Sesquiotica

squiffy

Posted on December 24, 2013 | 4 comments

Sometimes you just see a cute little word wandering around on the street and you pick it up and take it home. And you pet it for a little while, and then you use it in a sentence.

And then someone says “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

I have the habit of looking up any word that is new to me. But I didn’t always. And one word that just seemed so cute – and its meaning so guessable – that I picked it up without checking it for fleas was squiffy. Oh, look, doesn’t it just have that squee factor? It’s like a little mouse called Sniffy. It’s squeezable and soft. The ff takes away any clear echo of squid, and most people won’t think of spliff right away. (The hair-conscious may think of quiff.) And that squ that seems ironically so un-square can draw your attention away from the rather iffy aspect of it.

So the 24-year-old me was working away in a bookstore and I came face to face with some unforeseen and undesirable eventuality (there are many of those in the quotidian existence of a bookstore), and I said “That’s just squiffy.” And my manager, Dean Thorup, a fellow who (like at least one other I knew in the book biz) demonstrated by his existence that you could have an unspectactular education but still be quite sharp, said “That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

So what does it mean? Let me just say that it’s an adjective that many people will have cause to use during the recycled Saturnalia of late December. To be less coy about it: it means ‘intoxicated’.

But of course there are so many levels of intoxication. To draw a parallel, it’s an old (and not really accurate) idea that the Inuit (also called Eskimos by people who are not them) have some huge number of words for ‘snow’. The idea is that if you have a lot of exposure to something and a lot of reasons to make distinctions between different specific types of that thing, you will have a lot of words for that thing. This idea may have some basis (but do think of the number of things we encounter all the time in many varieties and still have just one or two words for), but another factor that can come into play is that things that are socially outré or taboo but nonetheless desirable tend to accumulate a lot of euphemisms and rakish synonyms.

One or the other of those factors will account for something I noticed in an Irish Gaelic phrase book: Irish has a goodly number of words for different levels of drunkenness. Well, that just plays to stereotypes, doesn’t it? But if you’re going down that road, you cannot ignore the amazing number of words we have in English for different levels of drunkenness – easily enough to make a whole year’s worth of word-a-day. And one of those words is squiffy.

So where does squiffy fall on the scale? Generally on the lighter side: what you may get from a snifter or two, just a sniff of the stuff, a couple of quick quaffs and that’s all. But you do well to check context. You surely know that some people like to downplay the level of intoxication, and others to exaggerate it. The lines between semantic categories are not even as tidy as if they had been drawn by someone who was rather more than squiffy.

Oh, and where does the word come from? It dates from the mid-1800s. The Oxford English Dictionary helpfully says “Of fanciful formation.” Go figure.

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cataclasm

Posted on December 22, 2013 | 1 comment

We had an ice storm in Toronto last night and today. If you’ve ever lived through one, you know what follows: a lot of crashing, as the ice clinging to high things comes loose and falls off – or breaks those high things under its weight and falls down with them. It’s one thing if you’re in an area with a lot of trees: the ice falling off branches sounds like people dropping champagne flutes onto a hard floor. It’s another thing if you’re an urban cliff-dweller, listening from your high windows to the adventitious cornices breaking free from their holds 30, 40, and 50 storeys above the shiny pavement and clattering into the chasm. It sounds more like the fall of an icy archangel through the thousand glass floors of heaven and hell.

Surely there must be a word for this, the aftermath of an ice storm? Of course. Etymology buffs can confect it from roots and they won’t be wrong: when things break down, or break and fall down, your Greek parts are κατα kata ‘down’ and κλάσμα klasma ‘breaking’ (from κλᾶν klan ‘break’), translated into the English modular bits cata (as in cataclysm and catastrophe) and clasm (as in iconoclasm), making cataclasm. And since clasm is related to clastic (as in iconoclastic, pyroclastic, etc.), the adjectival form of cataclasm is cataclastic, which, if you say it loudly, sharply, rapidly, and repeatedly in an echoey place, sounds rather like a big chunk of ice breaking free from the top of a building and disintegrating as it knocks against widow ledges all the way down.

But cataclasm is not just or even primarily for the breaking and falling of ice from on high. Indeed, anything that is inelastic can be cataclastic. Well, the only real current use of cataclastic is geological, to refer to a structural character caused by intense crushing. But it’s a suitable adjectival form for cataclasm, and cataclasm means ‘break or disruption’. Which characterizes not just what happens to the ice falling off buildings, but what happens to life in the aftermath of an ice storm: transit is cut off, power is cut off, the normal run of things is cut off. Things break down, and the system breaks down, at least temporarily.

It’s not necessarily accurate to call an ice storm a cataclysm with a y – that really refers to a catastrophic (‘down-stroking’) deluge, or something suitably like one – but it’s quite reasonable to call it a cataclasm… one that leads to thousands of smaller cataclasms.

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More Poetry Minute and a Half

Posted on December 21, 2013 | 1 comment

I’ve created four more episodes of Poetry Minute and a Half: “Out of the Business” by The Tubes (by request), “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, and one I’m particularly proud of, Rammstein’s “Mein Teil” in English translation.

Do send in requests. I’m thinking of branching out to other genres of music.

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anacoluthon

Posted on December 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Sometimes, halfway through the forest path of a sentence, where did it go? There was a flow of syntax that – something ate it. But what? An anaconda? A python? Worse: it is that most uncouth lexical reptile – the anacoluthon. It slips into a syntactic constituent and devours the tail of it, and in its place leaves the tail of another constituent to be grafted on.

But what a word, a snake in its own right, eleven letters, crawling into the modern era little changed from ancient times, like a coelecanth in the net of your page. Yet it is not such an ugly fish as that; indeed, it has a soft, liquid sound with just a single hard stop. It would do well as a word from a Celtic language – or, more to the point, an invented language from fantasy fiction. It would fit right into Tolkien’s Sindarin: “Fanuilos, le linnathon, nef aear, anacoluthon” – though it would break the rhythm of that poem, since the stress is on the /u/, as in Lúthien.

In fact, it comes from Greek: ἀν an ‘not, without’ and ἀκόλουθος akolouthos ‘following’ (do you notice how yet again we’ve shifted the stress from its placement in the Greek, which would be more natural to us?). The word is for something that does not follow what came before. To use the Latin equivalent, it is a syntactic non sequitur. You all know people who speak like this: the sentence flow they started, it’s changed halfway through – bang, you know? It can be used for topic fronting: “That cake you gave me, the dog ate it”; it can be used for rhetorical or poetical effect: “If only I could have – how could that have been?”; it can be used just because the train of thought went through a tunnel and when it came out everyone had changed cabins: “I brought that fruitcake that she made it with the raisins and the rum is so tasty.”

It is sneaky and slippery, this anacoluthon. The one thing you can be sure of is that it retains the element of surprise. You do not see it coming. And if you look behind you, you will not see it there either. Yes, it is invisible. But you did not see it behind you because it was not there in the first place – it does not follow.

Poetry Minute and a Half

Posted on December 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

Just because the idea amused me, I’ve started a series called “Poetry Minute and a Half” in which I read (erm, excuse me, the somewhat posh Godfrey St. John-Burns reads) heavy metal lyrics as poetry. In the interests of focusing on the sound quality, I’ve made them just the sound rather than a video of the reading, but since YouTube is the best place for sharing such things around, I’ve made the sound files into videos with just the title as the image.

These will likely be more amusing if you know the songs, but I’m sure they will have some entertainment value either way.

Requests for further poem readings are welcome.

Here are the first four:

nocturne

Posted on December 17, 2013 | 2 comments

Listen to the music of the night.

No, I’m not talking about some phantom. I’m not even talking about “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. I mean a nocturne. A quiet, moody composition, often for solo piano, evocative of the night: a solo instrument like a single light, a sound perhaps reminiscent of the arpeggiated strumming of a guitar, perhaps the call of a nightbird floating on top of it. “A expressive melody in the right hand is accompanied in the left by broken chords,” says Michael Kennedy in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music.

Broken chords. The cords are broken, the bonds, the harmony. This can be a hard word, nocturne, giving you a knock and a turn; such things happen nocturnally… JK Rowling knows it, for she named the street of the darker arts Knockturn Alley. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows. And night is all shadow.

No, not all. Night is a beautiful time for photography: lamps are lit, and the light is clear, directional, moody, angular; I’ve taken many pictures I like at that time, such as this one and this one. Night is a beautiful time for painting, too: James McNeill Whistler painted several works he called nocturnes depicting nighttime scenes with a fantastic half-seen moodiness; see Night in Black and Gold, The falling Rocket. Night is when light is not taken for granted.

So night is not just the school of hard knocks. It is also the school of soft nox – Latin for ‘night’, related via Proto-Indo-European to the word night, and root of nocturnus, source of French nocturne. It is not all white satin, but sometimes we want the night of the soul, because night is a time for mystery and love and focus and quiet. Sometimes we want to savour the complex and half-known emotions, when we cannot not yearn and doubt; we want to taste the times when there is no turn or no return, when bonds are weak or broken and nothing can be taken for granted, when we do not know if we will ever again find the welcoming threshold, the times when the only answer is music and art. Music like one of Chopin’s nocturnes – this one, maybe: Nocturne no. 20 in C minor, performed by Valentina Lisitsa.

Can you hold a candle to a beautiful nocturne? You can hold a candle because of one: You are walking through the dark, holding a dim candle, the doubtful music playing in the distance, lightly trilling on your heartstrings, and you don’t know where you are going. You continue unsteadily forward, one hand barely able to see the other, a step, a step, a step, and before you, now, you see a door, framed with a soft glow. And so you knock, turn the handle…

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Wah-wah in podcast

Posted on December 16, 2013 | 1 comment

The Week has a section of podcasts – audio versions of some of its articles. We’ve made one of my most recent article, on wah-wah pedals and acoustic phonetics. Now you can hear me narrating it and listen to the examples mentioned all in one easy six-and-a-half-minute shot. It’s at theweek.com/article/index/254186/the-science-of-making-a-guitar-sound-like-a-human-voice or soundcloud.com/theweek/the-science-of-making-a-guitar.

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ornery

Posted on December 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

There’s plenty about Christmas to make people crusty. Of course, there are many people who don’t cotton to the religious side of it at all, and that’s one thing. But for those who do – and even for many of those who don’t – the whole rush and crush and commercial spectacle of it, really a reheated Saturnalia frozen dinner with an overspiced commercial junk sauce poured all over it, can be vexing. And we all know how we, as humans, can be so easily vexed. People are prone to wishing death over ambiguities of grammar that have no effect on comprehension. So of course the biggest holiday madness of the year is going to be prime provocation for making the ordinary person quite ornery. But then there’s the music.

Yes, OK, not everyone likes “Christmas music,” that’s true. There’s no music so wonderful that someone won’t dislike it. With Christmas music, there is indeed an awful lot of dreck and schmaltz (two Yiddish words, by the way, so I guess that’s irony). But there’s also a lot of really nice music that was written for Christmas or is at least mainly sung at Christmas. We really have to distinguish between disliking “Christmas music” and disliking all Christmas music.

One of my favourite tunes that are heard mainly at Christmas is “I Wonder as I Wander.” If you’re not familiar with it – or even if you are – have a listen to this duet do a sweet and not overdone version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWqkOi175k. I rather think anyone who dislikes that song must be more than a little peevish.

The song, as you will learn in greater depth if you watch this little video, was “collected” by John Jacob Niles in July, 1933; he got it, or anyway some of it, from the daughter of a revivalist preacher in Murphy, North Carolina. The preacher and his family were about to be run out of town for being a public nuisance – camping in the town square, hanging their wash on the Confederate monument, generally being common and low-grade and disagreeable – but they needed money to buy the gas to get out, and the daugher, Annie Morgan, managed to get a couple of dollars off of Niles by singing him bits of this song that had been written who knows when by who knows who. Niles took what he heard and tidied it up and wrote some more.

Anyway, if you’re getting impatient to find out what on earth all this has to do with ornery, well, if you actually listened to the song – I sure hope you did, and if you didn’t, I think you should know I can see how many times people click on each link in my blog articles, so you’re not getting away with it – you will have noticed this line:

For poor ornery people like you and like I

Now, some people in their transcriptions of the lyrics have put that as o’n’ry or similar forms, the idea being that it’s just some poor-folks version of ordinary. But the thing is, although that’s where ornery comes from – an ordinary so ordinary that it’s lost some of its teeth and just sort of rolls through the mouth without a stop – that’s not the current meaning, and wasn’t by the the mid-1800s. It’s possible that the original author of the song may have just meant ‘ordinary’, but more likely he or she didn’t. No, the sense is – and already commonly was by the time the song was written – not just ‘common’ but ‘unpleasant’ and ‘mean’ and ‘willful’ and ‘cantankerous’ and ‘contrary’ and ‘disputatious’.

It’s a good word for that sort of thing. The orn may not sound pointed but it has echos of horns, and the word as a whole seems made to be growled in a curmudgeonly way by someone played by, say, Jerry Orbach. It curls around in the mouth like the spheres of an orrery (the motions of the celestial orbs reduced to a mechanism cranked like clockwork in a little space), groaning in mournful irony. The retroflex /r/ sound is often associated with the very common, from rural folk to pirates; posh people are thought of as dropping it.

This mulishness of ornery gives the song part of its force. It’s one thing to say that someone like Jesus came to die for ordinary people; it’s another to say plainly that he came to die for basic a-holes and rotten jerks. Those cretins who drive so rudely you hope they wrap themselves around a tree sometime. The people who can’t manage to be nice even for a couple of seconds in a shopping mall. Their screaming children, too. The public nuisances.

Also people who grumble about Christmas and Christmas music. People like you and like I. And, by the way, people who get exercised about turns of grammar such as “people like you and like I.” Ornery all. It’s very ordinary to be ornery.

guillemet, guillemot

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 2 comments

When you read the sea of black on white that is a text, it is as diverse and full of different life forms as the sea itself. It boils with the fantastic fish of words, all their different shapes, and the plankton and krill of periods and commas, and the catching bird claws of apostrophes and quotation marks, and on and on. But just as different seas have different kinds of life, so different languages have different forms of life in their textual waters. Some languages – French in particular – have birds that dive into their waters and swim after the fish: « these ». You see the wings angle as they push through and catch the text they enclose. They are all cupidity, hunger, desire in the head.

Desire in the head? How about a helmet of desire? There’s a name for that: will plus helm becomes Wilhelm or William or Guillaume or or or. And Guillaume has its diminutives and derivatives, two of which being Guillemet and Guillemot.

A French printer of the 1500s, Guillaume Le Bé (“Billy the B” in English, I suppose), invented handy little marks for enclosing quotations, and so those marks, « », came to be named for him, guillemets. The name might have you thinking of gulls, but these marks are not like any gull I’ve met; they are smaller, and black. They are like black birds that dive into the water and chase fish for their dinner. Black (sometimes black-and-white) birds that are called guillemots, not because they have helmets of desire (though they desire fish and chase them with their heads that sometimes look helmeted), but simply because they are named after the French name Guillemot, about which see above. They might look like gills for your bons mots, but they aren’t to help the words breathe; they’re to devour them in the open air.

But, oh, a note of warning. Guillemet is still entirely a French word, occasionally lent to English, and we say it like the French – the English approximation is “gee a meh” (with a g as in guy). Guillemot, on the other hand, has been comfortably in English for centuries, quite long enough to gain a spelling pronunciation: “gill a mot.” It has that French look but sounds more comfortable with the dipping claws “ and ”.

Meanwhile, the real textual guillemots, the guillemets, continue their dives into the chill waters of the text, never coming out empty-mouthed. « Bon appétit ».

Thanks to John Eerkes-Medrano for inspiring this note.

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cakehole, piehole

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 1 comment

“Shut your piehole.”

“Shut your cakehole.”

OK, which is ruder?

Obviously, both are rude. Even “shut your bouche” would be rude, though also confused. But there’s something particulary nasty about piehole and cakehole. If we see them in a context other than shut your, it’s likely to involve a word such as cram or stuff: “He gobbled down as much as he could cram into his cakehole.” “He stuffed it quickly into his piehole.” Want further evidence that these are low, rude words? Compare this: “The queen took the most delicate forkful of camembert soufflé and placed it delicately in her cakehole.” Did you laugh? Proof: the contrast is absurd.

It’s fairly plain to see that hole is a rude word when applied to a mouth. A hole, after all, is a simple, round, inarticulate thing; other holes we have on the body are the earholes and the nostrils (which have a non-hole name) and one other hole, an especially vulgar one. The resonance is clear. Hole is, after all, a plain old Anglo-Saxon word, of the stock that for a few hundred years was associated with the ruder folk while the court preferred French and the scholars used Latin.

So is cake. It has cognates throughout Western European languages, especially Germanic and Balto-Slavic ones. Of course, cake is delicious – everyone loves cake, and some people gobble it greedily, cramming it in their cakeholes. But cake is also a verb that is not always pleasant. What sort of thing gets caked on? Exactly.

Pie, on the other hand, while having been in English since medieval times (think of Simon the pie man, from the nursery rhyme), is not an Anglo-Saxon word in origin. In fact, it appears to come from Latin originally, by way of a bird. A bird? Not four-and-twenty blackbirds, no; a bird that is famous for collecting all sorts of odd things: the magpie, formerly called just the pie, from Latin pica by way of some later Romance languages. It seems that a pie was conceived of as a sort of omnium gatherum dish (mincemeat comes to mind).

Pie has long been a popular dessert, of course, and in many ways a demotic one: there’s the old story of a royal visiting a small town in western Canada and being told, after the main course, “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie.” Not “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s cake,” though that would give a more consistent sound. No, cake is a more elevated thing: remember, Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, in an oblivious insult, that peasants without bread could eat cake (actually brioche in the original). (This line had earlier been attributed to others, and most likely no one ever said it as such.) “Let them eat cake”? How rude. But “Let them eat pie”? Mmm, delicious. It’s true that royals have eaten lamprey pie (and many other kinds), but the associations are established: cake is a loftier dessert, but the word also has more unpleasant overtones, which lend further to cakehole. (There is also possible effect from K-hole, a bad trip caused by a particular party drug colloquially referred to as special K, but that’s in more limited circulation.) Cake is also a harder word, with those /k/ and /k/ stops kicking at front and back. Pie starts with a pop and then fades out.

In any event, cakehole is somewhat older – it dates from at least the early 1900s, while piehole only starts showing up in the 1960s and then more in the 1980s and on – and cakehole is by a long measure the more used of the two. I would say it’s also the ruder. If you disagree, just cram something in your piehole and shut your cakehole.

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