Category Archives: word tasting notes

emmet

Posted on December 24, 2015 | 8 comments

This word may look like it should be capitalized as a name. I must admit that the first time I saw it I thought so, especially since some of my family’s oldest friends are a family called the Emmetts: two doctors and three children (well, the children have their own children now). But emmet is more interesting and curious. And so I must pre-empt the Emmetts, but you will find that by the end I must admit I have – perhaps paradoxically – re-pre-empted the emmet for an Emett.

Let us start with emmet. What does it signify? An ant. Yes, that’s right, we have a longer word for ant, one with six legs (mm) and two pairs of letters and two syllables. Why would we have this longer word for a small thing? It happens to come from the same origin. The n in ant comes from an old Germanic m. Various regional Dutch and German forms include emt, empt, emte, amete, and so on. We could have kept it as empt, but instead we assimilated the nasal consonant to the t and lowered the vowel a bit, and we had ant. Except that people in some parts of England kept the m and added a vowel (e) for distinction from the t. In English, you see, there is no amity between m and t. They tend to have something between them – a vowel, a p, a syllable boundary. And with that a small distinction builds into quite the anthill.

Ants. Formidable, to be sure. Small but not to be underestimated. Axiomatically industrious; the cartoon version of them is as a living machine, crawling in coordination. And this is where I get back to Emmet.

I should say that the family name Emmett, also spelled Emmet or, as in today’s case, Emett, does not come from the ants – unless you have an Aunt Emma. The family name Emmett (with however many m’s and t’s) is actually taken from the diminutive form of the female name Emma. Who the heck was Emma and why was she so special? She was the mother of Edward the Confessor. But Emma is not originally a full name tout court; it arose as a diminutive of Irmgard (meaning ‘whole enclosure’ as in a castle) or Ermintrude (meaning ‘entirely beloved’, which this name no longer is). So the path from origin to end is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine.

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Or a Rowland Emmet machine. Who is Rowland Emmet? He was an artist and a creator of whimsical machines. If you have seen the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang you have seen some of his creations, intricate Victorianesque follies with spinning bits and wry humour. If they weren’t so clean and consciously self-amused, some might call them steampunk. They have assorted bits spinning and processing industriously like ants, and they have mannequins and other anthropomorphisms.

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The Ontario Science Centre has a small collection of Emett’s machines. It brings them out every December. They are delightful. They are every bit as entertaining and cultured as the Emmetts I have known since my childhood, and every bit as busy as the emmets I try not to step on as they march across the sidewalk or mob an apple core. Admit it: Emett was an eminent animator.

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chryselephantine

Posted on December 21, 2015 | 2 comments

Never mind the elephant in the room. It’s impossible to ignore the elephant in this word.

But wait. Let’s look at the rest first. What’s this chrys? Does Chrysler leap to mind? You may think this is an adjective for a Chrysler 300C, or perhaps a Town & Country. Huge, padded vehicles. But chryselephantine is not related to Chrysler (which is actually an old Dutch name), and it’s not pronounced the same way either. Our chrys of the day is said “kris,” the same as in chrysalis and chrysotile. And it means the same thing.

What thing is that? Gold. Greek χρῡσός chrusos. So is this a word for a golden elephant? Not so much the whole elephant. What have elephants been most valued for? I don’t mean their intelligence, loyalty, and work ethic – I’m talking about what thing has gotten them killed most often so people could steal it from them. Yes, ivory. The Greek word for ‘elephant’, ἐλέϕας elefas, is the same as the Greek word for ‘ivory’, and there’s an obvious reason for that.

So there we have it. Gold and ivory. And the ine? Just an adjectival ending. It doesn’t mean it’s a mineral or someone’s name (although that would be a heck of a name to have). It’s pronounced like “in.” The whole word is said /krɪsɛlɪˈfæntɪn/.

So a thing that is chryselephantine is… no, not made of gold and ivory, not generally. Just inlaid or overlaid with them. I mean, come on. That stuff is expensive. And, actually, in one of the two cases, illegal now for new production (I mean theft from its now-dead producers).

So you won’t be using this word much literally unless you deal in expensive antiques and antiquities. But you can still use it figuratively, especially if you want to be opaquely precious. Prose, verse, or music that is shining, gleaming, very valuable, can earn this sobriquet in high approbation. It’s sort of like throwing an overpriced statue at it. It’s a heavy word, so old, so expensive. It will drive the avid reader to the dictionary and the less avid reader to lighter reading. But it’s a word to keep in your collection. Just be careful who you show it to.

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elative

Posted on December 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

All motion is relative. And all relatives are emotional. Some are easily carried away. Some carry others away easily. When the season demands seeing relations, expect occasional elations along with levity. But while some will choose to be elated, others may find elation less elevating and, as the day grows late, may seek the elative (and perhaps the elevator).

And if those relatives are Finnish or Estonian, then ever the more so will you have their elatives. Elative, you see, is a case in such languages as those – along with illative, ablative, prolative, and translative, and abessive, adessive, and inessive – and instructive, and more. Things we in English do with prepositions and word order, they in Finno-Ugric languages do with suffixes (case endings) on nouns. If something is moving towards, into, out of, or away from something, or is becoming something or staying something – in short, if noun A has some particular relation to noun B – that relationship will be expressed by means of these noun cases rather than by any added words. So in Finnish, Mä otin lasin kaapista means ‘I took a glass out of the cupboard’, with kaapista meaning ‘out of the cupboard’ – the sta part is the ending that says it’s in the elative. The reverse direction is illative.

So why elative? Is it that Finns are very happy to get out of places? I won’t say that’s not true, but in this case the elation is not extreme happiness. It’s just e as in egress and eject and e pluribus unum – it means ‘out of’ or ‘away from’ – and lat as in ablate, translate, relate, and, yes, elate: it refers to taking or carrying. A person who is elated is, etymologically, carried away – or anyway taken away, transported. In the usual sense this means transported to joy, even ecstasy (a word that comes from Greek for ‘standing outside’), but in the grammatical sense it just means what you do to a glass when you reach into the cupboard and take it to go put something in it (which will be illative).

So if you find yourself with relatives who are very taken with you, but you would rather be taken from them, you can simply say “I’m feeling elative!” and leave it – withdraw with your glass for some illation of libation and illuminating liberation.

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Zen

Posted on December 15, 2015 | 5 comments

On the right side of my bookshelf, around where I keep a lot of my camera stuff, I have a section of books on Buddhism and related topics.

That photo is quite yellow. The shelf is lit by halogen lights and Christmas tree bulbs. It looks normal enough in person (well, a bit dark) because my mind adjusts to the colour. But the camera takes it and then we see the picture in a different context and we see the colour imbalance. So I reset the balance on the camera using a blank white sheet of paper – actually the back of an airline boarding pass that I have sitting around.

It’s not that that is perfectly neutral white balance. It’s just that it more closely matches our default bias. There is no such thing as unbiased, perfectly balanced colour, any more than there is such a thing as accent-free speech or an unbiased opinion. There is no neutral act of seeing. You just have to know what balance you want, acknowledge it, balance yourself according to it, just as you have to focus on what you focus on and choose what to have in the frame and outside the frame.

There’s one word that shows up a few times on the spines of those books. I could pull out any of them and feature it. I’ll pull this book out because I want to. I found it quite by chance in some used book occasion. It’s a book from 1960, although the first blank page has “January 1965” handwritten in fountain pen diagonally across the lower right corner. The pages are yellowing and smell of the gradual decay of tree-pulp paper and a bit of the basement it must have sat in for many years.

Here is the back cover.

That is the author. Does he look familiar? Here is his dedication.

The author was a motion picture actor. If you recognize him, it’s probably from The Bridge on the River Kwai. He played the Japanese Colonel. His name is Sessue Hayakawa. Actually, Sessue is a name he took when he started acting in movies; his given name – given at his birth in 1889 – was Kintaro.

Here is the front cover.

It’s his autobiography. The title kind of gives away the ending, doesn’t it? But it’s how he gets there that is of interest. He came from a noble Japanese family. He was all set for a career in the navy when, in a reckless diving misadventure, he burst his eardrum and was rendered unfit. He decided that he had dishonoured his family, and he resolved to do the honourable thing.

He in fact did commit seppuku, also known as hara-kiri (not hari-kari!). But he did not die. He didn’t have anyone to cut his head off at the end. So he was hospitalized with very substantial injury to his lower abdomen.

How do you follow up an act like that? With a visit to a Zen Buddhist priest. Followed by a lot of meditation. And then a career as an actor and more meditation and, well, this book.

I have several books on Zen. I have read much about it. Which is like shouting much about silence.

Whatever you think Zen is, it’s not. I can’t tell you just what it is. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that I am not a Zen master. I have meditated various ways at various times, including with Zen Buddhists, although in recent years my only meditation has been running, which doesn’t quite count. But I have no experience of enlightenment in the Zen Buddhist sense. I think I can see the shadow of a corner of it, maybe. I’m probably wrong.

The second is that you can’t explain silence with shouting.

I can tell you what Zen is. It’s a school of Buddhism, best known in its Japanese version although it also exists in China. Zen is the Japanese rendition of the word禅, which in Mandarin Chinese is chan. The full forms are zenna and chánnà. They come from Sanskrit ध्यान (dhyāna). Which means ‘meditation’.

Zen is meditation. In the plainest sense, that is what Zen is. To quote Sylvia Boorstein, “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

In some schools of Zen, that is it. You focus your mind, you watch the thoughts arise and pass by like clouds in the sky, you taste existence. In others, you strive to break your mind free from the ruts it travels in by meditating on paradoxical ideas.

In the end, you learn that you and the things around you are not many, not two. You come to recognize your position, your bias, your perspective, your focus, your frame. You learn that nothing has permanent existence, everything is changing, and what exactly is this “everything” and what exactly is this “changing” and what exactly is this “is” and what exactly is “what exactly” and

As in all Buddhism, the aim is non-attachment. I have some ideas about what is and is not non-attachment, but I’m not, you know, attached to them. Some people interpret non-attachment as meaning eschewing things of the world, but it seems to me that rejection is no more equanimitous than craving. Enjoying while it’s there and letting go when it’s not seem the best options. Fine words, of course, and badly self-incriminating, as witness the two thousand books I can’t bear to get rid of. Fortunately, like all fine words, they will eventually be forgotten.

The simplicity of Zen spills over into an aesthetic associated with it. But Zen gardens are not Zen any more than bedrooms are sleep.

I would like to eschew all marketing and branding that uses the word Zen. Putting Zen on commercial products is like putting vegan on roast prime rib.

I do remember fondly, though, one business in Toronto, no longer there I think – I used to see their sign in an upper window on Spadina: Zen Travel. I liked that. I imagined a place where you go in and they tell you that you are already where you want to be; you just have to realize it. But it’s how you get there that is of interest. In exchange, you pay them all you have, which is nothing.

But perhaps you will get a boarding pass. Which you can use in place of a blank sheet of paper to set your white balance.

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chevrotain

Posted on December 15, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Google image search for ‘chevrotain’ was exactly what I needed,” tweeted (twot? twet?) Iva Cheung today.

Why would that be? What is a chevrotain? Is it some way of entertaining with a Chevrolet? Or is it a kind of goat cheese? A herb, crossed from chervil and milk vetch? Could there be some other kind of overt chain between the name and the thing? What sort of inert havoc is this?

Ah, Google it yourself and you’ll see. A chevrotain is what is commonly called a mouse deer. It should not be mistaken for a mouse, a deer, a mouseketeer, or a deer mouse. The difference between mouse deer and deer mouse tells you how such English compounds are headed: they’re headed to the right. The first word modifies the second. A mouse deer is, nominally, a deer of the mouse type, while a deer mouse is a mouse of the deer type.

In reality, though, a deer mouse is just a mouse that is rather agile. (It is not axiomatically dead. Nor is a dormouse or door mouse. Actually, it’s doornails that are dead.) A mouse deer, on the other hand, is a creature that looks like a deer but is much smaller. And is not a deer, though it is an ungulate, which means it walks on its nails (formed into hooves). But these are not fingernails and not doornails; they are deernails. No, wait, they’re deer-mouse-nails. Um. They’re chevrotain nails. Maybe we should, for the sake of the French that is in chevrotain, call them ongles, which is French for ‘nail’ and comes from the same root as ungulate. (Ungulate has nothing to do with undulate; I’ll just wave that one away.)

The name chevrotain is, as I said, from French, and means (roughly) ‘little goat’ or ‘goatlet’. I must say that chevrotains look more like deer than like goats, but whatever. They don’t have horns or antlers, in spite of chevrotain being an anagram of active horn. You’ll be lucky enough to see a chevrotain anyway. They’re quite shy, because what they really look like to many other animals is lunch. They can be as small as 700 grams (a pound and a half), though some kinds get up to 16 kilograms (35 pounds). So they hide, and they mostly keep to themselves (with a bit of twisting and swapping the ch and a for an rt you can get introvert from chevrotain), which has helped keep them going as a species for about 34 million years. They get together to mate, which seems to be their main social activity; female chevrotains can be almost incessantly pregnant, mating as little as a few hours after giving birth (which has also helped keep them going) – but what the heck, the kids are standing on their own feet after one hour. But they have one at a time.

The other thing they have is fangs. Two at a time.

Yup, all chevrotains have sharp little fangs that stick out of the sides of their mouths. They may seem like micro-vampire-deer. But really they don’t suck your blood, nor do they crave hot sin (hmm, or maybe they do; see above about mating). Or anyway no one’s seen them doing so. We will overlook the fact that their taxonomic family name, Tragulidæ, is a bit reminiscent of Dracula, and that the suborder name, Ruminantia, reminds us of Romania, where Dracula is from. Or that they prefer the dark. There are no chevrotains in Romania; they live mainly in Asia and Africa. And they’re ruminants, which means cud-chewers, which means plant-eaters. But should you happen to be sleeping in a forest in Kerala, say, and you feel four tiny hooves treading on or near you…

Naw, never mind, they’d still be less to worry about than larger things like tigers or, worse, people. Chew that one over.

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limen

Posted on December 12, 2015 | 6 comments

limen

Follow the left edge of this sidewalk down with your eyes. At what point does it fade into blackness? What is the least light you can see before you can see no light – what is the minimum level of lumens? What is the least sound you can hear, the least touch you can feel? Where is sense no longer sense, feeling not feeling?

At the limen.

This is what psychologists generally mean when they refer to a limen: the line between perception and non-perception, from Latin limen ‘threshold’. It is not necessarily a clear line, a break, a thump. It may be like the moment you fall asleep. Have you ever noticed exactly when you lose awakeness?

But a limen can be another thing.

Look at the woman walking away from the camera. Is she on the flat sidewalk? Or on the faux-brick verge? Or both and neither?

And as you look at her, who is looking at her?

The camera received a share of the light bounced off her, but more a share of the light bounced off around her, so that she is discerned mainly by what she kept the camera from receiving: she is there by not being there; she gives her image by keeping light. The electronic data from my camera’s sensor was stored on my computer, and uploaded to a server, and is now temporarily stored on your computer and represented by an arrangement of light made by your screen. That light strikes your eyes. Your eyes transmit the signal to your brain. Your brain processes it, assembles it, infers a shape from the absences. Your consciousness is aware of this act of seeing. You may not be sure the figure is a woman, not a man, until I tell you so. But who is this you? You know yourself as a stream of thought changing incessantly, aware of the continuity from one moment to the next but leaving behind most of what occupies it. What thoughts passed through your mind over the 5 seconds starting exactly 24 hours ago from now?

We have, then, a string of physical things connecting and connected by processes, like a line passing from L to M to N. What is more real, the things or the processes? If you say the things, what do you make of this process of consciousness that is evaluating this reality? Can the spaces between the letters be more real than the letters? What matters more, the vowels or the consonants? Or the interaction between them? Is the interaction between processes and things the most real thing even as it is no thing at all but threshold between them?

Almost 18 years ago, I finished my doctoral dissertation on Richard Schechner, the founder of performance theory. He produced avant-garde theatre; he brought together insights from anthropology and theatre, and applied them to performance traditions and activities around the world. I am not generally one to focus my efforts on another person’s work, but it was a viable and recommended thesis topic and I enjoyed doing it.

A key concept in Schechner’s work as in the work of those who influenced him is the liminal. Here is a definition from The Ritual Process by Victor Turner: “Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” A liminal place or, by extension, a liminal entity (inasmuch as the entity serves as a transformational space) may be called a limen. Schechner preferred to stay with the adjective liminal, but I found limen a very handy concept and term of reference. I used the word 76 times in my dissertation. Here are some quotations:

We may visualize the individual, the moment of action, of creation, as the limen between the world of pure potential, unrealized, and the world of physical reality, done deeds, things concretized, set into matter. This point is always transforming potential into actuality just as it is transforming the past into the future. This individual, this act, this moment, this limen, is transformation.

The body is the limen between the inner and the outer.

This both/and is a fundamental characteristic of the limen, the transformational space. It is where there is “not this” and “not not this.” The person, the human individual, is the basic point of transformation, and this transformation requires a transformational space between individuals.

Performance is, thus, a thing that is done and yet also reflected on, held apart from the doer. . . . It is a doing into a subjunctive or suspended realm which nonetheless, by means of its signification—i.e., its effects on the inner reality—may be efficacious. It affects the outer reality by means of the inner reality, and yet affects the inner reality by means of the outer reality. It is ephemeral, and yet in the instant of its being is reified. It is both a being and a nothingness; it is, in short, a limen.

This is what this is: being being. We perform our selves performing ourselves. At every interaction, every threshold, every point of transformation, there is a limen. It is like the layers of an onion. But can you see, at any limen, exactly where the transformation takes place? Where one thing stops and another begins, where they merge and emerge? How do you illuminate it? By what process do you eliminate it?

And who are you to eliminate, who are always a process of elimination and emergence?

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alalite

Posted on December 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

I wanted to do something lapidary for tonight’s tasting note. I make no claims to writing gems – I am not much of one for self-spruiking – but at least I am not prone to alalia (speechlessness). So I have found this elegantly euphonious name of a mineral. It may even have something of the animal in it: specifically, a wing – ala – and a light one at that. So I’ll alight on it.

Its initial ala is especially to my liking because those are the initials of someone lovely and likeable (and light) to whom I was wed 15 years ago; today has been our anniversary. But it also has a little alliteration internally with those two licks of the tongue, and to the eyes it seems a specially strong seal of approval, A1 A1. I also like the little light in the middle right, the candle of the i.

But what light of the alalite through yonder window breaks? What colour is this rock? It is, it seems, a light – or not-so-light – green, that loveliest of colours, shade of the forest and of the best eyes. But alalite is a sort of diopside, or perhaps it is just another name for diopside – the sources are conflicting and uncertain on this – and diopside, though mainly various shades of green, can also be blue, brown, white, grey, or colourless. It can also be clear or cloudy. Very helpful, isn’t that? Anyway, it’s MgCaSi2O6. Magnesium, calcium, silicon, oxygen. Four things you are sure to have in your kitchen, but not in purified form, just in foods, supplements, or implements – or atmosphere. And not in this combination.

And where does this name come from? The Ala valley in Piedmont, Italy, where this variety of diopside was first identified. So it is a green stone of a mountain valley, and its name sounds like echoing yodeling. I like it – I delight in it. I do not have the stone, but I have the name, and it is illuminating (even elating) enough.

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amanita

Posted on December 6, 2015 | 3 comments

My late teens were charged with yearning and self-fulfilling prophecies of failure, an arc of desire and disappointment that was accomplished before it began. I felt that I wanted to be someone whose lost potential others would mourn, who had loved better than others and yet to whom others would say “I loved you better.” I was in search of a new version of reality, an altered state, one in which simple truth of feeling would be enough.

In other words, as I have since realized, I was pretty typical in many ways. Except that I was even less able than most to act on my desires, paralyzed from within, so afraid of rejection that I pre-rejected.

I was introduced by a drama teacher to the music of Laurie Anderson. I loved her work instantly. One piece stirred me more than others – and in fact still stirs me, and now I understand a little better what she had in mind. It’s “Gravity’s Angel.” Play it while you read this.

Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s rainbow.

Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s angel.

It’s a reference to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The song doesn’t follow the plot; you may know the song ever so well and still be entirely in the dark about the book. But there is a thematic resonance.

I was curious. A friend had the book. I borrowed it. I found it was very well written – vivid – but also a bit hard to follow, which actually I sort of liked (hey, I had already read Finnegans Wake). But it was too vivid, and it described some things that were hard to swallow. I put it down a third of the way through.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to try it again. I bought a copy.

It’s a darkly (darkly!) comic novel, hallucinatory almost, an alternate reality, full of sex and destruction and desires, version and inversions and perversions and conversions and reversions and other diversions. It’s set during the Second World War. Its opening and focal point is the Blitz in London.

I’ve been wanting for some time now to take this one from the bookshelf and taste a word from it. But what word? Today I finally just grabbed it and opened it and flipped to a page. Nope, not that page. Another. Hmm. A third.

Yes.

There. There is the word I want from this book. A word of hallucination, a word of escape, a key to a Lewis Carroll world of inversions, but a word of a destroying angel, an angel rising above a bombed city, an angel falling in a bomb on a city, an angel eating you from within like unsatisfied desire.

Amanita.

Amanita is a kind of mushroom. In fact, one kind of amanita is the classic toadstool, bright red with white dots: Amanita muscaria, commonly known as fly agaric (the musca in muscaria refers to flies), because it was used dried in bowls of milk to kill flies. But it is also a well known hallucinogen, eaten (and, it seems, smoked) recreationally. It has surely led to the undoing of many flies of more than one kind.

But then – beyond the undone flies – lurks Amanita phalloides, known as the death cap. And different species known as destroying angel: Amanita bisporigera, Amanita exitialis, Amanita ocreata, Amanita virosa. They will be your undoing if you eat them. Not right away – it takes a few days – but by the time you realize something’s wrong, your only hope to live is likely a new liver. Such appealing-looking phallic fungi, not so different in appearance from many table mushrooms, tempting too to those who wish to experience a new reality. Oh, and they will.

It’s a pretty word, isn’t it? Amanita. Like a cross between Amanda and Anita. Perhaps they are cousins of Alice – we should go ask her. It apparently comes from Amanon, a mountain in what is now Turkey. It makes me think of our first microwave oven, an Amana: a very well made machine, a miracle of technology, cooking with radio waves. Amanita could just be a small Amana, a little thing in your hand capable of leaving you fully cooked.

Pynchon’s book is a rainbow of sex and death, an arc with all the visible colours and more, extending into radio waves. It has its destroying angel and it has its angelic young man in an arc of destruction, annihilating at final contact; it has its louche antihero and its picaresque adventures, its half-circle of the demimonde; it has its escape, its hallucination, its alteration. It has its cheap tricks that make you say “Amanita few minutes to absorb this.”

And perhaps you will not fully appreciate what you have let yourself into, what you have let into you, the gravity of the circumstance, until too late. You have swallowed it and it has eaten you from within.

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jentacular

Posted on December 2, 2015 | 4 comments

“It’s… JEN-TACULAR!” You drop your fork on your bacon and eggs and look up at the TV. There, good enough to eat, are Aniston, Lawrence, Lopez, and Garner. Well! This is a good way to start the day. Breakfast TV indeed! Positively jentacular.

Of course, such a scene might be most openly desirable to that sort of gent who is attracted to copious quantities of bacon and eggs. Well, yeah, and the Jennifers, too. But come on. We’re talking about breakfast here.

You didn’t know? Jentacular means ‘of, or relating to, breakfast’. It’s from Latin jentaculum ‘breakfast’, which in turn is derived from jentare, ‘eat breakfast’ (or, for the old-schoolers, ‘break fast’, since breakfast is from break fast, i.e., end the overnight fasting – that thing where you don’t eat because you’re asleep). Of course, in classical Latin, it’s IENTARE; in modern writing, we distinguish consonant i from vowel i by using the extended version of the letter, j, for the former, just as we distinguish the vowel form of v from the consonant form of v by writing the cursive form, u, for the former. We’ve made them official different letters, and they sound much more different in English. But in Latin jentare (or ientare, or IENTARE since half-uncials didn’t exist way back then) was pronounced “yen-ta-reh.”

Quite a difference between a yenta and a Jen, though, isn’t there? As much of a difference as there is between breakfast and breakfast. In some places, breakfast may be fish and soup; in others, it may be sugary processed grains soaked in low-fat milk (because somehow lots of sugar and little fat is better than little sugar and lots of fat?); in others (looking at you, England – please invite me over), it may be bacon, eggs, beans, and fried tomatoes – not gentle, but gentile. Breakfast changes over place and time.

And so does Jen, or rather Jenny. We know that Jenny is not new as a nickname in English; we see it in various usages even in the time of Shakespeare. But somehow in The Doctor’s Dilemma, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1906, there is this:

MRS. DUBEDAT. My name is Jennifer.

RIDGEON. A strange name.

MRS. DUBEDAT. Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.

How do we reconcile this? Is Dr. Ridgeon oddly onomastically naïve? No. In the time of Shakespeare and for centuries after, Jenny was short for Janet or, occasionally, Jane. If you’re wondering how Janet came to be Jenny, you may as well move on to how Richard became Dick, Edward became Ned and Ted, Robert became Bob, John became Jack, and Margaret became Peg. After those, Jenny seems quite obvious for Janet, doesn’t it?

But more obvious for Jennifer. Which is indeed from the same root at Guinevere, which means, roughly, ‘fair and soft’. OK, fair enough, once Jennifer is popular it naturally claims Jenny and Jen. How did Jennifer become such a popular name that Jen is practically the default name for North American females now? I guess a lot of people liked it… starting with those who saw The Doctor’s Dilemma, which – in spite of being one of those preachy, wordy Shavian thinkdramas (which are nonetheless great to act in) – was quite popular. I’m sure the scripted extreme attractiveness of Jennifer Dubedat (and thus of the actresses who played her, starting with Lillah McCarthy) didn’t hurt.

But. That’s a lot to digest before breakfast. I should go more gentle on the gut in what is, for many of my readers who open this first thing in the morning, still an antejentacular hour. I suggest something to settle the stomach. Sparkling wine, perhaps? Ah, that would be jentacular.

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nenuphar

Posted on November 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

Doesn’t this look like the name of some Egyptian pharaoh or Babylonian king? Or perhaps some writing left on a wall by a disembodied hand that was a bit too drunk? (If that doesn’t make sense, look up mene mene tekel upharsin.) Or maybe what Neneh Cherry and Pharrell Williams would be called if they got together?

Or it could just be a nice soft word with white shoulders clothed in light linen. It seems pleasing enough. Even French in its way. To me it does, at least, because the first time I noticed it, it was spelled nénuphar. It was on a bottle of liquid hand soap. The French part. (Hey, we’re in Canada here.)

Twice a year, we go to the One-of-a-Kind Craft Show, and we have some favourite booths we stop at (out of the something like 1000 that are there). I like Peppermaster, for instance – I always taste their latest and hottest sauces. I get my cufflinks etc. from BBJ (Barbie’s Basement Jewellery). Aina buys dresses from if and Dinh Bá. And we buy our hand soap (and hand cream) from Lovefresh. It’s not as cheap as the mass-market stuff, but it’s more responsibly made and it sure is nice.

One of their kinds of hand soap is Nénuphar. Well, that’s what it is in French. In English, it’s Water Lily.

Yes, nenuphar – which is also an English word once you lose the accent on the e – means ‘water lily’. It’s not the kind of soap we buy the most of (grapefruit and lavender and lemon grass are more to our taste) but it’s nice for our smaller bathroom that guests go into. It has that super flowery smell. I mean, lilies, right? It makes me think of that perfume, White Shoulders. Also funerals. Especially if you open the bottle and sniff the great clear mass of it directly, full on. It’s like you’re lying on a bed of flowers. No, not on. Under.

So this word must be Greek, right, with the ph? Unless it’s something like Hindi or Thai? Hmm. Here’s the funny thing: It came to us (via French) from Latin nenufar. Latin got it from Arabic naynufar. The OED says that was probably a “transmission error” from Persian nilufar. Which in turn comes from Sanskrit nilotpala, from nila ‘dark blue’ and utpala ‘lotus’ or ‘water lily’.

Do you notice where the ph comes in? Right at the end. French also had it originally as nénufar. Apparently f just didn’t seem classical enough. Latin has f, but words that are loans into Latin must get ph because Greek, amirite? Maybe the f is just too, um, basic, so they have to adjust the ph balance.

So. From nilotpala to nenuphar – which, in English, according to the OED, is pronounced “nen you far” or “nen ya fer,” thanks to the phonological muscle-wrenching of the English vowel shift.

Well, whatever. It all comes out in the wash. Actually, no, it doesn’t – your hands smell like it for a while.

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