is a 350 mm lens, and yes, it’s telephoto too. There’s only so much you can do with the materials available to make the lens shorter. It has an angle of view like a 700 mm lens on a full-frame camera.

How long is 700 mm? About 2 feet 4 inches. What angle of view is that? Well… Here are some pictures taken using that 350 mm lens.