Draw a hot bath and add lavender suds. Chill a bottle of Taittinger. Bake an angel food cake, compile a trifle, create an Eton mess. Arrange hydrangeas. Set out the cushion you bought in Vienna, and the other that’s large and shaped like a book. Make a playlist of Ravel and Vaughan Williams, or of John Williams, or of Lana Del Rey, or of Beyoncé. Prepare a Sazerac. Perhaps – perhaps – put out a bowl of sweet, meaty sauerkraut, if that pleases, or a bassinet of crawdads, or a little watermelon gazpacho. Create pleasures. Make luxurious. Voluptuate.
Or sink into the hot bath with lavender suds, and drink a glass or two or three of Taittinger. Eat the angel food cake, eat and mess with the trifle, trifle with the Eton mess. Admire the hydrangeas and inhale their aroma. Lean against the cushions. Let the music play. Knock back the Sazerac and reach for another. Relish the sauerkraut, peel through the crawdads, slurp the gazpacho. Take pleasure. Luxuriate. Voluptuate.
It’s a good word, voluptuate, and it means both ways: make voluptuous, or enjoy voluptuously.
But wait. Voluptuous? In the world of today, that’s mainly a word for a buxom, curvaceous woman. But that is so limited and limiting. Voluptuous means ‘luxurious, sensuous, indulgent, hedonistic, delicious’; from that it includes ‘replete with gorgeousness’. We also have the word voluptuary, which means a sybarite, one who has given over to sensuous pleasures. All of these words come from Latin voluptas ‘pleasure’, which in turn comes from volup (earlier volupte) ‘with pleasure, pleasurably’, which traces to Proto-Indo-European *welh₁-, ‘choose, want’, a word that also has among its progeny well, will, voluntarily, and many more in various languages.
Well. Do you as you will, and do it voluntarily, and enjoy it voluptuously. And, in turn, set the scene: voluptuate so that others may voluptuate.
Each of us has different tastes, of course. Many treats of the senses are best kept to moderation, lest we end up with headaches, shakes, and assorted scleroses. But there are some that can be enjoyed endlessly. Music, for one. And words for another. For those of us who savour words volubly erupting on our tongues and in our minds, language is an endless smorgasbord of verses and conversation without the vitiation of vice. And so here on Sesquiotica I voluptuate that you may voluptuate, and perhaps even vice versa.
The secret treat of the long days of summer is the ending descent into the subfusc dusk. There are few things more quietly delighting than the quiet de-lighting.
Ironically, it does not stand on ceremony. I say “ironically” because subfusc has a certain ceremonious undertone; at Oxford, it is a word for the prescribed style of clothing with a formal tone: dark, not utterly dark but dark enough, colourless, desaturated – dark suit, black shoes, white shirt. It’s an in-group understanding of ‘dark’ – the casual formality of formal casualness. Something that stops just short of going the whole distance, smart but not so smart that it’s not smart.
Which, really, is this word: subfusc. How dare it end with a c like that. It ought to be either subfusk or subfuscous. But there you have it: it won’t go all in one way or the other. There is fusk, yes, and fuscous, and indeed there is even subfuscous (that long form, for the same sort who would say “champagne” rather than “champers”). But none of those are sufficiently brisk.
What is all this, anyway? Fusk and fuscous come from Latin fuscus, which means ‘dark’. It traces back through the dim mists of time to Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂-, which is also the progenitor of English dusk. English fusk means ‘dark brown’ or ‘dusky’; fuscous means about the same. You understand that sub- means ‘under’, but what stands under ‘dark’? Is it more dark or less dark?
The answer, originally, is less: subfuscus is ‘moderately dark’. Except… in Latin, they would have assimilated the prefix; the more proper form is suffuscus. That b is a bit too bright. The assimilation suffuses it (suffuse is not related to suffuscus, but it will suffice).
So. Subfusc. A grey study. More soft than funk. A good word for nearly the entirety of the photographic œuvre of Josef Sudek. Of course I won’t include any of his photos here; copyright is a real thing. But perhaps a few of my own will suit – a window onto the warm embrace of the post-dusk subfusc.
I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard the host of a classical music program (during the program, not in a promo) say, unprompted, “imprompti” as a plural for impromptu.
What! Imprompti? Pre-empting the familiar impromptus? I promptly looked it up to make sure I was not mistaken. But I was not: the English plural is impromptus. Some sources say we got it via French, wherein the plural is impromptus. But impromptu ultimately comes from Latin, where it is in promptu (Latin did not implement the /n/-to-/m/ place assimilation before /p/ in this instance, interestingly; it was left to French and English to do that). And the plural of Latin in promptu is…
Well, before I tell you, I need to give you a bit of background and context. Otherwise it won’t make enough sense. Let’s start, briefly, with that in. Often when we see in- or im- as a prefix in words from Latin, it’s a negator: immovable, indecent. Other times it’s an intensifier: invaluable. Sometimes it’s an intensifier later mistaken as a negator: inflammable, infamous. But sometimes it just means ‘in’, as in the same kind of thing as English in. Like in insert. And that’s what it is here – impromptu does not mean ‘not promptu’, nor does it mean ‘very promptu’; it means ‘in promptus’ (we will get to the question of promptus becoming promptu shortly). And what is promptus?
You might recognize prompt there, and you’ll be right if you do. Promptus is the source of that. As a noun, promptus means ‘readiness’ or ‘an exposing to view’; the noun is formed from the past participle of promo – which, amusingly, is not related to English promotion. No, this is pro ‘for, forward’ plus emo ‘I buy, I take’ (and no relation to emotion – sorry!). You may know the Latin phrase caveat emptor, ‘buyer beware’; that emptor is from the same root. And the past participle of emo is emptus, as in pre-empt (but not empty, which is a Germanic word).
So pro plus emo makes promo ‘I bring forth’, which formed promptus ‘brought forth’, which makes the noun promptus ‘readiness’ or ‘exposing to view’. So the plural of promptus is prompti, right? Ha ha, no. Latin is less simple than we might want; if given the chance to learn all the Latin word forms, we might want to decline, but they already have declined, and this is a fourth declension noun, which forms its forms differently. Let me add the scholarly macrons to mark length (not written in Latin of the time but useful to us today to distinguish vowel length): singular prōmptus in the nominative becomes plural prōmptūs, and in the accusative it’s singular prōmptum and plural prōmptūs. But, as noted, it’s in promptu and not in promptus. That’s because in in this case governs the ablative case (ablative comes from Latin for ‘taking away’, probably because many people wish it would be taken away). And singular in prōmptū pluralizes to in prōmptibus.
But that really doesn’t matter, because when we’re talking about several instances of improvisations (an impromptu is an improvisation, as you know) we’re not talking about being in several instances of readiness or exposing to view. No, it’s another case – like omnibus, rebus, ignoramus, and vade mecum – of a word being made into an English noun that might seem like it’s a direct borrowing of a Latin noun but is in fact grammatically different in the original source. So the plural of impromptu is impromptus, and there’s no alternative.
But because we have long learned that simple regular English plurals are to be dispreferred whenever possible, and especially that Latin words absolutely must be pluralized in an ostentatiously Latin way, darlings, lest we sound like utter ignorami… well, some of us are sometimes prone to produce spurious Latin-style plurals impromptu.
Some things have clear definitions, or at least seem to. Linguists will point out that you can come up with a definition of chair that will match most but not all chairs and will exclude most but not all things that aren’t chairs, for instance, but you can’t come up with a definition that covers all chairs and no other things, partly because there will always be some edge cases that people will disagree about (you may find some such in art galleries), and partly because chairness is a matter of common functional knowledge rather than strict definition. And yet there is rarely any confusion about whether something is a chair. Most people would agree that chair is much less vague than, say, cup, let alone art.
Contrast this with knoll.
Now, you know what a knoll is, right? You’ve heard the term. You likely have this general image in your mind: a kind of rounded little hill, or something of that order – more than a mound, but much less than a mountain. You might in particular know the phrase grassy knoll. You might (probably not, but you could) even know that knoll comes from an old Germanic root that also descended to words in other languages for ‘lump’, ‘ball’, or ‘turnip’. So, though a knoll can’t roll, it’s rounded. But how big is it? And how big isn’t it? I was driving with my dad recently in the Okanagan region and he pointed at a long, rounded, grassy, lightly treed prominence in the middle of the valley and said, “Would you call that a knoll?” And I wasn’t sure whether or not I would.
Now, if we had been oceanographers, the question could have been resolved by checking some measurements, because in oceanography knoll means ‘rounded fully underwater hill with a prominence of less than 1000 metres’. They’ve set an in-group definition, as one does in the sciences. It’s the same kind of taxonomic imposition as one encounters when someone tells you that a strawberry is not a berry but a banana is: that’s true when you’re speaking in botanical terms, but it’s different from the common-knowledge usages that communicate to ordinary people in ordinary contexts. So the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, does not at all meet the oceanographic definition of knoll, and yet.
And yet it also might not meet every ordinary speaker’s definition of a knoll either. It’s not pointy-topped, true, but it’s also barely prominent at all in its surroundings. It’s several times the height of a person, but less than the height of any of the trees on it. If you were to ask a person “Would you call that a knoll?” they wouldn’t necessarily say so. But it’s the term that Albert Merriman Smith used when describing the location in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and so it stuck. So we have an established and accepted precedent for calling a low rounded earth form with a prominence of less than ten metres a knoll, for what that’s worth. (Most people who have heard of the grassy knoll probably don’t have a clear picture in their minds of what it looks like. It’s smaller than I expected, I’ll tell you that.)
OK, so what’s the upper size limit of a knoll? How are we even supposed to know? Some people do seem to use the term loosely. In a recent Robb Report article quoted by Merriam-Webster, we see “Built over 25 years ago, the 50,000-square-foot domed dwelling is perched atop a 2,400-foot-high knoll, offering up 60 miles of sprawling coastal vistas.” I think that’s rather high for a knoll, and I have to wonder whether the author is the same kind of thesaurus-scraper who would say “we munched oatmeal” or “Chumbawamba crooned ‘Tubthumping.’” But it does convey the idea that the hill in question is rounded (at least I hope it is).
To help establish an upper limit for knollness, I’ve looked up a few things that have Knoll in their names. As you might expect, they’re more prominent than many knolls you might think of (because why would we have articles about insignificant knolls?). There’s Long Knoll (not to be confused with the former prime minister of Cambodia, Lon Nol), which is in Wiltshire, England, and has a prominence – in the topographic sense – of 171 metres. There’s Brent Knoll (which is probably also the name of one or more persons), in Somerset, England, a significant local land feature near the Bristol Channel with a prominence of 137 metres. There is The Knoll, on Ross Island, Antarctica, which rises 370 metres above the sea. There’s Cave Knoll, in Utah, which is more hard and lumpy looking and with pointy bits on top but has a prominence of just 95 metres. There’s Grindslow Knoll, in Derbyshire, which actually stands (or sits) a few hundred metres above its surrounds but has a high col connection to a neighbouring peak that makes its topographic prominence a mere 15 metres. And then there’s Bluff Knoll, in Western Australia.
I think Bluff Knoll tests the limits of common knoll-edge. Or perhaps it’s just bluffing. It’s the highest peak in its range, has a prominence of 650 metres, and has cliff edges on one side of its summit – a questionable kind of knoll-edge, to my mind. Granted, much of its overall form is rolling and even grassy, but come on. I’ve seen smaller things called “mountains.” I feel that Governor James Stirling, who named it Bluff Knoll (and after whom the range it’s in has been named), was rather pushing it. It might be better to call it what it has been called for much longer by the people who were there long before Sterling showed up: Pualaar Miial, which means ‘great many-faced hill’. Which, incidentally, seems inconsistent with what I would think of as a knoll.
But then what do I knoll? I wasn’t even sure about that long hill in the Okanagan. Knowing what I knoll now, I would call it one. Or I might just call it a hill, albeit a little one. Anyway, “mountain” would be right out.
Most people who use linchpin these days use it figuratively, to mean someone or something without which the wheels would come off the machine, so to speak. In a pinch, they’ll make it a cinch, even if it’s inch by inch. But what kind of thing might the linchpin of a word be?
Some people will say that it’s the spelling. Take linchpin for example: many people write it as lynchpin. Why? Not because we usually spell the sound that way; all the rhymes are spelled -inch. But there’s one word we have that’s spelled with a y, and it’s lynch, which, of course, is exactly the same sound as linch. The problem being that the verb lynch means ‘execute extrajudicially’ and most often refers to the hanging of black men by white mobs in the American South.
Which, I can assure you, has nothing to do with linchpin. The verb lynch comes from a surname, Lynch, which in England derived from a Kentish word meaning ‘hill’ but was also used as an Anglicized – and modified – form of Irish Loingsigh and related names, which originally named someone who had a fleet of ships. And since neither mob executions nor hills nor ships have anything to do with linchpins, it seems important not to misspell it, less there be a misconstrual.
But in truth, even people who spell it lynchpin don’t seem to consciously relate it to the mob hangings. I suppose they might, if asked about it, speculate that the thing it names was invented by someone named Lynch. But it wasn’t.
In fact, no one knows who invented the linchpin, because it’s been around since time immemorial – pretty much as long as there have been wheels mounted on axles. When you mount a wheel on an axle, you need to hold it in place so it doesn’t come off. And for that, people historically used what in Proto-Germanic was called *lunaz (the asterisk means we’ve reconstructed it from historical evidence), and in Old English was called lynis, and then in Middle English became lynce or lince: a pin inserted through the axle on the outside of the wheel. By Early Modern English, its spelling had settled on linch (and it’s safe to say that modern people who spell it with a y are unaware of its etymology), but by that time, it had come to be called a linchpin.
Which, given that linch refers to the pin, seems sort of like the number in PIN number or the tea (or chai) in chai tea or the free in free gift. But perhaps it’s more like the berry in cranberry: we could just call the thing a cran because there’s no other cran thing (leaving aside juice blends like cranapple), but somehow we have decided that we want to specify cranberry, just like you’ll sometimes see tuna fish – as though if we didn’t name the kind of thing it is, it would come off its axle and roll loose through the language. So we add the berry in cranberry and the pin in linchpin for a kind of security.
In fact, for linchpin there is a case to be made for the clarification: the meaning of lynis and lynce and linch had, it appears, spread so that it could also refer to the whole axle. It’s like how originally tuxedo referred specifically to a kind of jacket without tails (named after the place it originated), and then the sense spread to the whole suit that included the jacket, and now the jacket itself is called a tuxedo jacket. So why not pin it down with the added specification? Meaning that the ostensibly redundant addition is the linchpin of the word.
And that should hold it – at least until such time as the figurative use becomes the primary one and any literal use is taken as a reference to the figurative sense, at which time we might yet hear “and this is the linchpin pin.” Or we might not – after all, wheels are usually held on by more than a pin these days.
A gravedigger, a squid-jigger, and Mick Jagger were smuggling boomerangs and goggles in a dune buggy, juggling the boombox and jiggling and wiggling and snuggling as it squiggled on the dunes. Hah! What a boondoggle!
Wait, what was a boondoggle?
The little braided ring holding Mick’s scarf on, of course.
Those who know the word boondoggle almost certainly know it as a word for a wasteful project, a government make-work or junket – a way to hornswoggle the taxpayer. This got its start with an article on the front page of the New York Times on April 4, 1935, with the headlines “$3,187,000 RELIEF IS SPENT TO TEACH JOBLESS TO PLAY; $19,658,512 VOTED FOR APRIL | ‘BOON DOGGLES’ MADE | Aldermen Find These Are Gadgets—Hear of Eurythmic Dances.” The article explains:
The Board of Estimate voted an April relief appropriation of $19,658,512 yesterday, following disclosures by the Aldermanic committee investigating relief that $3,187,000 a year was being spent on providing dancing lessons and other recreation for the unemployed.
In the course of the day the Aldermen learned that the making of “boon doggles” was being taught to relief recipients. “Boon doggles” is a colloquial term meaning gadgets. Eurythmic dancing was covered in another work project, and there was a staff at work teaching the unemployed hobbies, the testimony disclosed. . . . Lloyd Paul Stryker, counsel for the committee, characterized the research projects in one word—“bunk.”
Stryker, as it happens, was a well-known lawyer, and one who cut quite a figure. He seems to have been especially important in the spread of boondoggle for the “wasteful project” use. (Eurythmic dancing, by the way, is a kind of expressive movement invented by Rudolf Steiner in 1911; the 1980s musical duo named themselves after it.) Further down in the article, we read a bit more information on the subject given by the mayor of New York City at the time:
Commenting yesterday on the Aldermanic investigation headed by Mr. Deutsch, Mayor La Guardia said:
“Educated persons and college graduates must eat, and when these projects were established by the Federal Government, there was a real crisis, particularly among the college groups and so-called white collar classes. Many things were done to give these people work, and it is quite possible that people do not understand some of these projects set up to give college people relief.
“If any one responsible will say that college people and white collar workers should not be continued on relief, I will be ready to take that recommendation, if they will take the responsibility.
“If the law was changed to permit us to use white collar workers on necessary city work, we would be glad to use them. But the law prevents this. I see nothing to ridicule in giving relief to people who need it. College graduates are going to get the same consideration as others in need of employment.”
Well. It’s always the way: what government does to benefit one set of citizens will (rightly or wrongly) appear wasteful to at least some of those whom it does not directly benefit. I won’t go into the further details of the social circumstances and obvious class distinctions evinced in the article, but I do need to correct one misapprehension: “boon doggles” (boondoggles, as we spell them most typically) are not gadgets. They are braided lanyards and similar items braided of leather or fabric. As the New York Herald Tribune noted about a visit of the Prince of Wales in 1929 (six years earlier),
The Prince also wore around his scout hat a “boondoggle,” which is a bright leather braided lanyard worn much in the manner of the hat cord used by the United States Army.
Thanks to Michael Quinion, I learn of a mention in the British magazine Punch a week and a half later, where it says that boondoggle is
a word to conjure with, to roll around the tongue; an expressive word to set the fancy moving in strange and comforting channels; and it rhymes with “goggle,” “boggle,” and “woggle,” three of the most lighthearted words in the English language.
The word was originally coined out of thin air – but obviously on the basis of what sounded good to an English speaker – by one Robert H. Link. He at first used it to refer to something else (I don’t know what) but, as he was an Eagle Scout, he put it to use to refer to the braided lanyards and braided leather neckerchief slides and similar things that the scouts had. It was a word he made up for fun, and it has been a boon to many – the mind boggles.
Whereas what we more commonly call boondoggles now aren’t necessarily made up for fun – more often for profit. And they are less boon and more dog. They are most often wastefully expensive projects that add little to no value or are inferior to alternatives. It could be destroying a public good such as a park to put in a large, outrageously overpriced, comically badly designed, and quite inappropriately sited private enterprise that has no hope of succeeding, just because of some side benefit for the politicians pushing it through. It could be building a badly designed airport that takes far too long to put in and doesn’t function well – there are a few that are seen that way, although, I note, not the one named after Mayor La Guardia. It could be some other construction project or similar make-work that drains money needlessly into the pockets of a select few.
All of these cases have two things in common, though: unlike the case cited in the 1935 New York Times, the people they benefit the most are people who already have plenty of money and means; and the people involved are no boy scouts.
Here’s the video of my presentation at the Editors Canada conference in Toronto, June 17, 2023. This is an updated version of the presentation of the same name I gave at the ACES conference in San Antonio in 2022.
It’s June, the month commonly seen as most conducive to nuptials. (Also to nuptuals, but that’s just because so many of us are used to words like conceptual and actual that nuptial just seems like it’s too easy and must really be nuptual. It’s not.) Nuptials, as we know, is used as just a fancy way of saying weddings (or wedding – we seldom see nuptial as a singular noun, and not often as an adjective, either, though it has been an adjective longer than it’s been a noun). But, historically, it’s more one-sided than that.
As you probably know, weddings in our culture (as in many) have long been focused more on the bride than on the groom. Prospective brides will hear “It’s your day!” and “It’s the best day of your life!” and the wedding dress is typically a huge production. Prospective grooms will not hear all of the same things, and are expected to wear some variation on a standard suit – don’t try to pull attention. Because historically it just hasn’t been the same life-altering thing for the man. The woman was getting her whole new name, identity, and career! The man was “taking a wife.” There’s still some of this, though it has diminished a little with widespread acknowledgment that women are equal human beings and deserve to be treated as such. But back in Roman times, where this word comes from, well…
Well, it’s like this. If I pull my Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary off the shelf and look up “marryvt” I get the following: “(of a priest) conubio iungo; (as the man) uxorem duco; (as the woman) viro nubo.” So while in English I can say “I wed Aina, Aina wed me, and Reverend Taul wed us” or “I married Aina, Aina married me, and Reverend Taul married us,” in Latin there are three different verbs.
What the priest does is conubio iungo, which has the verb iungo (ancestor of English join) and the noun conubio (nominative conubium, often but less correctly seen as connubium), which is from con ‘with’ plus nubium, which is from nubo plus -ium.
That nubo is the same verb that the woman uses, and it means “I wed” – but a man would not use that verb, and not just because viro nubo means ‘I wed a man’ (a thing that men were not supposed to do in Rome). The Latin noun conubium for ‘wedding’ is – like, say, adoption or victory – based on what one side of the action does. And the same goes for nuptial(s), which comes from Latin nuptialis ‘pertaining to marriage’, which is from nuptiæ ‘wedding’ (note that it’s a plural, like nuptials), which is from nupta ‘married’ or ‘married woman’, which is the past participle of nubo. It’s the occasion of her wedding. The other person getting married is there by implication, but mentioned? Nope.
Nubo also shows up in another word we know: nubile. You may know that as an adjective for an attractive young woman. Its Latin source, nubilis, literally means ‘marriageable’ – referring to a woman, not a man. You can see how it maps out the life course for a woman: “that young lady is very attractive, which I will express by saying she is fit for marrying.” Ripe like a peach, and ready for plucking, so to speak. And if she wanted other things? Pshaw.
And what does the man’s version mean, uxorem duco? Well, uxorem is the accusative case of uxor, which means ‘wife’ (you may know the adjective uxorious, meaning ‘very – perhaps too – devoted to one’s wife’; note that we lack a corresponding adjective in the other direction, because it has never been thought of as a fault for a woman to be extremely devoted to her husband). And duco? It has many meanings and many descendants – yes, including duke, but also deduct, conducive, production, ductile, and so many more. Its most basic meaning it ‘lead’ or ‘take’. From which you may deduce that uxorem duco translates pretty much exactly to I take a wife.
People are strongly divided over whether it’s delicious or nasty.
They’re also divided over how to pronounce it.
Also, does it have anything to do with Jennifer Aniston?
Let’s start with a key thing: there’s more than one kind of anise. And there are things that are sometimes called anise that really aren’t: fennel, for one, and also star anise, which is not actually related, though it substitutes very nicely and cost-effectively for the original anise. And there are also things that anise tastes like, or that taste like anise, that aren’t anise and aren’t called anise – specifically, licorice (or liquorice, if you prefer). The connection between all of these is cloudy… but only if you mix it with water.
Oh, and there’s also dill. Dill comes into this, just sort of as a little inset. But that’s mainly because of the inscrutability of ancient Egyptians.
Let’s start with the flavour. All of the things that taste like anise, or like licorice, or like fennel, contain the molecule anethole, which really looks like an unpleasant kind of thing to call a chemist, doesn’t it? Anethole is also closely related to estragole, a molecule that gives flavour to tarragon and basil. Anethole is (or plants containing it are) very popular, as we all know, not just for its characteristic and sweet flavour but also because it’s an aid to digestion (and it reduces flatulence too, and not just by overpowering the smell). This made it popular for desserts and after-dinner drinks.
It also has a party trick. Anethole is highly soluble in ethanol (say “anethole in ethanol” five times… after drinking some ouzo or absinthe), but is only slightly soluble in water, so if you dilute a liquor that’s flavoured with it, it goes from clear to cloudy. Which is really cool to observe, and I remember observing it quite a few times one evening in my youth. (I also remember how wretched I felt the next day.) This is called the ouzo effect, but it also affects mastika, sambuca, absinthe, anisette, pastis, anis de chinchón, anís, anísado, Herbs de Majorca, rakı, arak, aguardiente, and Xtabentún. Oh, and I think – I think – Herbsaint.
And if you hate the taste of anise, you’re not going to like any of those – although the amount in, say, a Sazerac is so subtle you probably won’t pick it out. But the funny thing is, you can hate the taste of anethole and yet love the taste of dill.
That’s funny just because anethole comes from the Greek word for ‘dill’.
Well. I’m being a bit puckish here. It’s more accurate to say that there has been some historical confusion between anise and dill. It’s not because they taste alike (goodness gracious, they truly do not), but it may be because the plants look similar (they do). The thing is just that there was this Egyptian plant called jnst, pronounced “inset” (see inset for hieroglyphics, courtesy of Wiktionary).
We’re not completely sure what it was, but it was an edible, possibly medicinal, plant with seeds – it could have been anise or dill; Egyptians had both. Anyway, the name made its way into Greek variously, notably as ἄνισον (ánison) and ἄνηθον (ánēthon). This resulted in the Latin words anethum, meaning both ‘anise’ and ‘dill’, and anisum, meaning just ‘anise’. Anethum developed over time into French aneth, Italian aneto, Portuguese aneto and endro, Spanish aneto and eneldo, and obsolete English anet, all meaning ‘dill’ (dill is from an old Germanic root that comes from an ultimately unknown source). And anisum developed into various versions of anis in quite a few languages, mostly spelled anis or anís.
OK, so how do you say anise? I’m not asking “how is it supposed to be said” – I’m about to tell you that. I’m asking how you say it.
Because the thing is, there are actually several ways that are all legitimate, established, accepted: “a knee’s,” “a niss,” “a niece,” “annus,” and “anniss.” Most people I know seem to prefer “a niece.” I, however, grew up saying “anniss,” like the first two syllables of Aniston.
Yes, I know, English got it from the French, so if you want to be true to that origin, you should say it “a niece.” But if we’re going to play that game, I’m going to start calling it “inset,” from the original origin, OK? So lay off. Anyway, I have one more inset to turn to, specifically that actress, Jennifer.
Now, if you know English onomastics, you’ll recognize -ton as toponymic: the family is named after a place, the town (or anyway farmstead) belonging to Anis – well, really, belonging to Ann, probably, and not likely anything to do with anise. But there’s a Greek derivation that’s buried but that we’ll resurrect.
As it happens, Greek for ‘resurrection’ is ἀνάστασις (anastasis). That gave rise to the name Ἀναστάσιος (Anastásios). And that in turn was made into the family name Αναστασάκης, typically rendered in the Latin alphabet as Anastassakis. One person who had that name was Yannis Anastassakis, who was an actor. He was noted for playing Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives – but he did that under the Americanized name his father gave him when he was two: John Aniston. (It was a name that already existed, but usually spelled as Anniston; there are towns of that name in the US.) He, of course, passed that family name on to his daughter, Jennifer.
Sorry for clouding this with that side shot. I know that Jennifer Aniston is not to everyone’s taste. But neither is anise. So there. Take it as a digestif.
For better or verse, I’ll come clean: To Limerick I’ve never been. Nonetheless, I’ll take time For eponymous rhyme, Since I favour the smart (and obscene).
I’m not sure it’s such a great pity To miss the place that named the ditty— One that Angela’s Ashes Left in tatters and slashes And more recently’s been called “Stab City.”
Still, the town at the mouth of the Shannon Has many a cultural fan in: Stage, music, and art And words all play their part— But the link to the rhyme is not canon.
The birth of the form of the rhyme Is lost in the deep mists of time, But this much we know: Two centuries ago Some London wag published this crime:1
“There was a sick man of Tobago, Liv’d long on rice-gruel and sago; But at last, to his bliss, The physician said this— ‘To a roast leg of mutton you may go.’”
Its catchy quick form was a lock For light verse made to bruise, jape, or mock, And you may with a smile Recognize the same style In “Hickory Dickory Dock.”2
Over time this verse form got around; The American first that we’ve found Was some twenty and four3 Dating to Civil War— Here is one, just to show you the sound:
“There once was a Copperhead snake tried to Bite Uncle Sam by mistake; But the Seven League Boot on old Uncle Sam’s foot Soon crushed this pestiferous snake.”
Does that last rhyme make you say “Oh dear, It’s the same word”? Well, friend, have no fear: It was done just that way For nonsense and for play By the great English poet, Ed Lear:4
“There was an Old Man of Kilkenny, Who never had more than a penny; He spent all that money In onions and honey, That wayward Old Man of Kilkenny.”
Does that verse make you dizzy or sick? Well, just wait, for it has one more trick: Neither wag, Lear, nor Yankee Named this verse hanky-panky Anything, let alone “Limerick.”
The binding of place name to rhymes Has trickled by nickels and dimes; Our first attestation Of association Comes from Canada’s Maritimes:
The St. John (in Nouveau Brunswick) Daily News5 filler wit did the trick For better or worse With this sad little verse, Note, “Tune, wont you come to Limerick”:
“There was a young rustic named Mallory, who drew but a very small salary. When he went to the show, his purse made him go to a seat in the uppermost gallery.”
So a tune is the source of the title? Play the tune6 and forestall your requital: It’s a friggin’ slip jig, So the rhythm’s too big, So you may yet restrain your excital.
However, to go for the win, Let “The Limerick Shanty”7 begin: Verse stretches to tune With additional boon Of a chorus for all to join in.
And quickly you will realize It’s a game made to extemporize; Thus did Oxford scholars Let steam out their collars With verses more witty than wise.8
And if you’re still yearning to see How that slip jig match-up came to be, Well, as (clutching his head) Von Sacher-Masoch said Of his Venus in Furs, “Ah, beats me.”
But I will say that I have a hunch— And I don’t think I’m just out to lunch— Why the waggish young blokes Used it for dirty jokes: It’s the one, two—wait for it—three punch.
If you want to tell jokes that don’t suck, It’s not just a matter of luck: It requires exploitation Of anticipation, Without which they won’t give a darn.
1 The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, published in 1821, quoted in “History of the Limerick,” by George N. Belknap, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 75, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1981), pp. 1–32. If you want about as much scholarship on the topic as you can stand, that is the article for you. If you lack the patience for 32 pages, you may yet enjoy “There Once Was a Poem Called a Limerick,” by Matthew Wills, on JSTOR Daily, April 12, 2021.
2 First published in 1744.
3Ye Book of Copperheads, published in Philadelphia in 1863, inveighing against “Copperhead Democrats,” who favoured peace with the South and opposed abolition of slavery. (If you click the link, be forewarned: some of the rhymes contain racial epithets.)
7 “The Limerick Shanty,” which uses the tune of “Won’t You Come to Limerick” plus a fitting of words with a bit of pause, with a set chorus involving elephants (for some reason) and each verse giving a chance to extemporize. The linked example has verses that, though they are not vulgar, are not all polite.
Sesquiotica 