A Word Taster’s Companion: Sushi thief!

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 2 comments

Today: the tenth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Sushi thief!

Fricative. Say sushi thief!

Congratulations. You’ve just made all four voiceless fricatives we have in English.

What’s a fricative? It may sound like a name for some fried and sauced meat dish, but the resemblance ends at the hissing and sizzling sound. A fricative is a consonant made by tightly constricting the air stream at some point in the mouth. There are four places where we make fricatives in English, and three of them aren’t places where we make stops or nasals. Two of these places, in fact, involve the teeth, which we don’t use for any other kind of sound.

So: sushi thief. The consonants in this phrase are /s/, /ʃ/, /θ/, and /f/. An equivalent phrase is harder to make for the voiced ones, especially since the voiced partner of the one we normally write sh – /ʃ/ – is relatively new and uncommon in the English phonemic set. None of the voiced ones, in fact, were separate phonemes in Old English. They were all just variants (allophones) of the voiceless ones, just as the tongue tap is a variant of /t/ and /d/ between vowels. But that was then and this is now. Your four voiced fricatives show up in the beige visor, along with /b/ and /r/: /ð/, /ʒ/, /v/, and /z/.

So we can match the consonants we’ve looked at so far by place, voice, and manner:

Bilabials: voiceless stop /p/, voiced stop /b/, nasal /m/

Labiodentals: voiceless fricative /f/, voiced fricative /v/

Dentals (i.e., with tongue): vls fric /θ/, vd fric /ð/

Alveolars: vls stop /t/, vd stop /d/, tap /ɾ/, nasal /n/, vls fric /s/, vd fric /z/

Palatoalveolars (or alveopalatals or postalveolars – there’s a terminology fight ongoing over this): vls fric /ʃ/, vd fric /ʒ/

Velars: vls stop /k/, vd stop /g/, nasal /ŋ/

You will see there are some gaps. We have fricatives where we don’t have other sounds and vice versa. Why is that?

We match the labiodental fricatives to the bilabial stops and nasal, since the teeth are better at letting the air through. Some languages do have bilabial fricatives, but they’re so similar to the labiodental ones, you’ll have either one or the other.

Some languages have stops behind the teeth as well as on the alveolar ridge. We don’t. Many languages don’t have those dental fricatives. We do. So it goes. Not all places in the mouth are equally well suited to all manners of sound; the tips of your teeth don’t make for good stops. But languages can be quite capricious in the sets of sounds they use.

We used to have velar fricatives in English. German still has a voiceless one, as in ach. Some languages (Greek is one) have a voiced velar fricative. We used to as well. Why did they disappear? Probably under the influence of French, which was the language of the ruling class for a while in England and had a huge effect on our vocabulary and pronunciation. It may have taken away, but it also gave – distinct phonemes for the voiced fricatives. In the final reckoning of phonemes we came out ahead, and we didn’t lose our dentals.

Where else can we stick a fricative? You’d be surprised. Welsh has one in the same location as [l]. You can have them farther back than [k], too: back to the back of your throat, even down into it. Some classifications call /h/ a fricative too. It does produce sound in something of the same way, but not really through constriction. And /h/ doesn’t pattern with fricatives in English. For example, you can put a voiceless fricative before [t] at the end of a word – laughed, last, lashed, frothed – but you can’t put /h/ there. (In some languages, yes; in Old English, even, yes; but not in modern English.) What makes a phoneme what it is has a lot to do with how we use it, how we think of it, not just how we make it.

What do fricatives feel and sound like to say? Although they share the hissing sound, the voiceless ones easily divide into two pairs. The ones with the teeth are soft, whiffling like corduroys, but because of their location they tend to be associated with spitting and similar acts (and /f/ is forever associated with a well-known vulgarity, but that’s another level we have yet to get to). The ones by the alveolar ridge are louder, more strident (that’s even the linguistic term), and their carrying power – like steam escaping – has long lent to their use for attention-getting and denunciation: Sssssst! Sssshhhh!

As to the voiced ones, they have a common buzz that can tickle the tongue or lip, and they seem suggestive of motors and motion – or insects, or zippers. They’re soft but can be a bit racy, especially given the things we may encounter that sound like them.

But does it seem to you that there’s something missing in this set of sounds? Oh, quite a few things still. But one kind of sound we haven’t touched on yet is very similar to a fricative. It’s the consonant equivalent of a diphthong…

2 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

if and when

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 2 comments

Dear word sommelier: I have heard that “if and when” is an unnecessary phrase, and that “if” or “when” individually should be sufficient. I read somewhere that using it is a sign of insecurity in a writer, like taking two swords to a fight. But I still see it, and I have to admit I kind of like it in some places. Can you help me?

If is a common enough word. Very common, indeed. It’s a slender word, like the slip betwixt cup and lip, like the narrow chance of something happening, like the gap between train and platform, or between door and frame. It’s like a ligature of fi that has had a falling out or is dancing a reel. But unlike of, it has not experienced any sound changes; we do not say it “iv” or drop the consonant altogether. This is because it is not a preposition, a substitute for noun inflection, leading into a noun phrase; it is a conjunction, leading into a finite verb phrase, which is a weightier thing. It is small, but so much swings on it – between door and frame indeed: it is a hinge.

When is also a common enough word. It, too, expresses contingency, although it does not necessarily express doubt. It is a bit like the wind – partly because it sounds like “wind” and, if you say the wh the old formal way, it whistles hoarsely as an icy gust out of your mouth, but also partly because there will always be wind, it’s just a question of when: if not now, then soon enough.

Either one introduces a subordinate, and generally either one is sufficient, with a different shade in meaning:

If the rooster crows, get up.

When the rooster crows, get up.

If you make coffee, bring me some.

When you make coffee, bring me some.

But then there is this other phrase, if and when:

If and when the rooster crows, get up.

If and when you make coffee, bring me some.

The wind of when bangs the hinged door of if. Banging doors can be annoying. But sometimes they can also be effective.

There is a small argument to be made in its favour logically:

If the rooster crows, get up. (Does not specify that you must get up at that time, just that you must get up at some point.)

If you make coffee, bring me some. (Does not require you to bring me some right when you make it.)

When the rooster crows, get up. (May imply that you should get up at the time the rooster usually crows, even if it doesn’t this time.)

When you make coffee, bring me some. (May be taken as a general directive without implication that you will be making coffee at any particular point in time.)

If and when the rooster crows, get up. (There is some doubt as to whether the rooster will crow, but get up at the occasion, provided it occurs.)

If and when you make coffee, bring me some. (Your making coffee is not a given, but should you do so, bring me some at the time when you do make it.)

There’s no doubt, though, that the real value of the expression is not its logical quality but its emphatic quality and the implications it carries. It doubly specifies, and thus has the insistence and intensity of reiteration. It means there is some doubt as to the eventuality, and perhaps some impatience regarding it. Here are some possible actual paraphrases:

If and when the rooster crows, get up = That bird sure takes its time about crowing and sometimes I don’t think it even does, but make a point of getting out of bed when it finally does. If it doesn’t, well, whatever.

If and when you make coffee, bring me some = At such time as your royal frickin’ highness chooses to put the pot on, don’t forget to bring me a cup before it’s cold.

So you see it adds some extra huff and puff, not just through the f and wh but through the arms-akimbo attitude it expresses. Use it with care. Sometimes you need two swords, but more often you’ll just hurt yourself.

Those who want a bonus round can use the more emphatic and heavily specified expression when, as, and if. The three contingencies really nail it down, and a triad always packs a punch, in rhetoric as in jokes. It’s so strong it is more likely to come after the main clause rather than ahead of it.

It does have a logical justification; the addition of as means ‘do it in the same time span rather than simply starting at that time’. But what it really means is that there is a possibility the occasion will arise, and the act discussed is strongly and imperatively attached to the occasion. So:

Get up when, as, and if the rooster crows = Provided that dumb bird shoots off its beak, take its crowing as a signal to arise, and be on your feet by the time it’s done its racket.

I would not recommend telling someone to bring you coffee when, as, and if they make some, because you don’t really want them to bring it to you as they’re making it.

The real punch of this phrase, though, is captured in this quote from The Rainmaker, by N. Richard Nash, which is where I first encountered it:

She always wears this little red hat. And last night, Dumbo Hopkinson says to her: “Snookie, you gonna wear that little red hat all your life?” And she giggles and says: “Well, I hope not, Dumbo! I’m gonna give it to some handsome fella – when, as and if!”

In other words, only when, not just on the possibility; only as, not just on the promise (and also not any later); and only if, which means it might not happen at all… take that as a challenge.

So keep that in mind – when, as, and if you ever use it.

2 Comments

Posted in word sommelier, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

pingle

Posted on February 4, 2013 | 1 comment

The work of word country, the careful crop-tending, extracting the fruits of the fertile soil of language, is not all large-scale operations for production in the millions or myriads or even thousands. Off in little patches here and there, small enclosures, window gardens and dooryards and suburban corners and rural nooks, dedicated individuals cultivate heirloom words, lexemes odd and quaint – to our eyes – but bearing flavours that make the tongue tingle afresh, ways of seeing and saying and hearing that many a logophile pines for.

Consider this one here: she has a little plot in which she keeps alive, for her enjoyment and in the hopes of repropagation, a few quaint and curious fruits of the English tongue, now found – when at all – in places peripheral and rural and mainly in books that already have the dusty-honey smell of aging paper. Today she has just added a new word, chelp, to the plot, next to her cherished crop of pingle.

Pingle! Such a fantastic fruit! It has conflicting tastes, of tingly-scented pines and kindling in inglenooks and of pinguid piglets and processed potato chips (Pringles, to be precise) and perhaps a soft pickle. Is pingle one word? Two? Three? Four? Five? When you taste it on your tongue, do you know what its place in your menu will be? It is a noun – it is three nouns: one is a struggle; one is a small enclosed piece of land; one is a small, long-handled pan or pot – and it is a verb, no, two verbs: one, used by Scots, is for exerting, struggling, contending; the other, used by Englishmen, is for picking at one’s food. So has it ever been, if you ask a Scot.

What do you do when you have a crop of words that look the same but have such different senses? They cleave together with the form; would you cleave them apart? The source is uncertain and may be multiple, but the sound and letters are all the same; drop it one place and it carries one savour, drop it another and it carries another. And it has such a hearty feel on the tongue – the old-home crisp pop of aspirated /p/, a quick high front vowel, then it sticks softly in the back, hardens next, and rolls off the tip of the tongue in a liquid syllable.

Our gardener loves this taste. She faces the challenge of keeping the word alive: it is a struggle, an exertion, a contention with nature in her little gated patch. If it bears fruit, it may be handed over to a careful cook who will give it a delicate turn in a little long-handled pan and serve it to give a special relish to a plate of language, only hoping that the diner will not pick at it and leave half behind. Oh, to pingle this pingle of pingle in her pingle, that it may pass through the pingle and not be pingled!

Thank you to Kathleen Lynch, word gardener, for mentioning pingle yesterday.

1 Comment

Posted in Word Country, word tasting notes

Tagged ,

chelp

Posted on February 4, 2013 | 2 comments

Visual: This word chelp is a short word with two arms stuck up and one foot stuck down. It has a bump sticking out at either side and a crossed circle (e) in the middle. It has an interesting trend towards – or away from – symmetry. Of course, the first thing you’re likely to see when you look at it is help.

In the mouth: It seems to stay at the front of the mouth: the voiceless affricate on the tip of the tongue, the mid-front vowel, the tongue-tip liquid, and then the stop on the lips to finish it. But rewind to that liquid: if you’re like most native English speakers, your tongue is actually shaped like a banana, the tip up but the middle down and the back curved back up. Oh, and yes, by the way, that ch is pronounced the usual way. This is not “kelp” or “c-help.”

Etymology: Probably a blend of chirp and yelp, but the word is not common or important enough to provoke much research, it seems, and it’s what Oxford calls “dialect” (as if all varieties of a language, even the most esteemed, weren’t dialects – which they are).

Collocations: This word is a verb, but there are citations with your chelp and thy chelp. One thing nearly all the citations have in common: the act of chelping is attributed to another person, most often (among the small sample Oxford gives) the person being addressed. Wordsworth: “Hold your chelp!” D.H. Lawrence: “I’ll stand no more of your chelp.” Keith Waterhouse: “Don’t go chelping back at her like you chelp at me.”

Overtones: It’s not a high-toned word; it seems to be something you put in the mouth of a country character – perhaps one of the help. It has echoes of chill and kelp and chip and maybe jilt, and (reasonably enough) chirp and yelp, and faint hints of such as Chelthenham and jalopy and djellaba. And of course there’s help.

Semantics: Of birds, it means ‘chirp or squeak’. Of people, it means ‘chatter or speak out of turn’; the Collins Dictionary helpfully adds, “esp of women or children.” In other words someone some crotchety guy doesn’t want to listen to while he’s trying to talk at them. But in more modern times it would be a term you could use with anyone to whom you might speak rudely and impatiently. Perhaps such as crotchety guys who are talking at you.

Serve with: You’re most likely to use this in fiction, to put it in the mouth of some rural English sort, and probably not a well-mannered one. But you could always use it in some poetry or some evocative expository text – as long as you put it in a reasonable context. It has a decent onomatopoeia; actually, it sounds like a bird making a doglike sound or a dog making a birdlike sound. The thing to watch out for is just that it doesn’t get inadvertently corrected to help.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: The nose knows

Posted on February 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Today: the ninth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The nose knows

Nasal. In phonetics, nasal is also a manner, not a place. Yes, your nose is a place, but you don’t put your tongue in your nose to say nasal consonants. Nasal consonants are made in the same set of places as stops. The difference is that when you say a nasal, your nose is open – more exactly, the velum is lowered, allowing air to pass through the nose.

Try this: say “nnnnnn.” Now say “nnnnnnd.” What happened at the end there? Your velum raised. All of a sudden air couldn’t get out because the passage through your nose was blocked off. That’s the difference between a nasal consonant, which allows air to bypass the mouth through the nose, and an oral consonant – all consonants involve the mouth, of course, but in phonetics oral means not nasal.

And this is why nasals tend to become voiced stops when you have a congested nose. Say mind your manners with your nose pinched shut and you will sound like bide your badders. And pinching your nose shut produces the same effect as raising your velum. You could do that instead to say stops: say “ann” and pinch your nose at the end and you have “and.” But if you had to pinch your nose every time you said /b/, /d/, or /g/ – or /p/, /t/, or /k/ – it would be a problem.

So say pat, bad, man. Voiceless, voiced, nasal: /p/, /b/, /m/. One place, three manners.

Same with the tongue tip: tat, dad, nan.

Now say cat, gad, ngan.

What was that last one? Well, if you can say the voiceless and voiced stop at the back of the mouth, you can certainly say the nasal there. So /k/, /g/, /ŋ/. (I love that symbol, ŋ – it looks like an elephant, doesn’t it?) And no, there’s no [g] in it. We just write it ng because centuries ago we didn’t have a separate phoneme for that sound, [ŋ]; it was just what we did with [n] before [k] or [g] (it still is that too). And then we dropped the [g] in many places so that ng changed from [ŋg] to just [ŋ]. Yes, that’s right, when you say doing you have already dropped the [g], even if you say it “properly.” If you say it like doin’, you haven’t dropped the [g]; there is no [g] to drop any more. You’ve just moved the velar nasal forward to be an alveolar nasal. (And, by the way, doin’ was considered the correct way to say it for a long time, but it was changed back to “the way it’s spelled” in the 18th and 19th centuries.)

The reason we don’t start words with [ŋ] is that it was originally always before a [g] or [k], and it only came to be independent where we dropped the [g]. Some other languages allow it, but many Anglophones believe they can’t say it at the start of a word, so names like Ngaio (a Maori female name, best known from Ngaio Marsh, an author of detective fiction) and Nguyen (a very common Vietnamese family name) tend to be modified in English pronunciation.

Pity. Get a good handle on this sound. If you want to be a really good word taster, and taste the really good words, you have to be willing to make all the sounds your mouth is capable of making, in all the places your mouth is capable of making them, even in locations in words that you wouldn’t normally have them.

What do nasals feel like to say? Well, they’re singable, and they can have a warm and comforting nature. What do you say when you think of good food, for instance? Mmmmm. But they can also be used for hesitation, because they’re consonants you can hold on for a long time without getting to the point. It’s luck – or is it? – that no starts with a nasal, so we can say nnnnnnnnooo as we cagily consider a questionable option. And the velar [ŋ], held by itself, is as likely to express frustration or resistance, perhaps because it’s well suited to saying with teeth clenched. Say it expressively and observe the wide-mouth grimace you probably make… and you hands clenching into fists.

But hold [ŋ] at the end of a word and it has some of that [g] or [k] grip, but much softer. As with the stops, you’ll typically find [n] to feel the lightest, and [m] to feel the warmest. But as always… it varies.

Next: Sushi thief!

1 Comment

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , ,

fisticuffs

Posted on January 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

What is the softest sound in English? The one most like a very fluffy feather duvet?

To my ears it’s /f/. Yes, /h/ is in some ways softer, but that’s the softness of a breeze. I’d rather lie on a fluffy duvet than a soft breeze.

Now, what do you associate with being hit with the hand, open or clenched? Anything soft?

Well, yes, perhaps there’s a scuffle, a brushing and grasping of clothing before the bruising and bone-bopping. Two bodies engaged in a physical confrontation may come into close contact like letters in ligature, fi or ff. But the swinging fists, cuffing each other’s heads? Hard like a voiceless stop – a knuckle tap like a /t/, a solid knock like a /k/.

Perhaps the fists swing through the air with a rustling of fabric, and the person hit falls back with further friction. Perhaps a pugilistic confrontation really can sound like “fisticuffs.”

But does it have to? Well, of course not. Onomatopoeia is not the sole basis of language. And it just happens that the word we have for a closed hand, claviform, is fist, a word of Germanic origin that comes by way of the Old English strong feminine noun fyst. And one word we have for striking a blow with the hand is cuff – we tend to think of this as a backhand now, the sort of thing that might actually make a “cuff” type of sound – a word that appears to come from Germanic but may have an ultimate Hebraic source, the OED says coyly. (Note that it’s not cuff as in ‘sleeve collar’ – and fist-to-cuffs, which I have seen, is just not it.)

And so we do the sort of handiwork to which we are often wont: we take two words and, playing on assonances, make a compound analogous to another one – such as handiwork. Handy work? Fisty cuff. (Fisticuff was at some earlier times spelled fisty cuff.)

You don’t normally see or hear reference to just one fisticuff. Somehow such a lengthy and scuffling word is not quite right for a single bop to the brainbox, is it? Instead we get a five-dollar word for a fistfight: “It now and then happened that the literary gladiators came to actual fisticuffs.” (J.A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy.) There is something of the Victorian waistcoated bare-knuckle boxer in this: it has a formal or old-fashioned edge, or anyway a certain detached erudition. I can picture Snagglepuss saying it: “Heavens to Murgatroyd! Fisticuffs even!”

And it does, after all, have a sonic infrastructure of physical stuff, sticks and staffs and fists and some selected expletives (stronger than “Suffering succotash!”). It is also a pleasure to say, cycling from bitten lip to hiss and tap on tongue tip to kick at the back and then again the opening fricative. It has rhythm, a dactyl time-step like a little soft shoe. It plays so effectively with words like confiscate and suffocate and even sycophant, plus stick shift and scoff at and so much more.

Give it a try: The sycophant was fixated on the efficacy of resorting to fisticuffs. Stephanie Escoffier can scoff at my fractured stick, but it effected sufficient deflection when I was engaged in fisticuffs. Not glorious prose styling, but an engaging oral exercise. And fair enough: a most common kind of fisticuffs now, it seems, is verbal fisticuffs.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

gobbet

Posted on January 30, 2013 | 5 comments

My taste of this word is likely different from that of at least some other people, thanks to the context in which I first saw it.

Gobbet is not a common word, so if you see it used a certain way, that usage can make itself pretty comfy before it has too many occasions for it to be revised. Its strong tastes of other related words can play a role in this too. So when I first saw the phrase “gobbet of phlegm,” it was easy to picture a big gob of a loogie the size of a gobstopper being disgorged via someone’s disgusting gob (mouth), perhaps into a goblet.

It happens that, even though this sense does not appear as such in the dictionaries I’ve looked in, the collocation gobbet of phlegm has a certain currency – Google lists “about 29,200 results” when I search the exact phrase. If you search it, you will find quite a number of hits of fiction – gobbet is one of those words a person is unlikely to use in ordinary conversation but may take the occasion to drop into fiction with the idea that it will contribute to a rich, evocative literary style. Whether that idea is accurate I leave it to you to judge in each case in which you read it – Google it yourself and judge from the gobbets that appear.

No, no, I’m not being disgusting. The thing is, gobbet does not have ‘gob of phlegm’ as a standard (dictionary-recorded) sense. The sense in which I have just used it is a sense that has come into use in the past century: ‘brief literary fragment presented for analysis, translation, or discussion’.

But that is not the base sense. Let’s get to the meat of the matter: a gobbet is a mouthful of meat, or anyway a chunk of food the size of a mouthful – an amount you could hold in your mouth while saying gob but not while saying the et. The word comes from French gobet, related to the verb gober ‘swallow’. It’s been in English since the 1300s.

There really is something stuffed-mouth about that gob, isn’t there? And it has a kind of ugliness to it, too, manifest in goblin (which is unrelated). Even goblet, which bespeaks rich ornamentation, is – I find, anyway – much more susceptible to images of ugliness and fugxury than, say, chalice. Add that little tail et, which gives it perhaps a slightly more literary and less common air and echoes an imperative, “Gob it,” and you have a lexical equivalent of a gross lump with a little bow on top.

Of course you can speak of gobbets without being disgusting or thinking disgusting things; you can draw on the higher-toned influences of goblet, for one thing, and write of gobbets of meat and goblets of wine and then you just have a feast with gobs of food in the positive sense – something you can gobble gladly. You don’t need to go down the gross road. But it is easy to do so.

As witness the only definition for gobbet in Urban Dictionary, a source you can always count on to go down roads congenial to the minds of 14-year-old boys: “A chunk of human remains that has drifted ashore after a shipwreck disaster. From the old days when piracy was common, as was sighting dead bodies on the banks of the oceans.” I’m thinking whoever wrote that probably saw the word in just that one context – evidently a book on pirates, and one that we may suspect played up the gore somewhat – and from that inferred a greater specificity than actual usage reflects.

I must admit I’m surprised that Urban Dictionary doesn’t have anything on the phlegm sense. I take this as just more evidence that this is an uncommon word. Of course the phlegm sense is not recorded in dictionaries and so is not really a “proper” usage – more of a grabbing and stuffing according to sound association. But it’s not altogether inappropriate, as long as the amounts referred to are mouth-sized.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

gambol

Posted on January 30, 2013 | 2 comments

Visual: A not-too-long word with a lot of curves and a few straight lines. The ol looks a bit like the b mirrored in a ripply lake, or vice versa. Depending on type face, there may or may not also be some echoes of shape between the g and the a.

In the mouth: Not a crisp word, nor an especially fluid one – aside from the ending liquid /l/. It’s more of a leaping or capering word: in saying /gæmbəl/ you start at the back of your mouth and immediately bounce off the front, landing at last on the tip of the tongue and holding. The voiced stops and nasal give it a padded, perhaps gummy feel, though that is of course affected or overshadowed by the sense of the word.

Etymology: From the French gambade ‘leap, spring’, which comes from Italian gambata, from gamba, leg. There was probably some confusion between the ade ending and an auld ending leading to the current English form. It is not apparently related to gamble, though there may have been some cross-influence.

Collocations: Gambol is not a word that has specific travelling companions (no, not even take a gambol), though it is known to be used more with children and animals than with adults. It is also not a feature of many quotations, though Hamlet does use it in an odd way, to mean something more like ‘leap’ or ‘flee’: “Bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word, which madness Would gambol from.” Elsewhere (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) Shakespeare uses it in the more expected sense.

Overtones: The resemblance to gamble is unmistakeable and the possible cause of mistakes. This makes gambol a better word for writing than for saying, and when saying it one may overpronounce the second syllable for clarity. This word also has tastes of gumbo, gable, amble, and the whole family of mble words, such as crumble, tumble, humble, resemble, grumble, et cetera, plus symbol.

Semantics: Leap, spring, cut a caper – in dance, in sport, or wherever. Both noun and verb gambol exist.

Serve with: This word shows up here and there in places where you will think, “Hmm, that’s a word I don’t see all that often but that seems to take a nice bounding turn on the page.” It’s a high-toned way to speak of frolicsome movement, and it reinforces a literati in-group because it’s the sort of word that will likely be taken by “those who don’t know better” to refer to something else (specifically betting). Using it has the same kind of effect as a subtle name-drop: “While I was talking to Chomsky after his lecture, there were dogs gamboling in the park beyond the window.” You might say, thus, that it is a stylistic gambol – and a stylistic gamble.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: Stop! What are you doing?

Posted on January 26, 2013 | 1 comment

Today: the eighth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Stop! What are you doing?

Stop. No, that’s not an order, that’s a manner. If no air can get through the mouth or nose at all until you release the consonant, that consonant is a stop. All the consonants in decapitate are stops, for instance. Our English stops are voiceless /p/, /t/, /k/ and “voiced” /b/, /d/, /g/. Why did I just stick scare quotes on “voiced”? Because you don’t really keep your voice going during the time your mouth is stopped up. Not usually, anyway. Try it with holding a /b/, /d/, or /g/ and trying to make a voiced sound. Sounds like you’re stifling a sneeze – or something worse. No, the usual difference is actually in how close before the stop the voice stops and how soon after releasing the stop the voice starts again. (Linguists call this voice offset time and voice onset time.) We also tell the stops apart by how long the vowel is before them, as I mentioned in “The vowel circle.” The differences are small, but they’re enough to notice.

Now, let’s get some exercise.

Say picket, kaput, tip-top; doggèd, bagged; debit, batted. Pay attention to your tongue as you say them. Emphasize them. Get a feel for the sound.

If you’ve read “Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes,” you know about the aspiration on the first sounds of picket, kaput, and tip-top. (If you haven’t read it, why not? Give yourself one demerit point and go back and read it. Honestly, how do you expect to be an expert if you skip things?) I’m talking about the difference between the /p/ in spit and the /p/ in pit. Also between the voiceless stops in still and skill and the ones in till and kill. Put your hand in front of your mouth while you say them if you want to refresh your memory. Don’t do it in public; people might think you’re checking your breath. Actually, you are, but not that way.

OK, now say a picket, a picket, a picket, a picket, a picket, a picket, a picket… Come on, faster!

Now say gotta be, gotta be, gotta be, gotta be, gotta be, gotta be, gotta be… come on, pick it up!

You may have noticed something in picket a and gotta. Most North American English speakers will, in relaxed speech, turn [t] and [d] between vowels into a tap or flap of the tongue – so the dd in madder and the tt in matter tend to be indistinguishable much of the time (thank goodness for context). The IPA symbol for this sound is [ɾ]. The voice never actually cuts out on a tap, which is why people often think it’s just changing the [t] to a [d] – the tap is more like a [d], but it’s not one; it’s as much like a quick British “r,” which is why the symbol is the shape it is, [ɾ] (and why some North Americans think some Brits say “veddy” for very). But you may nonetheless say madder slightly differently from matter. This will be a subtle difference in the voicing length on the [æ], as I’ve mentioned: a vowel is shorter before a voiceless stop. But the difference can often be too subtle to be reliable.

What do stops feel like to say? They’re percussive, but the exact quality varies according to place and voicing. Listen to them as you say them: [p] is lower in tone than [k], which is lower than [t]. This is because of the size and shape of the resonating cavities when you release the stops. This makes [t] the lightest and most fragile-seeming of the bunch. That’s helped by its being on the tip of the tongue, which feels less substantial than the back of the tongue, which kicks with [k], or the lips, which pop with [p]. But the tip is also the most agile part.

Add voicing now – in other words, reduce the voice onset time after release. They’re [b], [d], [g]. They’re blunter, stickier. But they still have the same kind of differentiations as their voiceless counterparts.

But it’s not as though there’s some absolute intrinsic taste to each of them. It varies from word to word, and from speaker to speaker. Say them all several times and decide for yourself how they seem to you: pat kid bag, tap dig back, top dog buck, put big cod… Yes, part of it is in how they play with other sounds. And the meanings and other associations of the words, of course. Oh, we’ll get to that!

Next: The nose knows

1 Comment

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: The consonant line

Posted on January 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Today: the seventh installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The consonant line

If vowels are the blood of words, consonants are the bones. And while vowels are in a circle in the mouth, consonants are in a line, because they’re made by contact – or very close constriction – between the tongue and the palate, or the lips with or without the teeth.

Start by getting just a basic sense of what your tongue is doing. Move the tip of your tongue slowly from “th” (as in “thin”) to “s” to “sh,” then back forward. Now do the same but with voice: “th” as in “this,” “z,” “zh.” And back.

Now let’s go just a little crazier: saying “l” (as in “let”), make the same range of movement with your tongue tip. Does it tickle? Oh good.

What you’re doing when you do that is running your tongue tip between the back of your teeth and the back of your alveolar ridge – alveolar comes from the Greek for “wind.” Behind it is the hard palate. Keep curling your tongue farther back if you can and you’ll get to the soft palate, also known as the velum. This is where, with the back of your tongue, you say the final sounds in long, log, and lock. All the consonants in English are articulated somewhere in the line between there and the teeth and lips. (OK, except for [h]. And also the glottal stop, but that’s not a separate phoneme.) Some other languages go farther back.

Consonants may be linear, but they have several ways they can be made, so there are more of them. Linguists classify them by voice, place, and manner. The manner – the type of movement made – is what really makes them interesting. All good word tasters must mind their manners, and in the next six sections I will tell you the manners to mind.

First: Stop! What are you doing?

Leave a comment

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , ,