My latest article for TheWeek.com is about the similarities between the typical Californian accent and the typical Canadian one:
For fun, Google some news or weather videos from Canadian TV stations and from Californian ones. Give them a listen, and you may be surprised just how similar they can be.
Posted in The Week
Tagged accents, California, Californian accent, Canada, Canadian accent, dialects, linguistics, The Week
Imagine the most remarkable display of brinkmanship you could bring to a rink. Let’s say the rink is a frozen infinity pool, the waterfall edge the very brink of a cliff. Place a golden bracelet or ring there, on the brink – a real piece of bling you’d need to bring in a Brink’s truck, one that would break the bank or bring you to the brink of bankruptcy – and have a race to skate over, snatch it, and skate back. The starting bell rings, and they’re off. Look at that one, a real Hans Brinker, silver blades and all! (Actually, good steel does better, but, then, fiddles made of gold sound bad too and yet people want them.) The bling is teetering on the brink, and the others are making straight for it. But our Brinker skates around in a big S, swings in along the brink and, in the blink of an eye, picks it up with his pinkie! Will he slip over the brink? More to the point, will all the other skaters diving for him push him over the brink? No! He executes a beautiful Axel, sails over them as they go over the brink, and lands with a ringing silver “plink!”
Back from the brink of disaster! Brinkmanship indeed. No, wait – look at the big S right down the middle: that’s brinksmanship!
Brink is one of those good old resonant Germanic words (so many echoes of other words, and such a suggestive sound too) that these days are used more figuratively than literally. Things are on the brink, maybe teetering on the brink, or are brought back from the brink – of what? War, extinction, bankruptcy, disaster, death, collapse. All precipitous things, just like the cliff that a literal brink is the top edge of… in English, anyway.
It is interesting to see how brink has developed in different Germanic languages. In Danish, brink is a precipice; in Swedish, the descent of a hill; in German, a green hill; in Dutch, a hillside or the edge of a grassland – or the village green itself: that is where the family name Brink comes from. I suppose the ancestors of Perry Brink, founder of The Brink’s Company, may have been protectors of the village green; his company protects a different kind of green.
And brinkmanship – also seen as brinksmanship? It’s a creation of the Cold War, coined in 1958 by either John Foster Dulles (secretary of state) or Adlai Stevenson in reference to Dulles’s diplomatic approach of pushing opponents to the brink of nuclear war. Nowadays it is used more generally to refer to an approach that plays very close to the edge, just betting that the other guy will be the first to blink.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged brink, Brink's, brinkmanship, brinksmanship, Hans Brinker, word tasting notes
It’s cold outside. Storms are in the offing; power is on and off. Charge your flashights and pull out your warm clothes: your balaclava, your cardigan with the raglan sleeves… Go out to do war against the incessant snow and ice. It’s a fool’s errand in the guise of heroism: you know you will be defeated, you are surrounded on all sides, the snow will fall, the road will be covered again, but go you must. Yours not to make reply, yours not to reason why, yours just to do and… well, try.
Yes, a Canadian winter has that much in common with the Charge of the Light Brigade.
How much? Not just the glorified misguided heroic futility (though at least your version of heroism doesn’t involve killing people – somehow in civilian life they’ll put you in jail for that but in war they’ll give you a medal), not just charging the light, but wearing the balaclava, the cardigan, the raglan sleeves: all named because of that one battle on October 25, 1864, during the Crimean War.
What, after all, was the battle on that day named? Not the Charge of the Light Brigade; that suicide mission of cavalry with swords against entrenched guns, of olden chivalry against newer technology, done in error due to simple linguistic ambiguity, was just one part of it. It was the Battle of Balaclava. It was named after the town near Sevastopol where it happened; the name is thought to come from words meaning ‘catch fish’.
And who was the commander of the British forces? Field Marshal FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan. He was 66 at the time and had lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo.
And who was the leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade, that charge made famous by a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (giving us lines such as “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”)? James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, just turned 57.
These are not coincidences. All three items of clothing – balaclavas (also called Balaclava helmet or Balaclava cap), raglan sleeves, and cardigans – got their names because of that battle and that famous charge. The battle was lost by the British, as was the famous charge, but it was such a glorified example of heroism (mocked decades later by G.B. Shaw in his play Arms and the Man) that the place and those two key leaders came to give their names to emblematic items of clothing: the woollen head coverings worn by the soldiers (the weather was not warm), the style of sleeve preferred by the one-armed field marshal (with one piece of fabric right up to the collar, rather than with a seam at the shoulder), and the buttoned sweater worn by the cavalry commander.
The words don’t all have the same flavour, to be sure. Balaclava is the most exotic-sounding to Anglophone ears, and makes me think of balance, and claviers, and baklava, which I would much rather be inside eating than shovelling snow or killing people. Raglan has a clear echo of rag and Raggedy Ann but also, for me, of the song “My Lagan Love.” Cardigan makes me think of a Scotsman (since it’s a Scottish name, like Costigan and others similar) sending the same card again. All of them have at least one liquid (/l/ or /r/) and one velar stop (/k/ or /g/); only one has a vowel letter other than a, and two end in an.
And they have come to have different usages, frequencies of usage, and associations in modern times. The cardigan is by far the most spoken of, and is an item of apparel thought of as comfortable, domestic, bookish, not military or heroic. Raglan sleeves are, well, a style of sleeve, and the person most likely even to talk about a style of sleeve is probably your mother or someone you equally associate with domesticity.
But as to the balaclava, I will quote from the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names: “The town has given its name to the balaclava, a knitted woollen covering for the head and neck worn by the British against the cold and much favoured by modern criminals.” Ah, yes. This, at least, is keeping the crime in Crimea.
Now put yours on and go out into the valley of snow, with your shovel or your six-horsepower snow blower. Things could be worse. In fact, they probably will be soon.
“I love folk music,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, “but the name ‘Hootenanny’ rather repels me.”
Oh dear. All the hoot ’n’ holler got her goat? No need to be so owlish about it…
Not that this term for the folk music equivalent of a jazz jam session has any direct reference to owl hoots or nanny goats. It showed up in the 1920s as a word for a thingumajig, a doodad, a whatsis. But by the 1940s it had been picked up by folk musicians – well, it just sounds like a folkie thing, dunnit? I half expect there to be a folk group called the Hootin’ Annies. Oh, wait, there is. Five women who play bluegrass. Um, also there seem to be several other small-time groups going by that name. Of course.
Folk music likes to go for the earthy. It has different streams, but one thing that they mostly have in common is that they eschew the sophisticated and elegant feel. It’s folk, after all, not ladies and gentlemen. So I’m not surprised that they would be attracted by the sound of hoot with its dull round high back [u] sound, which generally carries an unrefined air – large, dull, and so on – and also by the maximally contrasting but also somehow less-refined-sounding nasal [æ̃], the usual sound used to imitate bagpipes. And it gives the speaker the chance to use a country-sounding syllabic [ʔn̩], like the end of hootin’. Simply not somethin’ yer fancy sorts a people would be caught sayin’.
At the same time, the word has rhythm to it. In fact, it neatly matches the rhythm pattern of a standard 4/4 bar of music. And it has a certain visual patterning: the paired oo in the first part, the paired nn in the second part, the h of the beginning rotated and bent to the y of the end, a t and an e in the middle hinge. So, Lady Bird notwithstanding, it has just the sort of appeal one wants… precisely because it’s an ungainly, even repellent word. It’s honest. Or it sounds like it is, and if you can fake honest, well, you’re set.
And, like a lot of folk music, it comes from who knows where. Yes, it was first a word for ‘thingamabob’ or ‘doohickey’, but who made it up, when, where, why, how? No one knows. It was penned by that great folk author, Anonymous – or confected on the spot by a bunch of people, like any good hootenanny.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged hoot'nanny, hootananny, hootenanny, word tasting notes
Watch a video of me reading this ghost story, if you would like, or read it below. Or read along with me.
This word has a ghost in it, a little guest in the host: a letter h, symbol of a soft breath, here seen but not heard – like many a spectre.
In Old English, this word was gást, with no h. By the 1400s, it had changed to gost or goost. But it was not until William Caxton brought over the printing press from the continent that the h appeared: Caxton had spent much time in Bruges, and when he printed this word he added an h to match the h he knew in the Flemish gheest.
If Caxton had taken a freshly printed sheet, the ink still wet, and folded it, the ink would have produced another ghost: a light mirror image of the printed matter. This is one of many similar things called ghosts, such as phantom images on televisions and on radars. Things seen but not signifying the same thing.
But what, in origin, is a ghost? Let us return to that letter h. It stands for a breath. And breath has been equated with the spirit, the soul, in many cultures, languages, and times. The word for that part of us that is immortal was, in Old English, gást – not that your soul is a guest in your body, but it is the ghost that you give up when you die; it ascends to join the Holy Ghost and the heavenly host.
Over the centuries, we have come to prefer the Latin-derived spirit for that, and have reserved ghost for a spectral being – especially the echo of a person who has died. A haunted house may have a ghost that repeats the same action over and over again, something emblematic for that person, perhaps something fraught with emotion. It can be an ordinary action of an ordinary person, but to see something so eerie, so eldritch, as a bodiless spectre – a ghost without the machine – will leave us frightened.
But how are these ghosts wandering around if their spirits are supposed to be in Heaven or Hell? This is why I said echo. It has been suggested – I seem to recall by Kurt Vonnegut, but I have only the suggestion of a memory of where he suggested it – that ghosts are not actual beings but simply echo images. Something passed through and left ripples, and the ghost is the ripples. See it come… watch it go… st.
I wonder, too, whether the ripples may be not from what the supposed person saw or felt, but what we have seen and felt, perhaps what we remember or imagine of the person. A ghost could be of a living thing. I think of Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel”: “Well, we were just laying there. And this ghost of your other lover walked in. And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire.”
There are many places I pass by where I can almost see, feel, or taste what happened there. Something that involved me. An argument. An accident seen or averted. A kiss. A casual touch or glance, full of intention. An understanding reached. I can stand in these places and look where I looked and almost see what I saw, almost feel what I felt. The person or people involved may be living or dead, near or far, but there is a ghost there, just for me. Made of thin air. Full of desire. Or dread. My desire or dread.
And ghosts can be things that should have happened. Or things that I think happened but did not. Things that I just wanted to have happened. For any person, their home town is a ghost town, a town not empty but full of the empties of pasts consumed and possibilities not realized.
And sometimes our ghosts create a reality. A thing that does not belong but sits there silently before our eyes because we think it should be there. Not a whole and not a hole, holy or unholy, not a sign but… a sigh, unrealized. The h in ghost.
My legs are bagged. Bagged like groceries. They’re wrecked like the Edmund Fitzgerald. They’re so sore I need to help myself with my arms when sitting down and getting up, and I grunt when doing either.
Don’t worry. It’s not permanent. It’s just the effects of exercise. I dealt the first blow to them at my niece’s wedding reception, dancing Russian-style to “Rasputin.” Then today I went skiing, and of course along with everything else I had to ski the high steep mogul runs: Memorial Bowl. The Lone Pine. Because bragging rights. And after that, my leg muscles were in pain.
Well, not all of my leg muscles. Mainly my quads. You know, quadriceps. Musculus quadriceps femoris. The muscle on the top of your upper leg, the big flat muscle that other people sit on if you let them.
Actually, the quadriceps isn’t one muscle. It’s four. Hence the name: quadriceps, Latin for ‘four-head’. The full name means it’s the four-headed muscle of the femur. And by four-headed, they mean there are actually four muscles. The one on the top is the rectus femoris; the other three beneath it are the vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, and vastus intermedius.
Tell you what, if you’re not entirely sure where your quads are, or what they might be feeling like for me right now, do this: plant your feet about a half a metre in front of a wall, and – without a chair – assume a sitting position against the wall, using just the force of your legs to hold your back against it, with your knee and hip joints at or near 90-degree angles. Hold that position for a while. When your legs start to shake, keep holding it. Eventually – within a minute or three, probably – you will have to stop. Congratulations: you are now feeling your quadriceps. Both of them. Or all eight of them.
So that’s why it’s called quadriceps rather than quadricep? Nope. Quadriceps is not a plural form, actually. In the Latin it modifies a singular noun, musculus. In Latin the plural would be quadricipites, but in English we just use quadriceps for one or more than one – although, as with biceps, people sometimes backform an s-less singular.
So we get the short form, quads, which has strong tastes of squad and squat (and squatting uses the quads!). And we have the fuller word, quadriceps, which will quite reasonably remind you of biceps, and which counterbalances the thick and broad quad with the sharp snipping ceps, joined by a ri bridge. The added length also changes the visual balance: from the rotational quasi-symmetry of quads to a mirror-style quasi-symmetry with quadriceps. Both of them have the little snake of an s on the end.
But snakes bite. Quads don’t bite, not exactly. They burn. But not spontaneously. Just as a bit of quad-pro-quo.
I wonder if having the right person sitting on them would help.
I’m back in Alberta for a few days, driving around through my memories. This evening we drove west on the Trans-Canada Highway. About 80 km west of the city, we passed a significant sight from my childhood: the sign on the Trans-Canada Highway that says North ↗ Morley Road. That was where we would turn off the highway on the way home from Calgary. Up the off-ramp, turn right, then two sounds: “krrrrchung” and then “khrkhrkhr” – the sound of a cattleguard followed by the sound of a gravel road.
What is a cattleguard? You may know it by some other name – cattle grid, stock grid, stock gap, cattle stop, or Texas gate (which is what some signs in Alberta also call it; I’ve never cottoned to that – we’re not in Texas, we’re in Alberta). Or, if you don’t live anywhere near where ungulate animals need to be kept on one side of a fence through which a road must pass, you may not know what it is at all. Here is what it is: At the point where a road passes through a fence, in place of the road is a stretch a couple metres long of metal bars over a trench. The bars are far enough apart that a hoof could slip through, but close enough together that a car can drive over it without too much trouble. It’s a brief bumpy stretch; the sound you hear as your tires rumble over it sounds something like “cattleguard” if you drive at just the right speed.
A cattleguard is the sound of being in ranch country. It’s an Alberta sound for me, and a piece of my childhood. I sure don’t hear that sound in Toronto. When I hear it, I know I’m driving back into a landscape of memories, memories that roam freely like grazing beasts. They could cross the road of my mental journey at any time. Sometimes I have to slam on the brakes for them.
But memories are memories; the past is the past. When, returning to your present, you drive back across the cattleguard, the animals of your past cannot follow you. Some of the places of the past persist to the present, but the memories of what happened there are forever in the past, forever just echoes. And some of the places of the past are simply gone. At the Morley Road exit, there used to be a restaurant, the Chief Chiniki; my brother worked there for a while. It’s not there anymore – it burned down a few years ago. So, several years ago, did the house I lived in 30 years ago as a teenager, a bit farther west at the foot of a mountain.
Not all changes are bad: the gravel road into Morley was long ago paved into a nice, smooth, safe two-lane road. The cattleguard is still there, of course. But we didn’t drive over it, because we didn’t turn off at the Morley Road; we continued west to the Highway 1X exit, south onto a snow-covered gravel road, over a different cattleguard and in to the Rafter Six Ranch, a guest ranch owned by friends of ours, full of memories for me. I worked there one summer; my family spent a Christmas there in one of their cabins after we had to move out of one house and were not yet moved into another; we’ve eaten in their restaurant I don’t know how many times…
The lodge at the Rafter Six is unchanged since I was a preteen. Everything looks the same. The log walls, the hand-carved signs, the wooden tables, the gift shop. The restaurant booth where I made a stupid comment about a co-worker’s weight. The spot in the hallway where I referred to a prospective employee as “scruffy,” not realizing he was right behind me. The table where I got a tongue-lashing from someone who thought I was a racist because he took literally a sarcastic remark I made about a news item. The place where I had a breakfast buffet of greasy food while afflicted with a horrible hangover induced by ouzo. Up the hill a bit, the place where I drank all that ouzo the previous night. It’s all still there.
For two more days.
After nearly 40 years, the Rafter Six is closing. Not because they don’t have enough business. No, because they made a deal with a resort company to expand and build more guest rooms, and then the resort company hit a rough patch because it was overextended in the economic downturn, and when it went under it it dragged the Rafter Six with it. Now the ranch is closing at the end of the last day of 2013. So we went there and had one last dinner in their dining room, chatting with Stan and Gloria, our friends, the owners. One more piece of my childhood and youth, disappearing.
After dinner and conversation we stepped out into the great cold country darkness, the glow of the lodge behind us, the stars up above and the black nothingness of the woods surrounding. Like the land of memory, where your piece of history is lit up with night lights while its context is gone from view. A threatening, consuming darkness. I never liked being in the country at night. But I did like the warm welcome of the Rafter Six.
Then we drove away, over the cattleguard and onto the highway.
If you’re concerned about something, you may well want to have something to say about it. But before you can say something about it, you really should be able to give a detailed account or description of it. In order to do that, you need to be able to perceive it thoroughly. And in order to do that, you need to be able to perceive it at all.
Usually the order of things is thought to follow smoothly enough: first you notice it, then you see it in detail, then you are able to describe it, then you can give your opinion of it, good or bad. But sometimes it goes the other way: first you start by shouting about something, then you learn more and are able to give a detailed account of it, and then you pull back further and are just looking at it, and at length you find you are only just able to make it out… and maybe at the end it’s gone altogether.
Language can be like that. Decry, descrive, descry, scry…
And thereby hangs a tail. I mean a tale. A tale of two words that came from Old French, one descrier from des plus crier, making ‘cry out’; the other descrivre, cognate with describe and having the same meaning. Descrier became English descry, meaning first ‘cry out, proclaim’ and then ‘denounce’, but the alternate form decry has taken on that sense. Descrivre became English descrive, which got worn down a little bit and merged in form with descry, but by the time that had happened the sense had shifted from ‘describe’ to just ‘make out’ or ‘perceive’. And descry has been further worn down in occasional use to scry.
So it’s not just that one’s awareness of language in general tends to take the backwards route, from loud opinion to observation to having more and more trouble even making out the object. It’s also that certain words move in that direction, and this one most appositely so. At the end you’ll be squinting and craning your neck just to scry the word as it gets scrawnier… it the sort of thing that makes a person cry; it’s almost scary. But it’s a normal course for words.
My latest article for TheWeek.com is a quiz. It’s a really hard quiz (but also fun):
But after the quiz I explain just why it’s so hard to tell them apart. So do it… and live long and fill that prescription!
Tagged brand names, drug names, drugs, fantasy, names, prescription drugs, sci-fi, science fiction, The Week
Originally published in The Spanner, issue 0010.
“I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.” —Eleanor Lavish, in A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster.
Thus was the devotchka invited by the diva to an adventure, a diversion. To venture forth to the invention of novelty, voler au vent… But they were overcome and when they came to, they were not in Florence but in Villa Verba, city of words, and their dear dirty back ways had happened to take a different cast.
For what is an adventure? Not a vision of a nun and a novena, no; it is a tour or turn of sorts; but how does it happen to be as it is? Nature or nurture? Does it simply arrive or is it sought? Or do we seek its arrival?
Miss Lavish ventured to find its advent. But what she came to was to come: venire. She sought an uncertain future, quod futurus est, ‘which is about to be’ – is becoming. And she wished ‘to come to’ it: advenire. And what it will ‘have come to’: adventus.
Such is her Vedanta, her path to self-realization in ultimate reality. She has a vendetta against stasis. But now she is looking down this alley of words, and although she has bundled the Baedeker away in her bag, she may be wishing that she had Roget – or at least Bartlett, Miss Lucy Honeychurch’s chaperone. For when etymology turns anfractuous, one may be heading for an accident.
An accident: something that has simply happened. So, too, is – was – an adventure. Simply a thing that happened; it came to pass. Chance, fortune, luck. If Miss Honeychurch brings luck, they shall have luck. But o, Fortuna, velut Luna (not Lucy): Miss Lavish seeks fortune, and it shall tell out as it will – lavishly or not. When you seek chance, if you find it, you shall indeed have adventure.
“Lost! lost! My dear Miss Lucy, during our political diatribes we have taken a wrong turning. How those horrid Conservatives would jeer at us! What are we to do? Two lone females in an unknown town. Now, this is what I call an adventure.”
In the back alleys of Villa Verba, the inversions will put in you a trance position. You seek adventure but you find it in broken parts: a turn, beyond which lurks a raven duet; if you evade it you will slip into the never; if you think your sense of direction is trued you will see it denature at a v in the road; in a fit of vertigo, you find yourself due in a tavern, and if you are naïve and invade further you will be mastered and can only hope that you will, through the stirring mist, find a rudiment to save you, but your number is up, a sum inverted… for you have drunk over your draft, and your fortune is misfortune: when the pieces come back together you have met your match through a misadventure.
Thus is the reality of our ventures revealed. We think adventure is something that we do: we go forth and happen to the world. But when the world happens to us, we are absolved of responsibility; there is no misconduct, no miscreant, no negligence. Simply death by misadventure.
Then something did happen.
Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. “Cinque lire,” they had cried, “cinque lire!” They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.
Miss Honeychurch recalls later on how the spot came to her dress. It was no fault of her own. There was a young man, yes. So she says. But oh, where is the clever lady and her lavish words? Did she find her adventure? Miss Honeychurch remembers how she was misled by Miss Lavish, hoping for a happening but being happened to unhappily in the alleys and vialetti. Words were getting to her and yet had gotten away from her. So she made her choice: she stole a space so she could find her honey and a church, and when she came to, Miss Adventure had seen her end by misadventure as the word closed in on her.
The city of words is a casually acausally cruel place.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged adventure, misadventure, The Spanner, word tasting notes
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