fob

Posted on June 12, 2024 | 1 comment

As I encountered Maury near his front door, he was patting his pants pockets with a vexed expression.

“What’s the prob, Bob?” I said.

“Fob,” Maury replied.

“F.O.B.? Full of bother?”

“O bother, where art thou,” he said. “In this case, I am addressing my fob. My fob is not in my fob and I cannot find it. I had ordered a fob for my fob so I could find it in my fob, but they fobbed me.”

I paused. I blinked. I blinked again. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I think the chain of that has broken for me.”

“For me too, precisely,” Maury said.

“You ordered a fob… for the fob… that goes in your fob.”

“Now you have it,” Maury said. “I wish I did.”

“Well, let me make sure I have the links. Fob, as in a small pocket for a watch.…”

“The original sense, yes,” Maury said, and patted the little pocket in his jeans, what we commonly think of now as a change pocket, though its original use was to hold a pocket watch. The word fob may be related to a dialectal German word fuppe ‘pocket’.

“…and fob, as in a chain that attaches to a pocket watch…”

“The thing I ordered, yes,” Maury said. Chains for watches came to be called fob-chains by association with the pocket that the watch went into, and that was shortened to fob, executing a sort of metonymic transference, from the container to the retainer. A fob can also be a ribbon, and a fob can also come with a protective cover for the watch.

“…and fob, as in a thing that attaches to a fob and goes into a fob.”

“Such as the little device without which I am not getting into my building,” Maury said.

“Quite the thing that fob circles around the watch and then replaces it. A watch itself is not a fob, but any little decorative or functional thing that can attach to a fob-chain and go into or hang from a pocket can be called a fob. It’s a real fob, in the other sense.” I meant the sense of ‘cheat, trick’, which relates to the verb fob as in fob off, ‘swindle someone by substituting an inferior item’. This also comes from German, but is probably not related to the other fob – unless the connection is to a secret pocket, which it may be, but we don’t know.

“Well, as I said, they fobbed me,” Maury said. “They fobbed this off on me, to be precise.” He reached into a pocket and produced a very small chain with very small links – the sort of thing that, in a photograph with nothing else for scale, could look like a watch chain of the right size. As he held it up I could also see that the ring at the end was broken. “And it was sent FOB origin, which in their view means that once it was in the mail it was my problem.” He stuffed the fobbed-off fob into his fob pocket.

“That’s not quite right,” I said. “That just means that the liabilities for transporting the goods and for damage fall on you as soon as it’s shipped. It doesn’t mean they can send any old inferior product and it’s your problem once it’s in the mail.” For those unfamiliar with the term, FOB stands for free on board and is a shipping term designating where the responsibility for the goods passes from seller to buyer.

“I know,” Maury rumbled. “And I shall be addressing this through the e-commerce site. But FOB – first order of business– is to get into my FOB – forward operating base.” He continued patting his apparel. “Ah!” he said, pulling his handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his jacket. “At last, an FOB – flash of brilliance.” From within the folds of the handkerchief he pulled a small grey disc-like object. Then he reinserted the handkerchief in the pocket, its corners protruding jauntily. “Foppery has its tricks,” he said, and advanced to the door, fob in hand.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

chicest, chicane

Posted on June 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

Let me introduce you to the chicest linguistic chicanery… what? No, not the choicest. The chicest.

No, it doesn’t rhyme with nicest. It’s the superlative of chicer.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, most chic.

Yes, chicest looks weird, but how would you spell it? Thanks to the orthographic chicanes and etymological chicanery (or vice versa) of the English language, we have a word that phonologically is eminently amenable to addition of the superlative suffix but in written form seems to have had something shaved off, resulting in an obstacle to comprehension.

Well, we’re the ones to blame here. Swiping French chic into English is like swindling something from a luxury store just because it’s more expensive when you could have had the same thing readily enough from someplace cheap. Yes, yes, French is chic, all fashionably set out and all that, but German simply has good arrangement and tasteful presentation – or, as the Germans say, Schick.

Of course Schick may seem a word for ‘neatly shaven’, because, after all, it’s a brand of razor. But it’s also the German word for tidy arrangement et cetera, formed from the verb schicken, ‘arrange, outfit, dispatch’ (related to other Germanic words meaning ‘happen’ and ‘hurry’). And, as far as we can tell, Schick is the origin of chic.

But there could be some trickery, some deception, some misleading arrangement. After all, schicken may also be the origin of French chicane.* And chicane refers to deception or subterfuge, at first especially in legal matters but also over time in other kinds of subtlety and trickery. In English it also has the same sense (but a different pronunciation, one that sounds like it’s been too close to cocaine), plus some derived senses, notably a hand that has no trumps in a game of bridge, and a section of a race course that has a double curve.

Which is funny, when you consider that in matters legal and financial, a chicane involves pulling a fast one, while in racing (cars, bobsleds, etc.), a chicane exists specifically to slow racers down. You think you’re going one way, then you suddenly have to change direction, and then you have to change back to the original direction. 

Which is sort of like what happens with chicest. After all, it’s a French word that combines with an English suffix and manages to look like both French and English and also neither. But it would probably be even worse if we tried to spell it any other way. Chickest? Obviously not. Cheekest? Ha. Sheekest? It would sound right, but it would look so wrong. Chiquest? I mean, yeah, that’s as close as you might get, but it still has its hazards. And anyway it would look like it came from French chique, which refers to a flea or a lump of tobacco, both of which come from Spanish chico ‘small’. Which somehow is not related to chic.

Well, anyway. I think our language has some cheek coming up with a chicane like chicest. But if you’re wondering what I do, well, I’m sorry to say that while I will say “chicest” (“sheekest”) out loud, I’ll write it as most chic – I’ll chicken out.

* Are you surprised to see German words becoming French words? It’s true that French is not descended from German, but it’s also true that Germany and France are neighbours and that before the Romans came to France it was full of Germanic and Celtic speakers, so there has been some swerving of words between them.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , ,

quixotic

Posted on June 3, 2024 | 3 comments

We went to the ballet yesterday. They were performing Don Quixote. As we settled into our seats, we observed quite a few people taking pictures of their programs with the curtain as a backdrop. I did likewise. You can see why.

Yes, the front of the program said DON QUIXOTE, while the projection on the curtain said DON QUIJOTE. (From where I was sitting I could see the orchestra’s scores on their first pages. They, too, said DON QUIXOTE. Alas, my camera did not capture that detail.)

Well. That seems rather quixotic, doesn’t it? Or should I say quijotic? How would we pronounce that, anyway? I mean, Quixote is said like “ki-ho-té” but we say quixotic like “quick-sot-ic.” (I am told that some people say “key-zot-ic” but that seems even more muddled to me – might as well go all one way or all the other.) If it were quijotic would we say “kwai-jot-ic”? Or “kwij-ot-ic”? Or would we manage to make it “key-hot-ic”?

But why would it be quijotic in the first place? Why did the curtain say DON QUIJOTE?

That last one is easily enough answered: If you buy an edition of Cervantes’s novel in Spanish, it will say Don Quijote. In modern Spanish, that’s how it’s spelled. For them, spelling it Quixote would be sort of like us spelling Shakespeare’s King John as King Iohn. That’s how it’s spelled in Shakespeare’s First Folio, and Don Quixote is how Cervantes’s first edition spelled it… well, OK, it spelled it DON QVIXOTE.

And to be fair, the difference between Qvixote and Quixote is like the difference between Iohn and John: originally, U and V were two shapes of the same letter, a letter that could have a vowel sound or a consonant sound, and I and J were likewise two shapes of the same letter, a letter that could have a vowel sound or a consonant sound. But eventually (by a couple of centuries ago), the two forms were treated as separate letters, each one having one of the sounds. On the other hand, X did not become J – both letters still exist in Spanish, and one was not created from the other (even if X can be made by crossing two I’s). But some sounds that had been represented by X came to be represented by J.

That’s the very short version. The fuller version is that in Old Spanish, X was used for the “sh” sound (/ʃ/) and J for the “zh” sound (/ʒ/), as in fact they still are in modern Portuguese. But in Spanish the two sounds merged into the voiceless /ʃ/ in the century before Cervantes (which was also the century before Shakespeare, a time when English was changing its long vowel sounds; Cervantes died April 22, 1616, exactly one day before Shakespeare). Subsequently, the /ʃ/ sound shifted to its current back-of-mouth heavy “h” sound (written in IPA as /x/, as it happens), and in the early 1800s the spelling of that sound in Spanish was standardized to J, with X left to stand just for /ks/. But that was after we had come to know Don Quixote in the English-speaking world and after we had confected the word quixotic from it.

There’s a little bit more, by the way, though it doesn’t bear directly on Quixote. When Spain invaded and colonized Central America, the sound /ʃ/ and the similar sound /ç/ (which is like the German “front ch” or Polish ś) were written as X, and although those sounds have tended to become the /x/ sound in modern Spanish, they still sometimes spell them with x, as in México (which in Spanish is pronounced as though it were spelled Méjico – a spelling that has in fact been common in Spain). This is the origin of the x in words such as axolotl and xoloitzcuintli, and place names such as Ixmiquilpan. We like it well in English because the letter X, due to its infrequency in English words and its generally ostentatious non-Anglo-Saxon provenance (the x in Saxon notwithstanding), tends to have an air of the exotic.

And, yes, at times of the quixotic. Which means not simply quirky or chaotic, but possessed of impractically (even delusively) lofty, romantic, chivalrous ideals. Prone to tilting at windmills, imagining it as fighting dragons. Redolent of a vaunted distant past. Which, in Spanish, the spelling Quixote would also be. (You can still get that spelling in some other names, such as Pedro Ximénez, which is the name of a grape that is used in some kinds of sherry.) Ah, star-crossed X, so much grander than J, not merely twice but ten times as great as I… what a spelling you cast on us.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

fulminant, fulminate, fulgent, fulgurant

Posted on May 27, 2024 | 4 comments

It was working fine – fulgently, even. And then, suddenly, after the update, it was not. It was case of fulminant software dysfunction. At random times, it would suddenly slow down dramatically and use up so much memory my laptop’s fan was threatening a tornado. A program I would normally keep a half dozen files open in, and not need to restart for weeks at a time, I suddenly, tout à coup, needed to restart three times a day. Nor were the bits of advice online especially illuminating – no, I’m not going to simply rip out the entire software suite and reinstall, thereby losing all my settings, and [stricken from the text] you for suggesting it.

Needless to say, I was fuming. In fact, I was fulminating. I expounded effusive verbal effluvium, of the fulsomely vulgar kind. I don’t expect software to be inevitably fulgent, let alone fulgurant, but I do want it to be configured meaningfully. And if it’s not being useful, well, I will be Zeusful: hurling verbal lightning bolts at it.

I don’t know just how enlightening that all is, but in the end, it’s the lightning. You see, Latin for ‘lightning’ is fulmen, which is formed from fulgeo ‘I flash, I glare, I am lightning’. And from fulmen and fulgeo we get fulgent ‘shining like lightning’, fulgurant ‘dazzling like lightning’, fulminant ‘appearing abruptly and striking destructively like lightning’ (most commonly used in medical contexts), and fulminate ‘make a verbal attack; hurl verbal lightning bolts; espouse the striking of lightning on the subject’ – fulminate first appeared in English in the 1400s in legal and ecclesiastic contexts, referring to denunciations, formal censures, and similar blasts from on high, but now it’s extended to any kind of verbal inflammation.

These four words are similar and yet not the same – they cover a range of aspects of lightning, positive (the emission of photons and their illuminating effects) and negative (the electrical charge and its destructive power). The point, if you figure it out, is to have the full meaning with all its implications: a shock to the system may be enlightening, but not all abrupt enlightenment is jovial in nature. Yes, Jove – Jupiter – Zeus – is the god of sparkling jollity, but he is also the god who hurls thunderbolts, and they can land in different ways, including the abrupt arrival of a curse, as in misfortune, or the abrupt emission of curses, as in imprecations.

And it can come in multiple scales and modes: macro or micro, hard or soft, deed or word. Now I can hardly wait for the next electric download of an update to restore my software to fulgent functionality.

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

morbido

Posted on May 21, 2024 | 1 comment

I don’t often do tastings on non-English words, but this Italian word has always had an interestingly contrasty flavour for me, particularly because I come to it as an English speaker.

I should say, first, that the stress in this word is on the first syllable: “mor-bido.” So you really get that “more” sound. But in the context I usually hear it in, it’s not the mournful “mor” of a mortuary; in fact, it’s rather moreish. You see, I hear it mainly in cooking videos.

No, let me explain. I like to watch cooking videos in Italian. This is because (a) I like Italian food and (b) I like practicing my Italian comprehension. And this is specifically not because the videos are of cooking, uh, morbid things. I mean, yes, there are often dead animals in them (or anyway pieces thereof), but the morbidity and mortality are absolutely not the focus. So why am I hearing morbido? Because it means ‘soft’.

That’s right, it’s what we call a “false friend” – a word that resembles one English word but means a different one. A common example is French travailler, which resembles ‘travel’ but means ‘work’. Often people call these “false cognates,” but beware: not all false friends are false cognates. A false cognate is where two words appear to have the same etymological origin but don’t. A classic example is that cognate is a false cognate with cognitive – the two don’t come from the same root; cognate is from co ‘together’ and gnatus ‘born’ (from a root we also see as gen– as in generation and genital), while cognitive comes from co plus gnitivus, which is derived from gnosco ‘I know’. On the other hand, travel and travailler are not false cognates; they really do have the same origin, but they went in different directions: the Latin etymon was a word for a kind of torture, and the English used it as a word for voyaging while the French used it as a word for work. (Make what cultural inferences you will about that. Anyway, English also borrowed it separately as travail.)

OK, so is morbido a false cognate with morbid? No, it is not. Both words come from Latin morbidus, ‘sickly, diseased’ (which in turn comes from morbus, ‘disease’, which draws on the same mor- root as mortality). In English (and in several other languages), it kept that sense or at least stayed in the same sphere; we now commonly use morbid to refer to a focus on decay, disease, and especially death, but the medical term morbidity refers specifically to occurrences of illness, not of death – the collocation morbidity and mortality refers to bad things that happen in the course of medical treatment, both sickness (morbidity) and death (mortality). Whereas an Italian chef uses morbido to refer to good things – specifically soft ones – that come up in the course of cooking.

So… does that mean that Italians have, or anyway had, a negative attitude towards soft food? As though perhaps it is only for the invalid and valetudinarian? No, it seems not; rather, it was that disease and decay are associated with weakness and lack of strength and firmness, and so it came to mean that, and then it lost its negative tone and took on a positive one to mean ‘soft’, ‘docile’, ‘smooth’, ‘not rigid’. As the website Una parola al giorno puts it, “È uno degli esempi più splendidi di parola che si sia emancipata totalmente dalla sua origine scura e spiacevole, diventando una luce sensoriale potente, gradevole e gradita” (It’s one of the most splendid examples of a word being totally emancipated from its dark and unpleasant origin, becoming a powerful, pleasant, and welcome light to the senses).

It is not, after all, that morbido is used only for soft food; a pillow may also be so (“un cuscino morbido” is not only for your death bed), and, as Garzanti tells us, many other things may be called morbido (or, for feminine nouns, morbida): hair, fabric, skin, wine (smooth and well balanced), paintings (harmonious and delicate), personal character (tolerant, agreeable, sequacious even)… 

All of which inevitably seems a bit odd to my ear, and I can’t get around it. I’m simply too habituated to my English associations. The result is a dissonance that may not be morbid but is not morbido either. Meanwhile, to the person who grew up speaking Italian, the English use of morbid may also seem odd, perhaps feeling that when we talk of “morbid humour” and “morbid TV shows” and so on we have an eye on the cushions in the coffin and the softness of decay. On the other hand, they can associate it with the word morboso, which does mean ‘morbid’ or ‘sick’.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

droves

Posted on May 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

Every afternoon, on both sides of the building I live in, the driving force is cars, droves of them, like cattle crowding into chutes. Out my bedroom window, to the south, I see cars crawling on the expressway; on the north side, at street level, the street – which is meant to have one lane of traffic each way – often has three unofficial lanes jammed up one way and no room for human or beast or automobile in the other direction, just droves and droves striving in intense slowness to make it ultimately onto the equally torpid elevated highway. (Meanwhile, parallel to the expressway, trains carry commuters – each train carries up to 5,000 people, which is as many as you’ll see in the 4,000 cars that at any moment of rush hour occupy two lanes for the full 18 kilometres of the Gardiner expressway – and the trains are moving briskly… but I digress.)

Why do we speak of droves, anyway? Droves almost seem like groves, but mobile: large groups of like beings motivated en masse – leaving in droves, coming in droves, sometimes fleeing in droves or turning away in droves or arriving in droves. Often it’s fans, or voters, or customers, or tourists. People who exhibit group behaviour.

It doesn’t have to be people, though. Poets usually use droves about non-human things, and sometimes modified with an adjective: “the fireflies will rise in lucent droves” (Dave Lucas), “droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river” (Sheryl Luna), “the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves” (Jennifer Moxley), “They blossom, thick and fast, in droves” (Conor O’Callaghan), “Winged droves at evening wheeling!” (Ian Dall). But whatever is in the droves, it’s always the behaviour of a swarm or a herd.

Which is as it ever was, and if they move as though impelled, so much the truer to origins. For the first things to go in droves were cattle: a cattle drive drives a cattle drove. Yes, drove is formed from the same root as drive; in Old English the noun took the same form as the past tense – drāf – and both forms followed the same phonological trail under the whip of time to become drove. Only now, as the noun, you seldom talk of a drove, especially if you’re not talking of cattle or sheep; the multiplicity is an essential quality, and so why imagine just one drove being driven if you can imagine several, perhaps coming from different angles?

Which is like downtown Toronto traffic every weekday afternoon. Every street from whatever angle leading onto the Gardiner is backed up. In the morning, it’s the other direction, of course. Either way, droves and droves of drivers. Does it seem unkind to liken them to kine? Fair enough, they’re not cattle; cattle in a drove are hoofing it and actually moving, and may well make it to dinner first too…

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

Pronunciation tip: My IKEA kitchen

Posted on May 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

This is the pronunciation tip I’ve been wanting to do for most of a year. As soon as we decided to get IKEA to redo our kitchen, I knew I wanted to do it. Of course I couldn’t do it until the kitchen was done. The kitchen was done a couple of months ago… but I need the opportunity to record and edit the video, and also, I needed to find out how actually to say the things. Which takes more time than with most languages.

Leave a comment

Posted in pronunciation tips

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

bizarre

Posted on May 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

Napoleon’s in the back, sweet Eugenie’s in the front
Sweating on the beach in the hot, hot sun
Suddenly Napoleon goes and splashes in the water
Folks all look around and say, “Do you think I oughter?”
Eddy calls up Oxford, says “Come for your appointment,
Meet me on the beach, you better bring the ointment”
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

Soldiers study in casinos, they’re bathing in the salt
Villa Belza’s run down but it’s nobody’s fault
Virgin’s on the rock, Basquing in the sun
Sharks in the museum but the seals have the fun
When The Sun Also Rises it shines upon the turf
But the director’s friend comes and shows us how to surf
This may seem incoherent, shading into weird
Want to know the sense? Hey, grow a beard
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

If you were listening to popular music in the mid-’90s – or, apparently, more recently in some circles – you will know instantly what song that’s riffing on: “How Bizarre” by the New Zealand group OMC. And if you know that song, you know it lacks the coherent lucidity of, say, “Down Under” by Men at Work. But you can make sense of the lyrics above… if you know about Biarritz.

Biarritz? Is that a bizarre place? Not exactly. It’s a seaside resort in France, in the Basque region near the Spanish border. But it has enough quirky things that a person can fill out some odd lyrics: 

  • After the French revolution, sea bathing went from a thing one didn’t do to a thing that fashionable people did do, and Napoleon himself did it at Biarritz.
  • Empress Eugènie, the wife of Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III, built a palace in Biarritz that is now a hotel.
  • Biarritz was also a popular spot with British royalty, and Edward VII caused a minor stir when he had the Earl of Oxford (H.H. Asquith) come to Biarritz to receive his royal appointment as prime minister.
  • There are casinos in Biarritz, though they were converted for a time after World War II to an American G.I. University.
  • There were salt baths – in water ten times as salty as the ocean – though they’ve been closed for 70 years now.
  • Among the sights in Biarritz are a statue of the Virgin Mary on a rock reachable by a bridge; the Villa Belza, a neo-medieval villa built in the 1890s that for a time was in bad condition but is now spruced up into apartments; and the Museum of the Sea, which has aquariums with sharks and seals.
  • When Peter Viertel was in town to direct the movie of The Sun Also Rises, a friend of his came from California and introduced surfing to Europe, and Biarritz is now a major surfing destination.
  • And the name Biarritz is originally from Basque – as is the word bizar, which means ‘beard’ and is not related to Biarritz (similarity notwithstanding) but likely is the origin of the word bizarre.

That took a long time to get not very far, didn’t it. And ended up raising even more questions. Well, at least one question: How do you get from ‘beard’ to ‘weird’?

It’s not that beardos were weirdos. The sense seems to have taken a quirkier route. The Basque word bizar appears to have been the origin of Spanish bizarro, which means ‘handsome, gallant, brave, noble’ (like Zorro, perhaps?). And somehow it came from that into French bizarre, which means pretty much the same as English bizarre – English got the word from French, so at least that’s no surprise. 

Now, the French word may actually have gotten bizarre from the Italian bizzarro, which means now means ‘quirky, weird’ but previously meant ‘quarrelsome’. There are duelling ideas of where bizzarro came from, but the suggestion that it came from Spanish and that ‘gallant, brave’ slid over into ‘quarrelsome’ is at least plausible. And ‘quarrelsome’ can plausibly become ‘incongruous, quirky, nonsensical’, so at the very least we have a possible trail. For that matter, ‘gallant, brave’ can also slide over to ‘extravagant’ or – as brave is sometimes used euphemistically to mean now – ‘extremely inadvisable’. (The alternative suggestion, that the French saw bearded Spanish soldiers and thought they were weird, and used a Basque word for ‘beard’ to mean ‘weird’, is frankly rather bizarre as far as I’m concerned.)

However it got to be what it is, bizarre now is a word for something that is pointedly incongruous. I like the distinction Littré gives between bizarre, fantasque, and extravagant: “S’écarter du goût ordinaire par une singularité non convenable, c’est être bizarre ; s’en écarter par une fantaisie qui tout à coup change d’idée, c’est être fantasque ; s’en écarter d’une manière contraire au bon sens, c’est être extravagant” (To depart from ordinary taste by an inappropriate peculiarity is to be bizarre; to depart by a fantasy that suddenly changes one’s mind is to be fanciful; to depart in a manner contrary to good sense is to be extravagant). So, for instance, if bathing in the sea was simply not considered rational behaviour, doing so might be bizarre. Not that anyone would use that word to describe the emperor.

Merriam-Webster gives a similar kind of distinction between fantastic, bizarre, and grotesque, noting that bizarre “applies to the sensationally strange and implies violence of contrast or incongruity of combination” – which could describe soldiers taking classes in a casino, but somehow that’s not quite it. No dictionary I’ve looked at points out that z is a letter that is often used in English to give a sense of the strange or exotic – as it’s uncommon in the language and features largely in imported and confected words – but the word bizarre is at the very least no less exceptional for having it. (It wouldn’t have that effect in French, where z is somewhat more common.)

But how about that song, now? OMC – short for Ōtara Millionaires Club – were from Ōtara, a low-income suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, not a seaside resort for the upper classes in the south of France, so their song is anyway not Biarritz. And their singer, Pauly Fuemana, wasn’t Basque (he was Niuean and Māori) and didn’t have a beard, but it would have been more bizarre if he was and did, all things considered. But how bizarre is the song? Is it bizarre enough, or is it bizarrely not bizarre (like Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” is ironically full of things that aren’t ironic)? After all, there’s an important distinction to make between bizarre and simply incoherent. Or is the sense of bizarre just getting gradually bleached from time in the hot, hot sun? Well, here, you decide.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

succour, secure

Posted on April 30, 2024 | 1 comment

Jacques’s job came with a certain security, but it was no sinecure. He worked at a branch office (“succursale,” en français) of an underwriter, and they were a bit oversubscribed. Although he was by nature carefree, at this particular moment he was overrun, and he called me up. “Au secours!” he said. “Can you run over?” 

“I’m not so sure,” I replied. “What can I give you?” 

Jacques shrugged audibly. “Succour?” 

“How about a sucker, au sucre?” I said. 

“Sure,” he replied. I grabbed a lollipop and my jacket and headed over.

Not that a sucker is necessarily appropriate succour; although some of us may think of succour as encouragement, it really means ‘relief’ or ‘help’ – if you run to give someone succour, a bit of alimentary energy is the bare minimum, and they might prefer lawyers, guns, and money.

And in a plurality, if possible. Succour is a fake singular – the original form English took from Norman French was socours, which was subsequently mistaken for a plural. But in fact it came from Old French secours (which became modern French secours, as in au secours, ‘help!’), which was from Medieval Latin succursus, a participle of succurrere, ‘run to help’, from sub ‘under’ and currere ‘run’ – so if you are overrun, you need someone to underrun. The sense of assisting also gave rise to the French derived form succursale, ‘branch office’ (there is an English word succursal, referring to a religious subsidiary or a ‘chapel of ease’, but I’ve never seen it actually used in the wild).

Secure may seem to be related, but don’t be so sure. In fact it comes from securus, from se- ‘without’ and curus ‘care’ – compare the nearly identical sinecure, from sine ‘without’ and curus ‘care’. Securus passed into Old French and became seür, which became modern French sur(e) and English sure. And of course English also borrowed the Latin more directly to make secure.

And sucker, and sucre? Sorry. The latter is from Sanskrit (via Arabic); the former is as English and Germanic in origin as any word can be (though it does connect at the Proto-Indo-European with Latin sugo, source of French sucer ‘suck’). So it goes. Etymology solely by sound is insecure and gives no succour – it’s for suckers.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

figment

Posted on April 25, 2024 | 2 comments

“I wonder what that fig meant,” Maury said, as we walked through the art gallery.

“What that figment what?” I said. “Which figment?”

“No, the fig,” Maury said. “In the painting.”

“Which one?” I looked around us to see which he meant; there were paintings in all directions.

He nodded his head back towards a room we had lately left. “The Bosch. The busy one.”

“I saw no fig,” I said. “Perhaps it was a pigment of your imagination.”

“No, I gave it a paints-taking examination.”

“Well, why would there a be a fig there? They’re not natural to the Netherlands.”

“Nor the netherworld, but no matter: it’s fiction, you know.”

“Ah,” I said, “a figment indeed, then: the ficus was fictus.” 

I will explain this: ficus is Latin for ‘fig’ and is where we get our word fig from; fictus (not related to ficus) is where we get our word fiction from, and is the Latin past participle of fingo, ‘I make’ or ‘I fake’, which is the source of our figment – and also our feign. Maury knew this, of course, since he is also a figment of my mind (you do know these vignettes are fiction, right? The narrative details, that is – the linguistic facts are facts. By the way, fact is from factus, which, like fictus, means ‘made’, but in a different way and from a different verb).

“But it was not just my imagination, running away with me,” Maury said. “It was Bosch who was the boss. He decided to inflict the ficus on us.” He halted and held up a finger. “Let us reconfigure.” He turned and headed back towards the Early Netherlandish room.

“And you decided to focus on it,” I said, following him. “But I think you were foggy. This fig leaves some questions unanswered.”

“Oh,” said Maury, feigning befuddlement, “there were no fig leaves in the painting. All figures were unimpeachably there.”

“And apple-y so,” I said. “The fruits were looming. But a fig? Under where?”

Maury rolled his eyes and turned the corner into the room. “In short, over there.”

We made a bee-line for the painting. “Is that it?” I pointed.

“No, that’s fragmentary. Over there.”

“That dab of pigment?” I gestured to a roundish pinkish patch.

“Yes, I think… oh, my word.”

“What is your word?” I asked.

“Nothing at all, in fact. It’s just a figure of peach.” He turned away in disappointment.

“Well, then,” I said. “That fig meant your imagination.”

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,