Douro

Posted on May 25, 2015 | 5 comments

Things to know about the word Douro and the river and region it names:

1. It’s not “door-o,” even if it is the gateway to some stunning wines and scenery.

2. It’s not “do row,” though you can boat on it. Port merchants used to use it to ship port. Now it’s dammed, so they use trucks. You can take a boat to drink and sing and look at the hills. I recommend it.

3. Don’t even think about it being dour. It’s the home of port. You know, one of the most posh ways of getting sick drunk ever invented. Dour is not it.

4. The Spanish version of the name, Duero, is also not “do row.”

5. But Portuguese is not pronounced like Spanish anyway. If you pronounce Portuguese as though it were Spanish, you can count on being wrong, and someone’s probably going to get hurt.

6. Douro, the Portuguese name, is said like English “dough roo.” You may or may not rue the dough you spend visiting this region and trying 90 wines. I don’t rue it.

7. Duero, the Spanish name, is pronounced the way it’s spelled, provided you know how to pronounce Spanish. Like “dwair-o,” for those who don’t.

8. The name comes from Latin Durius, which in turn most likely comes from a Celtic word meaning (you’ll love this, it’s so intensely descriptive) ‘water’ or ‘river’. The Proto-Indo-European root is dor.

9. Water is what you can end up drinking wine like in this area if you’re not careful. You need to be durable. You should drink lots of water before bed.

10. You can’t fully taste the word without tasting a lot of wines. Not just port, which is what the Douro region is known for; dry reds and whites too. I can’t do that for you here, so you’ll just have to go about it yourself like I did. By Tony Aspler’s count, he, I, and the rest of our group tasted about 90 (69 in Portugal and 21 in the Duero region of Spain, upstream).

11. If you just visit the Douro DOC wine region in Portugal, you can be forgiven for thinking maybe Douro really means ‘the opposite of flat, straight, and wide’, because that’s what everything around there is: the opposite. The roads are a lane and a half wide and don’t go the length of a tour bus without curving. The tour bus is what you may be sitting in, peering out the windows thinking about how close you are to tumbling hundreds of metres down over terraces, as the driver somehow pours it around the bends like a cross between a boa and a Maserati. Just remember that they regularly drive tanker trucks to and from the quintas that are pasted to the sides of these hills, on the same narrow roads your fat bus is on, is that one oh please no I don’t want to die oh no it was just a little pickup that apparently teleported from the front of our bus to the back unscathed.

12. If you just visit the Ribera del Duero region in Spain, nearer the source of the river, or the Toro region a little farther downstream towards Portugal, you may more likely think it means ‘strong’ or ‘expensive’, as most of the wines around there are one, the other, or both.

13. Put it this way. On two successive days we had lunch near the Duero. On one day we had full-flavoured wines that retailed for under €20 a bottle, some under €10. Strong, rich, but nice. We bought two bottles. On the next day we had four finely crafted wines made at the most beautiful and clean winery I have ever seen. They were all marvellous. They retailed at €30, €40, €100, and €220 a bottle. I would have bought the €40 one but I didn’t have the chance. Just as well. I’d just end up drinking it.

14. Have you poured yourself a glass of wine yet? Get training!

15. I’m not saying you’re going to do insane things like my tour group did, such as tasting 30 wines in three hours. (You sniff, swirl, and spit. You do not swallow a lot. But your tongue is ready to run down the hill.) But be prepared.

14. Those were dry wines, by the way. Mostly red. Tasting 30 ports could kill you. Even if you didn’t swallow. It’s a lot of sugar.

15. The Duero starts in Spain. For a stretch it is the Douro on one side and the Duero on the other, as it forms the border between Portugal and Spain. It runs through scenery that is breathtaking or terrifying depending on where in it you are. It empties into the Atlantic at Porto, where the big port companies have their headquarters. Actually they’re on the south side of the river, in Gaia. It’s a lot of warehouses for storing port. It has more alcohol per square metre than anywhere else in the world.

16. At this point I think you really do need to start tasting Douro and Duero wines if you are to get a good finish on the tasting of this name. I can’t give you that. But I can give you photos. They will give a little bit of the experience. Here they are. If you click on them they will take you to larger versions in the context of my Flickr albums, which include many other photos as well.

You think scenery like this exists only in ads and movies. Nope, this is exactly what the Douro near Pinhão looks like.

If the scenery looks like this, raise your head some more.

There we go. Wicked scenic, eh?


For some reason, people on freeways apparently do not want to have to drive hugging the bends down into the valley and then back up again. But if you are going to visit a quinta, where they make port, you will get to take the little non-freeway roads. Oh yes you will.


Imagine this is the view from your bus window. You took this picture with your iPhone as the bus sailed around a bend on a road much like the ones you see down below. How much wine do you think you will need to anaesthetize you enough that your back muscles don’t spasm because you are tightly gripping anything near you and you know it won’t help because whatever you’re gripping is going to roll down that hill any second now too?

You may think that port can teach you how to fly. Or you may think that it can teach you how not to give a flying f—. You will be right about one of those two things. Hint: the second one. Do not think about whether your bus driver can teach you how to fly.


If you have acrophobia or weak knees, you are automatically disqualified from working for a quinta in the Douro DOC. Or really even from visiting it.

Here is a hotel you can stay in. It does not require driving on cliffs to get to. Much. OK, just a little.

This is the part of Spain the Duero (Douro) comes from. Nothing heart-stopping here. Except for the wine prices.

This is where it ends up just before emptying into the Atlantic: Porto (as seen from Gaia). Hmm. There seems to be something missing.

Oh, yes. That.

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The future of American accents

Posted on May 13, 2015 | 2 comments

I’ve been interviewed a second time about that article I did for The Week on what Americans will sound like in 2050. This time it was with a National Public Radio station in New Hampshire, and it was pre-recorded and edited rather than live and on the spot. It’s about 11 minutes. They’ve put it up on their website:

What Americans Will Sound Like in the Future

(You have to scroll down a bit to get to it, as it’s one of several segments in the show.)

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quaxing

Posted on May 11, 2015 | 3 comments

Do you like quaxing? I like quaxing. I quax all the time. Well, to be precise, I quax regularly every Friday at around 6:30 pm, and I may also quax on other days of the week.

What is quaxing? By context, you may guess it is not related to sounds ducks or Aristophanic frogs make (brekekekex, quax, quax?). No, this word is an eponym. Or perhaps I should call it a contreponym or perhaps a spitonym, because its sense is pointedly in spite of the person whose name it uses.

I don’t know if this word will take off and last. Its sound is sharp and exceptional and suggests things unrelated to its referent. But right now it’s a fun little flash in the pan. And I bet at least one of my regular Sesquiotica readers (hello, Janet!) will know it already, since she’s from New Zealand, which is where this word started.

New Zealand, I should say, is one of only four countries in the world where I have driven a car. When we plan trips, we will plan with trains if possible, buses or planes if necessary, but cars only if unavoidable. Well, to see New Zealand close up we needed to rent a car. But if we were living in a place such as Auckland and needed to go shopping, well, we wouldn’t need a car to do that.

But Dick Quax disagrees.

Dick Quax is an Auckland councillor. And Dick Quax, in a Twitter exchange sparked by a suggestion that a shopping centre ought to have better transit options, declared “no one in the entire western world uses the train for their shopping trips” and followed that with “the very idea that people lug home their weekly supermarket shopping on the train is fanciful.” He was subsequently skeptical about declarations by some that they get their groceries on their bikes.

I live in Toronto. Toronto has a large ring of suburbs full of people who are used to having to drive to get anywhere and do anything. I remember that life: I lived out in the country when I was a kid. I lived in Calgary for a year in grade 5. When we lived in Calgary, even out in the sprawling northwestern suburbs, I would take the bus and walk quite regularly, though not all the time. Now I live in Toronto, I don’t even own a car. I rent when I have to. I seldom have to. Every Friday, after work, I go to the St. Lawrence Market and buy my groceries and carry them home. It’s enough for two people for a week (not including lunches). Many people in central Toronto do the same.

This, according to By the Motorway, is what quaxing is: “to shop, in the western world, by means of walking, cycling or public transit.”

Could you carry home enough for a family or four or more? One person might have trouble, but two might do it more easily. Shopping more than once a week is also an option. The thing is, where I live, the nearest parking to the shopping is also the nearest parking to my residence. Even if I were to shop farther away, I would still have a lot of bag carrying to do to and from the car.

So I’m lucky, right? Because I live two blocks from where I shop? Lucky only in that I can afford my residence here (which did not cost more than a house in drive-to-shop-land). I didn’t roll the dice; we chose to live here. Also, there are many families with children and teens living in the building I live in. Living far from shopping is a choice many people make, and they have their reasons. It’s just not a choice everyone makes. Some of us prefer to quax. I’m not going to be a dick about people driving to shop when they live too far from the store to walk; I know the exigencies of life for many. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people who drive to shop not to be dicks to those of us who quax. We’re keeping the streets and air that much clearer. I have to tell you, it’s all that it’s quaxed up to be. It’s quick, too.

Who, by the way, is Dick Quax? Aside from being an Auckland councillor, I mean? He’s an Olympic silver medallist from 1976. In what? The 5000 metres. Running. You know, going places on foot. Physical fitness, et cetera.

Well, he may have won silver in 1976, but I think he’s won irony in 2015.

(By the way, in case you’re curious, Quax is a Dutch name, as are many that end in x. He was born in the Netherlands – where quaxing is the usual way to go shopping – but moved to New Zealand in his childhood.)

Thanks to Tweeters @leoniedoyle and @ladyfleur and to Kirsty Johnston of the NZ Herald for bringing my attention to quaxing.

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apatite

Posted on May 10, 2015 | 3 comments

The forms of apatite are many, diverse and colourful. Apatites are bred in the bone and borne out in the teeth, but domestic apatites are pale reflexes of the wild and exotic apatites you may find. In the many apatites of the world is much deception: you may think you have and hold one thing, but it is quite another. Look closely; you may see palaces and caves, heavenly clouds and hellish nightmare realms. But one thing is true: apatites are hard. Specifically, apatite is the defining mineral for 5 on the Mohs scale.

Yes, I’m spelling that right, and what is the Mohs scale? It’s the standard scale for hardness in minerals and other things. Talc is 1 and diamond is 10. So, strictly, apatite is exactly halfway up. But consider your teeth and bones: do they seem hard to you? One kind of apatite, hydroxyapatite, is the major component in tooth enamel and bone mineral.

Yes, apatite is a mineral. It’s actually a group of phosphate minerals. Its name, which sounds exactly like appetite, comes from Greek ἀπάτη apaté ‘deceit’; Abraham Gottlob Werner gave it the name in 1786 because apatite was often mistaken for other things. (To satisfy your appetite for etymology: appetite comes from Latin appetitus ‘desire’, from appetere, from ad ‘to’ plus petere ‘seek’.)

Minerals are fascinating things. Everyone should, in their childhood, spend some time in the minerals section of a museum. Try to go to one where they light them nicely. The mineral is mainly just arrangements of molecules made of calcium, phosphorus, oxygen, and either hydrogen (and more oxygen), fluorine, or chlorine – Ca10(PO4)6(OH,F,Cl)2. But take a look at how that all comes out. So many colours and shapes.

From such basic elements are our apatites built and crystallized, and yet they crystallize in so many different ways. Some are lucid, some opaque. Read into them what you will; see fantasy realms and dramas, or pure forms. Seek what you desire, but be prepared for deceit. There is no need to be uptight about it. In the end, know this: ordinary as they may seem to you, you have your own apatites, and you would be an indistinct useless mass without them.

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redolent

Posted on May 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Boy, it smells.”

“Smells? Smells of what?”

“Smells of something nice.”

“…”

“I mean, it’s pungent.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Sure, it has a nice odour.”

“Like, it reeks of good things?”

“Well, what? Is there another word for smelly that’s not freighted with negative associations?”

“Like a word that seems made to be said by a gentleman with an Italian accent?”

“Yeah, sure, a roll of the tongue, a tap, a liquid, a nasal, a final crisp point.”

“Do you mind if it makes you sound like a hackneyed newspaper scribbler?”

“…Um… should I?”

And so we come to redolent. It’s a delicious three syllables, more sapid than lentil, not as bright as red, entirely oblivious to rodent, rolling off the tongue like an Italian second dish. It’s not a verb, it’s an adjective – and it usually shows up with one of two prepositions: of and with.

So already it’s a little starchy because while you can use verb forms of some of the others (it smells, it reeks), you have to use a form of be plus a preposition to make redolent work. I mean, yes, you can say “That’s a very redolent cigar you have,” if you don’t mind sounding like the sort of self-consciously sesquipedalian person who will always say “reticent” where “shy” would be better. But normally you say something is redolent with a thing or redolent of a thing.

What’s the difference? “Redolent of X” means it has the smell of X, but of course in a rich, evocative way. (The writer thinks, “I want something lyrical here,” and grabs this word, which tends to come with a little flag sticking out of it, “Try me! I’m evocative!”) The air ­– most often it’s the air – is redolent of spices, garlic, perfume, onion soup. It borrows on reminiscent of (we will not say reeking of). “Redolent with X” means it is full-smelling, rich and evocative – the smell is saturated, red-lined even – and that the main element in this richness is X. It’s in the same vein as spiced with, alive with, rankling with, pregnant with, riddled with, that sort of thing.

Either way, it revs up with the opening /r/ and then readily rattles off three syllables. Etymologically, it uses the Latin re prefix as an intensifier; the d is inserted because there needs to be a consonant between the e and the following vowel. The olent has the same ol as in olfactory, from olere ‘emit a smell’.

And unlike smelly, pungent, odorous, reeking, and so on, it does not have a primary negative tone. Nor, on the other hand, is it flowery like perfumed. It is mellifluous, polysyllabic, literary. All of which make it ripe to be hackneyed by scribblers who want easy shortcuts to textual flavour and evocativeness. It is a sort of instant umami, a dash of nam pla – or more likely a sprinkling of powdered onion soup mix on the top of the casserole of words. Use it with care, therefore; you don’t want your text to be redolent of – or redolent with the odour of – junior journalists and other hacks.

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celerity

Posted on May 6, 2015 | 1 comment

If this word looks to you like it should be a famous vegetable, maybe it’s time to bring you up to speed on it. This is not food fast or slow, nor a star who’s fallen off the b-list; it’s more a characteristic of a tercel, if not always of a Toyota Tercel.

Celerity is what you have after acceleration (ac ‘to’ plus celer plus ation) and before deceleration. If you want to get somewhere in a trice – can we say get there tricely? – you need celerity or ye will be derelict. Let me add some clarity: celerity is speed, from Latin celer ‘swift’. It is a business-class or first-class word for speed. And just as business and first will get you to your destination at the same time as economy, but with more expense and ostentation, so celerity will serve the same sense as speed, but with a Rolex chronograph on its wrist.

There are other synonyms for speed, of course; Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus includes fastness, fleetness, haste, hurry, quickness, rapidity, rapidness, speediness, swiftness, and velocity. But they don’t all have exactly the same tinges and tastes. Some imply time pressure, some have a sense of carelessness; others are dryer or more positively toned. Several have that –ness that drags like a trailer. One thing nearly all of them do have, though, is a fricative at the start: /s/, /f/, /h/ (only sort of a fricative in English, admittedly), and the one voiced one the engine-rev /v/. Two others have the liquid /r/. Only one starts with a stop: quickness.

Of them all, celerity is truly the most rare and expensive – the only one that the average speaker might not even know. It is a shining silver streak of a word, soft and liquid with one lightly crisp tap as it passes. It may have a more lyric quality, even. It is ethereal and yet somehow slightly lesser in impact.

I do not think that this watch is truly a businessman in business class drinking his transatlantic Caesar with celery. No, it is a wisp of a lady in a diaphanous dress wearing not a watch at all but simply a silver bracelet, sitting in first class sipping Perrier-Jouet and talking to no one as she sees the Pacific slip quickly away below. Who is she? A starlet? A food guru? A simple skater? No one knows for sure, except for that bespectacled nerd sitting next to her reading impenetrable theory for relaxation. He is flying as fast as she is, and he will arrive with her at the same hotel room. And he knows what celerity is. Not haste. Not hurry. No pressure. Simply being everywhere before the slower ones.

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brash

Posted on May 5, 2015 | 2 comments

To be brash is to be rash – b rash indeed. It’s to be flashy and crashy and probably trashy, perhaps to be brutal and break things. It is to say to your brain “sh!” before it can finish. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of the adjective brash is “Hasty, rash, impetuous; (orig. U.S.), impulsive, assertive, impudent; crude, insensitive; flashy.” Ashes to ashes, but bashes to the brashest. It is a characteristic most especially of the young, and in particular of young men. Words it most often shows up with, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, include (in descending order) young, loud, style, bold, cocky, and arrogant.

Here’s another word you may see with it: water. As in water brash. This is a medical term. It’s not brash water; here, brash is a noun. A more technical term is reflux. You lie down, the acidic contents of your stomach – including excess saliva – flow up, it produces a burning sensation and a sense of unpleasant water flowing back into your mouth and probably some general gastric discomfort. So it’s water and it’s rather brash. But this is the noun, meaning ‘break, attack, assault, burst’. It’s the original brash.

In fact, brash the noun was around since the 1500s, while brash the adjective has only been around since the 1800s. It’s quite the brash upstart. But wait, there’s more: there are actually two each of noun, adjective, and verb for brash in the OED. The other noun version is ‘heap of fragments, such as rock rubble or crushed ice’. The other adjective version is ‘fragile; brittle’ and mainly applies to timber. The two verbs are an obsolete one meaning ‘assault, attack’ and a 20th-century one meaning ‘remove the lower branches of a tree’. They don’t all have identical origins as far as we can tell, but we can’t entirely tell for sure either. The main thing is that the sense we commonly use, like a couple of the others, seems to have imitative or sound symbolic origins – that is, it makes use of the phonaesthemes /br/ (as in break, brunt, brittle) and /æʃ/ (as in smash, crash, dash, splash). They were grabbed and rashly bashed together. But the result seems to hold water.

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Tiffany

Posted on May 4, 2015 | 3 comments

Today has been Audrey Hepburn’s birthday. She would have been 86 but she died in 1993, alas. For me, she is the quintessential gamine, a kind of divine apparition, and she is the only actress of whom I have bought an entire photo wall calendar, an artistic homage I usually reserve for artists such as Alphonse Mucha. I think the first movie of hers I ever saw was her first big hit, Roman Holiday. But the movie I – like so many others – will enduringly associate her with is Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

We can leave aside the fact that Truman Capote (who wrote the story on which the movie was based) thought she was badly miscast and wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role. Let us also for the moment leave aside the terrible casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi (his scenes should be re-shot with George Takei presenting an entirely different and better version of the character, in my opinion). The rest of the movie is lovely, even though some people might think it a bit tawdry and no one could call Holly Golightly a saint. But I want to talk about Tiffany’s.

Or, more particularly, Tiffany. Such a gem of a name, soft, sighing in the wind, the ff waving like a field of heather or timothy. Yes, Tiffany is a more heather-like name than Heather, I think. But it’s also more delectable, like a perfect little tiffin or tea. Now, yes, it can have a girlish faddishness or faddish girlishness, I suppose, and it does call forth a certain preciousness. There was a girl in my high school named Tiffany, and actually she didn’t seem precious and expensive at all, but then she wasn’t in my grade so maybe I was wrong. I actually used to think Epiphany would be a good name for a girl, though I’ve never seen it; it has a similar sound but perhaps more of a coruscating phonetic epiphenomenon. No?

The famous Tiffany, though, and the Tiffany of the movie, is the family name of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who founded a jewelry store that is now one of the anchors of 5th Avenue in Manhattan. It is a place you can go to look and dream, though not really to have breakfast. It is where you see the bright shiny priceless things.

But there is another Tiffany, one more in line with Alphonse Mucha: both had connections to Art Nouveau, an artistic movement I shamelessly adore. (I once bought an entire book of Art Nouveau wrapping paper.) Such beautiful botanical curves, softly illuminating their surroundings. The Paris Metro seems a wonderful thing just because at some stations you pass through Art Nouveau entrances. It is a perfect fairyland home for the gamines and assorted theophanies of the world. And the most luminous artist of them all was Louis Comfort Tiffany, maker of stained glass – lamps, windows, what have you. Was he related to Charles Lewis Tiffany? He was Charles’s son. (Comfort was a personal name held by several men in the Tiffany clan.)

There are also musical connections to Tiffany – an American singer who had a hit with “I Think We’re Alone Now”; a K-pop singer, member of Girls’ Generation; and the song “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something, which I heard a gazillion times on the radio 20 years ago, which was 17 years before I ever saw the movie.

Oh, yes, the movie: I first watched it on an Air New Zealand flight from LA to Auckland – a flight where the flight attendant spontaneously offered us sparkling wine with breakfast, quite the contrast to the horrible United Airlines flight from Sydney to San Fran on the way back, where our direct request for sparkling wine at breakfast elicited a look of disgust and a flat refusal. Well, never mind, that UA flight was from hell for several reasons, but sparkling wine on Air NZ on the way to NZ was at least as heavenly as a Danish in front of a jewelry window.

So. Sparkling wines. Art Nouveau glass. Jewels. Audrey Hepburn. Such divine manifestations indeed. And fair enough. Tiffany is a name given in honour of the epiphany – the divine manifestation, the revealing of Jesus to the magi. Epiphany is a Greek word, but the Greek word for ‘divine manifestation’ is theophany.

Which is the etymon of Tiffany.

That’s right. Just as Dionysos became Dennis, Theophany became Tiffany. What the heck… St. Audrey became tawdry, you know. But not in Breakfast at Tiffany’s she didn’t. Or maybe she did, just a little bit, to dip into the weary tarnished but hopeful joy of humanity and raise it back to the divine. You know, Louis Comfort Tiffany sought out the glass with impurities, because it made a more beautiful glow…

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obnoxion, obnoxity, obnoxiety, obnoxicity, obnoxy, obnoxiosity, obnoxiousness

Posted on May 3, 2015 | 3 comments

Ah, the constant lexical capriciousness of the English language. It’s like a combination of Christmas and Hallowe’en: when you unbox a word, you don’t know if it will be trick or treat. It’s like trying to learn to eat with a full formal flatware setting: the multifarious forks, knives, and spoons, there for you to choose from wrongly and make yourself look like a bumpkin. Our derived word forms in particular display a pointed obnoxion.

What do you mean obnoxion isn’t a word? Religious – religion; contagious – contagion… What is it, obnoxity? You know, loquacious – loquacity; mendacious – medacity… Well, then, how about obnoxiety? Like anxious – anxiety? Let’s see… calamitous – calamity could give us obnoxy… It’s not obnoxicity, anyway, right, because that really is just an –ity with an –ic before it… Maybe obnoxiosity on the model of monstrous – monstrosity? No?

Well, we’re getting through all the Latin endings here. I mean, the word obnoxious comes from Latin obnoxius, which is from ob ‘towards, in the way of’ and noxa ‘hurt, injury’; it meant ‘exposed to harm, answerable, subject to punishment’. So clearly we should use a Latin-derived suffix to make the noun. It would be silly to stick on an old Germanic suffix, right? Something like –ness?

Oh, come on, you have got to be kidding. Obnoxiousness? That’s the correct form? Well, it sure is an obnoxiously long word, so maybe it’s fitting. Anyway, there are other –ous words that get a –ness as well; the Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of them, from abstemiousness through anxiousness and atrociousness and barbarousness and boisterousness and capaciousness and consciousness and contagiousness and… um, yes, we do have anxiety and atrocity and barbarity and capacity and contagion…

And, according to Oxford, we also have obnoxity and obnoxiety. Could it be that obnoxiousness is a measurable quality and one or both of the others is an instance of someone or something being obnoxious? Well, yes, an obnoxity is “An obnoxious, objectionable, or offensive person or thing; an object of aversion.” As to obnoxiety, it’s listed as “Originally: †the state of being liable to something; liability (obs.). Now: offensiveness, objectionableness, odiousness.”

Remember: the original definition of obnoxious in English as of the 1500s, and the usual sense before the 1800s, was (per Oxford) “Liable, subject, exposed, or open to a thing (esp. something actually or possibly harmful).” You would be obnoxious to punishment or obnoxious to accidents or or or… But the ‘hurtful, injurious’ sense (proper to Latin obnoxiosus) appeared in the 1600s and prevailed by the 1800s.

Mind you, these days obnoxious means not so much ‘hurtful’ as (to quote Merriam-Webster) “unpleasant in a way that makes people feel offended, annoyed, or disgusted.” We see it in phrases like obnoxious little brat, loud and obnoxious, rude and obnoxious, and obnoxious behaviour. It’s a very hard-to-ignore quality.

Which leaves us with the obnoxion of English derivational morphology. There are plenty of people who would like obnoxion to be a word in regular use; just Google it and you’ll see. But there are also people who are rather obnoxious about its being “not a word.” (“You dreadful little man, you are using the wrong fork with your squab.”) You get generally similar results for obnoxity, obnoxiety, obnoxicity, obnoxiosity (and obnoxiousity), even obnoxy.

I think it just leaves plenty of opening for being obnoxious. Which, in the bratty sense, can even include a little puckishness and rambunction. Rambunctiousness. Rambunxity?

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lithobraking

Posted on April 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

Today, the MESSENGER orbiter, which had been circling Mercury since 2011, executed a lithobraking manoeuvre.

What is lithobraking? It’s one of the ways of reducing the velocity of a spacecraft. Yes, it’s braking as in braking, that thing you do to slow down a car or a bike. The verb brake in this sense comes from the noun brake, ‘device for slowing or stopping a wheel’, which comes from one or both (by mutual influence) of the Dutch verb breken ‘break’ (in reference to crushing flax in this case, apparently) and the Old French brac ‘arm’ (in reference to a lever, which is used for applying the brake), which comes from Latin bracchium.

Spacecraft are gliding through space, so you can’t just slow down a wheel that’s in contact with a surface; you have to use some external force. One way of doing this is by aerobraking. A spacecraft that has come a long distance at high speeds needs to slow down enough to get into the right orbit around a planet, and if you dip into the atmosphere and back out, you can use the friction of the atmosphere to slow it down rather than needing to burn a lot of fuel firing rockets to the same effect. So: aero, from Latin for ‘air’. And braking.

The MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe didn’t use aerobraking at any point; Mercury doesn’t have enough atmosphere for that to work. When it arrived at Mercury in 2011, it had to use a complex and large set of manoeuvres to take it to the right speed and into orbit. But it settled into its orbit and commenced mapping Mercury. It was set for a one-year mission. But at the end of the year, it still had lots of juice, so they decided to keep it going as long as possible. And they started live-tweeting it: a person on Earth tweeting as the first-person voice of MESSENGER.

Orbit is not a pure and simple thing. Your straight-line speed has to be just right to pull you away from what you’re orbiting with the same energy as what you’re orbiting is exerting through gravity to pull you towards it. Orbits can decay: the speeds aren’t quite matched. MESSENGER needed to fire some rockets occasionally to fix decay of its orbit. And finally it no longer had the fuel to do so. Its orbit would inevitably give way to the pull of gravity. It was determined that the resolution of this would be lithobraking.

Do you recognize lith? It’s a Greek-derived root meaning ‘stone’; you see it in lithograph (a printmaking technique using etched stone) and monolith (speaking of things in space, cue 2001: A Space Odyssey). Lithobraking is using rock to reduce the speed of a spacecraft. It has been used with the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover, for instance.

Where do you get rock in space? You don’t. You get it at the surface of the planet.

The Mars landers inflated big balloons and bounced along the surface of the planet until friction with the stone finally stopped them.

MESSENGER did not have big balloons. It was not designed to be a lander.

Lithobraking is a technical term for a precise manoeuvre calculatedly using the rock of a planet’s surface to stop a lander. It is also a more sarcastically euphemistic term for crashing.

The MESSENGER ground crew on Earth knew that this was the inevitable ending. The orbit was decaying and gravity would win. They let this be known on April 16. @MESSENGER2011 tweeted:

Oh No!! I’m going to be creating a new crater on Mercury? Hum.. This should be interesting.

They made a manoeuvre on April 24 to set the trajectory. The probe would come into the planet at 3.9 km per second and would contact the planet’s surface at about 54˚ north on April 30, at 2:36:06 EST, Earth time. The probe tweeted more information, including this:

I’m only ~ 3m across, but I will create a crater about 16 meters across.

Yesterday (April 29), it tweeted:

Well my lithobraking will occur tomorrow @ 3:26pm EDT. More info here: bit.ly/1DLhHVg

A Twitter user commented this morning on the use of lithobraking. @MESSENGER2011 responded:

It’s called I don’t want to think about crashing. Lithobraking sounds a lot better.

And at just the predicted time, in just the predicted way, MESSENGER lithobraked from 3.9 km/s  to 0 km/s instantaneously – on the other side of Mercury from the Earth, so there are no pictures of it as it happened. But there’s a new crater on Mercury now. You can find out more at @MESSENGER2011 and messenger.jhuapl.edu.

And now so many more of us know this word lithobraking. The first half is smooth and classical, the liquid /l/ and soft /θ/, like flying through space though it refers to stone. The second half is hard, abrupt, an odd and uncertain form from Germanic and/or Latin. Collided together, they make quite the contrast. Of course, contrast is what lets you see craters…

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