burgundy

Posted on July 17, 2024 | Leave a comment

Today I’m tasting burgundy. You may notice that I haven’t capitalized the word. No need to be high-and-mighty; my current theme is colours, and the name of the colour is lower-cased. Not that I can limit myself to the colour with this word, naturally, but it is a good place for me to start, because it was the colour that was my introduction to burgundy – specifically, the burgundy Oldsmobile Delta 88 two-door sedan that my parents bought in the mid-1970s. 

It’s been even more personal than that for me, too; in my early 20s, for a time I dyed my hair burgundy. I know this would not have met the approval of Lola in Kinky Boots, whose disdain for the colour was quotable: “Please, God, tell me I have not inspired something burgundy. …Red is the colour of sex! Burgundy is the colour of hot water bottles!” But I have had many agreeable experiences with the colour, though most of them when it was in a glass.

About that, by the way. When I look at the official RGB version of the colour burgundy, #800020  , it seems rather darker and duller than the wines of Burgundy. But when I look at photos of Burgundy wine in a glass, I have to admit it’s pretty spot on. It’s just that red Burgundy wines, being made from Pinot Noir grapes, are more translucent; in many lighting conditions they fairly shine and glow, and so they seem lighter.

Not on the pocket-book, though. Burgundy wines are among the highest and mightiest; the most expensive wines in the world are Burgundy – prices run well into the five figures for a bottle and leave even the top Bordeaux wines in the dust. Part of this is that the grapes they’re made with, Pinot Noir, are hard to work with; they grow in tight pine-cone-shaped clusters (hence the name) and are as thin-skinned as some of their most ardent partisans. Part of it is that Burgundy isn’t all that large a growing region, and it’s the farthest north of any major red wine region in the world. Part of it, certainly, is that the best Burgundy wines are indeed extremely good (though they’re not everyone’s favourite; I for one fancy the Bordeaux style more). And part of it is marketing – a campaign that has been going on for most of a millennium, since Philip II the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, declared that only Pinot Noir grapes could be used to make red wine in his lands. Gamay was banished to Beaujolais. There’s nothing like message discipline, eh? The fact that the Dukes of Burgundy were among the highest and mightiest in France certainly helped.

Of course, Pinot Noir grapes had been in the region since time immemorial. Which is more than you can say for the name Burgundy. Oh, it’s not that Burgundy is the English version and Bourgogne the French; in point of fact, the French is farther from the original. In Latin it was Burgundia, but that came from an older Burgundi, which traces back to the Proto-Indo-European *bʰérǵʰonts, which meant ‘high, mighty’. This Burgundi was the name of a Germanic tribe.

Germanic? In the heart of France? Yes, indeed. France has plenty of Germanic and Celtic historical influence. But, although modern Bourgogne has its high points, the Burgundi didn’t get their name from that. Nor did they get their name from the even higher Massif Central of France, further south, where they were before they moved north into the area that now has their name (they also had land as far south as the coast). They only moved there in the 400s, in fact, after having been resettled there from the middle Rhine region, around Alsace.

The middle Rhine region? That’s not very high at all. But wait. Were they from there originally? It’s harder to trace before that, but it’s thought they (or, you know, the core part of their ancestors; people do intermarry over time with others in the area) may have come from the valley of the Vistula – the river that runs through Kraków and Warsaw. In Poland. Which would not explain how they came to have a high-and-mighty Germanic name. But there’s one more dot to connect.

Well, maybe. There is a place called Bornholm that has in the past been ruled by Norway and Sweden but now belongs to Denmark, and its name historically was Burgundaholmr. The Burgundians might – might – have originally come by way of there, possibly from even farther north. Or it could just be coincidence. After all, the Burgunda part can be taken to refer to a high rock, which Bornholm does have. And the holmr means ‘island’. 

Yes, Bornholm is an island in the Baltic Sea. It is one of the most eco-friendly places in the world; its power is mostly generated from wind and sun and by other eco-friendly means, and their rate of recycling is very high. They don’t grow grapes there, however. And their flag has no burgundy in it… though it does have red, lots of red. But you can get some Burgundy there. Go to Kadeau, their Michelin-starred restaurant; it has a mighty list of them – of course, the prices are rather high.

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periwinkle

Posted on July 15, 2024 | Leave a comment

Ah, the old curiosity shop on the corner, with its owner, who looks a little like Henry Winkler, and its near-infinite assortment of finds. Look around the store. What shall you pick up today? Perhaps that pretty flower vase with a painting of Persian sprites? Or this weird little winch? Or a set of picks for escargots? No, something less practical… You peer into a corner and spy a pair of tightly laced periwinkle winkle-pickers. You raise an eyebrow; you glance at the shopkeeper and he winks at you. You’re not sure how to take it. He nods to a sign on the wall that says “Sometimes words have two meanings.” Sense spirals in on itself like a snail. Are you convinced?

Let’s unpack these periwinkle winkle-pickers. The trick is that periwinkle isn’t really a word that has two (or more) meanings; it’s two quite different words that just happen to have become identical in form.

The first word – the one that has been in English since Old English times – was at first pervince or pervincle; it came from Late Latin pervinca, from Classical Latin pervica, which is apparently per- ‘thoroughly’ and a form of vincio ‘I bind, I conquer’ (as seen in convince and in “veni vidi vici” too). The Latin form also seems to be shortened from vicapervica, which has an incantatory quality to it, and it is likely also related to pervicus ‘stubborn’. This pervinca was – and in Italian still is – the name for a low-lying flowering plant (a few kinds thereof, of the genus Vinca) with long trailing stems that tend to take root wherever they touch the ground: they are thoroughly bound, and thus stubborn (pervicacious).

Which does not matter when it comes to the usual point of reference for this word. It is the plant’s flowers that are focal: they have five petals and are a light purplish blue with a white centre. This light purplish blue, which in RGB terms is standardized as the very tidy #CCCCFF  , is called periwinkle for this reason.

But, because the world is full of complications and wonders, there is also another flowering plant called periwinkle – it was thought to be of the same general kind, but it turns out it is not. It also has five-petalled flowers; they have been cultivated in various colours. The genus is now named Catharanthus. Its most widespread species, Catharanthus roseus, was formerly called Vinca rosea, and it is from this old name that alkaloids produced from it are called vinca alkaloids; two drugs that are used to treat cancer are vinblastine and vincristine, which clung to the vin- though the plant has been uprooted from it. Thus they are related to the colour periwinkle – etymologically but not in any other way.

And then there is the other periwinkle. We’re not completely sure, but it seems that it started with Latin pina, from Greek πίνη (pínē), variant of πίννα (pínna), ‘mussel’, plus Old English wincel ‘corner, bend’ from an Old Germanic root referring to turning or bending. It names a kind of sea snail (‘bendy mussel’, I guess), similar in size to a periwinkle flower but otherwise with nothing in common. Somehow pinewinkel, which could easily have been pennywinkle (as indeed it was, but only in regional variants), became periwinkle. The fact that it evolved to the periwinkle form around the same time as the flower name did, in the early 1500s, suggests some cross-influence or mutual influence. Yes, one is a snail (and not a bluish-purple one either) and the other is a flower, but that doesn’t defeat the mutual lexical attraction – the “sounds familiar” effect. And anyway, periwinkle is a rather winsome word form, if you ask me.

But the little snails turned a corner, so to speak, and left off the peri- in common use: as often as not, now, they’re just called winkles. Which adds a wrinkle, especially if you go shopping for them, because this same root became Dutch winkel, which first meant ‘corner’ but, by metonymy, became a name for a corner store (or a storage corner), and so now Dutch winkel means ‘store, shop’ (and periwinkle seems like it could mean ‘around the store’ – or, if you wish, ‘shop for Persian fairies’). Meanwhile, German Winkel still means ‘angle, corner, nook’. The name Winkler comes from someone who was a shopkeeper, or who lived on a corner. And there are some other words in English that are also related more distantly, from the root meaning ‘bend, turn’: winch, wink, and wince.

Winkles, as you may know, are edible (when cooked), and in Scotland and Ireland you can buy them by the bag; when you get a bag of them, you get a little pin for picking out the winkles from the depths of their shells. The Latin name for them, Littorina littorea, gives a clue that they are found along the seashore – they can be caught in a drag net, but they can also be picked by hand at low tide.

And do you, when picking winkles from the seashore, wear winkle-pickers? Hmm, no, don’t take it so littorally. One ought not to use such fancy shoes for perambulating the damp strand. The point of winkle-pickers is the toe: that is, the toe is long and pointed, and so, wittily, the name suggests you could use it as a winkle-pick, to pick winkles out of their shells. They got this waggish name somewhere around the 1950s, when their popularity peaked with the Teddy Boys.

And so your periwinkle winkle-pickers are a colour named after a flower named for how its stem takes root, and a style of boot named after a device for eating little sea snails. Will you buy them? Where could you wear them? But you are not impervious to their pervicacious charms; you have grown fond of them already, and they sit there saying “pick me!” So, with the slightest rueful wince of convincement, you do.

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mauve

Posted on July 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

Maeve and Maude are sitting mellowly in Malvern drinking gin and tonic and eating marshmallows on Melba toast. They are, perhaps, not in the pink of their lives, but they are at least in the mauve. Or the mauve is in them.

It’s not that the marshmallows are mauve – though that may depend on how you look at them. No, it’s that the gin in their G&Ts is Empress 1908 gin, which, though naturally indigo in colour, when mixed with tonic water – shifting the pH – turns a fetching shade of mauve. Which is perfectly fitting.

I’ll explain. Tonic water, as you may know, contains quinine, which is useful in treating malaria. Quinine comes from a South American plant, cinchona. During the 1800s, when the British Empire was putting a lot of people in tropical places such as India, there was considerable demand for it, and people were looking for ways to make a lot more of it for a lot less money. The chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who was in London in the 1850s, thought he might be able to synthesize it from coal tar. This turns out not to be possible, but in 1856, one of his students, the 18-year-old William Henry Perkin, while trying to do so in his home laboratory, found he had created – among other things – a dark residue that, when he tried to clean it off using alcohol, left his cleaning rag permanently stained a rather lovely shade of purple.

Young Perkin immediately went into the dye business.

You see, up to that point, all dyes needed to be made from natural sources, and in particular, the purple dyes needed to be made from shellfish or from bird poo – and the shellfish kind was rare and extremely expensive, while the bird-poo kind was, frankly, crappy. The luxury and cost of the shellfish purple, which was classically gotten from traders from Tyre, had led to its association with royalty. So Perkin at first called his product – the world’s first artificial dye (and also the first aniline dye) – Tyrian purple. But by the time he was bringing it to market in 1859, he had renamed it with a French word: mauve. This mauve dye caught on quickly, as purple was suddenly affordable – and also because Queen Victoria wore a mauve gown to the Royal Exhibition in 1862. Its fad faded once it was found that the dye also faded, but mauve never went away; indeed, it had a great resurgence in the 1890s.

And where did this French word mauve come from? From a pretty little purple flower of the family Malvaceæ. This flower, named malva in Latin, had, by the usual weathering and fading of words over time, become mauve in French. And a particular one with white-and-purple flowers, Althæa officinalis, went from Latin bis malva to French guimauve. Does that word guimauve look familiar? If you’re Canadian, it probably does, because you’ll see it on the French side of packages of a particular foodstuff: marshmallows.

Mallow, like mauve, is descended from Latin malva; it’s the English name for the plant. For the Althæa officinalis, we added marsh because of where they grow. As it happens, marsh-mallows have been eaten and used medicinally for millennia, at least since Ancient Egypt. Among the things made with them was a confection produced by boiling the roots and mixing the result with honey. Over time, the confection added egg whites and replaced the honey with sugar, and eventually – in the 1800s – the marshmallow root was replaced with gelatin… but the confection kept the name. Like many words, it stuck around even after the original connection had moved on.

But things such as dyes and flowers are as often named for what they look like as for what they come from, like the coal tar derivative was named for the flower. Words, too, can look similar without being actually related: neither Maude, nor Maeve, nor Malvern, nor Melba (nor Melbourne, which is the origin of the stage name Melba – Nellie Melba was born in Melbourne, Australia), nor even mellow is related to mauve/mallow/malva. 

And when, in 1869, William Henry Perkin named his third son (who would go on to become a noted chemist in his own right) Frederick Mollwo Perkin, he did not name him Mollwo after the flower that named the colour that made both of them rich. No, he just named the boy after his second wife, the boy’s mother, who was born Alexandrina Mollwo – her family name is from Germany; it was adapted in the 1600s from the French name Molveau, which is a variant of Maulveau, a toponym meaning ‘bad valley’. (No word on whether the valley had any guimauves growing in it.)

So, to recap: Perkin tried to make quinine from coal tar; the result had no quinine but had a dye. The dye was named after a plant it wasn’t made from. That plant has also given its name to a confectionary item, which is also no longer made from it. And the confectionary item is not the same colour as the dye. (Well, I guess you could find mauve marshmallows somewhere, or make them if you want.) And Maeve and Maude have purple in them, not from the marshmallows, not from the quinine, but from the gin, which is also not made with mallow (speaking of how things are named, its colour comes from the butterfly peaflower, Clitoria ternatea), and which is only mauve when mixed with the tonic – so once again quinine has led to mauve, in its way. 

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cobalt

Posted on July 9, 2024 | Leave a comment

What colour is this eye?

I asked people on Bluesky, and I got various answers, including blue, blue-grey, and teal. Nobody said what I have always thought of it as: cobalt. Well, I suppose colour is in the eye of the beholder – literally, in this case, as it’s my eye.

Perhaps I’m being a bit fanciful in thinking it’s cobalt. I’ve always thought of cobalt as a sort of metallic, pastel-y blue, though apparently officially it’s not that metallic a colour… aside, that is, from being literally made from metal. The definitions are varying, mind you. For example, Wiktionary says it’s “deep blue” and shows a swatch of RBG #0047AB  , which is also the colour given at the Wikipedia article, but it gives as a synonym zaffre, which is a colour the name of which is cognate with sapphire; zaffre is defined as the colour of the cobalt pigment, but it shows a swatch of RBG #00416A   – somewhat darker, and perhaps closer to the colour of my eyes (which part, though?).

But if we’re talking about fanciful illusions, let’s talk about this name cobalt. It may seem like something cold, perhaps from the Baltic belt, or it may have computer echoes (as in COBOL, the programming language), but it’s a respelling of German Kobalt, which is taken from Kobold, which names a kind of goblin – from Middle High German kobe ‘shed, sty’ (nothing to do with beef) and holt ‘goblin’, which in turn is from hold ‘friendly’, which is a bit euphemistic; it means, more or less, ‘our little friend in the shed’.

And was our little friend in the shed blue? No. Our little friend in the shed was just difficult and noxious and disappointing. The goblin was in the details. You see, when cobalt ore was dug up and they tried to smelt it for silver or gold, all they got were a greyish powder plus arsenic fumes (as it happens, the primary cobalt ores always contain arsenic too). Insult and injury.

But usefulness can be in the eye of the beholder: while they didn’t get their silver or gold, the powder they did get could be sintered with aluminum oxide to make a good, stable blue pigment. (It can also be handled in other ways to make other pigments, such as cerulean.) So we think of cobalt as blue, though the metal itself is basically grey, and other molecules you can make with it can be black, brown, or even, as with cobalt chloride hexahydrate, red.

And yet, for a long time they didn’t know that cobalt was what was making the cobalt colour. What I mean is, they knew cobalt ore gave a powder that could be used to make the blue, but they thought the colour came from bismuth. It wasn’t until around 1735 that the Swedish chemist Georg Brandt saw the cobalt in the cobalt: he determined that it was actually a different metal, previously not identified – since cobalt never just sits there by itself; it’s always found in ores with other metals. It was the first metal to be newly identified since the start of recorded history. Quite something, the things that were there all along that you have to look twice to see.

And while cobalt is best known for its colour – a colour it doesn’t even have in its basic form – that’s not what it’s mostly used for now. It’s used more in alloys in such things as turbine blades, it’s used for producing radiation for therapy and sterilization, it’s used as a catalyst, it’s used in certain magnetic applications, and it’s used in batteries. In fact, the odds are nearly 100% that you have at least a few grams of cobalt within a very short distance from you as you read this, as the lithium-ion batteries that help power nearly all modern digital devices – among other things – use lithium cobalt oxide.

And although cobalt was first identified and used in Europe, the majority of the cobalt extraction in the world now is done in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in mines that despoil the landscape and exploit the local populace, including children. Fortunately, cobalt is very recyclable; cobalt from old batteries can be extracted and used in new batteries, and increasingly that’s what’s being done. But it’s a reminder of the things we can’t see in the stuff of our daily lives – unless we look closely.

By the way, look closely at that picture of my eye. Do you see the reflection left of centre? Can you make it out? Look closely. Here’s a picture of what I was looking at.

What colour would you say those umbrellas are? How about the reflections on the table? To me, it’s elementary: I see the cobalt in the cobalt. But – as always – it’s in the eye of the beholder.

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cerulean

Posted on July 4, 2024 | 4 comments

I sat down at the table in the park, just south of the art gallery, and I saw a little piece of heaven, just lying there, with no particular point, and how it got there was unclear. It might as well have fallen from the sky.

A little piece of heaven? A Prismacolor “Light Cerulean Blue” pencil. (Yes, cerulean blue is like pizza pie and tuna fish and so on: the definition of the first word includes the second.) Undoubtedly it was accidentally left by a student at OCAD University, the “pencil-box” building of which fills a part of the skyline above the park, or perhaps by someone younger who had been playing on the playground just metres away or in the community centre also just metres away.

Why heaven? Yes, the sky is blue, but more to the point, that is the point: cerulean comes from Latin cæruleus, which means ‘sky-coloured’ and is formed from cælum ‘sky, heaven’ plus the diminutive suffix -uleus (the first l rolled into an r: cæluleus became cæruleus). Which means that it is literally a little heaven – “heavenette” if you wish. Latin did not distinguish between ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’; the line “factorem cœli et terræ” from the Credo is typically translated as “Creator of Heaven and earth” but could as readily be rendered as “maker of the sky and the ground.”

Speaking of ground, the point of the pencil had been ground down – or anyway worn down through use – and needed to be sharpened, which is to say ground (or cut) to a point. But at least that meant it had been well used before I found it.

Which reminds me, as it may well remind many of you, of the classic “cerulean” monologue given by Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) in the movie The Devil Wears Prada:

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner… where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact… you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

The great insight from the speech covers not just that particular moment, nor even just the fashion industry, but how culture in general works. Including language. We happen on words with no particular idea how they got there, but there was a whole history that led to that moment, and there is nothing we can do to exempt ourselves from it, even if we are oblivious to it. The “plain meaning” of texts only exists because of millions of people over thousands of years borrowing, referring, changing, negotiating, and agreeing. Believing that what you see now and understand from it is the only real possible meaning – as many people like to do with some texts from ages past – is like believing that that sweater got into that bin for no particular reason, or that the pencil on the picnic table had simply always been there, or was placed there just for me so I might write this or perhaps scrawl my name on the table or draw heaven there on earth. And on the other hand, believing that certain specified older meanings of words are the only true meanings is like believing that the only true cerulean is Oscar de la Renta’s.

After all, de la Renta didn’t invent cerulean either. Who made the sky blue? Not Oscar.

But… the colour cerulean doesn’t exist because someone wanted a sky-blue colour and made it and named it as such. It’s not just that the sky comes in many colours, and only sometimes is what we call “cerulean” (usually it’s one of the many shades we call “sky blue,” and sometimes it’s no kind of blue at all). It’s that at the time the colour we call cerulean came around, things went the other way. The colour came first, and then they chose a word they liked for it.

In 1789, you see, a Swiss chemist named Albrecht Höpfner synthesized a pigment from cobalt stannate. It had a pleasant medium bluish colour, not as green as teal but not a pure blue either. For a time it was called Höpfner blue. But somewhere around the middle 1800s, an art supplier decided to give it a nice Latin-type name and called it ceruleum. Variations on the name abounded; it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the name came to be set as cerulean, which is what the artist and art theorist Max Doerner called it. It’s been used in many paintings, such as Claude Monet’s La Gare Saint-Lazare. Now it’s widely used, although often what’s called cerulean is no longer cobalt stannate, but just pigments, inks, or the RGB rays of your computer screen combining to the same effect. Have a look at the emblem of the United Nations: it’s in cerulean; the colour was chosen by the designer, Oliver Lundquist, as “the opposite of red, the colour of war.” When you think of the colour, you could think of any of these things. Or even of none of them.

And who knows what other artworks any artist who uses the colour is thinking of? Everything has references to other things, but sometimes they’re not intended by the creator, at least consciously. But the colour was there, so they used it. Just as the pigment was there and the word was there, so they put them together because it seemed suitable and attractive. After all, why did Oscar de la Renta choose cerulean?

He didn’t. The cerulean fashion lines referenced in the monologue never existed in reality. They were made up by the screenwriter for Miranda’s pocket disquisition. In fact, the monologue didn’t exist in the movie script either, at first. It started with a few lines by Miranda disparaging Andy’s fashion sense, which were then cut, but Meryl Streep asked for it to be added back and fleshed out. The writer of the screenplay, Aline Brosh McKenna, at first wrote just about blue, which had been chosen as the colour of the character’s sweater because it would work well on screen. But then she realized that a fashion maven would use a more precise term, so she presented Streep with several words for kinds of blue. From those, Meryl Streep picked cerulean. Did she know how that word got there? What its origin was? She might have; she’s Meryl Streep, after all. But perhaps it was just there, like a left-behind pencil, and it served the purpose. It does have a nice sound to it, even if you don’t know all the other references it has and the history of the name.

And none of this even gets into why the sky is blue (look up Rayleigh scattering if you’re curious). Or why cobalt stannate is that particular kind of blue. Or for that matter where cælum and -uleus came from – there are speculations as to the Proto-Indo-European origins, but it’s not like we can ask the people who spoke those words. Not any more than I could ask the person who left the pencil on the table what they had drawn with it to wear the point down so much.

Well, perhaps they came back and picked it up and sharpened it and drew some more with it. Or perhaps someone else took it. I don’t know. I left it there when I departed. It had served its purpose for me.

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The Truth About English ebook

Posted on July 1, 2024 | Leave a comment

Do you see the difference?

Yeah, I adjusted the kerning a little. But the real difference is one you can’t actually see from the image: The Truth About English is now available as an ebook.

Yes, that’s why I’ve been quiet for two weeks. It takes forever to make an ebook. (That’s not true. I was travelling and attending a conference. Making the ebook from the InDesign files was pretty quick and easy, really, but I didn’t have the opportunity until today.)

Currently it’s available on Lulu.com, https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-harbeck/the-truth-about-english/ebook/product-nvw6vv5.html?q=Harbeck&page=1&pageSize=4. Lulu will soon be syndicating it to the other popular ebook providers, and because of how that syndication works, and the commissions taken, the price is a little higher than I would otherwise have made it (but still much less than the print version). (But if you buy it directly from Lulu, I get more money than if you buy it from the other providers, and don’t you want me to get paid for my efforts?)

However, I have also, separately from Lulu, made it available on the Apple Books store, https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-truth-about-english/id6505080776. And the price there is a little lower, because there’s no intermediary. So if you (like me) get your ebooks from Apple, you’re in luck.

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The Truth About English

Posted on June 13, 2024 | 6 comments

Most of what you were taught about language in school is wrong, and what’s right mostly isn’t right for the reasons you thought.

I’ve been giving presentations about the deeper details of this fact for nearly two decades. Up to now, you had to either be there in the room when I gave the presentation, or watch the video of it on my blog, or in just a couple of cases read the text of it on my blog. Now I’ve brought together eight of my best presentations about the English language’s history, grammar, and more, revised and in a format suitable for consuming at leisure in the environment of your choice. Presenting my new book, The Truth About English: Lessons You Never Got in School. It includes:

  1. A Language in Motion
  2. When Does Wrong Become Right?
  3. When to Use Bad English
  4. Smash All teh Rulez
  5. What Flavour of English Do You Want?
  6. Sounding Like the “Right Sort”
  7. The Secret Set of Extra-Tasty Words
  8. A Hidden Gender?

It’s available now on Lulu.com: https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-harbeck/the-truth-about-english/paperback/product-57ggk44.html?page=1&pageSize=4

It will also be available soon on Amazon.com. However, Amazon takes a big cut of the price. In fact, I could set the price lower if it weren’t on Amazon, but I can’t have a lower price on Lulu than on Amazon (alas), and it’s worth it for visibility to have it on Amazon. But I will have copies for sale in person at a discount if you happen to see me at a conference or similar event… along with copies of my other books such as 12 Gifts for Writers.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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