brackish

Posted on April 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

Laurie took a sip from his glass. “Brack!”

“Old brack water?” I said.

He shook his head and spluttered. “Brock! York! Guelph!” Or maybe he was just yucking and yexing.

I decided to test the hypothesis that his distaste for the water was equal to his distaste for certain Ontario universities. “What was it, loo water? Would you like some rye instead?” (Waterloo and Ryerson, like the other three, are also not the University of Toronto or McMaster, Laurie’s almae matres.)

Laurie wiped his mouth. “Brackish. Send it back.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Is that onomatopoeia? Brackish? Doesn’t sound like water to me.”

“I wonder,” I said. “More likely we’re going at it brackwards: gross salty water may seem flat and cracked like ‘brack’ because of the sound of brackish.” I saddled up a computer and did some looking up. “Seems to come from Middle Dutch brak, ‘salty’ or ‘worthless’. The trail is kind of lost after that.”

I kept looking while Laurie sought out something better to drink. “Maybe some backwater with bark and a crab in it?” he said over his shoulder. “Or Aristophanes’ frogs, brakakakax koax koax?”

“Well, that was ‘brekekekex,’ but…” I said, snorkelling the internet. Actually, snorkelling is perhaps not a good word for it, as brackish water nauseates me, too, and I have a consequently bad record when snorkelling. But anyway. “There was a brack that was a loud noise or outcry, but that’s obsolete,” I said. “It could also mean a break or rupture. Oh, and there’s an Irish seed cake. And there’s bracken, which is a kind of fern.” I looked up. “Of course there’s brachy, a Greek prefix for ‘wide’, as in brachydactyly. The wide brackish Sargasso Sea? And there’s Georges Braque, a cubist painter, many of whose works were shades of brown and black. And of course the rather distasteful mania for collegiate basketball playoff brackets that comes around every March.”

“Give it a break,” Laurie said, handing me a glass of beer, another for himself in the other hand. “At least these won’t be brackish.”

“Until we belch: ‘brack!’” I said. Laurie pulled a face. I sipped. I paused. I pulled a face too. “Um, what kind of beer is this?”

“Let me see… something like Busch. Or Pabst. Or Schlitz.”

“Aw, man,” I said. “Rule number one: Don’t drink beer that sounds like a beer can opening!”

Thanks to Laurie Miller for suggesting today’s word. I hope he doesn’t mind my putting rather more words into his mouth than he used in suggesting it – but he did supply the university yexing.

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conniption

Posted on April 23, 2015 | 7 comments

There was a time in American English when words were like contraptions you could jerry-rig: a bit from here, a bit from there, all bolted together to make a pseudo-classical bit of hickery. Absquatulate and copacetic are two classics – though copacetic is the newer by nearly a century, showing up circa 1910. Absquatulate hit the scene around 1830. So did contraption – a pseudo-classical construction with a trap stuck in it. And so did conniption.

You know what a conniption is, right? It’s a fit: a fainting fit or a hissy fit or some other pique or fright. We often see the redundant (but assonant) phrase conniption fit – in fact, that’s how it shows up in the earliest attested uses.

I think conniption has a good sound; that nip in the middle is fittingly indignant but short; the gathering con could call on confound and condemn and consarn (a fake-swear probably based on concern and usable where one might use goshdarn), and the ption ending brings out not only contraption but corruption, consumption, and conscription – and eruption and exception, among others. And just maybe, the word as a whole has an air of a sneezing fit.

So where did conniption come from? Um, the US… around 1830… and no one’s really sure of anything more than that. There’s speculation, of course, but not even a whole lot of that. It was confected; it fit well; it stuck. If you look at Google ngrams, you’ll see ebbs and flows over the decades.

Mind you, you’ll also see results from the earliest 1800s. Have a look and you’ll find hits like these:

“there are a thousand occasions in which it breaks through its original conniption” —1803

“The economy of injustice is, to furnish resources for the fund of conniption” —1807

“who would be the avengers, not the abettors of conniption” —1811

“the moral conniption of our first parent has been entailed on his whole posterity” —1811

This is rather entertaining. But if you click through and look at the actual photo facsimile, you will find what you may have already guessed: it’s due to bad optical character recognition. This conniption is in every case a corruption… of corruption.

Tsk. It’s enough to give one a conniption.

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When intransitives go transitive

Posted on April 22, 2015 | 2 comments

This article was originally published on BoldFace, the official blog of the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada.

We’ve all learned that there are two kinds of verbs: transitive and intransitive. Transitives take a direct object—“I fry an egg”—and intransitives don’t—“My stomach aches.” But that’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s not actually quite right.

For one thing, there are also impersonal verbs (“It seems to me,” “It rained”), which don’t even have proper subjects, just empty pro forma its.

For another thing, there are different kinds of intransitive verbs. Linguists divide them into unergative, where the subject really is the one doing the thing, and unaccusative, where the subject is treated as being on the receiving end of the action and can be modified by the past participle. We see from the guests are departed and the departed guests that depart is unaccusative; run, on the other hand, is unergative—you can’t say the run horse.

There are also verbs that change from intransitive to transitive or vice versa—several kinds of them. We don’t always think about them. In fact, some details of them are still being argued about by linguists.

I think it’s time for a quick field guide to these changeable verbs, complete with their overstuffed technical names.

Agentive ambitransitives

Some verbs can name the object of the action or not, but they always say who or what is doing the action (i.e., what is the agent). Read is one of these: “What are you doing?” “I’m reading.” “Reading what?” “I’m reading this article on grammar.” These are the nice, simple ones, and we don’t need to worry about them. But worry, now… yes, that verb can worry us a bit more, or we can worry it.

Ergatives

With worry, the object when it’s transitive—“That worries me”—is the subject when it’s intransitive—“I worry about that.” Another one of these is break: “I broke the window,” but “The window broke” and “The window is broken.” And if “I fry an egg,” then “The egg is frying.” Do those look like the unaccusatives I just mentioned? Some say that’s what these are. But some linguists argue that these aren’t true unaccusatives, precisely because they have transitive variants. True unaccusatives, like come and arrive, can’t be used this way. So what do we call these ones? Ergatives (from a Greek root for work). Well, some of us call them that, anyway.

Some people call some of these middle voice. Take for example shave: “The barber shaved me” or “I shaved myself”; “I shaved” means “I shaved myself” and “The barber shaved” means “The barber shaved himself.” Why middle voice? Because it’s not exactly active and it’s not exactly passive—or, we could say, it’s both at the same time.

Preterite causatives

Our real favourites, though (if by “favourites” we mean “favourites to get exercised about”) are a set of verbs that express transitive causation by using the past tense of the intransitive form. We don’t make new preterite causatives anymore, but we have some lying around… not laying around.

Yes, lay is one of these. “I lie down today,” “I lay down yesterday”; “Now I lay me down to sleep” (reflexive), and “I lay down the law of grammar” (transitive). We wanted something to express “cause another thing to lie down,” and we just used our past tense of the intransitive for the present of the transitive (and then made a new double past from that: lay gets a d to be laid). I’m sure many of you wish we hadn’t.

Another one like this is fell. This isn’t an ergative—if it were, you could have “I am felling the tree; the tree is felling.” Nope. “The tree falls,” “The tree fell”; “I fell the tree today,” and “I felled the tree yesterday.”

Cognate object constructions

There’s one more especially fun case: verbs that are intransitive—and in some cases always and everywhere intransitive and never taking an object—except when the object is a nominalization of the verb. You die, and you don’t die something, but you can die a death. You can die the death of a hero; you can die a happy death or a sad death. Likewise, you can smile, and you can’t smile me and I can’t smile you and neither of us can smile our faces (not in standard English, anyway), but we can smile a smile. I can smile an aimless smile that hovers in the air and vanishes along the level of the roofs (to steal from T.S. Eliot). And then perhaps you can smile that same smile.

What do we call these? What we probably should call them is a term Iva Cheung made up for them: self-transitives. But in case you haven’t noticed, linguists sometimes like ugly terms a bit too much, and so it turns out that the technical term for this sort of thing is cognate object construction, because the object has to be cognate (coming from the same source) with the verb. I wouldn’t blame you for preferring Iva’s term, though.

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cymotrichous, leiotrichous, ulotrichous

Posted on April 21, 2015 | 4 comments

When I was a little kid, certain adults would tell me to eat the crusts on my bread because they would make my hair curly.

This did not make me want to eat the crusts on my bread.

Seriously, what was so much better about curly hair? I was perfectly happy with my hair, which was fine and straight. (It still is, though I have since discovered that if I grow it to 24 inches it develops a whorl at the bottom.)

Nonetheless, one time at age 4 or 5 when I was at the home of a friend of mine, her mother was curling her hair and asked if I would like a curl, and when I said yes she put a curl right in the middle of the top of my head. I think it lasted a few days. I probably looked like a soft-serve ice cream cone.

Some words are like that curl: unnecessary ornaments used just because someone thinks they will look good: “A longer, hairier word would go better here.” I have nothing against ornamental words, of course – I have a massive collection of them – but I also don’t think they are intrinsically better. There is no prima facie reason to think that a polysyllabic Latin-Greek confection is a truer, more accurate name for a thing than two syllables of Anglo-Saxon. But words are known by the company they keep, and some words just look like they belong to the best clubs.

Today’s triplet of words are a veritable Huey, Dewey, and Louie – or maybe Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – or, hmm, Larry, Curly, and Moe – of ostentatious sesquipedalian pseudo-classicism. They are words that you will probably encounter in three places: newspaper articles written by the same sort of people who feel compelled to call a cucumber an indehiscent pepo and to call a pumpkin a gourd four times for every once they call it a pumpkin; “did you know” articles and lists passed around by the kind of people you’d really like to unfriend on Facebook but don’t want to cause bad feelings; and spelling bees.

All three of these words are made from Greek parts and have been around in English for about a century and a half. They were made up by a French naturalist who wanted to classify humans into types by hair, because if you’re going to classify things you have to classify them in Latin or Greek or it’s not science!

Because of the time when they came into English, their pronunciation follows the old-style English-oriented pronunciation of classical words. For one thing, the stress is on the antepenult – the third-last syllable – in all three. For another, cymo is said like “sigh mo,” leio is said like “lie oh,” and ulo is said like “you low.” (That makes my hair stand on end. People! These are Greek roots!)

Any guesses as to what they mean, what they classify? Try the trichous half; it’s the less tricky part. Have you seen the word trichotillomania? It’s a compulsion to pull one’s hair out. (Endemic to the editorial profession, if figuratively.) The source is the Greek τριχ trikh root, which refers to hair.

So. I am leiotrichous. This may sound like the self-introduction of some ancient monster or warrior, but it just means I have straight hair – Greek λεῖος leios ‘smooth’. Certain adults of my childhood thought it was better to be ulotrichous: to have curly hair – Greek οὖλος oulos ‘crisp, curly’. Many people favour being cymotrichous: having wavy hair – Greek κῦμα kuma ‘wave’. I like all sorts of hair, and all lengths from ankle to none. I’m fine with what I have.

And now we have three more words to stick on the knick-knack shelf. They are the kind of word you will always need to define on first use unless you’re talking to a true in-group. They’re like that odd mystical little object that looks rare and special and pricey but that is unidentifiable until you explain to your dinner guests that it is the trigger assembly from a Qin Dynasty crossbow. Then they all nod sagely and are impressed.

But you may also want to tread a little carefully. These words are now used (when used at all) simply as descriptives for kinds of hair, but words that began as means of racial classification can sometimes have a bit of an off odour to them – like burnt hair, maybe.

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Hello, LA, this is your future talking

Posted on April 20, 2015 | 3 comments

My latest article for The Week, “What Americans will sound like in 2050,” has drawn some attention. In particular, it caught the attention of some folks at KPCC, an NPR radio station in southern California. They did a live interview with me this afternoon (this morning their time). They also recorded it and transcribed some of it. It’s 7:23 long, so it won’t eat too too much of your time…

Predicting the future of American English

 

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gimlet

Posted on April 19, 2015 | 4 comments

I was at a very good party last night. I was barely in the door before I was being acquainted with a gimlet, which turned out to be the drink of the evening. I had heard of it before (probably first in magazine ads in the 1970s) but to my recollection had never had one. Well, I had two last night. A gimlet is made with gin and lime cordial – the bartenders at this party used Bombay Sapphire (Broker’s probably would have been better, or Tanqueray; Bombay is a little delicate) and Rose’s Lime Cordial, plus a little lime juice, a cucumber garnish, and – heretically – a mint leaf. It was nice to have a classic cocktail that was also a relief from the usual drill. It augured well: the party was not boring.

Which was ironic. After all, a gimlet – the thing the drink is named after – is a small hand drill for boring holes. It’s like an auger, but smaller. Once the bit bites in, it keeps digging with each twist, spiraling the wood out as it goes. So it’s sharp and piercing, like the lime juice in the drink and like a look from a squinty eye – a gimlet eye, as they are sometimes called. A gimlet eye is not like being sloe-eyed (which is good, because there is no sloe gin in a gimlet). It’s an eye that may seem to throw down a gauntlet but more likely is just drilling you.

The g on this word, in case you’re not sure, is pronounced “hard” like the one in give, not “soft” like the one in gibe. It comes to us from Old French guimbelet, which is the source of modern French gibelet, which is not to be confused with Old French gibelet, the source of modern French gibelotte and modern English giblet, which has a “soft” g. (This is what you get for drilling down to the giblets.) The source of that Old French guimbelet is also the source of our modern English wimble, which means ‘gimlet’ and is not to be confused with wimple. There is also an unrelated adjective wimble ‘nimble’. Wimbledon is unrelated and it’s not my problem if you find lawn tennis boring.

So anyway, a gimlet – the drink – is for people who want to recast their gin and tonic with lime. Fair enough, since gimlet anagrams to lime GT. It’s maybe more like a lime Tom Collins, though – just replace the lime with lemon and you’re there. (Who was Tom Collins? It’s disputed but most often pointed at an Irish activist of the 1700s. On the other hand, I can tell you that the martini was originally called Martínez.) Now, if you want a different citrus, no need to go off on a tangerine, I mean a tangent; if you’d rather fill holes than make them, just use orange juice in place of the lime cordial – and vodka in place of the gin – and you have a screwdriver.

And, on the other hand, if you decided that the gimlet-eyed person is really sloe-eyed, you can take comfort in that – and complete the assembly – by adding sloe gin and Southern Comfort to your screwdriver and having a drink called a slow comfortable screw. I’m not making this up.

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antanaclasis, polyptoton

Posted on April 17, 2015 | 1 comment

Imagine lettering these letters on a sheet of letter paper, or articulating them in an article: antanaclasis with its forays of four a’s – see those two articles an an in an article, appearing as is – and polyptoton with its two p’s to tease (and two t’s too), like a pair of polyps until appearing in toto. Such repetition with variation – forms varying as they repeat and repeating as they vary. If you could map them to a map you might imagine an image of Antananarivo, perhaps, or some proximate topology (like the tsingy). But have these word forms landed on the page to inform us about land forms? Is antanaclasis doing its eye-breaking break-dancing to slide in in place of some slide about a landslide? Does polyptoton fall like some fell waterfall, pooling in a pool of manifold loops, so many loopy topoi like so many folds?

In fact, though the results echo by sheer reflex, though the shape reflects that echo and faces you like a sheer rock face, they are not geographic; and though the technique may be rhapsodic – even euphuistic – the technical terms are rock-hard canonical rhetoric, classed more in the classical canon than in hard rock.

Can you sense their sense? Are the above paragraphs sensible or nonsensical? Well, never mind, I’ll ease your mind – or I’ll remind you if you were once mindful of these terms: they refer to related figures in speech and writing.

Antanaclasis comes from Greek ἀντανάκλασις, from ἀντανακλᾶν antanaklan ‘reflect, bend back’, from ἀντί anti ‘against, in the opposite direction’ and ἀνακλᾶν anaklan ‘bend back, break’ (from ἀνα ‘back’ and κλᾶν ‘break’), and it refers to use of a word in multiple meanings: not to find the mean, nor to be mean, but just to mean in more than one way along the way.

Polyptoton comes from Greek πολύπτωτος, which comes from πολυ polu ‘many’ and πτωτος ptótos ‘falling’, and it refers to use of many cases or derived forms of a word: you derive forms by forming derivations to inform your readers formally.

Both of these have been used judiciously by great writers for subtle effect – they are certainly most effective when used subtly. Mind you, antanaclasis is really a way of punning; when Pistol in Shakespeare’s Henry V says “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal,” he’s using just the same kind of figure as in the joke “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” But polyptoton sounds more rhetorical, more speechy: “The Greeks are strong, and skillful to their strength, Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant” (Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare again).

Anyway, you can figure out whether and how they will figure in to your writing. You may enjoy writing their figures – their repeating loops of a’s and o’s and p’s – or you may find them disfiguring; you may like playing with the play and interplay of that their senses denote, or you may find it a senseless display. It’s up to you.

This late loopy type foray is for a type IVa who has lately closed another loop.

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The sounds of historical English

Posted on April 15, 2015 | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago, I did an “English language time machine” piece for The Week. This week, it’s up as a podcast, for those who prefer to listen:

What the English of Shakespeare, Beowulf, and King Arthur actually sounded like

 

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The sound of 2050

Posted on April 15, 2015 | 3 comments

The Week is doing a special series on the US in the year 2050. They asked me to write an article on what English will be like then. I obliged. Here it is, with illustrative videos:

What Americans will sound like in 2050

 

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An article title, “An article title ‘An article title needs commas’ needs commas,” needs commas

Posted on April 14, 2015 | 13 comments

A little while back, a fellow editor asked me about commas and appositives, particularly with an eye to mentioning titles of books and such like. Consider the following:

A 2011 report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” makes no mention of the weather in January.

The question was whether the commas should be there. It’s a restrictive, isn’t it? You’re specifying which report, right?

Actually, structurally, no. It’s kind of counterintuitive. In fact, with just a noun phrase there, you can’t make it restrictive. Compare:

A passenger, a young lady, sat next to me.

*A passenger a young lady sat next to me.

A passenger, who was a young lady, sat next to me.

A passenger who was a young lady sat next to me.

When it’s just a noun phrase, it’s effectively an alternate subject (or object, in a case such as “I sat next to another passenger, a young lady”) – you need to make a full relative clause to make a restrictive.

Now, if you use the, you can go with or without commas when it’s a name or title:

The report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” came out in July.

The report “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” came out in July.

Note that the second is restrictive, while the first assumes that the report has already been established in a previous sentence and we are here just naming it. With “a” rather than “the” you of course can’t have established it before, but you are on the spot establishing it, and you would need a relative clause to restrict it further:

A report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” came out in July.

*A report “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” came out in July.

A report called “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” came out in July.

A report, called “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” came out in July.

In some nonstandard versions of English we can use a simple noun phrase as a restrictive: “I met a man Bojangles and he danced for me”; we see survivals of this in something like “He is her man Friday.” But it’s not a real option in standard modern English.

And how about an instance like the following – should there be a comma after “report”?

In the 2011 report “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” the authors pretend it’s not brass monkey weather in January.

In fact, it’s fine as it is as long as the report is not previously established in the text. If we said “In a 2011 report,” we would need to use commas, but with “In the 2011 report” we can’t use the comma (the comma after is fine because it’s the end of the propositional phrase that’s modifying the main clause). If the report is previously established – “…there were annual reports on Ottawa tourism from 2009 to 2014” – then your sentence would be “In the 2011 report, ‘Fun Things’” etc.

Here are the three possible combinations of articles and commas, with comments:

  • In the 2011 report “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” – specifies which book you’re talking about that you are newly introducing
  • In the 2011 report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” – the book has been previously named, so you’re not at this point establishing its identity, you’re just clarifying it
  • In a 2011 report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa” – “a 2011 report” posits some report, tout court, without greater specificity possible; you can’t narrow down on a because then it’s not a report, it’s the report, this report – so if you add the title it has to be non-restrictive because a can’t be restricted further

There was one more question, based on a reading of a dictum from the Chicago Manual of Style: If you use something like called before the title, shouldn’t it have a comma? Like this:

A 2011 report called, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” etc.

The answer is no, it shouldn’t. It’s an error I see on occasion, I think because of confusion with sentences such as “John said, ‘Come in,’” and “Suzie called, ‘It’s time for dinner!’” In the use here, call is a verb that takes three arguments (in the syntactic/semantic sense of argument: an entity or actor or complement): a subject and two objects. The first object is what (or who) is being called, and the second is what that person or thing is being called (i.e., the name). “I shall call him John.” When used as an adjective, the subject is removed (same as in the passive voice) but there still need to be both objects. “A boy1 called John2 came to see you” – not “A boy called, John, came to see you.” (You can write “A boy, called John, came to see you,” making it non-restrictive, because “called John” is a relative clause, though a nonfinite one. But that’s a separate matter.)

The rule is the same for entitled: “A report entitled ‘How to Freeze Your Ass Off in Ottawa’ just came out” – not “A report entitled, ‘How to Freeze Your Ass Off in Ottawa,’ just came out.” It has the same argument structure.

Always remember: approach authoritative grammar guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style with the Buddha’s dictum (a variant thereof) in mind: if something you read in it conflicts with your sense of what is usable English, follow your sense… and figure out what the reason is for the discrepancy. If following a rule makes something sound weird to you, the odds are good that the rule doesn’t apply in that way in that instance.

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