Got on the bus. Got a nice seat at the front of the raised section at the back. Nice and warm there.
Someone else got on and sat behind me. Then coughed. And coughed. And then coughed again.
I got up and moved to the back of the back, so no one could be coughing on my neck.
By the time we got to the subway station, there were three people in front of me all coughing. And one over to the right. All coughing forwards, at least, but coughing and coughing and also coughing and occasionally coughing.
Covering their mouths? No. All adults and yet somehow they felt that it was just fine to decorate the ambient atmosphere with their sputum.
Sputum. This is a wet winter word. It’s as medical (and indelicate-sounding) as scrotum, and as phonaesthetically expressive as spit and sputter and spatter and spurt and spew and perhaps spoor (which doesn’t have to do with expectoration but boy does it sound like it). It makes me think of Aquascutum, which is a British luxury clothing brand well known for their rain coats. The name means ‘water shield’: scutum is Latin for ‘shield’, and I sure wish I could have a sputum scutum to protect me from the expectorated phlegm of my fellow travellers. (Did you know, by the way, that Sputnik is Russian for ‘fellow traveller’? Did you also know that I wish these open coughers could be sent up into orbit just like Sputnik? Except of course then these sputumniks would be showering us with their space phlegm.)
In case you’re not quite disgusted enough yet, I think I really must quote the Oxford English Dictionary definition of sputum: “Saliva or spittle mixed with mucus or purulent matter, and expectorated in certain diseased states of the lungs, chest, or throat; a mass or quantity of this.” Oh, sorry, has that put you off your nightcap or your morning toast and eggs? If not, should I point out that sputum can be anagrammed to upmust and put sum and tum’s up? I can ease the tum a bit by mentioning that sputum is taken straight across from Latin for spittle, and is derived from spuere ‘spit’. Or, OK, I guess that may not help either.
Look, sputum is disgusting. It should have a disgusting word for it. I mean, OK, sputum is a reasonably crisp word, no worse phonetically than teaspoon or stooping; it gets its grossness by association. And yes, sure, splutum would be even grosser, because messier. But splutum is not to be found, alas. Well, not so much alas. If it were to be found, it would probably be found on the back of my neck on the bus.
This is a word that, for me, brings hiking, a backcountry lodge, a classmate, a cookbook, Will and Kate, a suburb of Chicago, and a figure skater.
I grew up in and near Banff, so for me Skoki is first of all a valley and a lodge. I knew of it and had read about it for years before we ever went there. You can’t get there by driving, oh no. You go to the trailhead, which is at Lake Louise ski area (the most scenic ski area in Canada, loaded with excellent and challenging terrain, and also the place I broke my leg when I was 12 – in one of the flattest and least scenic parts of the whole place). Then you hike almost 15 kilometres through the back country, over Boulder Pass, past Ptarmigan Lake, up and over Deception Pass and on down into Skoki Valley.
I love hiking. I really love hiking in the mountains. I love the scenery, the nature. I love seeing the pikas and the lichen and kinnikinnick and the great peaks and valleys. I love walking up and down. I need to have things well above sightline in order to be happy where I live, which is one reason I live in a downtown high-rise now. We went hiking many times when I was a kid, picnicking on Shake ’n’ Bake in Larch Valley and having strawberry tea at Lake Agnes. My high school grad class went on a weekend hike to Shadow Lake in the fall of our last year (thereby hang some tales! but I won’t digress now). Get me hiking and I’m happy.
But I hate camping. In my childhood and youth I spent many disgusting cold damp uncomfortable smoky mosquito-bitten wildlife-haunted nights in tents. Yuck. If I never sleep in a tent again I won’t mind.
Skoki Valley is a beautiful place, and a beautiful place to hike to. You shouldn’t try to do it there and back in one day; it will take you about five hours each way. You’re staying overnight.
But did I mention there’s a lodge?
Skoki Lodge is a beautiful log lodge. It’s two storeys and who knows how many stories – it holds an important place in the history of Banff National Park. It opened in 1931 and has expanded a little since then. It has no electricity or running water, but it has heat and they give you heated water and nice food and lamp light and all that. We finally went there when I was a teen. I enjoyed it very much.
It is now being run by one of my high school classmates, Leo Mitzel. Leo is from Lake Louise and has always been a backcountry kind of guy. (If you’re wondering what he looks like now, here’s a picture from our 30th reunion last fall. If I ever go into much detail about that reunion here, it will deserve its own post. It was every bit as hilarious as the hike, which I don’t think I will ever talk about in much detail on this blog.) It is also being run by Leo’s wife, Katie, who he met at Skoki. She has produced a lovely cookbook. I was very happy to receive it from my parents this past Christmas. It includes the menu they served to Will and Kate (i.e., the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge), who stayed there in 2011. I am also happy to report that they did not miss a chance to use Skoki in the name of a kind of cookie – not Skoki cookies, which would have been a perfect sound, but anyway Skoki warden cookies.
By the way, you don’t have to visit Skoki in the summer. It’s also open in the winter. It’s OK to ski there!
It happens that Skoki is an anagram of OK ski. That’s not where it comes from, of course. On the other hand, it’s clearly not an Anglo-Saxon word. It would probably be spelled scokie or scokey if it were. It’s the odd one out in its surrounds: Skoki Mountain, which sits above the valley, has neighbours named Fossil, Jericho, Ptarmigan, Brachiopod, Anthozoan, Redoubt, Richardson, and Pika. It has that nice crisp mix of voiceless fricative and stops that sound so, ah, “authentic” (I think of Kananaskis, and of Nakiska, a ski area with a name that was basically made up to sound authentic). It ends with an open i that’s pronounced /i/ (“ee”). And in fact (although it’s coincidentally a place name from Poland) it’s modified from a word for ‘marsh’ from a Native American language.
Which Native American language? Potawatomi.
A few of you may know where the Potawatomi live. I’ll tell the rest of you: in the central United States, west of the Great Lakes.
One of the first white people to visit the valley, in 1911, was James Foster Porter, who was from Illinois. The valley apparently reminded him of an area north of Chicago, the Skokie marsh, on which the town of Niles Center was built. He and his companions discussed names for the place and liked Skokie, and it stuck. The Banff version was later respelled as Skoki, probably because it seemed more appropriately non-English, but I don’t know really.
The people in Niles Center also liked the name Skokie. They liked it enough that in 1940 they voted to rename their town Skokie. Skokie is officially a village, although it has a population of 65,000. It’s right on the northern border of Chicago. North of it are the Skokie Lagoons. Near them is the Winnetka Ice Arena, which is the home rink of the Skokie Valley Skating Club.
That’s where Jason Brown is officially from. Who is Jason Brown? One of the best figure skaters in the US today (update: and 2015 US men’s figure skating champion). He grew up in Highland Park (another northern Chicago suburb, and coincidentally the name of a good brand of Scotch whisky). He lives in Colorado now, but his official home club is the Skokie Valley Skating Club. He’s why I thought of Skoki tonight: we were watching the US national championships.
But I have now put my wife on notice that we will be visiting Skoki Lodge some time in the future. She rolls her eyes at the lack of electricity and running water, but it was good enough for royalty, so I say it’s good enough for us. Plus the food looks delicious.
Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, blog.editors.ca
First of all: If you can avoid using whom, you should. Any but the most formal texts are better off without it; it’s a foreign word for most users, as evidenced by the general inability of even many language professionals to use it quite correctly all the time.
Sometimes, however, you have to use it. The text demands it. When you do, you may be faced with a choice between two voices in your head – the one who says what you would say without thinking too hard about, and the one who says what you would say if you did think too hard about it. Whom do you believe? More to the point, who do you believe is right?
As a general rule, believe the first one. That’s the one that won’t tell you to use “Whom do you believe is right?”
Is that whom wrong? You bet it is. It’s also an error many people make. Here’s what’s wrong and how to avoid it – and similar misadventures.
The key is this: Always look for a subject for every conjugated verb.
We know (I hope) that whom is for the object and who is for the subject (and, if you don’t use whom, who is for the object too). We also know that when we ask a question or make a relative clause, the subject or object of the verb is at the start of the clause:
Sheis right.
Whois right?
Shetickledhim.
Whomdidshe tickle?
A womanknowsher grammar.
She’sa womanwhoknowsher grammar.
Shetickleshim.
He’sa manwhomshetickles.
In each of the above sentences, all subjects are in small caps, all conjugated verbs are underlined, and all objects are in bold. Not all verbs have objects, but they all have subjects. In some sentence a single subject has two verbs – “Hebakeda cake and icedit nicely.” But unless the verb is an imperative, there has to be an explicit subject. And if that subject is the interrogative or relative pronoun, it has to be who, not whom. So:
Whodoyou believe is right?
Who is the subject of is. And you is the subject of do (which is the auxiliary for the infinitive believe). If you make who into whom, you don’t have a subject for is.
This throws people off because they see “do you believe” and think, well, it has to have an object. “Whomdoyou believe” is correct, after all.
But when it’s “…believe is right,” it’s not the same. You say “Ibelievehim” but not “Ibelievehimis right” because the clause “heis right” is the object of believe, and within it he is the subject of is. We get tripped up because the subject and object raise to the same position (I’ve added brackets to separate the clauses):
Ibelieve [shetickledhim].
[Who] doI believe [tickledhim]?
[Whom] doI believe [shetickled]?
The key, as I said, is to make sure you have a subject for every verb. Or avoid using whom altogether. And when you are faced with those voices, ask yourself: Whomdoyou believe? And [who] doyou believe [is right]?
We know how some people insist on using borrowed plurals (heck, one of my first articles for The Week, a couple of years ago, was on that). But here’s the thing: they just borrow the nominative plural and think they’re covered. That works fine with languages such as French and Italian, but it’s just a token effort when you come to a fully inflecting language such as Latin. If you want to insist on genii instead of geniuses because it’s truer to the Latin, you really ought to know that genii’s is, by the same token, just plain wrong. It should be geniorum. Find out this and much more in my latest:
My latest article for The Week answers the question, “Why do we have nope and yup… and yep and yeah and nah and yea and nay?” Or, as their title puts it,
I must say I like to have the odd duck. It can be quite nice. Uncommonly among birds, it can even be cooked rare.
I also like to be the odd duck. And to know the odd duck. An unusual person. A rara avis: a rare bird. Not necessarily sui generis – one of a kind – but infrequently seen. A paragon, not an epigone; perhaps also a paradox, an enigma. An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in bacon and glazed with an orange brandy sauce, and not overdone. Raring to go.
You can cook duck breast rare because ducks are tougher birds (have you ever tried to joint one?), less susceptible to infection; the meat is also better suited to it at least in part because it is better suited to flying. It can make it up to where the air is rarefied, and perhaps by consequence it can manage to be served rare. Indeed, if it is not rare I would rather say it is not well done. As it were.
Rare duck breast is not rare because it is hard to find but rather because it is like a soft-cooked egg. From Old English hrere, probably originally having a ‘shaken, agitated’ sense, we got a word rear that retained its old-style pronunciation, as bear has. It referred to the condition of a slightly undercooked egg. The sense transferred to meat by the 1700s, by which time it had been respelled rare.
A similar change took place later in the US (from the same people who gave us varmint from vermin and grits from groats): the verb rear, as in go up on the hind legs, became rare and is usually seen in raring, especially raring to go. To me it gives an image of a dragster peeling out from the start, the nose lifting up a little, because of the sound of it: “Rare. Rare! Rare rare rare rare rare!” This works better in North America, of course; the British pronunciation, as given by Oxford, is /rɛː/, which has lower air pressure.
But our rare for ‘uncommon’ is our rare for ‘sparse’. Rare soil is soil loosely packed; rare earths are minerals and elements that are sparsely distributed through the soil (specifically they are the lanthanide series of elements). Neither rare soil nor rare earth elements are actually all that uncommon; they are just not highly concentrated. Rare air is not uncommon, either; there’s quite a lot of it surrounding the whole planet – you just have to get up to a loftier level, high peaks and flight paths.
These rares come from the original Latin sense of rara (also rarus and rarum and so on depending on inflection): ‘loose, spaced, porous, sparse, few and far between, uncommon’… It all goes together. But with room between.
So, too, do my friends the rarae aves, the rare birds and odd ducks. They can be found in the loftier levels, sometimes up in the clouds and wanting in concentration, perhaps prone to ducking out of crowded occasions, but – like rare earth magnets – capable of exerting a powerful attraction, one that pulls over a long distance. They will not get or give a lot of rah-rah-rah, but they are always worth the effort to have for dinner – or drinks, or smart conversation, that rare art.
The first time I recall hearing this word was in a recording of an Irishman (middle east coast, I think) that I was listening to for accent acquisition purposes. He talked about dulse, which the fisherman liked to eat because “it gave them a good thirst for their porter.”
What I recall most particularly about his pronunciation was the intrusive schwa. Irish accents, due to a feature of Irish phonotactics, militate against adjacency of /l/ and any of several other consonants. You will hear “fillum” for film, for instance. And so dulse in that accent sounds like Dulles, as in John Foster, as in the Saarinen-designed international airport near Washington DC.
But there’s a good reason for that: the word it comes from in Old Irish is duilesc (in Scots Gaelic, duileasg). There’s an actual e written there. In the English transcription, it was dropped – because they’ll say it anyway. (The e on the end is likely there to keep the s as /s/ and not /z/.) All the non-Irish Anglos, however, seeing the spelling, make it rhyme with pulse and Hulce (as in Tom, the actor). Which actually results in a different sound for the phoneme /l/: back of the tongue higher, tip tense and touching less (if at all). Readier to swallow.
What is dulse? A vegetable, but not a pulse. It’s a kind of seaweed, and yes, it does give you a good thirst for porter or whatever else may be to hand that is wet and copious and dulls the desire. I will say it’s not the dullest thing I’ve ever tasted, nor is it dolce. A bit more like salty licorice painted onto a dishwashing glove. Not the sort of delicacy one fights duels over. In fact, it’s not really a delicacy at all – it’s available in quantity, cheap, and is not actually disgusting.
The phonetically inclined may notice that dulse in the Irish pronunciation, /dʌləs/, is very nearly a rearrangement (anaphone?) of /sæləd/. (A closer anaphone of salad would be dull-ass.) Well enough: you could make a salad of dulse. Mind you, you would probably find yourself wishing you had just eaten it by hand out of a bag. It’s not the sort of seaweed you get on your sushi (which, it occurs to me, I ate at Dulles when we were waiting for our flight home). It’s about as thick as the schwa between /l/ and /s/ in that Irish pronunciation. I mean, it wouldn’t be a dull-ass salad. But it schwa could be intrusive. Better to keep one hand free for your porter.
This is a fiction I wrote several years ago for a book idea that I didn’t finish. I just remembered it. Here, read it.
One of the people who had a profound influence on my early development as a word taster was my grade two teacher, Miss Knirps. It was not quite that she had a word taster’s love for language and for the flavours of words. Oh, she loved certain words and ways of saying things, but she always seemed to approach words as though they were bees, useful for honey but capable of stinging you at any moment.
Miss Knirps of course seemed impossibly old, but I believe she was about 27 at the time. She was prim and pretty in a very tidy way. She was also very concerned with decorum. She wanted, I think, for all the children of the world to spontaneously join in a circle to sing decent songs about pleasant things. She was a naïve romantic at heart, her world view evidently shaped by too many Barbara Cartland novels. But she must have had a darker, funkier side to her, kept very far apart from her classroom life, because the songs she would recite to us, or have us recite, or even sometimes sing, were lively, popular songs from the current hit parade… bowdlerized. Songs from groups like The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan.
I remember her sitting and reading to us in that exaggerated intonation and sing-songy voice that teachers of small children can have: “Old black water, keep on rolling. Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shining on me? Keep on shining your light; you’re going to make everything all right. And I don’t have any worries, for I am not in a hurry at all. I would like to hear some happy Dixieland; pretty lady, please take me by the hand.” She looked at us with a very proper smile of the sort intended for those of tiny brain. “And the lady would take him by the hand and say, ‘I shall dance with you, good sir, all day long.’”
Miss Knirps folded the piece of foolscap she had written her lyrics on. One of the girls – Shelly Priest, in whom one could see the spark of a Knirps-in-training – raised her hand and said, “And then what would they do?”
Miss Knirps got a dreamy look in her eye. “They would have to part ways, of course, as the sun came close to the evening. But he would give her his calling card, and he would say –” she produced another sheet of foolscap and unfolded it carefully like a blintz or a diaper – “Missy, don’t lose my name; you don’t want to dance with anyone else. Send it off in a letter to yourself! Missy, don’t lose my name, for it is the one you will own. You will use it when we are together and have a home.” (We didn’t know at the time that Miss Knirps – Melissa Knirps – was called “Missy” by many of her friends.)
Then she taught us that chorus to a rather stiffly simplified version of the music – the refrain from Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” of course. I have to say that, stripped of its louche jazzy tone, that tune is as stiff as an old dry washcloth. But we didn’t know any better. We sang it together.
We sang it a few times through, in fact, so that some of us could actually remember it when we got home. Joey McTavish was singing it around his house when his teenage sister Janis heard him, did a spit take with her Coke, and fell about the place in a paroxysm of laughter for more than ten solid minutes. Then she pulled out Pretzel Logic and played it for Joey.
Joey’s eyes, so I’m told, were the size of dinner plates by the end of the song. Naturally, she played it again, and sang along. And for good measure she played him a the rest of the record too. And when she asked him if Miss Knirps had taught them anything else, Joey’s muddled recollections ultimately allowed her to sort out enough to pull out the Doobie Brothers and play “Black Water.”
When show and tell came the next day, Joey had a look on his face like he had a unicorn with side-mounted machine guns in his bag. When his turn came, he toodled over to the record player, which was already out and in position from some Burl Ives songs Miss Knirps had played for us. As he pulled out his record, Miss Knirps naturally went over to help him.
As she reached for the record, which was not in the album cover, she spotted the label on it and froze for approximately one half second. Then, with her smile held with the firmness of rigor mortis, she took it from him, placed it on the player, and played “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” Which, in case you don’t know, has no words and is a Duke Ellington tune of the sort children would enjoy and teachers would not object to. Even if it is being played by Steely Dan.
“But that’s not –” Joey started to say.
Miss Knirps pressed one finger on her lips and another, firmly, on his. “Let’s listen.”
The tune done, she handed the record back to Joey and said, “You must thank your sister for lending us her record.” He hadn’t mentioned that it was hers. Apparently this was an easy guess. “But tell her to be careful and make sure it doesn’t get damaged. I think it could get scratched if you keep bringing it here.” And, smiling ever so sweetly, she sent him back to his seat, his face now looking like someone else had just eaten his ice cream. We couldn’t figure out why.
But of course we found out later, after school, and several of us got Janis to play it for us until she heard her mother coming home.
As for Miss Knirps, she switched genres, preferring to base her verse on literature that no one’s teenage sister was likely to be reading. She read us “The Highwayman” largely unaltered, quite a thing to do for grade two kids in 1974. She also read us something that to this day I haven’t traced for certain but strongly suspect was based on Charles Bukowski; I remember her saying “We danced and danced and danced and danced. And danced.” Heh. Danced indeed.
In retrospect, I do believe that Miss Knirps would have been more disturbed to hear us singing the nonstandard negatives (“you don’t wanna call nobody else”; “and I ain’t got no worries”) than to hear us singing about adult romantic entanglements. Such poor language was not for good children! I know for certain that it was those, and not the entanglements – more adumbrated than explicit, and opaque to us at that age anyway – that really blew away Joey. And the rest of us, too. Hearing them in those songs was the linguistic equivalent of seeing Miss Knirps taking a pee.
I do not want to devote my life to explicating someone else’s epic after they’re gone. I do not want to be one of the little piggies trotting along chasing the big one. I do not want simply to imitate some idol. I don’t even understand people who would rather argue about, for instance, exactly what Kant did or didn’t say rather than about the viability of this or that idea Kant might have said – people for whom the world of facts and information is just a world of warring planets, and they have chosen one to be an asteroid of, hoping perhaps for a promotion to minor moon by the end. I simply don’t understand people who just want to devote their lives to the work of some other person. It doesn’t matter even if that other person is really just the hydrant they’re peeing on; while they’re peeing on it, someone’s peeing on them.
To be perfectly honest, even if someone tells me I’m just like this or that other person, or have said or done something that is so [person X], I try to be nice about it but it drives me crazy.
Maybe this is partly because I have a brother who is three years older than me who always preceded me to the next level of schooling. I hit high school wanting to establish myself among new potential friends (after my previous disasters) and I’m instantly “little Harbeck,” judged by what my brother has done and measured against him. I move on to university and I’m “little Harbeck” again, the anticipated duplicate nerd who turns out to be a loudmouth spazz with a temper and a deathly fear of saying actual nice things to people.
I’m sure it’s also partly because I have always had an unassailable belief in my own potential. Does that sound obnoxious? I won’t say it’s not. See above. I’m not so obnoxious now. But I still have an abiding desire to do things that are in some way singularly new.
It’s also because I’m built to follow and handle ideas, not people. I’m still learning about people. The one thing I can say for sure is that the truth value of a universal proposition does not depend on who states it. (The perceived truth value does.)
This all may seem a bit funny if you know that my doctoral thesis focused entirely on the life’s work of one person, Richard Schechner. I have an excuse: my advisor told me that would be the best topic to pursue. I was pragmatic enough to know I should do what would get me the degree efficiently. Plus it came with a five-week sojourn in Princeton. It was really fascinating learning about this guy. But mainly it taught me some things I would need to do and be if I wanted to be someone, not just an epigone of someone.
Well, no one else is doing word tastings. Ha. Speaking of which: epigone.
Nice word, uses all three stop locations in English – lips, tongue back tongue tip – and all three kinds – voiceless, voiced, nasal. I want to pronounce this word “e pig a nee,” /ɛˈpɪgəni/, because it’s evidently Greek and Greek words and names usually get that treatment in English – it would rhyme with Antigone, for instance. But this word is actually said /ˈɛpɪɡoʊn/, stress on the first syllable, the last syllable rhyming with cone. Why? Because it’s not actually a Greek word unchanged.
We got it as the plural epigones from French épigones, from Latin epigoni, from Greek ἐπίγονοι epigonoi, which was the plural of ἐπίγονος epigonos. Which meant ‘born afterward’ (the epi in this case meant ‘after’; in some other instances in English it means ‘around’). There were seven heroes who led the war against Thebes, you see, and their sons were the epigones – the less-distinguished inheritors. Nowadays in English it means, as dictionary.com puts it, “an undistinguished imitator, follower, or successor of an important writer, painter, etc.”
So not only are those scholars who dedicate their careers to some author epigones, and not only are those no-lifer fanboys who spend all their money aping this or that sci-fi show or movie epigones, but so are all the lesser abstract expressionists, all the splash painters after Pollock, all the uninventive atonalists of the later 20th century, all the movie scorers who set Glass-like scales, all the fanfic authors… for that matter, so was I in my late teens, trying to produce something like Finnegans Wake (the results were vomitrocious and soporific). I think one goes through excusable phases of epigonism in one’s youth; ideally, at length one learns to be “inspired by” and “drawing on” rather than slavishly imitating.
Unless one builds one’s entire career on being an epigone of some greater light, of course. Many comfortable, even “distinguished,” careers have been built on such. But do I want my mark in history to come after e.g. or i.e.? Nope.
He got on the elevator just before the doors closed, that guy. Him again. An inch or two taller than me and probably 1.4 times my weight. A bit socially odd and hard to read; always seems like something is nettling him a bit.
It’s an elevator ride. Twenty-something floors. Stare at the door, the floor. Sometimes people talk. Fortunately not this time. But as soon as he exited the elevator, five floors before my floor, I pulled out my phone and made a note:
Stertorous
His most salient characteristic, you see, is that his breathing is very audible. Very. With occasional mouth noise, but mostly through the nose.
Usually if I’m in the elevator with someone who makes that kind of noise breathing, that someone is a dog. Probably a little bulldog.
More often when you hear a person breathing stertorously, you’re in their bedroom. Or near them on a bus or airplane. Or in church. Or maybe a meeting at work.
Stertor is loud breathing, one could almost even say stentorian breathing. Constricted breathing. Breathing as of one asleep. In particular, breathing like snoring, although it can be gentle snoring. Stertorous is the adjective. Of course.
The word stertorous does not have a gentle sound to it, does it? It sounds strained, terse, tense, tortured perhaps. There may be a stutter, but a restricted one, ingressive.
Here, do this: whisper “stertorous” as you inhale. Presto, stertor. Even better, move your tongue back a bit in your mouth, as though you’re about to clear your throat, and do the same thing again. Yeah. Like that. That’s some serious stertor. Not so much sonority as snority. Or just snorty.
That works particularly well if you’re a typical North American or someone else who uses the humped-up-tongue /r/. In that case, both syllables of stertor have no real vowels; the peak of each is a syllabic /r/: [stɹ̩ɾɹ̩]. (Doesn’t that transcription look like it could be a visual representation of snoring?)
The word stertor comes straight from Latin, of course. The Latin noun is formed from the verb stertere ‘snore’. That happens to be an anagram of resetter, as in resetting your sleep or your alarm, but I doubt the ancient Romans foresaw that fact. But of course stertorous is an anagram of sot rouster and rests or out and torture SOS and rots so true and to trousers and…
Well, anyway. It may be a sound often associated with sleep or coma on the part of the person (or dog) making it, but for those of us hearing it at close range, it is rarely ours to rest.
Sesquiotica 