chumming

Posted on February 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Looks like some friends are joining us!”

That’s the sound of someone who’s been chumming. But chumming is two different words, and the sentence has two different connotations.

You certainly know the more common chum, verb and (more often) noun. “Why so glum, chum?” “Who’ve you been chumming around with?” It’s of murky origin, but might be related to chambermate; the oldest use (from the earlier 1700s) refers to having someone as roommate: “We chummed together in university.” More recently and generally, it has come to mean ‘be on friendly terms with’; chumming around tends to imply being on widely and extravertedly friendly terms with various persons, and it often has a negative tone: “He’s been chumming around with some rather shady sorts”; “He got the contract? What do you expect – they’ve been chumming around together”; “You can tell a lot about a person by who they’re chumming with, and just look who she’s having for dinner at her place.”

You may or may not know the other chum, noun and (more often) verb. It’s from an American language, perhaps Powhatan or perhaps Chinook Jargon, and it refers to the kind of stuff you distribute in the ocean to attract sharks and other marine predators: the often rancid remnants of desecrated marine life – fish blood, fish guts, fish bits – and the distribution thereof in the water. If you’re in a fishing vessel rather than a cruise ship and you’re “chumming around,” it probably means not literally making new friends but more wryly “making new friends”: drawing the attention of sharks, bass, and similar carnivorous sea creatures.

And so you have a sort of mirror “never the twain shall meet” relation between the two: are you chumming, or are you chumming? Except… what if someone is socially baiting to attract friends who are, figuratively, sharks? Let us imagine that someone is making public statements on social media or in the press that are “just asking questions” about something that non-vicious people had settled a long time ago. “No, I’m not committing to a position; I just want to know whether you really think this kind of people are truly equal human beings.” They’re not attacking, but by raising the topic, they are treating it as an open one, one for which either answer might have some merit. And in so doing they’re attracting the responses of people who they are happy enough to be generally friendly with – they’re chumming for people to chum around with – people who approach such “debates” about the same way as sharks approach discussions over who to have for dinner.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

hopscotch

Posted on February 14, 2024 | 1 comment

Hopscotch, as you can tell by the name, is a kind of whisky made with beer.

You doubt me? It’s made in Vermont by Mad River Distillers. They use “Triple Sunshine” IPA (a kind of beer that has a lot of hops in it) made by Lawson’s Finest Liquids. Now, obviously, as they are in Vermont, it is not truly Scotch; it would have to be made in Scotland for that. But it is a single malt made in the same style.

So we’ve cleared that up.

What?

Children’s game? Are you serious? With hops and Scotch whisky?

I see: in the Oxford English Dictionary they have a quote from 1886 referring to “the well-known boys’ game of ‘hop-scotch’” and another quote from 1801 saying “Among the school-boys in my memory there was a pastime called Hop-Scotch.” So it was boys playing with a bitter plant and…

No?

OK. Scotch that. Apparently it has nothing to do with those kinds of hops or that kind of Scotch. (And lately, at least in North America, it seems to be thought of more as a girls’ game.)

In fact, this word, hopscotch, is a fun little lexical grid game because it is made of two parts, each of which has an unrelated homonym:

  • Hops, the plant (which can be in the singular, hop, though it seldom is), comes from Proto-Germanic *huppô and has cognates in German Hopfen and French houblon. 
  • Hop, the action, comes from Proto-Germanic *huppōną and has cognates hoppen and hoppa in several Germanic languages (and also hobble in English). 
  • Scotch, the beverage, is formed from Scot plus ish distilled together, and Scot is from Latin Scōtī, which named both the Scottish and the Irish peoples. 
  • Scotch, the noun and verb meaning ‘scratch, cut, score’, referring in this case to the markings on the ground for the game (now often done with chalk or even paint) – and, as in “scotch a rumour,” using the metaphor of scratching out – comes from Anglo-Norman escocher, from Old French coche ‘notch’, apparently from Italian cocca ‘notch, corner’.

So, it stands to reason that there are four options:

 hop ‘bitter plant’hop ‘leap’
Scotch ‘whisky’Hopscotch (1)Hopscotch (2)
scotch ‘scratch’hopscotch (3)hopscotch (4)

If hopscotch (4) can be leaping around a scratched court, and Hopscotch (1) can be whisky made from beer featuring bitter herbs, then there should also be a Hopscotch (2) that is leaping around whisky – perhaps a whisky bar (yes, in Saint John, New Brunswick) or a whisky festival (yes, in Vancouver) – as well as a hopscotch (3) that is something made by scratching bitter herbs (well, there’s a whole beer company by that name in Auckland, New Zealand, and there are also I’m not even sure how many beers by that name made by various companies, including one made sometimes across the street from me at Goose Island, though I don’t see any that are of the type of beer called Scotch ale; there is also a hopped cider called Hopscotch made by Saltbox Brewing Company in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia).

And if you want to know about the rules of the game hopscotch, there’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. Look there. I’m just the word dude. Besides, I’ve never played it. When I was a kid in Alberta, it was for girls only. Oh, and if you want to know about the Vermont whisky? Never had that either, but I’ll take the next chance I get.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

rigmarole

Posted on February 12, 2024 | 1 comment

Ugh, those friggin’ regulations. Whatever you do, it’s not enough. It’s like some kind of deranged quadrille or cotillion – every step you take, there’s another step to take, all being called by some man running you ragged. It saps morale. It feels rigged, like you have to know the right strings to pull. It’s just more and more rigmarole.

Rigmarole. It could be such a nice thing, like eating rigatoni to the sound of a barcarolle. But no, it’s nothing but multifarious regulations made of murky regurgitated legal blither.

Or… well, how would you define rigmarole? Like the big runaround? A long litany of hocus-pocus? Legal blah-blah-blah? A verbal mugging? Or simply beleaguering gibberish? Or some other kind of verbal thingamajig?

Speaking of which, you may know this as rigamarole, with the extra a syllable to give it a rhythm like thingamajig or gobbledegook. But that’s just a needless addition – though, for that very reason, rather apposite. And the truth is that rigmarole is already an altered form. It is from – get ready for this – Ragman roll.

That’s kind of confusing or suspicious or disappointing, isn’t it? How is there rhyme or reason in that? What, for that matter, is a Ragman roll?

As it turns out, it’s two things, and there is disagreement about which of them it came from, and how the two are related and how either of them gave rise to rigmarole, and the various often lengthy discourses on historical minutiae never give a fully satisfying explanation.

The first Ragman Rolls are the… oh, here, I can’t even, I’m just going to quote this rigmarole from Wikipedia:

the collection of instruments by which the nobility and gentry of Scotland subscribed allegiance to King Edward I of England, during the time between the Conference of Norham in May 1291 and the final award in favour of Balliol in November 1292; and again in 1296. Of the former of these records two copies were preserved in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey (now in the National Archives (United Kingdom) at Kew), and it has been printed by Thomas Rymer. Another copy, preserved originally in the Tower of London, is now also in the National Archives. The latter record, containing the various acts of homage and fealty extorted by Edward from John Balliol and others in the course of his progress through Scotland in the summer of 1296 and in August at the parliament of Berwick, was published by Prynne from the copy in the Tower and now in the National Archives. Both records were printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1834.

Whoever all those people are, not one of them is Ragman. The further explanation, quoted from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is that Ragman Roll “originally meant the ‘Statute of Rageman’ (De Ragemannis), a legate of Scotland, who compelled all the clergy to give a true account of their benefices, that they might be taxed at Rome accordingly.” Which still does not explain the etymology.

But then there’s the second thing. There was a game of chance called Ragman, in which the key instrument was a roll of writings, called the Ragman roll, which had verses within it with strings attached to them, and you pulled a string and read the verse, which described some personal character (like a roll-playing game?). And… yeah, I don’t really get the picture either. But why the name? Merriam-Webster explains, “The roll was called a Ragman roll after a fictional king purported to be the author of the verses.” Which explains nothing. A ragman was someone who collected and dealt in rags, which was not a high social position, so applying the name to a king or noble seems to have been a derogation.

So perhaps the game is named after the Scottish records described above. Which, it has been suggested, are so called because the original was a number of rather ragged pieces of paper or parchment sewn together. And also perhaps to insult the king in question, Edward I (insults not being out of the ordinary when dealing with questions of royalty between Scotland and England). At the end, though, the histories and explanations, once unrolled, remain ragged, the connection between all of that and what we have now seems roughly stitched without further justification, and so we’ve learned a whole lot of not much.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

draconian

Posted on February 7, 2024 | 1 comment

Some people’s attitudes towards minor transgressions of grammar, spelling, punctuation, or similar niceties can be a bit drastic. Dramatic. One might even say… draconian. Prescribing cruel punishments for misplaced apostrophes. Breathing fire on those who would use a word inappropriately.

Such as using a word that’s a legal allusion for non-legal matters, perhaps?

I may be reaching a bit here, but I can’t help but think that the “decimated means reduced by ten percent, you vulgar barbarian” crowd might feel that since draconian originates in a particularly severe legal code – one that prescribed the death penalty even for some kinds of theft, and enslavement for failing to pay debts to one’s social superiors – the broader use of draconian, as in (to cite a few common examples) “draconian security measures,” “draconian environmental measures,” “draconian austerity measures,” “draconian spending cuts,” and “draconian budgetary policies” might be worthy of censure. Or whips, chains, forced servitude, gruesome death, that manner of thing.*

To be sure, draconian is still used in the strictly legal sense too. I’m editing a book on the Qin Empire in China, which was spectacularly expansive and spectacularly short-lived (221–206 BC), and the author has much to say about its “draconian principle” in law, whereby if a judge had several options for punishing a misdeed, the most severe was always to be chosen. Not only that, if a judge was more lenient, he could himself be subject to the punishment he was supposed to have given.

Great way to preserve social order, eh? As long as people are afraid of punishment, they’ll be good. 

Well, either that, or they’ll lie a lot. All the time. 

In the Qin Empire, couriers for priority government communications could be fined severely for being even a little late, so they often faked arrival records. But never mind that – breach of filial piety (e.g., being rude to your parents) could be punishable by death, and the onus was on the parents, as the offended parties, to report the transgression. You can see that many parents might decide to let a bit of youthful insolence be dealt with at home rather than see their child (however nasty) be executed. Oh, but if someone found out that a child had breached filial piety and the parents had not reported it, the parents would be punished! Not by death, but severely nonetheless. 

So if you wanted a decent kind of social order where impulsive progeny were not regularly slaughtered wholesale, it relied on a whole web of deception, the weak point of which was anyone who was too inhuman, too intimidated by authority, or both.

But while those who lack mercy may be rewarded with fear, they get little respect, and people will take opportunities to displace them. Cruelty eventually has to eat what it has planted. Which was one factor in the demise of the Qin Empire (not the only one, mind you; when you expand your empire too quickly, you tend to lack the resources and logistics to sustain its periphery; to make up for a lack of public servants in the peripheries, the Qin commuted many penal sentences to forced servitude in government postings in remote locations, which turned out about as well as you may guess).

So now think of the more draconian prescriptivists of English. The teachers who brook no “barbarisms.” The authors of rigid and intolerant guides to English, people who gleefully enfranchise frank rudeness in social contexts (unsolicited corrections of others’ speech) and even vandalism (“correcting” public signage). Sure, people carry corrections in the backs of their heads, and may even be “on their best behaviour” linguistically when there is any threat of censure, but no one enjoys this except the people issuing the corrections – and, if we can be honest, they don’t seem happy about it either. The most gleeful and joyous use of the language is often in the infractions! And nuts to the old dragons.

Speaking of which. Draconian can be defined as ‘of, like, or resembling a dragon’. So is this term related to the laws lain down by dragons of lore, cruel and inflexible and breathing fire? No – the use we make of it is based not on a dragon but on a person named after one: the Athenian lawmaker named Drákōn Δράκων, rendered in Latin as Draco. He was the one who, around 600 BC, set down the Athenian legal code, the one I spoke of up in my third paragraph, which could have you killed for filching a cabbage.

Well, I speak of Draco as a person in good faith, but the lore may be in bad faith; it’s possible he was a mythical creation, a fictitious person to whom was attributed the works of unknown real persons. At any rate, though, his name was a proper noun, and so draconian is an eponym. And, for those who wish to be fussy, the distinction between ‘dragon-like’ and ‘harsh in punishment’ is a distinction between draconian and Draconian.

Indeed, if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary (entry last updated 1897), the entry is capitalized: Draconian. But also, the OED doesn’t include the ‘dragon-like’ definition with that entry. On the other hand, it also doesn’t include the more common definition, either. Its definition of Draconian is simply “= Draconic adj. 1, 2.”

Yes, in the view of the OED, the preferred adjective is not draconian or Draconian but Draconic (or, I suppose, for the ‘dragon-like’ sense, draconic, though they don’t say so). Never mind that their own usage charts show draconian being used orders of magnitude more often than draconic; those charts have been updated recently, while the definitions have not.

But if you are the sort of person for whom “the old ways are the best ways,” you may well prefer to go with 1897. Or perhaps even 600 BC or 221 BC. But before you get too Draconic in your prescriptions and penalties, take note that Draco’s laws were repealed not long after his death – and those of the Qin Empire were also softened by the Han dynasty that replaced it. When punishment is not so much the means as the end, those who are mean will soon enough meet their ends.

* I once had someone say “I hope you die a horrible death” to me for my article suggesting we would be better off without apostrophes. I know that they were deliberately overstating the matter, but still…

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

demur

Posted on February 3, 2024 | 2 comments

I was going to taste a different word, but I couldn’t find a way not to make it distractingly political (O tempora! O mores!). I have a longstanding moratorium on politics here, so I am demurring. That’s not to say I won’t get to it, but, when topics political come up, no matter how consequential they are, sooner or later one must give it a rest.

Which is what demurring is. We may think of “I demur” in Bartleby-the-Scrivener terms, “I prefer not to” meaning “not between now and the end of time,” but the point is it’s not a stop; it’s a delay, however indefinite. It’s for something you don’t deem urgent. Perhaps you’re being coy – may we say demure? – and it’s just a decoy. The matter at hand may yet find its redeemer. But probably not. Demur may be (to quote one definition) “to make scruples,” but sometimes it is done unscrupulously. It may be to let the subject mature – to the point of senescence or even obsolescence – but it may be to leave it in the mortuary. Which would be, as they say, a rum thing.

There’s little question of what demur meant in earlier times. It comes from the same origin as French demeurer, which means ‘remain, stay, stop, persist’. That origin is Latin demorari, which – pun notwithstanding – has nothing to do with Demerara (which comes from an Arawak name for a tree). But, like Demerara rum, it has to do with an alternative to stress: the heart of demorari is mora, which means ‘delay’ or ‘wait’ or ‘duration of time’ and has come into English as a unit of phonological weight, an alternative to the syllable. 

In English, we measure our words in syllables, and each word of more than one syllable has a stressed syllable. In a language such as Japanese, however, there are not syllables but morae, and there is not stress but pitch accent. It’s all sounds, of course, but it comes down to how you think about it (just like stress). The simple 5+7+5 addition of a haiku is made for morae – like in this one by Kobayashi Issa:

hatsu uri wo 
hittoramaete 
neta ko kana

Notice that hittoramaete is seven morae: hit-t-to-ra-ma-e-te. When you impose the haiku form on the bump and jump of syllables, as in this English translation of the above, it’s always a bit less or more, eh:

the first ripe melon
holding tightly close to her
my child rests asleep

This mora shows up elsewhere in our language, too: in moratorium. That may sound like a mortuary, but it’s not related. Demure is also not related; it’s from the same root as mature, and as the French word for ‘ripe’, mûr or mûre. French for ‘blackberry’ is also mûre, but the two are not related, even if the blackberries are ripe; the blackberry mûre is from Greek μόρον móron, which is not related to English moron, which is from μωρός mōrós (note the longer ω: in Classical Greek prosody, it has two morae, whereas ο has one), which is not related to morose, which is related to mores, as in  morals, those things that forbid murder, which is related only distantly (through Proto-Indo-European) to mortal and to mortuary – a place where mortal remains demur indefinitely.

What? You murmur “no more”? Then I’ll let it rest.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

skulduggery

Posted on January 30, 2024 | 1 comment

Skulduggery! What kind of clandestine outrage is that? Is it some fiddling, diddling, or jiggery-pokery? We know it’s not pleasant, that’s for sure.

Or… well, what do you find pleasant? Certainly not digging skulls by moonlight in graveyards. But how about some other “underhanded or unscrupulous behavior”? Or what about “shockingly gross or lewd conduct”?

Don’t look shady at me. Those are just definitions from Merriam-Webster. Here, though, let’s switch to Oxford. Do you like “underhand dealing, roguish intrigue or machination, trickery”? Not so many admit to enjoying engaging in it, but rather more like to read about it – and it never fails to fill movie theatre seats. OK, and how about “breach of chastity”? Or “obscenity”? I know that many of you are at least secretly charmed by such things.

But wait. I’m playing a trick here. My subterfuge is that the more lusty among those definitions are not for skulduggery itself but for the word it evolved from: sculduddery.

Sculduddery, we discover, got its destiny from the clans: it’s an old Scottish word, spelt variously, including sculdudrie, which is how it can be seen in a 1714 play by Susanna Centlivre with the provocative title The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret!!!

Well, the secret’s out now… except for the secret of where the heck sculduddery originally came from. Not from skull, that’s for sure, for what have skulls to do with lewdness? (Please don’t answer that. You know what I mean.) From scullery-maids? I mean, probably not, but even if that were so, what would duddery mean? Something to do with duds, i.e., clothing or rags? We can only speculate, and I wouldn’t want to reach too far on something like this, because, as every linguist learns, etymology by sound is not sound etymology, and sculduddery has left no trail of evidence behind.

Which, admittedly, is a thing skulduggery aims for. But, now, by what skilled diddly did sculduddery become skulduggery? Well, skulduggery shows up first in the mid-1800s, and first in the US, and first spelled scull-duggery, and first referring to political and financial trickery and intrigues. We don’t know for absolute certain that it traces to sculduddery, but the trail from shady conduct of one kind to shady conduct of another is not long, and neither is the trail from duddery to duggery, especially when we consider the influence of other English words that go to the /g/ in the middle rather than staying at the tip of the tongue. It just feels a bit more right (and a bit more shady) to dig in further.

And then, of course, the scul or scull is easily reinterpreted as skull, especially given the associations of skulls with piracy, graveyards, and so on. It’s true that etymology by sound is not sound etymology, but the average speaker does not carry that in mind; common uses of words are often quite strongly influenced by what other words they sound like. That’s how outrage has gained an air of rage out even though it’s unrelated (it’s from the French noun form of outré, which means ‘excessive’ or ‘beyond propriety’ and traces to Latin ultra). And so the shady conduct of sculduddery, shifted to the different shady conduct of scull-duggery, gained yet another kind of shade at the sign of the skull.

Which is not to say that there is always a literal boneyard in mind with the term. I checked for collocations, and political implications remain quite frequent – for instance, if a candidate starts out promising one thing and then sneakily ends up standing for something very different. I was surprised, however, to see that the word most commonly seen with skulduggery in the Corpus of Contemporary American English was pleasant. 

Hmm… so is skulduggery really so charming? Or is it returning to its more sexual senses? Some of you already know the answer: Skulduggery Pleasant is the title character of a series of dark fantasy novels by Derek Landy. They are, I’m told, quite popular. And what sort of person is Skulduggery Pleasant? A 400-year-old murder victim brought back to life as a living skeleton.

And it seems there’s no lewdness or bawdiness in the books at all. What a sneaky transformation!

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

pandiculation

Posted on January 26, 2024 | 1 comment

Ah, to wake as a cat might: purr, pandiculate, approach the perpendicular, expand, open the Pandora’s box of the day.

Is there one word in there that’s a bit of a stretch? If so, it would be pandiculate. I don’t mean to say that it’s beyond your reach lexically; it’s just that pandiculation is literally a bit of a stretch. It’s the fancy word for that yawning stretch you do first thing in the morning (or, depending, at various other times, I suppose). You do not need to gesticulate when you pandiculate, but I won’t tell you not to.

There is a connection between pandiculation and gesticulation; it’s the same piece as you see in vermiculation and articulation and a few others; it’s also related to the -cule in molecule and minuscule and ridicule, among others. It just means, more or less, ‘little’; that is, it’s a diminutive. 

So pandiculation is a little something. A little what? Let me expand a little on this: pandiculate (and pandiculation) comes from Latin pandiculor, which means ‘stretch oneself’; you can still see the diminutive in there, which, when removed, takes us back to pando, which means ‘I spread, I stretch, I extend’ – or, yes, ‘I expand’, and yes, that’s the same pand. So pandiculor is ‘I expand a little’.

But just a little. We don’t want to pass out. Which, oh, yeah: pass, the verb, comes from Latin passus, ‘(a) step’, which is the past participle of – yes – pando. Meanwhile, Pandora is unrelated (the name comes from Greek for ‘all gifts’), and so is panda (which probably comes from Nepali or Tibetan).

But waking up lazily, like a panda or a cat, is a gift. Might as well stretch it out while you can. And then, if it’s a weekend day off, you can later on have a glass of wine. I’ve found just the bottle for you, from South Africa:

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

vertex, vortex

Posted on January 24, 2024 | Leave a comment

I like watching the kind of extreme skiing videos where a pair or trio of skilled extraverts in Gore-Tex scale exceptionally steep peaks and then, at the top, on the knife-edge of a ridge, don skis and revert: they slide scenically all the way back down, accelerating, linking turns, cavorting.

I could not do this. I would not scale such a vertical. I would not stand at its vertiginous apex. If I were, somehow, inadvertently, to find myself at the vertex, unable to divert, vertigo would overtake me. My eyes would pop wide open, from e to o; my world would become a vortex, and I would be whorled down the vortical, every turn for the worse…

Vortex and vertex: two words so similar, and yet. Like horse and hearse, perhaps, or person and parson.

In fact, quite like the latter. Because, you see, like person and parson, vertex and vortex started as two versions of the same word. But unlike person and parson, these two -texes didn’t split apart in English. Rather, vortex is archaic Latin for vertex, which is Latin for ‘summit, highest point, top, whirlwind, whirlpool’.

How does one word mean both ‘summit, apex, rocky peak of land’ and ‘eddy, whirlpool, spinning hole in the sea’? I turn to my Latin dictionary and there I find the source: verto, ‘I turn’. A whirlwind or whirlpool turns, of course. But also, a line turns at a corner, and the ground turns at a peak – it stops going up and starts going back down.

We have many vert- words in English, all having something to do with turning, in one way or another. An extravert (now often rendered extrovert by analogy with introvert) is someone who is turned outward. The vertical is that which is turned perpendicular to the horizon. Something that’s vertiginous induces vertigo, which is a sensation of the world turning around you. And so on. And many of these words came up the natural route of daily use via French into English: convert, divert, version…

But vertex and vortex came the other way: someone in English or French wanted a proper term for a thing, and so they turned to the Latin lexicon. Geometers in the 1500s wanted a learnèd term for the peak of a cone or the corner of a polygon, and of course vertex is what such things were called in Latin. But cosmologists in the 1600s, such as Descartes, wanted a term to name the whirling of matter around a central axis, a thing they observed in the stars (Newton’s Principia propounding gravity was still a few decades in the future), and this archaic Latin word vortex served the turn – and then, over time, was converted into a word for such eddies as we see in the sea and sky around us.

And now, somehow, pretty much everyone knows vortex, and it shows up in occasional daily use even among non-nerds, but only mathematicians and similar sorts speak of vertices.

Which, oh, by the way: the plural. Your math teacher will always have said vertices. English being as it is, vertexes is an established alternative, but, English speakers being as they are, it is looked down on. And the plural of vortex? The same obtains. In truth, I’ve long thought that vortexes is common enough, but a Google Ngram tells me that vortices is much the preferred version. 

But, as you will see if you look at the ngram, while vertices appear in the plural nearly as often as a singular vertex, most of the time there is only one vortex. If you have cause to speak of vortices, it may be a very bad day, and one you might not slide out of too easily.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

swidden

Posted on January 22, 2024 | 2 comments

I was editing a book, and I saw a word I didn’t recognize: swidden.

MS Word recognized it. It had no red underline. 

I looked it up. It turns out to be a word for a field that has been cleared for agricultural production by cutting the existing natural vegetation, letting it dry in place, and burning it in place. 

As I looked at it, I saw a word that presents as having a long English pedigree – a word like midden, which we hardly use anymore (unless we are archaeologists or zoologists) but that has been in the language for most of a millennium, or like hidden, which is still seen often. Somehow this old word swidden was peeking up from the ashes of underbrush, and being used as if it had always been common.

As it turns out, sometimes you just need to let a word rest for a while – a few centuries, in this case – and though its usefulness had been depleted, it now has fertile ground again. Here is what Wiktionary revealed to me: a quote from Guido Sprenger’s “Out of the Ashes: Swidden Cultivation in Highland Laos,” in Anthropology Today 22, no. 4 (August 2006), page 9:

It’s not that Karl Gustav Izikowitz (1903–1985) invented swidden. When the Swedish anthropologist did fieldwork in northern Laos, he focused mainly on economic issues. In his view, the Rmeet . . . had a particularly ancient type of agriculture, characterized by the burning of a plot in the forest each year and allowing fallow periods of 10–15 years for the soil to recover. After his return to Sweden in 1938, Izikowitz recalled a similar technique practised in his home country, called svedja, meaning ‘to burn a field’ (as verb) or ‘burnt field’ (as noun). With the help of Professor Eilert Ekwall, he located an old dialectal word in English for it: swidden.

This swidden is from Middle English swithen (‘burn, scorch, singe’), from Old Norse svíða (‘singe, burn’). So it means, basically, ‘burning’. The key to this form of agriculture is that land that may not have enough nutrients in it to support the crops can have the nutrients added from the ashes of the burnt vegetation. To make a swidden, you don’t simply cut one day, burn the next, and plant the day after; you cut, let it all sit during the rainy season and then dry out in the dry season, then burn it, and the next wet season the field is ready and fertile. 

You can use such a field for a few years, but then you have to let it lie fallow for several years while it regrows the wild vegetation. This means that swidden farming uses a lot of land over time, and is not suitable for cash crops or for any area with too dense a population. But it’s quite sustainable for certain kinds of subsistence farming populations; the land is allowed to regenerate, after all. And since it is used for subsistence farming rather than cash crops, it typically involves a diversity of crops rather than a monoculture.

Why dig up an old word? Well, it comes with a certain feeling of antiquity and staying power, but it also comes without some of the associations and implications other terms might have. There is, in fact, a common term for the kind of agriculture that uses swiddens: slash and burn. Tell me how that sounds to you.

We know what slash and burn is, don’t we? Here’s Wiktionary’s definition: “Rough, coarse and lacking finesse, performed with little skill.” Slash is a violent, bloody, uncontrolled word; burn has more negative than positive tone. If someone says “slash-and-burn agriculture,” you probably think of it as merely destructive and unsustainable, callous, bad for the environment. Slash one day, burn the next. Grab what you can and to hell with the world.

Which, if done in a massive and short-sighted way, slash and burn can be. But it doesn’t have to be bad. And it can be difficult to have a clear-sighted discussion of a subject when the name used is overgrown with negative associations. You could invent a new word, yes, although new words tend to be formed from existing ones anyway, and if they aren’t then they’re rootless and may not survive. But you could also put in the sweat equity to uncover a hidden but suitable old word, like swidden, and perhaps it may be fertile, at least for a few seasons.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

quagmire

Posted on January 19, 2024 | 2 comments

For peat’s sake, give us a fair shake. We know the topic is mired in uncertainty; we know there’s question of how it can hold water; but this is a matter of centuries of accumulated understanding. Let’s not get bogged up.

“Bogged down”? Well, yes, I can see why you’d say that, but let me give you a fresh perspective: a bog is up.

Perhaps I am swamping you here; let’s back out and dry off, and I’ll be back to bogs in a moment. Today’s word is quagmire, but I don’t mean to emulate one (not this time). 

You probably know quagmire more in a figurative sense (unless you’re a huge fan of Family Guy, in which case you know it first as the name of a character on that show, but since that particular character is creepier and slimier than a dank fen at midnight, I’ll leave him behind). If you read the news, you are likely to know it for its application to intractable military excursions, notably in Vietnam and Afghanistan – two countries in which (ironically) there are few literal quagmires (in Afghanistan, there appear to be none at all). You will also see quagmire with words such as bureaucratic, legal, and political. It can also be used for matters more personal, as in Robert Creeley’s poem “The Door”:

Lady, do not banish me
for digressions. My nature
is a quagmire of unresolved
confessions. Lady, I follow.

What, precisely, is a quagmire? A sticky muck? Is the “qu” the sound of a foot losing its boot? When you know the true answer, the ground will tremble.

Probably. Well, we’re not sure entirely, but quag (a word beloved of many Scrabble players) may be related to quake. And in any event, what distinguishes a quagmire from any other mire (about which mire, I mean more, to come below) is that below the plant-matter surface is liquid (water and other things), below which lies even more muck. If you step a foot on a quagmire, it will shake and quake; if you put your weight then on that foot, you may well sink into it, and then you will get bogged down indeed.

Oh, yes. Let’s get back to the downness and upness of bogs. You see, while we use words such as bog and fen and swamp and marsh and (for the Brontë sort) moor in a general and rather soft and squishy and shaky way, knowing generally what we have in mind but not willing to put any weight on the understanding, biologists have (as they sometimes do) given the terms more precise definitions. And the first thing to know is: a fen is down, a bog is up.

OK, that’s a bit simplistic, but only barely. Both fen and bog are kinds of mire; a mire is a wet peatland, and peat, as you may know, is partially decomposed plant matter, accumulated over centuries (growing at an average rate of a millimetre a year), typically largely composed of moss, with an assortment of biochemical characteristics, such as an ability to preserve corpses for millennia (bones not included). But whereas a fen is situated in a place such that its wetness can be fed and sustained by groundwater, a bog has accumulated so much peat that it has risen above its surrounds, and its wetness is fed and sustained entirely by rain (and, in places such as Sweden, which is approximately 14% peatland, sometimes snow).

Another distinction that you may enjoy bringing forth at parties is: a swamp has its branches, a marsh has its roots. This, too, is simplistic, but the point is that a swamp is characterized by tall vegetation such as trees and papyrus, and may or may not have peat, whereas a marsh is a kind of wetland that has plants rooted in mineral soil, and so is not a peatland.

And where in all this is the quagmire? A quagmire is, as said, a floating mire, one that makes waves like a waterbed (speaking of unresolved confessions). If it is a bog, it is called a quaking bog; if it is a fen, it is a quagfen.

But why stop there? Never mind the unresolved confessions (yes, never mind them, I say; they will only suck you in); let us look at the unresolved etymologies, the endless accumulation of lexical sphagnum, the words that came from somewhere organically and now decay on the sacred papyrus of the dictionary. There are, once you test the surface, some other synonyms for the bog-standard quagmire. There is – I owe this to Oxford – quallmire, and quamire, and quavemire, and quawmire; in later levels, there is quabmire, and quadmire, and quakemire; there is even bog-mire and gog-mire. Mires they are one and all, but as to what kind of quagulation, or quallity, or quaveform, well, it boots little to attempt to discover. If you try to put any weight on your under-standing, in fact, your boot will be gone for good. Don’t try to rescue it, unless you want to be a museum piece circa AD 4024.

So. Does all of that clear up questions? Do you feel more rooted, or are you swamped and unmoored? Some of it is new, yes, but, like all lexis, it joins the sodden mass of language floating on the water of culture. So you can let it sink in. Or vice versa.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,