mosey

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

One thing that gets on my nerves is when I really gotta mosey somewhere and there are people in my way on the sidewalk or the stairs or the escalator and they’re just, you know, moseying.

OK, did both of those uses of mosey make sense to you? The one meaning get moving, motor, vamoose, and the other meaning go slowly, meander, no hurry? One like a rolling stone, and the other gathering moss? I’m sure I’ve encountered both of them – well, I know I have, because I’ve encountered both of them in every dictionary I’ve looked up mosey in, but I think I’ve also encountered both in real life – but my impression is that one of them, the one I lean to automatically, is the more common expected sense. And that impression has been reinforced by an informal poll I did on Bluesky, where respondents unanimously agreed… not so much that it means one as that anyway it doesn’t mean the other.

I asked the following:

In your own usage, if you say you are (or were, or will be) moseying, are you meaning:

1) going quickly

2) going slowly

3) either, depending on context

4) nothing so specific as all that

5) some other thing (specify)

I got 36 responses. Of those, 33 agreed that “going slowly” was either the definition or at least part of the definition. The other three, along with some of the 33 who went with “going slowly,” specified that the important detail was aimlessness, nonchalance, casualness, lack of urgency, wandering, meandering, that manner of thing. No one went with “going quickly,” although one allowed that it could be used ironically with that sense, and another allowed some contextual flexibility.

So, naturally, I’m about to tell you that “go quickly, make haste, get a move on” is the older sense. Because of course. You saw it coming, didn’t you?

The word mosey first appeared in the US in the early 1800s, with the first known published instance in 1829. The earliest senses specify not so much the speed as the motivation: fleeing, decamping, escaping, getting out of the way. The implication is also typically doing so on foot. But there are instances where the sense of speed is inescapable, such as “At last the spell were broke, and I moseyed home at an orful rate” from 1859 (thanks to Green’s Dictionary of Slang for that). So, in short, we could say that the first sense of mosey is as a synonym of vamoose.

Well, vamoose first appeared as such about a decade after mosey did, so you could say as readily that vamoose was a synonym for mosey. But you know what I mean. But say… vamoose comes from Spanish vamos, ‘let’s go’. Could mosey have come from that, too?

Well, it could have. But we’re not a hundred percent sure. It could also come from an Algonquian word for ‘walk’. Or it could come from Mosey as a nickname for Moses, either in reference to the exodus led by the biblical Moses or to someone of that name in a popular song who had to flee creditors. We’re just not entirely sure. The word didn’t announce its arrival and origins. It just… moseyed in, real casual like.

But anyway, within a couple of decades, the sense of ‘go casually, wander, meander, amble aimlessly’ et cetera also moseyed in, often bringing along an adverb such as along or off or around. And, at leisure and at length, it prevailed. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get out the way any time soon.

Just like those people who manage to walk in the least hurried manner possible right down the middle of the stairs or sidewalk, vaguely trending slightly right and left but never giving a clear way to get by so you can make it to the walk light or the train that’s arriving in the subway station. Come on, people! This ain’t a mo-seum!

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avuncular

Posted on September 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

Hey, how are ya? Doing great? I found out something interesting you might like. A couple of things, in fact. The first thing is, it turns out that although I have three nephews and two nieces, I can’t be literally, etymologically, avuncular to all of them. Figuratively, sure, and that’s fine, of course. But that leads to the second thing: there are more English words than you might think that come from Latin kinship terms. And if you start trying to be literal about them all, you’re going to make trouble for yourself. It’s your life, of course! But just in case you wanted to know.

Isn’t it nice how uncles are assumed to be friendly and caring in a down-home, benevolent kind of way? That’s what we mean with the term avuncular, which, along with broadly meaning ‘kind, benevolent, tolerant (especially in the manner of an older person to a younger one)’, literally means ‘of, relating to, or like an uncle’. Except the Latin original, avunculus – from avus ‘grandfather’ and the diminutive suffix -unculus – refers only to the maternal uncle. You know, the mother’s brother – or, yes, the mother’s sister’s husband. So since my wife’s sister has two kids, I am literally avuncular to them. My brother’s three kids, though? Nope, sorry. Not etymologically literally, anyway.

But of course sticking to the Latin meaning of these terms would be atavistic. It would be not grandfathering the senses but great-great-great-grandfathering them – because, yes, atavistic relates to atavus, which means ‘great-great-great-grandfather’ – or just ‘ancestor’. That’s from the same avus (‘grandfather’) plus at-, which is a form of ad-, meaning ‘to’, ‘toward’, and a whole bunch of other things.

But let’s take a look at some of the other terms we have in English that come from Latin terms for family members. There are the literal ones like maternal (from mater, ‘mother’), paternal (from pater, ‘father’), and uxorial (from uxor, ‘wife’, which also gives us uxorious, ‘highly devoted to one’s wife’). There are the ones that have both literal and figurative uses, like fraternal (frater, ‘brother’), sororal (soror, ‘sister’; sorority is the most common English descendant), and novercal (noverca, ‘stepmother’ – and in the figurative use of the term, the stepmotherliness is generally wicked). There’s also nepotism, from nepos, which can mean ‘nephew’, ‘niece’, ‘grandson’, or ‘granddaughter’ – our use of nepotism to refer to hiring family members (especially direct offspring) comes from when the popes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance would appoint their nephews as cardinals.

We also have some other less common ones. There’s the term the levirate, which I first encountered in an anthropology book where the author, in categorizing various cultures, divided them between those that “practice the levirate” and those that don’t, but did not even once explain what “the levirate” was. Well, it comes from Latin levir ‘husband’s brother’ and refers to the practice of requiring a woman whose husband has died to marry her husband’s brother. (“Oh, that. Of course!”) 

There’s no corresponding term for marrying a deceased wife’s sister, presumably because that’s not a widespread cultural practice, but in any case Latin somehow didn’t even have a special term for that relation; a wife’s sister is just soror uxoris. A wife’s brother is similarly frater uxoris. But oh, by the way, a husband’s sister is glos; if we had an adjective based on that, it would probably be gloral, but we don’t. (If your husband’s sister is named Gloria, that would be close, though not actually related – except by marriage, of course.)

We also don’t have a word socral from socrus ‘mother-in-law’ and socer ‘father-in-law’, which really seems a missed opportunity. We do have a word materteral, ‘of or like an aunt’, the counterpart to avuncular – not broadly used, but it can mean ‘auntyish’. But, like avuncular, it refers only to the mother’s sister (matertera is just mater plus a contrastive suffix). The father’s sister is amita, apparently formed as a diminutive of ama, which basically translates as ‘mommy’. No word on – or for – what your father’s sister is supposed to be like; amital is not a thing, though its homophone amytal is a synonym for amobarbital and is seen in sodium amytal, the sedative that is supposedly “truth serum”… so who knows, maybe your aunt on your father’s side is prone to telling you the plain truth.

Which brings us to your uncle on your father’s side. If I’m not an avunculus to my brother’s kids, what am I? I’m a patruus. As it happens, we don’t have an English word derived from that – such as patrual. But in Latin, the patruus stereotypically was indeed prone to telling the truth – and not in a kindly, avuncular way. Patrual, if it existed, would mean more like ‘severely reproving’ or ‘brutally critical’. As it happens, we do have a term in English for someone sort of like that (though maybe more blunt than actually mean): Dutch uncle.

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garnish

Posted on September 10, 2025 | Leave a comment

“You said you withheld the garnish for safety reasons,” Maury’s friend Brandur said. “I’m sure it wasn’t withheld from your paycheque, though.” He raised one eyebrow to indicate that he had just made a conscious witticism. “You were not garnished.”

“Indeed,” said Maury, “the cocktail would have been the garnishee. But the garnish would have been an addition rather than a subtraction. However, that’s true in any case, because garnishing a paycheque is a subtract that comes only after an add.”

“Add as in addition or ad as in advertisement?” Brandur said.

“Yes,” Maury said.

There was a pause. Maury sipped his Berlin cocktail and did not immediately explain. Brandur finished his own cocktail and said, “Well, I am going to serve the next cocktail, and I have brought a garnish for it too.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a vacuum bottle, set it on the table, and then pulled out a plastic container, the contents of which were only dimly visible, and set it down too. “But first you have to finish your cocktails” – he looked at both of us – “and explain to me garnish in more detail.”

Maury tossed back the last half ounce of his and set the glass down. “Garnish, as in deduct money from wages to satisfy a creditor, is shortened from garnishee. The verb garnishee is formed from the noun garnishee. The noun means ‘one who is garnished’.”

Brandur was about to exclaim something I probably wouldn’t want to transcribe here, but Maury continued: “It’s not circular because that garnished means ‘served notice’ – that is to say, ‘warned’. Specifically, warned – as for instance with a notice, or advertisement – that they are to have money deducted to satisfy a debt. So the garnish is added as an ad to indicate that there will be subtraction.”

“Ah, I see,” said Brandur. “I should have made the deduction. But such an addition seems more than decorative.”

I set down my empty glass. “Indeed,” I said, “the decorative sense is a latecomer. The word comes from guarnir, the same Old French source as for our word warn. It meant ‘provide’ or ‘furnish’ but also ‘defend’ or ‘warn’. Our word garnish came to mean ‘fortify’, or ‘equip’, and then to mean ‘clothe’, and from that ‘accessorize’ – but also, more pertinently, it could mean ‘serve dishes of food’ and then ‘decorate dishes of food’.”

“And guarnir,” Maury said, “came from a conflation of two Old Frankish roots, one meaning ‘warn, protect, prepare’ and the other meaning ‘refuse, deny’. So it is bifurcated both forward and backward in time, in each direction splitting into one sense meaning something additive and one meaning something subtractive.”

“Well,” said Brandur, pouring a cold, clear liquid from his vacuum bottle into our glasses, “I have prepared this for you.” He opened the plastic container and pulled out three small metal forks; on each fork was an olive and a cube of something white. “Speaking of bifurcation.” He plunked a fork into each glass and gave each a little stir. Then he held up his glass and said “Skál.”

“Scowl?” Maury said (he doesn’t know any Icelandic). He picked up his glass and eyed it skeptically.

“No need to scowl,” Brandur said. “It’s mainly brennivín. Fittingly.” He took a hearty sip and said “Ahhh!” theatrically.

Maury sipped his and made a face like a cat that had just tasted lemon juice. After a moment to recover, he said, “And vermouth, apparently. And something… else.”

I stared at the white cube. “Is that…”

“Kæstur hákarl,” Brandur said, with an angelic smile. 

For those who don’t know, that’s an Icelandic specialty: rotten shark. Anthony Bourdain once called it “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” he’d ever had.

“Well, now, that is the perfect garnish,” I said. “It both adds to and subtracts from the drink. I take it as a warning… and I will have to refuse.” I set my glass back down and stepped away from the table.

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brandish, brandy

Posted on September 2, 2025 | 1 comment

Maury’s Icelandic friend Brandur is quite the firebrand. As I entered Domus Logogustationis, he was brandishing a book and a bottle of Bas-Armagnac and shouting – in a style perhaps more of Russell Brand than of Marlon Brando – “What. Is. This. Word. Brandywine!”

I approached Maury and leaned close. “Is he on a bender?”

“No,” Maury said. “In fact, we were just about to have the first cocktail of the evening. A Berlin.”

“Ah, yes, a splendid beverage, though best had second.”

“We’re out of vermouth,” Maury said.

Brandur slapped down the book, which was a cocktail manual. “Look!” It listed the ingredients for a Berlin as “1 part Becherovka, 4 parts brandywine.”

“How very quaint,” I said.

“Do they think they’re Tolkien?!” Brandur exclaimed.

“Perhaps in a token way,” I said.

“I just want to know,” Brandur said, “is brandywine redundant, or is it a contradiction in terms? After all, brandy is not wine. But it’s made from wine.”

“It’s just the long form,” I said. “The short brandy was clipped from it, or else it was clipped and altered from the Dutch source, brandewijn, of which brandywine is a somewhat anglicized version.”

“At least it’s made from wine,” Maury chipped in. “Unlike that caraway-flavoured vodka with which you Icelanders get carried away.”

“Brennivín!” Brandur said.

“Same word,” I said. “In origin. Imported into Iceland, and localized; the liquor it names was not so easy to import, and impossible to make with domestic crops, and so the spirits were also localized. But, yes, brandewijn means ‘burnt wine’ or, more broadly, ‘cooked wine’.”

“And as brandywine and brennivín have the same origin,” Maury said, “so too does Brandur.”

“What!” said Brandur, brandishing the book. “My fine name refers to a burning log, or a sword!”

“Yes,” I said, “all from the same root. The Proto-Germanic *brinnaną, meaning ‘burn’ or ‘be on fire’, gave us English burn and its assorted Germanic cognates, such as German brennen, as well as brand, which started as a word for a burning log or piece of wood – a firebrand – and came to name a hot piece of metal, such as is used for branding animals and barrels of spirits, and also a sword, flaming or otherwise. And it is from that weapon sense that the French verb brandir came, meaning ‘flourish a weapon’, and from that – which is conjugated nous brandissons, vous brandissez, et cetera – came English brandish.” I nodded to the book, which he was still wielding at head level.

“And now,” Maury said, “let us lift our spirits another way, by pouring some of this brown river into this mixing vessel—” He began to free-pour the Armagnac into a cut-glass pitcher.

Brandur wagged a finger. “Ah, ha, I know what you did there. Brandywine, Brown River.” He turned to me. “In The Lord of the Rings, the Brandywine River’s name is a reanalysis of baran duin, ‘brown river’.”

“Or, in the real world,” I said, “baran duin was backformed by Tolkien, given that he had already given the river the name Brandywine and needed to come up with an in-world derivation.”

As Brandur and I chatted, Maury continued the mixing: he added an appropriate amount of Becherovka (Czech bitters, if you don’t know) and some ice, and stirred, and then strained it into three glasses. “Friends, the Berlin,” he said.

“So called because of the Brandenburg Gate?” Brandur said.

“That’s a rather clever connection,” I said. “Pity Brandenburg isn’t actually related to brandy.”

“It might be,” Maury said, raising a finger.

“Well, it might be,” I said, “but it might not. We’re not entirely sure. But that’s not why this cocktail is the Berlin. It’s so called for the same reason we ought not to be having it as our first drink.” I reached for the cocktail book, which Brandur had set face down open to the appropriate page, and showed him the epigraph on the recipe:

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. —Leonard Cohen

“I see,” said Brandur. “And does it matter what brand of brandy one uses?”

“Cognac, Armagnac, but nothing cheap, please,” said Maury. “That would be disappointing.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “where’s the garnish?”

“Withheld for safety reasons,” Maury said.

Brandur furrowed his brow and looked in the book. “Ah,” he said, and read aloud: “Orange zest, burnt.”

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quick

Posted on August 27, 2025 | 1 comment

I’m reading the autobiography of Geddy Lee, and so I’m listening to even more music by Rush than I usually do. And on Moving Pictures – the classic album that includes “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” and “YYZ” – there’s one song that always quickens my pulse, but especially in times of revived prejudice and reactionary fervor: “Witch Hunt.” The song opens with discordant strings and the dark sounds of a mob, which, I read in Wikipedia, “[Alex] Lifeson explained was recorded outside Le Studio on a cold December day, with the band and others shouting, warmed by a bottle of Scotch whisky.” (I’m not sure how hygienic that was.) The lyrics build to describe xenophobic book-burners, “Quick to judge, quick to anger / Slow to understand.”

Quick. They were quick, and their victims were dead. It cuts to the quick – but in more ways than you might think. In the paragraph you just read, there are (along with quick and quickens) six other words all etymologically related to quick: biography, revived, Wikipedia, Lifeson, whisky, and hygienic. And if I were to point out that Le Studio, in the Laurentians of Quebec, was like a zoo of internationally famous recording acts, that would add a seventh.

I’ll go through them one by one. Let’s start with the origins of quick, though. As you may know, or may have surmised from phrases such as the quick and the dead and cut to the quick, its original meaning was not ‘speedy’ but ‘alive, living, lively’ – and it is from the ‘lively’ sense that it extended through ‘active’ and ‘vigorous’ to ‘speedy’, a sense that first showed up in the 1300s and, by the end of the 1800s, was the dominant sense. But quick, its Latin-looking qu notwithstanding, was cwic in Old English, and that came via Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European *gʷeyh₃- ‘live’, which is the source of quite a lot of other words relating to life – not all of which have the same kind of kissing mouth gesture as [kwɪk].

One of those words is Greek βῐ́ος (bíos) ‘life’, which appears in biography. Another is Latin vivus, ‘alive’, root of revived. Another is Greek ζῷον (zõion) ‘animal’, root of zoo (via zoological garden). Yet another Greek word from the same source is ὑγιής (hugiḗs) ‘healthy’, root of hygienic. And then there’s wiki, as in Wikipedia, which comes from Hawai‘ian wikiwiki, which is a borrowing and reduplication of English quick – a rather quicker etymology than the others.

And then there’s Lifeson, as in Alex Lifeson, the guitarist of Rush. But, ha ha, I’m pulling a fast one with this – you see, life is not etymologically related to quick. But Lifeson is his stage name; it’s a translation of his actual name, Živojinović, which in the original Serbian is written Живојиновић. A translation? Yes, the Serbian name means ‘son of life’, and ‘life’ in Serbian is живот, žìvot, which is indeed from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *gʷeyh₃-, via Proto-Slavic.

And then there’s whisky. It comes, clipped and modified, from Scots Gaelic uisge-beatha, ‘water of life’. It’s a translation of Latin aqua vitæ, and you will know that vitæ is related. But so is uisge-beatha. But while, as Ogden Nash wrote, candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, it’s not the whisky (uisge) part that’s related to quick, sound resemblance notwithstanding. No, I’ve pulled another fast one: uisge means ‘water’; beatha means ‘life’, and that is the word that is related – you may notice (if you squint) the resemblance of Proto-Celtic *biwos to the Greek bíos.

And so we see how one root has quickened many modern words (and there are still more in other languages), in some cases sneaking away after a brief kiss. Words are the stuff of life, and their ways are many and mysterious.

Oh, but did you notice one more word up there that’s related in sense but not etymologically related? Take a quick look and see if you can spot it.

It’s Rush.

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obsequious, bosque

Posted on August 20, 2025 | 3 comments

You know what obsequious means, I’m sure. You’re far too intelligent, well-educated, literate, and lexically endowed not to. But if I were to venture a definition in my prolix, fatuous way, I might say that it means something like ‘obvious sucking up’, like a weak, squeaky blob, a queasy wuss, fawning, sycophantic. 

Or I could just say, anagrammatically, that it is the way of “IOU bosques.”

No, of course obsequious and IOU bosques are not etymologically or, per se, semantically related; you’re far too clever for me to put one over on you like that. But allow me to explain, if your patience will tolerate me for so long.

Obsequious is transparently Latin; it comes, following a course of derivation, from the verb obsequor, ‘I comply, I yield, I gratify, I oblige, I submit’, et cetera. That is in turn formed from ob- ‘toward, against’, as obvious, object, and so on, and sequor ‘I follow, I pursue, I comply’. You could say it means ‘I obviously follow your will’. The word obsequious has been in the English language since the 1400s; at first it just meant ‘compliant, dutiful’, but by the time Shakespeare used it it tended to imply extremely or ostentatiously so. There is a related word, obsequies, that refers specifically to the obligations surrounding funerals, and obsequious has also been used (even by Shakespeare) to mean ‘dutifully observant of funerary rites’, but that is merely a side branch.

However, speaking of branches: in all this, bosque is very much in the woods, bush league, as it were. It has a classical connection – Latin boscus – but that came into Latin from Frankish, which came from Proto-Germanic, and so this word has various cognate cousins, such as English bush and bosk, French bois, and Dutch bos. But while the Spanish word bosque means, simply and broadly, ‘forest’, the English borrowing of it – said the Spanish way, which is like Canadian “bosk, eh” – has a narrower sense… sometimes as narrow as just a row or two of trees on either side of a river bank.

For that is what, in English, bosque means: a gallery forest that follows a river or stream (or lakeshore) on a riparian flood plain. Look at an aerial view of the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and El Paso and you will see 500 kilometres of winding bosque, following the river obsequiously, obviously seeking hydration. Like all obsequiousness, there is no great depth to the bosque; get away from the river and it becomes dry, arid, not lush with trees or bush. But, oh my, how the bosque flourishes and flatters as it follows the flow of the water. 

And so, likewise, should you choose to be obsequious to someone, you have decided that, for them, “IOU bosques.” You will treat it as their due for you to lavish lush love over them for what they can give you… though you may quietly cast shade where they can’t see.

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vain, vane, vein

Posted on August 8, 2025 | Leave a comment

Would you fain be a vane, swivelling with the wind, empty of intrinsic direction, with no sound sense? Nothing more than a conduit, like a vein for the weather? Such a vain existence it would be!

Vain? Do I mean self-centred? How could that be, for one without any independent identity? Do I mean that the efforts would be in vain? But what efforts?

No, I mean something in another vein. I mean the original sense of vain: ‘empty, devoid’, from Latin vanus (or vana or vanum), as in the verse from “O Fortuna,” which is set in the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana:

status malus
vana salus
semper dissolubilis

you are evil
devoid of safety
forever dissoluble

(The latter two lines could be translated more laconically as “not sound.”)

You may know this sense better in the famous line from Ecclesiastes, rendered in the King James Version as “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Latin – also well known – is “Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas.”

But is vanity really the right translation? They just used the English word that was descended from the Latin word, but the English word has shifted in sense, now usually focused specifically on material things and self-centred interests – the sort of thing decried by the preacher of Ecclesiastes, and by many a preacher since, as without intrinsic merit or durable virtue (though many modern preachers seem not to see worldly riches as empty, except inasmuch as they want to empty others’ accounts into their own). In the Latin of its time, vanitas was ‘emptiness, nothingness, falsehood, deception’. So “vanitas vanitatum” could be “emptiness of emptinesses” or “void of voids” or “fake of fakes.” Or, more idiomatically, in the words of the more modern New International Version, “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’” (The Living Bible, which calls itself a paraphrase, makes this “In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile.”)

But let me make a small digression, if I am able (I can if I may). The original verse from Ecclesiastes was not in Latin; it’s part of what Christians call the Old Testament, otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible. And the Hebrew word that vanitas translates is havel (הבל). 

Not as in Vaclav Havel, Czech president and author of such works as The Garden Party, a play in which a young man finds himself a position in the government Liquidation Office by speaking in empty clichés and at length loses his identity. No, that Havel comes from Latin Gallus, meaning ‘rooster’ – you know, like what you see raised on a weather vane. But the Hebrew havel means ‘vapour, breath’ or ‘air that remains after you exhale’ or, by extension, ‘nothing’. 

As it happens, Havel (הבל) is also the name that has come into English as Abel – you know, the second son of Adam and Eve, liquidated by his brother Cain in a fit of envy because God liked Abel’s sacrifice better: Cain grew vegetables, while Abel raised livestock. Cain’s victory was hollow – but on the other hand he had progeny and Abel was unable, having lost himself. (The relation of Abel’s name to the word meaning ‘nothing’ is subject to scholarly disagreements. According to different accounts, there may be something to it, or it may just be a coincidence of sound, signifying nothing.)

But any effort to connect all of that to which way the wind blows is in vain, not in vane. The weather vane, though it is devoid of its own direction, conveying only the sense of the air that passes by it, is not related to vain. Nor is it related to vein, which comes from Latin vena, meaning ‘blood vessel’ (which could also be an artery; the direction of flow was not specified in Latin as it is in English) and any of many things that similarly carried a flow, such as a watercourse or a vein of ore in a mine. No, though we would fain find sound meaning in coincidences of sound, these too signify nothing. Instead, vane comes from something that has itself changed direction over history: Old English fana.

This word has changed in two ways. The first change is sense: fana meant ‘cloth, banner, flag’; modern cognates such as German Fahne mean ‘flag’. But today, a vane is not flappy fabric at all; it is rigid metal, and its rigidity allows it to show more surely which way the wind is blowing. But speaking of which way the wind is blowing, consider the breath that has gained voice between Old English and now: the f in fana. 

Yes, the second change is sound. In the English of southern England, f in some contexts got a [v] sound, which we see, for example, in vixen, changed from f as in fox (you will notice the vowel also changed, for other reasons). This is also what happened between fana and vane. (It did not happen to fain, but that word – meaning ‘gladly’ or ‘glad’ – is unrelated; it came from Old English fægen.) 

Another thing that happened is that long a, which used to be like in father, shifted, along with the other long vowels of English, and now blows differently: there is no [a] at all in it now, only [eɪ]. And the other a in this word, which was short, lost its identity: it was phonetically emptied and is now not sound, and it is written with e, the usual letter for a vowel that is no longer there, serving only to show you which way the previous vowel blows.

Well, even if the other sounds have changed – not only in vane but also in vain (vana) and vein (vena), since Latin v was [w] or [u] – at least the n remains. Which is either suitable or ironic or both, as n is a well-known variable.

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calypso

Posted on August 1, 2025 | 1 comment

He came off the boat, onto an island, and he wandered far and long; at last he came to where there was refreshment, and a place to stop and stay. And he partook of the intoxicating beverages, and of the nourishment, and he was at ease. But at length he looked towards the water, and he longed for his wife, who was across it; but he could not leave, because of Calypso.

Homer’s Odyssey, book 5? Maybe. But my Wednesday, after work? Certainly.

How could that be? Was I in hiding, perhaps, from the crypto bros of the apocalypse? Or entrapped by a goddess, kept concealed for seven years, until at last I could step up?

Oh, I was there at the behest of a goddess, to be sure, but she was my wife, who was coming to meet me. I had made my own small odyssey – a six-kilometre walk from the other end of the island, rather than taking the ferry to the dock a hundred metres from my destination – but not all who wander are lost. The Calypso that had me get on the island and was keeping me there was a local calypso band called Shak Shak, performing in the evening at the Island Café (in its new quarters, after the old one was incinerated by a fire a year and a half ago)… and I had to arrive early and bide my time to stake a spot. Seven years? No, but a couple of hours. I was, it is true, served intoxicating beverages by a woman from a foreign land, but they were beers, I had ordered them and would pay for them, and the woman was the Venezuelan bartender.

Why go to such lengths for calypso? My friends, if you’re asking, you haven’t been where calypso is being played live. It really is a musical intoxicant, almost guaranteed to make you come on and dance:

Which is how it got its name. Well, its first name… but then there were wanderings. Calypso music, you see, is descended from kaiso music; both are from Trinidad, the southernmost Caribbean country, just off the shores of Venezuela. Kaiso comes from Ibibio and Efik phrases meaning ‘come on’ or ‘get on’, which are said as encouragement, sort of like “Bravo!” And, as far as we can tell, the word kaiso got so encouraged that it got on and wandered and grew until it became calypso.

Which, of course, was already known as the name of a goddess (specifically a nymph) who held Odysseus in thrall on her hidden island for seven years, until at length he began to pine for his homeland and his wife. The island of Calypso was named Ogygia, as opposed to the island of calypso music, Trinidad (or the island I was on for calypso, Ward’s Island, which is not actually its own island but part of Toronto Island).

And Calypso’s name did not mean ‘come on’ or ‘get on’. No, it came from Greek καλύπτω kalúptō ‘I cover, I conceal’ – because Calypso concealed: she hid Odysseus from everyone else for seven years. This word καλύπτω also has a mysterious resemblance – mysterious because it’s not clear how they’re related; they may have come from unrelated sources and over time gained greater phonetic resemblance because of their similar sense – to κρύπτω krúptō ‘I hide, I cover, I conceal’, the source of our modern crypto.

Well, perhaps in the fullness of time we will find out exactly how Calypso and crypto are related, and exactly how kaiso came to be calypso. At the end, we are told, all will be uncovered, revealed – the cover will be taken away: ἀποκάλυψις ápokálupsis ‘uncovering, revelation’, from ἀπό (apó, ‘away, back’) and καλύπτω. Which is, of course, the etymon of apocalypse… But a revelation doesn’t have to involve incineration; it can just be when the band comes on stage and begins to play.

Which Shak Shak did. And there was no cover – although a jug was passed around, and we put some cash into it. (They also had a tap machine for cards, but they weren’t taking crypto.)

At length, Calypso, in spite of her love for Odysseus, heeded the direction of the gods of her time and gave him the means to make a boat and cross the water home to his wife. And at length, my wife and I, in spite of our love for calypso, heeded the god of the time tables and made it to the boat, got on, and crossed the water home, away from the island and calypso. But we can always listen to calypso at home, even if it’s not quite the same as being there. Here’s a concert video of the Mighty Sparrow, one of the greats of calypso, who I saw in concert more than 30 years ago in Edmonton (not this concert, just to be clear):

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Pronunciation tip: French cuisine

Posted on July 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve done a pronunciation tip video, and it’s mainly been because I wanted to do this one but I was hoping to do some kind of stunt for it such as making coq au vin. Well, I made coq au vin less than a month ago, and I was too busy cooking to make a video. So never mind. Here, for those who want to know the French pronunciations, is how you say 65 food-related terms from French that show up in English: aigre-doux, aïoli, à la carte, à la minute, à l’orange, amuse-bouche, apéritif, au jus, baguette, bain-marie, béarnaise, béchamel, beurre manié, beurre noisette, bon appétit, bouillabaisse, bouillon, bouquet garni, brioche, brunoise, chiffonade, confit, coq au vin, cordon bleu, coulis, court bouillon, crème brûlée, crêpe, croissant, croustade, demi-glace, digestif, en croûte, entrecôte, fleur de sel, foie gras, fricassée, hors d’œuvre, julienne, lyonnaise, macaron, macédoine, Madeleine, mélange, mesclun, mirepoix, mise en place, moules marinières, pain d’épices, pain perdu, papillote, pâte à choux, pâtisserie, piperade, ratatouille, rouille, roux, salade niçoise, sauce bordelaise, sole meunière, soupe du jour, tournedos Rossini, velouté, vichyssoise, and vol-au-vent.

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caboose

Posted on July 22, 2025 | 2 comments

When you were a kid, did you always wave at a caboose when you saw one?

There are four possible answers:

  1. Of course!
  2. That was before my time.
  3. What’s a caboose?
  4. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? That would get me slapped!

Well, there is a fifth possible answer – “No” – but I think the only people who would say that would be ancient mariners. You see, though it’s now often used to mean, um, “booty,” caboose has gone on a long and interesting trip, starting in the same place you might find booty but perhaps on a higher deck. I mean that it started out as food storage, whereas now it’s, um… Let me put this another way: it was a place where you could really get cooking, whereas now it…

OK, let me be plain. A caboose, in the oldest sense we know of, was a shack built on a ship’s deck to house the stove and/or to store the food. It was used when there wasn’t a proper galley. The word is descended from Middle Dutch kombuys via French cambuse (and we’re not really sure where kombuys comes from; the etymons have the look of meaning ‘something-house’ but I’m not sure what the something would be. Also, although Portuguese comboio ‘train’ has a certain resemblance, it’s unrelated – though it is related to convoy). Other descendants of these words (e.g., modern Dutch kombuis, Swedish kabyss, Italian cambusa) still generally name a food storage place or a cookhouse. But in English, in particular in Canada and the US, the word got on a different train.

It’s not that other countries don’t have trains, of course. But in North America, the long freight trains that covered long distances needed a crew car at the back, partly so someone could hop off and reset a switch once the train had passed over it, partly to give a place to look over the train and make sure that everything was OK with it (no load shifting, no damage, no fires, no detachment), partly to give a place to do paperwork and to sleep and cook, and they decided to call the car – which was originally just a cabin on a flatbed – a caboose, after the shipboard thing it first resembled. (It’s not that nowhere else in the world had similar cars; they just didn’t look quite the same, and they weren’t called cabooses.)

Cabooses are cute, especially the ones with the little cupola on top. The cupola is there so a crew member can look over the train; some cabooses instead had bay windows on the sides, and some had both. But there’s something very Richard Scarry about a little head poking up in a little cab on the top of a little red car at the end of a train. If you’re a kid and you see one, of course you wave! And maybe the train whistles back at you (probably not, though; you’re at the end away from the whistle).

Nowadays, though, you should neither wave nor whistle, for the only caboose you are likely to see on the average day is the rear end not of a train but of a person. The transference of sense is obvious – from back end to back end – and the word has a certain fun sound to it, complete with boo like in booty. But the train that got it there has moved on now. Train cabeese (sorry, cabooses) were legally required up to the 1980s, but improvements in train technology – which included not only cameras and sensors but also suitable room for crew quarters up in the engine – obviated them, and the train companies’ fiscal desires led to crew reductions, and so cabooses were written out of the law. And that made an end of them. So to speak.

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