stracciatella

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 1 comment

Ah, you can see this is a nice, lovely, long Italian word. Look at those two c’s (with an i after, at that), and those parallel l’s, sort of like skis to go with the boots of the c’s. It has three a’s dispersed in it, one of which at the end. It looks extra yummy because it ends like Nutella – and, you know, those c’s kinda look like hazelnut shells too, when you think of it. Hmm, it does have a sort of shellish brittleness. Ah, what could this be?

Well, it’s an Italian word borrowed unaltered into English, so the odds are excellent that it’s to do with either music or food. You could certainly sing it – hold that double l extra long, stretch it out. But you can taste it so deliciously on your tongue, too: the opening /stra/ with the /r/ properly trilled, the long affricate – in Italian you say it like not “stra-cha” but “strat-cha” – and then to the tap and luscious lick, and all on the tip of the tongue. It’s not such a stretch, to tell the truth, to see it as a word for some kind of food.

But what food? Not pasta; that’s usually pluralized: tagliatelle, not tagliatella. Hmm. Maybe a kind of gelato (or ice cream)? Or perhaps a type of soup? Maybe an extract of some sort?

Yes. Yes. And, in one way of seeing it, yes.

Stracciatella is a kind of gelato yes. It’s vanilla with little shavings of chocolate in it. Like chocolate chip, but less chunky.

Stracciatella is also a kind of soup. It’s an Italian egg drop soup. The eggs are beaten with cheese and seasonings and then dropped into the soup and whisked in, so they float around in little shreds.

Always make sure you’re clear which one you’re ordering, but there will probably be few cases of possible confusion.

Here’s a tip about Italian words: if you see a stra at the beginning, it probably comes from Latin extra. So is this gelato or soup extra something? Hmm, well, not exactly; in this case the extra is extracted out of context – from extractare, which is ex plus tractare. That word – meaning ‘pull out’ – is the root, of course, of English extract, but also of Italian stracciare, ‘tear up, rip up, shred’. (Incidentally, neither shred nor stretch is etymologically related to this word.) And stracciare is the source of stracciatella, which names a soup with shreds of egg in it or a gelato with shreds of chocolate.

Now go eat something. I know you’re hungry. Italian does that to me too. Maybe that’s why people are always eating in Italian movies.

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shock

Posted on September 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Originally published in The Spanner, issue 0009.

Let’s play synonym substitution.

Game one: Peter Gabriel – a song: “Jar the Monkey.” Hmm. “Traumatise the Monkey.” Um, “Jolt the Monkey.” Tsk. “Apply an Electric Current to the Monkey.” Oh dear. No.

Game two: Gilbert and Sullivan – from another song: “Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp jolt.” Well… “…a short, sharp blow.” Yes, but… “…a short, sharp disturbance to the senses.” Oh, no. Really?

Game three: Casablanca – Captain Renault: “I’m appalled – appalled! – to find that gambling is going on in here.” Well, yes, but it’s not quite… “I’m surprised – surprised!” Well, Rick is the one surprised now. “I’m scandalized – scandalized!” Oh deeaaarr. “I’m taken aback – taken aback!” Seriously?

By now this shock of examples may have produced a shock of recognition (I will not say shock and awe, though). It should not be shocking, though, to note that synonyms are never quite exact substitutions. They have different shades of meaning, different ambits. And, quite importantly in some cases, they have different sounds.

Few of the alternatives to shock have anything close to its onomatopoeic effect. Jolt, perhaps, and maybe jar. But shock is more of a jolt than jolt, more jarring than jar. It slides in on a voiceless alveopalatal fricative, the same sound you use to hush another person or imitate escaping steam, a sound that, made emphatically, involves pursing the lips and showing the teeth in an aggressive, perhaps simian fashion. Then, after a brutally short low back vowel, just a transition from the release of the tongue at the front to the connection at the back, everything stops: air is blocked through the mouth and the nose, and the voice abruptly ceases. In fact, the voice cuts out a moment before the air flow stops. Short and sharp indeed.

Shock is the sound of a silverware drawer being slammed shut, of a sliding door cutting you off, of a sabre being sheathed, of curling rock knocking another or two sledges colliding or a hockey cross-check. It is not a crash; that starts with crack and fades off, like the sound of the word cosh. It is not a chop, which sounds like chop or chock. It is not a knock, which sounds like cock, or a pop, which sounds (of course) like pop. The word shop has a similar profile, as has shot, but listen how much more resonant that [k] is in the back. You come close with sock, and it is surely a shock to be socked in the jaw, but the fricative sliding into sock does not have the aggressive pursing of the lips and biting together of the front teeth. Perhaps the closest in sound is shook, an abrupt word for a frequentative action, but with a higher and hollower vowel.

Words do not have to sound like what they represent, of course; that fact should come as a shock to none. But when they do, it adds effect. And some words add effect by sounding like something related. Our verb and related noun shock come from an Old Germanic word that seems to be imitative, but shock of corn and shock of hair draw on one or two different Old Germanic words. There is nothing about them that presents a necessarily shocking image, and yet the word manages to convey a bunch as something a bit more like a bunch of exclamation points, just because it has that strong flavour of the more common shock, enhanced by the vividness of the sound.

Come, let’s play one more round of the game. Hamlet: “and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural impacts That flesh is heir to…” No, that’s not it at all… “the thousand natural collisions…” Not really… “the thousand natural indignities…” But there’s more and other to it… “the thousand natural jars…” Oh, heh heh. No, let it be shocks, naturally.

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tenterhooks

Posted on September 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

“I’ll buy you a coffee if you guess what these are,” Jess said. She held out a little box.

Daryl looked in. “Bent nails,” he said tentatively.

“To a certain extent,” Jess said. “But what’s their intent?”

“To frustrate carpenters,” I said.

“A bit of a stretch,” Jess said.

“They’re supposed to be like that?” Daryl said.

“It’s intentional.”

“It would help to see them in context,” I said.

“Obviously. Once you have them in the frame, you’ll catch on.”

“Or they’ll catch on,” I said. “But catch on what?”

“Feel free to ask around,” Jess said. “Canvas.”

“Ask strangers here in the coffee shop?” Daryl said.

“Get the answer by hook or by crook.”

“They do look like crooked fingers,” I said, crooking my index finger.

“There’s some tension between form and function.”

“Are you going to keep on at this?” Daryl asked. He gazed at the box intently.

“Maybe I’ll keep you on this. On these.”

“On tenterhooks,” I said.

Jess smiled and pocketed the box. “What do you take in your coffee?”

“Wait, what?” Daryl said. “He didn’t make a guess.”

“He got it for all in tents,” Jess said.

I smiled and extended a finger. “And on tenters.”

“Will you explain!” Daryl said.

“Don’t have a tenter tantrum,” Jess said. She headed over to the counter.

“A tenter,” I said, “is a frame on which canvas or other fabric is stretched to dry. From Latin tendere ‘stretch’, source of assorted other English words, including tent and extend.”

“What will it be?” Jess shouted at me from the counter.

“Decaf, cream,” I shouted back.

“But what are those, then?” Daryl said. “Don’t hang me out to dry here.”

“Before you rack your brain, put your brain to the rack,” I said. “A tenter needs hooks. To hold the fabric in place.”

The lightbulb went on over Daryl’s head. “Tenterhooks.”

“It’s not a Dutch family name!” I said.

“Not tenderhooks, either,” he said.

“Whatever those would be. No, if you feel like you’re in a state of tension, stretched and drying, you’re on tenterhooks.”

“Which would put me in Jess’s pocket now,” Daryl said.

Jess came back with the coffee. “Better luck next time,” she said. “James nailed it.”

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monimolimnion

Posted on September 11, 2013 | 3 comments

Just try reading this word correctly the first time you see it. It’s as though someone took three each of i, m, n, and o, shuffled them together, and then stuck an l right in the middle. On the left side, two each of m and o and one each of n and i; on the right, the converse. But it’s such a forest of dodging and dancing, with only the o’s to break up the incessant railway ties of the lines, that your eyes will likely glaze and cross and grasp only at that medial limen, the numinous minimal l that limns the mileu. It is all mixed up.

So you see mono, minion, moon, loom, onion, minim, lion… After grasping at it like the spokes of a whirling wheel, you take the l and pull apart there: monimo limnion. But what could that be? Look to Greek for the roots: μόνιμος monimos ‘stable, steady’; λιμνίον limnion ‘small lake’. Assembled in the 20th century from parts used in other words; used to describe the bottom layer of a meromictic lake.

OK, so that doesn’t get us a whole lot farther, does it? What is a meromictic lake? It is a lake in which the upper and lower layers never mix.

Say what? Upper and lower layers? Yes, lakes tend to have layers. You thought because it’s all fluid it must just swirl about and all be the same? No. Look at the sky: different kinds of clouds scud on different plateaux in the air. Fluids layer, and not just in bar shooters. Most lakes have at least occasional mixing of layers, due to wind or seasonal changes. But a meromictic lake has a lower layer that is somewhat denser and has much less oxygen, and an upper layer that is more changeable and oxygenated, and the twain do not mingle. The upper layer is called the mixolimnion, because it mixes – but not with the monimolimnion.

Meromictic lakes are not common; most lakes are called holomictic and have a mixing of the layers at least once or twice a year. In a meromictic lake the monimolimnion makes up most of the volume and lies down there, deep, anoxic (having little or no oxygen), unmixing, unchanging, unwelcoming, building up layer upon layer of stable sediment. It may build up gases such as carbon dioxide. If there is a disturbance that causes mixing of the monomolimnion with the mixolimnion – an earthquake, for instance – that’s bad news for things that live on the oxygen in the mixolimnion. And it can be bad news for things and people that live near the lake if built-up gas is released: in 1986, such a disturbance of Lake Nyos in Cameroon killed 1800 people.

But don’t think that meromictic bodies of water are all dark and foreboding. They can be quite pretty. And they include in their number the Black Sea. Also, I note, Lower Mystic Lake, in Medford, Massachusetts, near Tufts University, where I went to grad school; it’s surrounded by town and is popular for boating. I doubt most of those who besport themselves on it are aware that it’s layered like some shotglass drink with a rude name favoured by frat boys. Let alone that the lower layer has a name they would never get past their eyes after having a few of said drinks.

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Dashing around

Posted on September 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

My article this week for TheWeek.com is on dashes – the title is rather provocative, but the text is useful:

You’re using that dash wrong

To go with it, I present another poem from my book Songs of Love and Grammar:

Dashing around

My boyfriend is the dashing type.
He writes – whips off – with vim – and hype.
He goes – he comes – cycle completing –
and yet – I feel – he may be cheating.
Last week he sent a note – “Dear N –
I hope – so soon – we join – again!”
But then – missent – another too –
“Dear M—can’t wait—to meet—with you!”
From N – to M—his life’s a whirl!
He’s dashing—yes – from girl to girl!
I think I should have picked a man
with more breath & attention span.
I’ll find & marry someone bland
who’ll come & stay with ampersand.

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raring

Posted on September 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

This word is a fairly rare thing, but a much rarer thing – so rare as to seem to be erring – is to see it without to right after it.

And raring to what?

I bet you said go. Yup, far and away, raring to go is where you see this word. Occasionally it will show up with something else – raring to try, raring to fight. And sometimes it will have a bit more before it. Come on, now, tell me what two words would come before raring to go.

Yup, ready and.

Raring makes me think of drag racers, at their start line, the engines revving – you can hear them in the sound of “raring” – and when the flag drops the tires smoke and the nose of the car may even rear up a bit.

Hm, rear up. How about a horse that’s rearing up because it’s so eager? Rearing to go?

That would be the source of this. Raring is a variant (originally southern US) of rearing, as in rearing up on hind legs. Raring has always had the broader sense of ‘excited, eager’ or ‘angry, wild’, though, not just the specific one of ‘rearing up’. You might sometime have seen raring and tearing, but not so likely recently. It has also been used as an intensifier, as in a raring good time. And why not? It has that aggressive, desirous /r/ sound, helped by the /e/ vowel. It’s not quite the gripping /gr/ phonaestheme, but it still has some Tony the Tiger in it.

Raring may seem to have the vigor and juice of rare steak, but it’s not related to that rare. The rare of steak actually comes from an old word rear that refers to undercooked things, such as underdone eggs. The origin of that word is uncertain; it could be related to rear as in ‘behind’ – though probably not – but the rear as in ‘behind’ is not related to the rear that rare comes from (the ‘behind’ one seems to come from arrear).

Quite the set of rears, isn’t it? A bit of a pain in the behind. The rear that became raring is related to the word raise and used to have most of the same senses. Now it shows up in just a few: rearing up on hind legs, child rearing, things rearing their (often ugly) heads. The rest of them have been put on the rear ranges, or otherwise rearranged. But even as that form faded from use, and its modified version rare slipped away, raring managed to stay in a fixed form.

Try this, it might be fun: Ask someone why we say raring to go. See what kind of explanation they come up with.

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zoom

Posted on September 5, 2013 | 3 comments

A colleague today mentioned that her copyediting professor had said the Mazda “Zoom Zoom” slogan was incorrect because zoom implies upward motion, as with a plane or rocket.

Siiiiiggggghhhhhh.

I am not happy that someone who is teaching editing would insist on a false restriction such as this. Why do people zoom in on one specialized sense and take it as the whole picture?

Here is why that instructor thought this was a real restriction: in aircraft slang, as of 1917, to quote the Daily Mail (from the OED), “‘Zoom’..describes the action of an aeroplane which, while flying level, is hauled up abruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle.”

So the instructor is right? No, of course not, for two reasons.

First, that is a specialized sense and not the original – the original sense, dating to 1892 at the latest, is, per OED, “To make a continuous low-pitched humming or buzzing sound; to travel or move (as if) with a ‘zooming’ sound; to move at speed, to hurry. Also loosely, to go hastily.”

And second, what matters is not how the word was used in 1917 or 1892; what matters is how the word has come to be used and generally accepted in the most recent decades. Usage determines meaning, and current usage – like much non-specialist usage for the past century – allows zoom to refer to speed more generally, as in the original definition, and certainly to automotive speed.

But oh, oh, oh, some people just have to, have to, have to come up with restrictions on language. They don’t want to see the big picture. In the field of meanings they look and discover an “original” sense or see some “technical” meaning, zoom in on that, and decide that that must be the true sense and all the others are wrong. The etymological fallacy runs rampant. Conversational trump cards. Learn a new rule, feel more superior – or anyway learn a new rule and have new mental furniture to structure your existence. (Many, perhaps most, people actually love rules and restrictions, even if they don’t always adhere to them. As Laurie Anderson sings, “Freedom is a scary thing. Not many people really want it.”)

But isn’t the specialized sense the more accurate sense? They’re specialists, after all!

No, that doesn’t make it more accurate. That makes it more of an exception. Look, in medical speech, indicated means ‘considered the appropriate treatment’ – as in “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are indicated in clinical depression,” which means “drugs such as Prozac are considered appropriate treatment for depression.” But in everyday speech, that’s not what we mean by indicated, and you’re not required to be talking of berrytherapy if you say “He indicated the berries on the table.” So with technical terms generally. This includes biological classifications. The botanical class called berries includes bananas, but in ordinary life bananas are not berries.

I’m put in mind of a guy I knew in university who said that Calgary wasn’t a city because it didn’t have a cathedral. He based that on the idea that in medieval times a city was a city if it had a cathedral. He was, of course, wrong for several reasons: Calgary has a cathedral; we are not in medieval times; the medieval definition of a city that he was calling forth was not the original definition nor in any way a reliable definition, and it certainly is not the current definition. In short, he needed to zoom out. And get with the times and the facts, too.

And then there’s the fellow – a former English teacher, yet – who disputed the semiotic use of the word icon to refer to something that signified by resemblance. An icon, he declared, is an Orthodox religious image, and any other use is an abuse! Ah, dear, dear, dear. The word icon comes from Greek for ‘image’, so if you want to talk about commandeering a word for a specialized sense, it would be the Orthodox usage that does so…

Zoom is a perfectly usable (even if currently somewhat commandeered by Mazda) word in relation to speed, especially engine-driven speed, and it has a nice taste to it. We can ask ourselves why “zoom” specifically. There are similar sound words, too, like va-va-voom and the vroom vroom of an engine. The sound a piston engine makes (and, more particularly, made a century ago) seems best matched with a voiced fricative to start with, but the depth of the roar can call forth the high mid-back vowel [u], and the sustain and echo of it can be represented by [m]. Compare zip – much quicker and less substantial. Compare it with other sounds such as “shing” – that would be a sword being unsheathed, not an engine, no? Perhaps “brrrr”? No, that could be an engine, but one that’s just holding steady. You really do get a sense of something moving rapidly past and into the distance with “zoom.” Even the movement of your mouth, with the tongue moving from front to back while the lips purse and then close, reinforces this.

Oh, and why do we “zoom in” and “zoom out”? There’s that rapid motion again. When camera lenses capable of quickly and smoothly changing focal length came in, the effect of the focal length shift from the viewer’s perspective was experienced – as it still is – as being like rapid motion towards or away from the subject. As zooming towards or away from the subject – into or out of the frame. So there’s another one for the rapid motion sense. Oh, and that’s a technical sense, too. It’s also been around for more than 60 years. So there. Now zoom out again.

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When I’m semicolon on you

Posted on September 4, 2013 | 2 comments

My latest article for TheWeek.com is on semicolons. Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like them; I do; I’m not alone in this; I explain. I hope you will not give it a tl;dr. 😉

In defense of the semicolon

 

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jot

Posted on September 3, 2013 | 1 comment

What word does jot go with?

There are two most likely answers, and which one you choose will say a little something about your literary disposition.

The older of the two, and the one more restricted to literary and Biblical references now, is tittle. The original vector for it in English is Matthew 5:18 in the King James Bible: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” These days people will speak of every jot and tittle or not a jot or tittle, but most of them probably don’t know one iota of the literal reference. Which I will get to in a moment.

The newer travelling companion of jot, and since the 1970s the more common one (see this Google ngram), is down. This is not jot the noun now; this is jot the verb. You don’t have to jot things down; you can jot a few notes, for instance. But you almost always do jot things down (or jot down things) – notes, thoughts, things, ideas.

As the Google ngram will show you, jot is well past its heyday as a noun, but is gradually increasing as a verb (after a slight slump between the ’40s and the ’70s). Well, why not? It’s a nice, quick word, something you really could jot down. And there’s such a nice little tight chewiness to the word – it makes me think of chewing a flaxseed between my incisors (something I do with some frequency, as I like multigrain bread for my morning toast). It has nice tastes of jut, jet, jitney, and perhaps jute and jaw. Maybe even chit and chutney.

Are the noun and the verb related, really? After all, the noun means a small thing, while the verb means to write quickly and sketchily. But yes, the verb – which showed up in English two centuries after the noun – is based on the noun, from the idea of making quick small marks. You know, jots and tittles. I suppose they could have said tittle it down instead of jot it down, but that wouldn’t have been as short – though it might have been more titillating.

And whence comes this word in the first place? Really a translation failure. You know how when you get a computer to translate some text, if it doesn’t know a translation for a word it just keeps it as it is? Well, William Tyndale, in making his 1526 translation of the Bible (on which the King James Bible was heavily based), encountered the word iota and, in spite of the fact that he encountered it in the Greek (ἰῶτα) and had every reason to know the word and know what it was intending to convey, decided simply to transliterate it into English as iott (the letter j was not an independent letter yet; it was just an alternate form of i, and represented sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant – just as u and v were two shapes of a similarly bivalent letter).

Perhaps he assumed his readers would also have some knowledge of Greek. How much knowledge? The alphabet would be enough. You see, iota is the name of the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet: ι. In the Latin alphabet it became i; they started to jot a dot atop it just to make it stand out a little more. A little more? A tittle more – a tittle is any teeny little mark such as an accent or dot.

And both jot and tittle are still with us – neither has passed away yet. But now that I’ve jotted down this disquisition, my daily duty is at least fulfilled.

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perihelion

Posted on September 2, 2013 | 1 comment

This word makes me think of Murray Perahia, a well-known concert pianist, but it also makes me think of Trent Reznor and Stig Larsson, as well as sci-fi author Dan Simmons and a British perfume chain.

It makes me think of Reznor and Larsson because one of the pieces on Reznor’s sound track for the movie of Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is called “Perihelion.” It’s a brooding, atmospheric piece, the sort of thing I used to hear on CBC Radio 2’s program Nightline when I was delivering newspapers at 5 am in Edmonton under the aurora borealis. It all fit together very well then. Of course I didn’t hear this piece at the time, as Larsson hadn’t even written the book in 1989. But the style fits. Never mind that I never delivered papers at perihelion – I did it for less than a year and missed the dead of winter.

It makes me think of Dan Simmons because it seems like a name for a book he could have written. But no, that’s Hyperion. But there are books out there called Perihelion, including a book in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series (the book is by William F. Wu) and a sci-fi erotica title by Sylvia Walters.

And it makes me think of a British perfume chain because the chain is called Penhaligon’s. Which to my ears has an echo of perihelion.

This word also seems somehow arch to me. The /p/ at the front is pert, perhaps prim but perhaps perky, but a /h/ in the middle of a word always seems to have a current of violence or vehemence or some reptilian, perhaps ophidian, quality, especially when it is so heavily exhaling between two vowels. Could it all be the heavy purr-exhaling of a lion?

It’s Greek, originally, as you may have noted. The peri typically means ‘around, about’; the helion is from the root for ‘sun’. The ancient Greeks didn’t use this word because they had no reason to; there was no conception of bodies orbiting the sun on elliptical paths until rather later, and it didn’t really seem necessary to invent a word just to talk about Daedalus and Icarus. Johannes Kepler invented the word in a Latinized form as perihelium in 1609, and it was soon thereafter modified into a purely Greek form. It’s the opposite of aphelion (which is pronounced as ap plus helion, not a plus phelion). In an elliptical orbit around the sun, the aphelion is when the body (planet, comet, asteroid) is farthest from the sun, and the perihelion is when it is closest.

So how’s your memory of the astronomy you learned in school? When is the earth closest to the sun in its elliptical orbit? Not when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere… Nope, earth’s perihelion is January 3, and its aphelion July 4. I will glide past the fact that the earth is farthest from its source of light on the American national holiday. There are no national holidays on January 3, although I do note that on that day in 1496 Leonardo da Vinci tested a flying machine… without success.

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