tulle

Posted on September 11, 2023 | 4 comments

Tulle, as you may know, is a fabric that is useful for its light, fluffy, translucent character. It’s really a stiff fine open mesh made with fine thread, and it is used mainly in things such as tutus and wedding gowns to give a puffy and airy look with some volume, and in veils to somewhat obscure the face while still allowing the wearer to see. 

Which is why tulle makes me think of the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Here’s the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

Usefulness! Well, that’s a characteristic of a tool, isn’t it? In fact, use and utility and utensil all come from the same Latin root that descended to French outil ‘tool’. And so this tulle is a tool made useful in the whole by its holes.

But that’s not why it’s called tulle, even if tulle and tool are pronounced the same in English (by most speakers). No – it’s a French fabric, after all (the first tulle tutus appeared in Paris), and it’s called tulle, not outil. It is in fact named after the town of Tulle, near Limousin (another eponymous town). It’s the capital of the department of Corrèze, which is named after the river that flows through Tulle. And, incidentally, in French Tulle (and tulle) is pronounced [tyl], which is to say that the u is the same high front rounded vowel as the u in French lune and the ü in German rühren and the y in Finnish tyly.

Tulle (the town) winds with the Corrèze along both banks and runs steeply and briefly up the hills on either side; it’s an ancient town with stairs running in narrow passages between the stone walls of buildings. It was at a trade crossroads, and its river powered mills for industry. It has been known for producing things such as paper and guns, but also, since the 1600s, for lace.

But Tulle earned its name much earlier on the thread of time. There was a Gaulish settlement there before the Romans came, but when the Romans arrived they set up the usual Roman things, including a temple in honour of Tutela – the personification of the concept of a tutelary deity (guardian god). Roman towns typically had tutelary deities, but the practice was not to say who the deity was, so that the enemy could not do a ritual calling out the god by name and so weakening the protection. The god’s function was enabled by the presence of the god but also by the absence of the god’s name. The god could see your enemies, but they could not see the god.

And so (apparently) from this habitual anonymity the more abstract goddess Tutela emerged. And this particular town, it is further thought, got its name from the No Name™ Guardian Goddess whose temple had displaced the earlier Gaulish fort. But that name was individualized over time by erosion from the currents of language usage, and Tutela became Tulle.

But wait. There’s one more thing. The protective power of absence – what is not there – may extend even further. Littré quotes Jules Verne’s Géographie illustrée de la France et de ses colonies:

Il est bon d’ajouter ici que, contrairement à une opinion généralement répandue, les tissus qui portent le nom de tulle n’ont jamais été confectionnés dans la ville ni dans l’arrondissement [de Tulle].

My translation:

It’s worth adding here that, contrary to general opinion, the fabrics that bear the name tulle have never been made in the town or area [of Tulle].

But then Littré adds “Mais cela ne nous dit pas d’où le nom de tulle a pris naissance” (But that doesn’t tell us where the name tulle originated).

Ah well. Protected by the veil of time. Well, Tulle has been a useful tool no less, and tulle has netted the town some renown.

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fardel

Posted on September 7, 2023 | 1 comment

The plenitude of the English lexicon is, let’s be honest, a burden. A joyous burden, perhaps, for those of us who delight in romping in the garden of words and in discovering literary trouvailles in ancient, dusty, vermiculated, foxed tomes, but – in its demands on memory and resources – it is a fardel all the same.

You know this word, fardel, perhaps? If you do, it is almost certainly from one place: the most famous soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a classic of existential introspection – and one-quarter as full of quaint and curious words as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” How many of these have you seen in nature: contumely, disprized, quietus, bodkin, fardels, bourn, orisons? Unlike Carroll, who invented 28 words for his nonsense poem (one of the great pieces of verse in the language, thank you very much), Shakespeare invented none of those seven gems – though he is known to have confected the occasional lexeme.

Well, anyway. The sentence it’s in is this:

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

So you can guess that fardel means something like ‘burden’. And it does: a bundle, a load, a pack. Bearing fardels is the kind of travail from which one might willingly seek quarter – by which I do not mean another load of goods from the quartermaster.

If you speak French, this word might ring a bell: fardeau is a common enough French word, and yes, it’s just the modern French realization of the Old French word that was ported over to English unchanged as fardel. I do like the first definition of fardeau from Littré:

Chose plus ou moins pesante destinée à être transportée ou élevée soit par l’homme, soit par les bêtes de somme, soit par un véhicule. Les fardeaux les plus extraordinaires que l’on ait élevés en France sont les deux pierres qui forment le fronton de la colonnade du Louvre.

Which, for those not conversant in French, means

More or less heavy thing for transporting or lifting by humans, by beasts of burden, or by a vehicle. The most extraordinary fardels to have been lifted in France are the two stones that form the pediment of the colonnade of the Louvre.

Definitions further down in Littré include “Ce qui pèse moralement” (That which weighs morally) and “Ce qui exige beaucoup de soin et engage la responsabilité” (That which demands much care and involves responsibility). In other words, all the crap we have to put up with every day. As the old revival hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” goes, “Are we weak and heavy-laden, Cumbered with a load of care?” Such fardels are not all stone pediments; some are more abstractly rocky impediments.

So a fardel can be, say, the two dozen bottles of wine I hefted back from the car after our latest trip to Niagara wineries, but it can also be the burdens of such duties and liabilities as are involved in earning the money to pay for all those bottles, not to mention the responsibility of driving the car there and back on the Queen Elizabeth Way, which – frankly – was the most onerous fardel of the whole trip. (If you’ve driven on any of the expressways around Toronto, you know what I’m talking about.)

And where did this fardel come from? French got it from Spanish, where it started as fardo ‘pack, bundle’, and it is commonly – thought not universally – thought that Spanish got it from Arabic fard ‘one of a pair’, referring to a saddlebag (and subsequently fardo came to refer to the pair of saddlebags). So you might say that, given that a fardel was first a half, if you could halve your fardel that would give you quarter.

But there’s an easier way to get quarter with a fardel. All you need is the other sense of fardel, which was used through the 1800s but is in desuetude now: it comes from Old English féorða dǽl, ‘fourth deal’, i.e., ‘fourth part’; it is cognate with German Viertel and Swedish fjärdedel and, like them, it means ‘quarter’.

So we have, as it were, two fardels. (Two bits, or not two bits?) But if we are to take one of them, I would say the Shakespearean one is the better half. It’s worth the effort, for those who want the decoration.

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whorl

Posted on September 4, 2023 | 1 comment

In the Art Gallery of Ontario, there is a staircase designed by Frank Gehry that swirls from the old lower parts to the new upper parts, ascending from floor 2 to floor 5. It is not merely spiral; it is a vortex of wood, an eccentric cycle, weaving through the air and through a glass ceiling too. You have a choice when going up from the merely modern to the very latest in the art world: you can take an elevator, rising straight and without view, as though the floors were swapped like cue cards behind the sliding doors, or you can climb step by step through the art whorl, seeing the building revolving as you exercise your prerogative and are in turn exercised.

The staircase suggests motion; it encourages motion; it sustains motion; and yet it is not motion. It is as unmoving as the people who stop on its steps for photographs. It is dynamic past and future, but still present. It whirled; it will whirl (or we will whirl while on it); but it is a whorl. It is whole, unbroken, containing an open hole.

Frank Gehry is famously fond of natural forms, and a whorl is natural enough, but it can also be artificial, whether artistic or not. There are many ways you may visualize a whirled piece. You may barely bend a forest’s worth of twigs to make a funnel to the sky, for instance.

You may curve strips of rolled steel into an abstraction of a whirlwind, a clone of a cyclone.

You may paint petals of fleering faces onto a wall, all encircling a void eye. Though your eye may avoid it, and your heart may reject it, it is an injection of art, nature denatured. 

All are in the world of the whorl: if it is in some kind of concentric circles or spirals, it is a whorl.

Is whorl, the word, a frozen whirl? A whirl that was? In a convoluted way, yes. It is not a past tense of whirl – we have never said “I whirl today, I whorl yesterday” – but it is evidently formed from a variant of whirl; in earlier times, there were words whorwil and wharwyl that seem to have been especially swingy forms of whirl. This makes more sense when you know that whirl comes from something like whirvelen, likely from Old English hweorflian, a frequentative of hweorfan ‘turn’ (with the same frequentative suffix as gives us settle from set and prickle from prick). And it is also related to whirr and wharve.

And so it has turned around and come around again, and now it is concentrated, fixed in ink and pixels. But nothing stays still forever; the nature of nature is cyclic, and any whorl, too, may flower and grow and fade.

Or it may even ripple away in moments, waving as it passes.

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vista

Posted on August 31, 2023 | 2 comments

This land is your land, this land is my land
From Bonavista to Vancouver Island
From the Arctic Circle to the Great Lake Waters
This land was made for you and me

If you’re not from Canada, you’re probably thinking those words aren’t quite right. But not only are they the words I learned as a kid, I was well into adulthood before I learned that there were American words that were different.

Huh.

The other thing that took me a long time to learn was exactly where Bonavista was. I mean, I could figure out it was on the opposite side of the country from Vancouver Island, but specifically where I wasn’t sure, and for some reason – mainly because the place just never came up outside of that song – I didn’t look it up.

Well, it’s in Newfoundland, on a peninsula about halfway between Twillingate and St. John’s. I still haven’t been to Bonavista. But I have seen many a good vista in Newfoundland. And I feel like doing one more word tasting on Newfoundland.

I’ll assume you can see that Bonavista means ‘good vista’ or ‘good view’ or ‘good sight’ – though, perhaps ironically, Bonavista is not named for the beautiful vistas you can see from it; it is named for being a beautiful sight itself, when seen from sea by an Italian explorer on an English ship in 1497. The story is that Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot, for Anglophiles), on at long last sighting land there, exclaimed “O buon vista!”

Yes, “buon”; bona is not standard Italian or Spanish or Portuguese – it’s Latin (and some regional varieties of Italian). But vista is not Latin; it’s Italian, and Spanish, and Portuguese, in all of which it means ‘sight’ or ‘view’, and in Italian it is also the feminine singular past participle of vedere, ‘see’. The Latin equivalent is visa, the feminine singular past participle of video, ‘I see’ (from which is also derived viso, ‘I behold’, which in turn gave the frequentative visito, which became English visit).

Well, in visiting Newfoundland, my wife and I (and our friends) have seen many sights and views, and good ones at that. There really is no substitute for climbing up on a rocky, mossy, juniper-covered hill and seeing the scene in person, in 360-degree Sensurround. You can watch all the video you want, but seeing just what others have recorded having seen is no substitute. 

And of course my photos don’t do it all justice either – but you can take the inspiration and go see it yourself when you have the chance, and if you’re in Canada (or any of several other countries) you won’t even need a visa (though you might want some kind of credit card). And once you have visited and seen these good vistas, they will stay with you as memories, and if you have taken pictures you can revisit them wistfully, at least by sight. The Newfoundland coast really is a good looking place.

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capelin

Posted on August 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Sea life is simple; it may be lived from first to last without benefit of doctor, cook, or chaplain. If you are a fish, you hatch and grow with no sense of parents, family, or obligations; you eat when you have the chance, you may be eaten when a larger sea-dweller has the chance, and, if you are allowed the fullness of time, you follow your instincts like a hormonal twenty-one-year-old heading to Woodstock or Coachella where, after a period of frenzy and (if fish can experience it) ecstasy, you are done and another generation is started. But mostly you eat and are eaten.

It’s a fish-eat-fish world in the briny ocean, and, off the shredded-rock coast of Newfoundland, the fish that is the foundation of this big blue Ponzi food pyramid is the capelin. The capelin is a silver spear-tip of a fish, a species of smelt no bigger than a basketball player’s finger, and it eats plankton, and everything else eats it: herring, cod, whales, and your friends who live on the Newfoundland shore.

Your friends who live on the Newfoundland shore rely on the capelin, and not just or even mainly for frying and filleting and eating. The capelin feed the other food fish, after all, and fishers will use them as bait, but they are also where the entertainment happens. If you should go to the headland of some small local cape, or take a boat out along the coast, and look for whales, you will most readily find them where there are masses of capelin, because whales like to dine too. You won’t see much of the whales – the quick white plumes of their blowing, sometimes their fins, occasionally a tail – and you won’t see any of the capelin they eat, but you’ll know they’re there.

And if you visit a rocky beach, you may know even more directly that the capelin are there. If you go at the right time, in the height of summer, they will be rolling: the females will be laying their eggs and the males will be squeezing out clouds of milt (that’s what it’s called in this case, milt, but we both know what it is, come on) and they will all be hurling themselves up on the sandy pebbly shore like the front line at a pop music festival. 

There is a distinctive aroma coming from this occasion – I’m told; I haven’t smelt that smelt milt smell. People may arrive with nets and scoop up all the capelins they can to take back to their kitchens. Then the tide will draw back and the spawn will be incubating safely and the capelins, most of them, will lapse exhausted like partygoers by poolside, stranded, and simply dry and die and dry some more. And if you, a person, should come to the beach a while after this event, you ought to watch your step.

Their mating rites are their last rites, and all without benefit of chaplain. Except that’s not quite true. The littoral chaplet is their chapel and they are all their own chaplains, literally. By which I mean to say that capelin comes from French capelan, which comes from Italian cappellano, which comes from Latin cappellanus, which means – and is the origin of – chaplain. So capelin is simply chaplain with a sea-change (Littré tells me that capelan can mean both the little fish and a mean priest spoken of with contempt). And cappellanus in turn comes from cappella, ‘chapel’. (Cappella originally means ‘little cloak’ or ‘small cape’, as it happens.)

But many capelins end not in the chapel or rectory but in the refectory: via kitchen, to table. I, in Toronto, must walk two blocks to the market to get fish that has come more than a thousand kilometres, and must pay silver and gold at filet mignon prices for it, but my friend on the Newfoundland shoreline can, without walking much if any farther, bring back a bucketful of silver capelin that have been pulled directly from the sea, a grand travel distance measured in metres, and with nothing paid but effort and the usual expenses of a day.

And then she can batter and fry them in batches and we can plate and eat them a few at a time: silver and gold and free, fried hot and friable, to fillet with fork and knife – one whole fish history per serving, spawned, survived to full size, then eaten not among thousands by a whale but among dozens by a smaller mammal. The pinnacle of a capelin’s simple life. And then take another.

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Twillingate

Posted on August 21, 2023 | 1 comment

My friends and my wife and I went for an outing from Herring Neck on the rocky coastline of Newfoundland to nearby Twillingate. We walked up and around the lighthouse on North Twillingate Island. Then we took our packed lunch of runny cheese and large crackers and canned fish and hiked up and down and around and over, with a pause to eat, in the vicinity of French Beach on South Twillingate Island. 

I adore hiking. I grew up hiking in the Rocky Mountains, and I happily scramble up Newfoundland’s rocky trails between evergreens and scrub brush and past little ponds and streams, and when I am high on a rocky promontory above the Atlantic it is just like being up in the Rockies, on Tunnel Mountain or Sulphur Mountain or the Little Beehive overlooking the Bow Valley, except that the valley has been filled with saltwater up to a couple hundred feet below where I stand. The ocean is a wide, deep valley, so wide I can’t see across it, but somewhere on the other side is a French beach on the mirroring coast of Brittany.

It is all strangely familiar and familiarly strange. When I look at the terrain around my feet I might be on the way to Skoki Lodge or Sentinel Pass or Lake Agnes: there is lichen on the rocks, and juniper, and spruce trees. But then we descend briskly and we are on French Beach with waves smoothing out endless pebbles, a sight seen in my life only on vacation.

On the drive back through Twillingate we pass a two-storey box with teal siding and white doors and windows and the name TOULINGUET INN in hand-cut wooden letters. I ask Sarah what that word is. She says it’s the original name of Twillingate.

I had not, until that moment, considered that Twillingate might have come from anything but English. Yes, twilling (or twillin) is a bit mysterious, but more familiar than strange, and gate is, well, a gate. I was willing to take it at face value. But what was Toulinguet? Was it perhaps the name of a relative of Demasduwit or Shanawduthit, who were among the last of the Beothuk people, who were crowded from the coasts and squeezed to starvation by European incursions?

No, it is a word from the far coast of the Atlantic. The western tip of Brittany reaches towards America at Pointe du Toulinguet, a rocky promontory that, like North Twillingate Island, features a white lighthouse. The fishers from Europe saw this newfound headland and thought this strange land looked familiar, so they named it after what they knew – a mirror Toulinguet. And then when the area was settled by people from England, they made this slightly strange word more familiar: Twillingate.

But Toulinguet survives; it has not been forgotten. Sometimes, though, it is made a bit more familiarly strange. A main road across South Twillingate Island, from the causeway from New World Island up to the town of Twillingate, is named Toulinquet Road, with a q before the u. And an old chart that is wallpapered in Sarah’s house makes the name of the islands Toulingnet, as though they went fishing for the name but netted something topsy-turvy, n for u.

But where did Toulinguet come from? It’s a French word, right? We can see that by the spelling. Well, yes, in the same way as we can see by the spelling that Twillingate is an English word. But each word is the meeting of two languages; with Toulinguet the other language is Breton, the Celtic language of Brittany. The Breton source, so I read, is toull inged, meaning ‘plover hole’, for a pierced rock there favoured by birds (though the usual Breton word for ‘plover’ is morlivid, and another source tells me inged means ‘petit chevalier’, the shorebird called lesser yellowlegs in English). 

That’s not what Pointe du Toulinguet is called in Breton now, though – it’s Beg ar Garreg Hir. I can tell you that begmeans ‘beak’ or ‘point’ or ‘promontory’ (I’m tempted to say it’s ‘cape’ in Breton and make some wordplay, but that’s a bit of a journey, like Cape Breton Island, which is the place in Nova Scotia where ferries leave for Newfoundland). I can tell you that hir means ‘long’. As best I can discover, garreg is a mutated form of karreg, which means ‘rock’; you’ll see its reflexes in Welsh carreg and Irish carraig. So it’s Long Rock Point, or Long Rocky Point. With a hole for lesser yellowlegs off its tip. And the mirroring lighthouse on North Twillingate Island is on Long Point, which is rocky.

But the trail doesn’t end in Brittany. You can keep going, north across the channel to Britain. There’s a reason that Brittany (Bretagne) seems onomastically similar to Great Britain (Grande-Bretagne), and it’s that when the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain and made much of it into England, Celtic-speaking people were crowded to the edges – Scotland, Wales, Cornwall – or all the way across the channel, where they set up a little Britain for themselves, a bit of the familiar in a strange – and at length not strange – land. 

And their strange name, toull inged, was made familiar by the local French: Toulinguet. And then that familiar name was applied to a strangely familiar place on the far side of the ocean. And then people from England – mostly from the southwest, Devon and Cornwall – came and saw that strange name and made it familiar, Twillingate. Such are the paths we take through willing gates and over the strange and familiar.

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drong

Posted on August 15, 2023 | 1 comment

The northern edge of Newfoundland, a frayed lace of rocks and water and durable vegetation, is not a place to seek a throng or a crowded street, yet you may find yourself with little lateral room to move. In an island community such as Herring Neck or Twillingate, the houses appear to have been cast like so many dice across the bumptious land, stopping near the water; wherever a cube has halted its tumble, at whatever distance and angle from others, a roof is dropped on and windows and doors added, and there you are. So there is ample space between them. And yet.

And yet a scrabbling landscape that fights every alteration except the slow erosions of plants and water is no graceful receiver of roadways. Even the roads you can actually drive on are no wider than a cod-based economy would allow for; they wind up and over and around the rocky landscape in routes that would be thrilling to drive in a Lamborghini for exactly twenty-three seconds, at which point the heaving pavement would abruptly rip its low-slung undercarriage right off. 

To reach my friend Sarah’s house at the end of a succession of ever-smaller islands connected by short causeways and bridges, we take a road that starts as two lanes, then loses its paint, then loses its width, then loses its pavement, then nearly loses its very self, so that the last few hundred metres is a one-person-wide path over rocks and grass between peat and boulders. Beyond the house it continues on, by a bog, between bushes, up over stones, less than a foot’s width at times between vegetation that will undo your laces, finally fading out where the head of the peninsula meets the sky and you can look out on the endless ways of waves and whales.

This is a place of folk ways and folkways, little paths of culture proudly maintained, traditions that have held on like lichen over the generations since they crossed the ocean, from – in the case of this particular area – Cornwall and Devon. Newfoundland does not have a distinct dialect or accent; it has many, as many varying dialects and accents as it has villages, or rather more than that, even. And along with that comes an assortment of words that dictionaries tend to think are obsolete or at least covered in library dust.

Which is how, as we drove through Twillingate on the way to its lighthouse, we passed a street with the sign PRIDE’S DRONG.

“Drong?!” I said.

Sarah explained that a drong is a narrow laneway. She referred me to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. “I have a copy at home,” she told me.

“So do I,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

I’m back in my home in the sky in Toronto now, and I have my copy of that essential book on the table next to me, and I can tell you that at “drong” it says “See DRUNG.”

And at “drung” it gives the definition “A narrow lane or passage between houses, fenced gardens, etc.” It notes its etymology as coming from the same Old English root as throng.

Now that I have internet access (on the sketchy margins of Newfoundland the sketchiest thing of all is cellular service, and don’t get your hopes up about wifi either), I can confirm that drong (or drung) is an ablaut form of dring, which is a Southwest England way to say thring, which means ‘squeeze’ or ‘press’ or ‘crowd’. It is from that ‘crowd’ (verb) sense that the noun throng developed.

But you won’t see a crowd on Pride’s Drong, and you won’t feel crowded there either. If you’ve been to England, you no doubt have seen many narrow passages between buildings and fences and so on, the slender walled ways that would make it a challenge to pass another person. You are crowded by humanity and its clamoring for simultaneous space and closeness in its building and dividing. But in Newfoundland, it’s not quite the same. When a way can barely let two people pass, it’s not walls but peat and granite and the threat of falling into one or off the other that keeps you in line, or it’s the thriving scrub brush that gives your bootlaces a gantlope. And when a lane is only wide enough for one car going one way, as on Pride’s Drong, well, it’s not that there’s not enough room for the road, it’s just that there’s not enough road on the room. 

I didn’t take a picture, but have a look at the Google Streetview. I won’t say that the road is narrow on a matter of principle, but it may be narrow due to lack of principle (financial) or lack of interest (not financial). Sometimes ways are tight when means are tight, and sometimes there’s just no need to insult the landscape, or to do wrong to a strong pride of place.

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brave

Posted on July 31, 2023 | Leave a comment

What’s the line between brave and reckless? Between brave and foolhardy? Between brave and foolish? Between brave and careless? Between brave and depraved? At what point does a sincere “Bravo!” slope into a sarcastic “Bravo”? When does amazed “Wow!” slide over to scornful “Wow”? How many shades are there of “You have got to be kidding me” – and how many of them are one or another kind of “brave”? How do we distinguish between raw courage and mere brouhaha?

Of course the lines will be drawn differently by different people. Some people admire sports such as wingsuit flying and BASE jumping, and take the inevitable “in memoriam” rolls at the ends of videos of such sports as evidence of sheer valor; others find them to be the most senseless thrill seeking, and take the “in memoriam” rolls as proof. Some admire those who summit Everest, or K2, or Kangchenjunga, or Denali; others have little or nothing good to say about them. 

And some admire such feats but deny that they are brave, because they involve risk only for personal adventure and reward, and not for the sake of others. Bravery, in such a view, is heroism – and by “hero” meaning not someone who has endured hardship when they had no other real choice, but someone who could have had continued to live an easy and acceptable life but chose to face strain or danger for the sake of another (or others).

But then what of someone whose bravery involves hurting or killing others? Often acts of bravery are done by soldiers at war. Most people would agree that killing people who are shooting at you, especially if you’re doing it to help protect other soldiers on your side (or civilians), qualifies as brave; many people would also extend it to killing soldiers who are not at the moment shooting at you or others but would if given the chance, such as a tank or machine gun nest; many would also accept an attack on enemies by sneaking into their camp and killing them while they ate or even slept; but of those who found such acts brave, how many of them would see them as brave if done by someone they see as an enemy? Does the evaluation of individual bravery vary according to whether the army they’re a member of is defender or invader? If invader, does the motivation for the invasion matter? Or is all “bravery” that involves acts of war depraved? How about on the more individual level – if I say that I should “turn the other cheek” if attacked, does that also mean that I shouldn’t leap to the defense of others but rather tell them to turn the other cheek? 

These are endlessly fraught questions; there are no simple and absolute and undebatable answers, and the trend of thought has evolved over the centuries – when a word refers to something we value, its values will shift as our values do. But such is this word brave. It’s a word for someone who has drawn a line in a place we wouldn’t all draw it, and it’s a word for which we can’t all agree where to draw the line. So if it’s not clear or universally agreed what bravery is and where bravery comes from, should it be surprising that it’s not clear or universally agreed where the word brave comes from?

The immediate source is no problem: English got brave from French brave. And the evidence is straightforward that French got brave from Italian bravo – perhaps via Spanish bravo. As Littré points out, if the word were an older one that came into French directly from Latin, the typical development of form would have made it brou (haha, but the word does not exist). But then where does Italian bravo come from? 

Normally it would be easy: bravus. But such a word is unattested in Latin; we suppose it must have existed in Vulgar Latin, but Classical Latin doesn’t have it. It could have come from Proto-Germanic *hrawaz, ‘raw’, but there’s not much to support that origin. It might have come from a Gaulish word *bragos, which relates to boasting and showing off, but there’s not enough evidence to support a link there either. It might have come from Latin bravium, ‘prize, reward’, from Greek βραβεῖον (brabeîon), but there’s no evidence of development of the sense from one to another, and the phonological development is unlikely too (the stress in the Latin is on the i, for one thing).

So the most likely thing is that it comes from a fusion of the Latin words pravus and barbarus. You probably recognize barbarus; it’s the source of barbarian and barbaric and comes from Greek βάρβαρος ‘foreign’, which was made from an imitation of how foreign languages sounded to the Greeks: “bar-bar-bar,” like if in English we called people from other countries “blahblahs” or “yukkayukkas.” As to pravus, it meant ‘crooked, perverse, wicked, bad’ – and it’s the root of depraved (the de- does not signify negation – how wicked!).

So somehow ‘wicked’ and ‘barbaric’ got together and made a word that passed through ‘bold’ and into ‘valorous, heroic’ (and, as Wiktionary points out, in British English euphemistically to ‘foolish, unwise’) – and, in French, also ‘honest’ or ‘well dressed’ (a sense whilom seen in English), and in Italian (and also betimes in English) to ‘good, nice, clever, skilled’… and in modern Italian it no longer means ‘valiant’. O brave new word, that has such senses in it!

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dastard

Posted on July 26, 2023 | 1 comment

He was no standard bastard; he was a dastard. In a world where some go per ardua ad astra, he had neither ardua nor astra. His skullduggery was of the skulking and drugging kind, and though he thought himself a wizard, he was merely a coward, a laggard, an ill-starred sluggard. 

We will give him, at least, that he was no braggard – that would have meant owning up to his dastardly deeds, and he was too cowardly for that. He could only stab you in the back when his own back was turned – as though the b of bastard were facing away, d – and whether the ill deed was done or not, he could say no more than “drats.”

You may, perhaps, not have met the word dastard as such before. I think you’ll know the word dastardly, though it’s a bit antiquated now – it has the air of mustachioed villains and other pusillanimous vipers of the melodrama era. But just as cowardly is like a coward, dastardly is like a dastard; we have had dastardly since the mid-1500s and dastard since the mid-1400s. And while the -ard is on the model of coward, bastard, and wizard, all from French, dastard is like laggard, sluggard, and drunkard in having a Germanic root taking on the suffix to mean ‘one who does this dirty deed like a dirty bird’ (note, by the way, that words ending with ard that make it rhyme with “hard” or “bard” rather than “word” or “bird,” especially if they have any stress at all on the syllable, have nothing to do with all of this – so no diehard, no discard, et cetera).

And what is the Germanic root in this case? We’re not entirely sure, but evidence suggests that dast is from dased, which is none other than an old form of dazed, and meant ‘dull, inert, stupefied’. So originally a dastard was someone who shrunk from any deed of valor through the most elementary pusillanimity. In fact, it first referred to someone who was simply a dullard, and then over time it added the sense of villainy, of crimes not just of omission but of commission… but only in the most cowardly way. A snake. Or, perhaps, a poisonous turtle.

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forepast

Posted on July 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

This forepast evening, as rain was not forecast, we determined to take a boat to the island with a submarine for repast. But just past four, when I had bought the sandwich, the sky became overcast and the clouds started to pour fast, forestopping our plans. What to do? It was too late to make pasta for supper. Fortunately, within a half hour the downpour had passed over and we met our prefixed plan – we were on the ferry and cast off superfast, and no sooner had we reached the beach than the submarine was within us. And so the forecast was forepast and the repast was forepast, and all was fair sport.

You probably don’t use the word forepast – frankly, I don’t know who does – but it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, both of them having it as an alternative spelling of forepassed, and neither of them calls it obsolete (though Wiktionary does). But it’s only current, it seems, as an adjective; you can’t use it adverbially (“what I had done forepast”) – not anymore, anyway – and there’s no established use of it as a noun at all: you can’t, alas, speak of “the forepast.”

Which, I suppose, is to be expected; we already have the past, and what need is an extra syllable before it? What, the past before the past? But forepast doesn’t mean that; it just means ‘that has passed before’ – a synonym is bygone, and while we can “let bygones be bygones,” we can’t “let gones be gones,” whereas we can “let the past be the past” and so have no need for the aforementioned fore. And, for that matter, Oxford says that forepast is now used “only of time”; you can speak of forepast days and forepast hours and the forepast evening. 

But you know what? Who even knows that? This word has been with us since the 1500s, if not longer, and it’s in Shakespeare and Spenser, but, though its sense and construction are perspicuous, good luck finding current uses of it except in books quoting or emulating works from a forepast time. So you might as well take it as a lexical snack – use it as no more than hors d’œuvres, and not for repast per se, and you can plate it as you will. Or, you know, eat it off paper wrapping on the beach.

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