annunciation

Posted on December 9, 2012 | 3 comments

This is a little different as word tastings go. But then I often veer more into fantasia than simple sniff, swirl, and spit. This is a short story on annunciation – on the idea of The Annunciation, that point of departure in the Christmas story where the angel tells Mary she’s going to be the mother of the saviour. But this isn’t a story about Mary. She’s just the springboard. It’s a more modern and personal idea – fiction, but with a seed in my life. This is a short story I wrote 14 years ago, and I think it’s about the best I can do on this theme.

Incidentally, today is the twelfth anniversary of my wedding to the woman who helped give me the resolution to the inspiration for this story.

 

The Annunciation
by James Harbeck

Dark, rich, loving asphalt, comfort me. Dark, rich, loving asphalt, heal me. Pavement of the wounded souls, reach up through my feet-hearts and caress my unwanting being. In your stillness there is confirmation. And the echoes of my hard heels on your flat and gum-speckled surface are the sound of chants in cathedrals. With you flowing through me like a river, I am not alone.

*  *  *

It starts with an idea that angels could be dirty little children, or stones, or spires of cement, or thickets of nettly shrubs, or cats and dogs. Or the lady standing on a sidewalk in minus five doing her makeup in a palm-sized mirror. What is special, what makes an angel an angel, is the grinning joy of reality, the peeking underskirt hem-edge of the universe’s delight, the spirit-tickle of sanctity, showing through like a delightful joke. And not the person’s joke, not the stone’s or the tree’s or the dog’s or the child’s or the woman’s, but rather the universe’s itself, in such a delightfully unselfconscious way that the only way one can be an angel is first of all not to be in the slightest bit conscious of the fact that one is an angel.

And so it was. This idea, you see, did not show up internally first, as they tend to do. This idea came in the back way. It was a physical entity first. It was five grinning children in white cotton nightshirts, standing barefoot in the snowy ground and lifting their arms in what might have been an imitation of wings. Five grinning children, not singing glory to God in the highest but physically manifesting it. Not some stern glory, either, but a rather wobbly and sometimes distracted one. For unto us a child is born: I knew the meaning. A new spirit enters the world, an action waiting to be seen through to its completion. Some of it for me, some of it for others. And those five silly grinning kids in the snow, just waiting for God the almighty to call a juice and cookie break.

*  *  *

I took my leave of Carrie in the bus station. We sat staring across steaming coffees at each other, each speaking not a word, wondering what the other was thinking, thinking that it were best to say little. How much can be said? Once there was something between us; now there are thousands of miles between us. She left to make a new life in another city with another job, and I was left in a Toronto now wiped clean for me, empty of family, my rarely-seen acquaintances stale past date. The aftertaste of yearnings and attachments has an aging sweetness, but the promise of a fresh slate, a city sparkling in the frozen air like new-fallen powder, is another sweetness, and this one flashed of a history to be found in the future. As Carrie blew on her coffee, an angel walked behind her, muddy-hemmed white dress sweeping the loose papers on the floor. Oh, what a city! And then I looked at Carrie and her smudging lipstick coffee-flavoured and I saw—in her hopefulness and her slightly-used floppiness, in her blue hat and the air about her that suggested that things and persons would be parted with regretfully but hopefully like an outgrown favourite shirt deposited into a basement box—I saw the same angel. The angel of the muddy skirts and of the blue hats and of the coffee that was proud of getting to be $1.35 a cup. It was just in that breath, I think, that I realized that they’re all the same angel, there is only one angel, just as there is only one primary blue, only one 440-hertz A, and every time you see the one or hear the other, it is the same as always but also its own instance.

And so there are angels and angels, and angel and angel.

My angel. My fresh, new, empty city. And Carrie’s angel, in her wet Vancouver.

I began to walk. I have always walked; I began to walk even more. Motion was my holy spirit.

*  *  *

My sense was that the angels were—even always are—heralding the advent of some new spirit, some saving light; they were, as I watched them, the forerunners or fingertips of a miracle, of a divine sneeze. I was a shepherd, watching my flocks by night. As I stood in the front of the subway train, seeing through the window the blackening walls flow toward me and past me, every concrete tie whirring beneath me another beat in the anticipatory drum roll, I felt as though I were being sucked into the future. Bursting into the light of the platform at Bloor, it was as though I had made it through the after-death tunnel into the other world, and the down-coated muesli of transit passengers edging the yellow line were heavenly hosts. I would step through the door and it would be Christmas morning, and the truth would be made known after all our living.

Maybe it was the flowers or the bonsai bushes in the underground mall, or perhaps it was the empty fountain that begged me to be its water. Perhaps it was the thrusting, punching, humping music following me from the HMV, asking me to live it, to be its avatar. All I know is that somewhere in the Holt Renfrew Centre, as I walked between the four-foot-high poster heads and headless lingerie mannequins, I became aware that the one who was to give birth was I. Me. The entire world had turned into an annunciation for the beauty of God, and I was the one who was going to have to bring it forth.

Quite naturally, I panicked.

*  *  *

What did Mary feel? Alone in that room on a bed of straw, only twelve years old, her life neatly arranged for her, nothing to have to worry about or think about, what did she feel when an angel appeared? And how did it appear? Did she roll over and realize the light of God was emanating from a piece of straw near her eye? Did her vision suddenly become so acute that every atom, every whirring electron, in the glistening walls was visible, could she hear it hum the music of the spheres?

Mary gasps as she sits bolt upright, dropping sleep like an iron pot. Something is stirring inside her. He own body, her own soul-manifested flesh, is creating God, and it presses the understanding into her mind. Wherever she looks, she sees angel. Door-shaped angel, ant-shaped angel, shoe-shaped angel, dog-shaped angel, straw-shaped angel, air-shaped angel. And she knows what the angel’s going to say even before the angel says it, so the angel doesn’t have to say it.

The angel tells Mary—Mary knows the angel is telling her—not to be afraid. Don’t be afraid: that’s a bad sign right from the start. Like when a person begins with “Don’t get angry, but . . .”

So she’s pregnant. Bad enough for her. But how can the small, insignificant girl that she is, engaged to a carpenter at that, how can she be the mother of the great saviour of Israel? It’s not a small responsibility.

Either she’s losing her mind, or it’s true. Trouble no matter what. How can she be comfortable, insignificant Mary? How could she ever stand having her name invoked by hundreds of millions every day, as though she were some rock star?

I understand Mary now, or so I imagine it. Her predicament. Glad tidings of great joy? What a crock! Doesn’t God know my eating habits?

Depression is my delicacy. I feast on it raw like sushi or ever so lightly sautéed. That sweet taste of “I can’t,” the relaxing reassurance that I’m not worth anything. And when I want some zip, I pour on liberal dashes of anxiety. Nothing makes me feel more real than questioning my own existence, attempting negation of everything that’s important to me. I can moan in weakness: “To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, moaning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your ears of mercy towards us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O pious, o clement, o sweet virgin Mary!”

Only she’s on my side of the fence. How could she go to the other side of the equation without losing herself entirely?

Now I walk like a madman up and down my beloved streets, my face twisting with my inner dialogue. I pound on walls at the slightest noise. I am unbearable. And I am alone: all my loved ones are in other cities. I have left them all behind, chasing after the rescue from God like a dog chases a car. I leave behind me a trail of unfinished friendships. Now I have caught, or I have been caught.

Help me.

*  *  *

Your arrival is the death of my comfort. I hide when I smell your beauty approaching, I tremble like a dog fearing its master, for you dare me to be someone worthy, you dare me to live up to potential I kept buried, slumbering, unacknowledged, safe. I will have to burn my mediocre works, and this self-absorbed story will burn first.

*  *  *

In the evening pool I float, eyes to the ceiling, ears tuned to the clotted sounds of the water. It’s still in this room, and the water is warm. The lifeguard shuffles and kicks, walks this way and that, nothing to do. I flip over and, expelling air, strive for the tiled bottom, for the amniotic comfort of a watery womb. But I don’t stay down. I can hardly even touch the bottom, though it’s only four feet beneath the surface. I float back up and spew my remaining breath into the air.

My angel is here. I know it. Somewhere between the tiles, somewhere in the spaces between echoes, in the gap between inhale and exhale, the tentacle of God slips and sneaks. This calmness is resounding with the portentous peace. The air, by its very leanness, is fat with blessing waiting to be grasped. Me, I would hide from my joy. If I were to let it in I would burst.

My life is a balloon full of blood and the angel is a razor.

*  *  *

Days go by. Sometimes I feel that I am back to normal living, that everything is as it used to be and my panic was a passing illusion. Underneath it, most of the time, is the side-glimpsed sense, like an itch you can feel but can’t find, that the “normal” is the illusion, and reality awaits through the next door, smoke gently curling from its green nostrils, its squamous tail coiled, tip tapping. And at moments I am like one drifting to sleep who suddenly jerks awake as though sparked by a plug, my gradually accreting sense of existence scattered as a film on stirred water. I work and bury myself in yes, no, and projects that I must do. Then I walk and I am alone, alone with my thoughts and fears, and from the bricks behind me in the after-work alleyway I think I hear again the angel breath.

*  *  *

The glow of the dirty brick walls, the rust on the bumper of the 1970s Impala, the transcendent shimmer of the kneaded and crumbled pavement, the wan but hopeful halogen glow from the light in the concave corner, it is all new, new like I am new. I left something behind, I left somebody behind; I can’t find myself now. This alleyway is empty. I am empty. I’ve tried on all the definitions and in frustration I’ve shredded my persona, crumpled it, left it in a corner or on a pile of perceptions somewhere. I’m like the patch of land where a building was, is not. If these walls up and down this alley were to evanesce, what would I see? If the brick structures were gone, or if I reversed the clock to before they were built, what would come next? Must something be built at all?

I feel that I will have to build myself a new living space. Right now I’m like a squatter in my body, taking cover in the most ramshackle hut in a barely sheltered corner of my head, a refrigerator box and a few blankets perhaps. Has there been a hurricane? Or did I blow the walls down myself? Were they ever there?

If I turn around and go back, will the alley look the way it used to?

*  *  *

Mary is the angel, projecting her angel-ness on the whole world. Before she even knew it, she had manifested God, she had become the miracle in order to bring forth the miracle. Everything she eats now, all her blood, her breath, her body, all feeds into this child. The child is made of Mary just so the child can be apart from her and give back to her the miracle. Or draw the miracle out from her.

Lightning does not come down from the clouds. It comes up from the ground. The clouds wait; the earth gives.

*  *  *

It’s like waking up.

I haven’t had a coffee in months and still I’ve been a nervous wreck. I’ve cut my sugar intake down to near nil and the walls of my mind are furrowed with fingernail marks. Finally, finally, after tearing around the palace of my potential being, I found a familiar sofa to sit on and feel like myself again. I wasn’t lost, I’m not lost.

And now this.

Like someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned and opened my eyes and realized that I had been dreaming and was now in the world I had forgotten. Back in Kansas with Toto. And you, Auntie Em. You, my omnipresent angel. You, my firstborn.

It’s like that moment in Tolkien when they realize the password to Moria was, had always been, right before their eyes, wasn’t even intended to be concealed. Not “speak, friend, and enter,” but “speak ‘friend’ and enter.” And you, angels, are my friend.

When I first knew the birth was going to happen, it had already happened. The angels: they’re the miracle. The angel is everything. Everything is the miracle.

But I already knew that.

*  *  *

Dark, rich, loving asphalt, you are my city. On you I walk, in you I curl. On my way home I pick up a bunch of flowers, limply dripping with the first mists of artificial hothouse spring. I am the bee. I find the honey where I flit, or I come home to the honeycomb. What will it be? It will be a table already set, steam rising from pots. It will be a kiss in the doorway. It will be a comfort I left behind in search of the comfort I had left behind. It will be a failed sojourn in another truth, an abandoned voyage. It will be my return as well as hers.

And yet my comfort is in searching, my place is in walking. I can only know where I am when I am moving.

The kids are there again, only this time they’re five superannuated t’ai chi practitioners swimming their molasses arcs into the air. The ground is covered with mud and the black slip-on dollar-forty-nine shoes of the air painters are already tempura-battered with it. They dance their impossibly slow and smooth abstractions and the mud eats them gradually; they sink further and further into it, to knees and to waists, their motions not slowing, and they become golden black-and-white-topped windbreaker- or track-suit-clad flowers, waving in their insouciantly oblivious spirals a goodbye from the angels.

I want to look at my bible: did Mary see the angel again afterwards? Having made the messiah out of her flesh, did she even need to? And having become separate from her miraculous child, having parted from her night-tickling angel, did she not spend the rest of eternity dining on the sorrows and cares of others, becoming in her angel-consciousness the mirror in which all the other, unconscious angels could look and see the divine fingertips reflected? What things did she, does she, see and feel?

I am at the door, quivering flowers in hand, lips prepared. I hold the key, and she is on the inside. And?

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ilex

Posted on December 8, 2012 | 2 comments

You may think of the ideal ornamented evergreen as being some kind of pine, fir, or spruce. Branches like bottle brushes, well suited for being bedecked with garlands and tinsel and bulbs and balls and little sleighs and skaters and lights, lights, lights.

In word country, there is another yule plant that is preferred, a plant that you and I may use branches of for decking the halls but that we would not cut down whole and drag into the living room. Well, they don’t cut it down in word country either; it’s bad luck to cut it down – ask any druid – and decorating it could be painful due to the sharp points on the leaves, adding extra spots of red from your dripping fingers to match the winter berries. So they just appreciate it in its natural environment, like good linguists, and have their children draw diagrams of it. And they bring their gifts to its base.

The ilex. A magical tree, evergreen and bearing fruit in winter, beloved of druids and a symbol of fertility and eternal life; Romans associated it with agriculture and harvest and decked the halls with boughs of it during Saturnalia. Christianity naturally coopted it. Some carols sing of it – though usually by its more common Germanic name, rather than its Latin one. We don’t sing “The Ilex and the Ivy” or “Have an Ilex Jolly Christmas.”

Well enough. Although ilex is now fully borrowed into English, its Latin origin adds a bit of ambiguity: in Latin, the word names the holm oak, which happens to resemble the holly tree to some extent. The name was transferred, and by no lesser a light than Linnaeus.

So in word country the ilexicographers gather around the ilex, flower in the midst of a grove of syntax trees. They are very careful to watch the orthography of their ilex: a slip of the pen and it is the ulex, which is a different tree, or the ibex, a goat with huge arching horns that are alarming to behold. Add an extra letter – write this ilex sloppily – and you get silex, which is silica, and your evergreen life is evergrey and inorganic.

Where will you find the ilex in word country? Look to a series of islets, sewn like eyelets in the brook that bisects the plain. This is land where they grow lexis, often wild, rough lexis. They let it come uncultivated and then sell it in bunches with brambles and thorns still sticking out. Same words, same sound, but you can see that it’s rustic: it’s full ov ruff things sumwun sed, mite of sounded like normal speech but yew no there unejucated so it shoze up like this. The ilex and the ilex are different things that look the same; the eye dialects are the same thing but look different.

But it will ever be thus. And you will see, too, by the ilex, the Rolex-wearing Lexus driver. Growing near its base you will find lilacs. People picnic around it, some enjoying regrettable food as gallerized by James Lileks (lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html). They may drink mate (sometimes spelled maté), which is Ilex paraguariensis. Those wanting the harder stuff have lately taken a liking to Elyx, but there is many an elixir liked for luxuriating. They sing “lully, lullay” and relax (the younger ones listen to Skrillex and say goodbye to go watch flicks). Others circulate, quietly capturing pictures with the soft and surreptitious shutter of a Rolleiflex. And off in the corner is an exlex awaiting exile, allowed to prick his finger on a leaf’s circumflex-like apex and leave red specks of vital flux as a last look back at the land of lexis and syntax.

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hyrax

Posted on December 7, 2012 | 3 comments

Here’s a word for all you autodidax to add to your wisecrax. It grabs the eye right away, with its x – always an eye-snagger, a multiplier of visual effect – and add to that the y, which with the x gives it a particularly masculine air and a raking angularity (imagine vyrax! that would almost be too much).

And the sound covers the length of the mouth – start in the throat with /h/, and then sweep over from the middle to the front with the /aɪ/ diphthong. Swing the tongue near the alveolar ridge with /r/ and then open to a low front /æ/ before ending with the percussive back-front voicless /ks/.

Indeed, stylish, and about as masculine as tie racks. Perhaps a manly man wearing cologne containing styrax, built like Ajax, able to wield a fine ax.

Anyway, surely the opposite of Lorax, right? That little furry Seussian creature warning of the consequences of abusing the environment? Heck, the name tastes more of lumberjax than of tree huggers. And certainly not a furry little critter!

Relax. This beast is a relative of the elephant, and thus also of the manatee and dugong. All massive animals with no fur in sight. You can feel sure that this beast is…

…a furry little animal, one to two feet long, about 6 to 10 pounds. The size of your cat, in other words. And looking rather like a rodent with a very small tail. Its name comes from Greek ὕραξ hurax, a word for a shrew-mouse.

Which is not to say that they’re not feisty. Check out this video of one getting a baboon to back off: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2NVu6F-eV4. But they have some linguistic interest too. It turns out they have dialects.

Dialects? Well, they “sing” a pattern to warn other hyraces (listen to a long recording of one, or watch a shorter recording of one, at www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/hyrax-song-complexity/). And that pattern varies geographically – slightly between close places, and more as the colonies get farther apart. Hyraces (or hyraxes, as you prefer) actually make a variety of vocalizations, as the situation demands. Hark, the hyrax startled sings…

And where do you find a hyrax? In the Bible, for one thing – it’s mentioned in some places, such as in Leviticus, where it is declared unfit to eat. Some old translations rendered it as coney or rabbit because the Renaissance Englishmen had no exposure to hyraces. You will also find it in various places in Africa. And, of course, at your leisure online or in your dictionary.

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manatee, dugong

Posted on December 6, 2012 | 1 comment

I was just reading my Twitter feed and saw a link to a Tumblr site, Manatee University Strategic Planning, which presents an aspect of humanity using huge manatees: it is a collection of pictures of manatees with, imposed on each picture, a caption of university strategic planning blather. Because why not.

So I thought, “Have I tasted manatee?” And lo and behold I had not (which surprised me). It’s a fun word, one which shows up in ordinary non-marine-biology speech mainly (in my experience) as an opportunity to make a pun on humanity. I’m sure if people could keep manatees as pets a great many of them would be called Hugh. Sort of like how many hairdressing places have names with puns on mane in them. For all I know, there’s a sea-cow-themed hair salon called Mane-atee.

Ah, yes, sea cow. There are two kinds of creatures that are called sea cows, and they look very much like each other, but you can tell them apart by two principal means: their tails are different; and one is found on the Atlantic rim, while the other is found on the Indian Ocean rim and all the way over to the east end of Melanesia. Aside from that, they are related to each other, and more distantly to the elephant and the hyrax – and not so much to other marine mammals. (What is a hyrax? I see haven’t tasted that one either. [Added next day: Now I have.] Note to self. Interim, I leave it to you to discover; you’re on teh interwebz, after all. Hint: it dunt look much like a elephant.)

So which do you find where, and what is the other one? The two questions are related, as their names reveal their places of origin. Manatee comes from manatí, which is a Taino word meaning “breast”. Dugong – the other sea cow – comes from Tagalog, which took it from Malay duyong; both mean “lady of the sea”. So if you know that the Taino were a pre-Columbian Caribbean people, and that Tagalog is spoken in the Philippines, you have that bit sorted out.

“Lady of the sea”? Well, here’s the thing: the manatee and the dugong make up the order Sirenia. They get this name from having supposedly been mistaken for Sirens or mermaids by sailors. Now, dugongs get up to 3 metres long and weigh more than 400 kg. Manatees get up to 4 metres long and weigh up to nearly 600 kg. Compare this to the average artistic depiction of a mermaid or Siren, based on a normal-sized slender woman, thus around 1.6 metres long and 58 kg. Also, the artistic images of mermaids and Sirens tend not to look like, um, a large amount of dirty laundry rolled in a towel. Seriously, if you haven’t looked at the Tumblr I linked to above, do. So if the legends about the sailors are true, I don’t really want to think about what that says about the salt-scored visual acuity and probable desperate concupiscence of the sailors.

Let’s just get back to the words. Manatee isn’t really an especially heavy-seeming word; indeed, it ends with that high, small [i] sound. It has echoes of a variety of other animate life forms, including man-o’-war, monitor, and chickadee. It seems like it could be a name for a small town somewhere up the eastern side of the US, perhaps between Manomet and Chicopee in Massachusetts, or maybe near Manchester, Tennessee. It sounds like a beverage the Israelites might have had in the Sinai desert: manna tea. It has a fair bit of paronomastic potential. As an added bonus, it’s an anagram of emanate, which somehow nonetheless seems quite different as a word.

Dugong, on the other hand, is a big- and heavy-sounding word, in spite of its being shorter than manatee (one less letter, one less syllable, one less phoneme). It can sound like a guy’s name – I’m sure there are guys out there name Doug Ong, and they’re probably pretty sick of sea cow jokes (or else they love them) – and like what a person from Chicago or Newfoundland might call a tam-tam (“Da gong!”), although the officially correct pronuncation is more like “doo gong.” Whereas manatee stays entirely at the front of the mouth, dugong starts on the tongue tip but then immediately moves back and stays back. And it ends on a consonant – one that rings like a gong, but is heavy nonetheless. Its echoes are more of words such as digging and dugout and maybe goldang, and of place names in the Philippines, Malaysia, or Indonesia. It anagrams to some two-word pairs – gun god, dug nog, dog gun – but no single word. In the basic homeliness and ungainliness sweepstakes, I think dugong wins – which means that in the versatility and prettiness contest, manatee takes it.

But between the actual critters? Look, they’re both mighty homely. But dugongs have that tail that’s like a dolphin’s, while manatees have a rounded, spatulate thing. So I think dugongs win on the style points by a tail.

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holiday

Posted on December 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Ah, it’s the holidays. The season of happiness, joy, peace, buying frenzies, and vitriolic rants about lexical choices. For instance, some people froth at the mouth on seeing Xmas, presumably unaware that this comes from a longstanding Christian use of X to stand for Christ, representing not our letter x but the Greek letter chi (χ), which is the first letter of χρῑστός christos, which of course is the source of Christ. The abbreviation Xmas has been in use in English at least since the 1500s. (Other insertions of Greek characters into Christian symbology include the P with an x on its stem you see sometimes, taken from the first two letters of χρῑστός, and IHS, which is really a slight Latinization of IHΣ, which is short for IHΣOYΣ, which is IESOUS, i.e., Jesus.)

A current popular rant – one that has been popular for quite some time, in fact – is against happy holidays. “It’s Christmas!” people fume. “Call it Christmas! Wish people a Happy Hanukkah if they’re Jewish or a Happy Diwali if they’re Hindu or whatever, but let Christians have their holy days too!”

And a response sometimes made to that is, “Holiday is from holy day, so when you’re wishing people happy holidays you’re wishing them happy holy days! So what’s the prob, Bob?”

I’m going to aim for the middle of the fence on this, hoping I don’t get a picket up my butt. On the one hand, it’s perfectly reasonable for people who really celebrate Christmas as Christians to want to celebrate it as Christmas. At the same time, there are plenty of people who are enjoying the holiday season without any particular religious inclination – though the season does exist because of yule. Note that I said Yule: Christmas is, after all, a Christianization of a pre-existing pagan festival (Jesus was not in fact born in December 25 – actually probably sometime in April or September, depending on who you ask). Much of what constitutes Christmas now for most people has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus: Christmas trees are a pagan holdover; Santa Claus is based as much on a pagan figure as on any Christian saint (St. Nicholas was not a jolly fat man who rode a sleigh and gave out gifts to all good children); the frenzy of gift giving has a connection to Christianity so tenuous as to be barely worthy of account, especially since it also connects to pagan customs. So the name hangs on, but Christmas is only really a Christian celebration for Christians. For all others the word has moved on, pretty much.

And so has the word holiday. Etymology is not a suitable guide to current meaning! I’ve mentioned at other times how throw and warp have changed places semantically over the course of English, and how silly comes from a word meaning “blessed” and nice from one meaning “ignorant”. I can also mention that one may take a vacation without vacating one’s residence (in fact, some people love to take a vacation day and stay at home all day). And in general we go on holidays for no religious purpose at all. Summer holidays from school? Nothing holy about that. And “bank holidays,” a term used officially in some places? Well, I guess if you worship money… but you can’t worship it as much on a bank holiday, because the banks are closed.

So while the December holidays are, by tradition, holly days (and, if you celebrate Hanukkah, possibly challah days), and if you despise commercialism you may find them to be hollow days, their existence as holidays does not depend on their being hallowed days – but their existence as holy days does. The term holy day has split apart from its progeny, holiday, precisely because of the semantic shift (some might say bleaching) of holiday. It is true that the Jewish High Holy Days (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah) are sometimes called the High Holidays, but that’s a special usage, and not a universal one at that either.

But we can see that the word holiday has varying meanings and flavours – it can shift not just from person to person but even within the year for a given person. For Canadians, Victoria Day is a holiday, and we have various civic holidays (even without a state religion), but if you’re anywhere near Christmas – or it’s the current subject of discussion at whatever time of the year – the holidays means that time of year when you have lots of cinnamon-and-clove-flavoured stuff and lots of peppermint-flavoured stuff and extra amounts of sugar and fat and, if you are so inclined, extra alcohol (especially via eggnog), and yummy fruitcake unless you’re one of those strange Americans who believe that fruitcake is bad (I was truly gobsmacked when I first heard Americans insult fruitcake), and decorated trees, and Santa (by the way, anagrams are also meaningless as semantic indicators: there is no special reason that dog is God backwards anymore than that Santa anagrams Satan), and Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen and Rudolph and endless TV specials and and and and…

But, returning to holiday, outside the ambit of Christmas it does get various other flavours and associations: shootouts (Doc Holliday, he of the gunfight at the OK Corral), jazz (Billie Holiday), hotels (Holiday Inn, a chain named after a movie that introduced the world to the song “White Christmas” – which also became the name of the sequel movie), various other movies (including Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn), days off work, long weekends, summertime, quite a lot of different popular songs about different times of the year, and assorted other variously well-known people named Holiday, Holliday (such as Polly Holliday, the actress who made the line “Kiss my grits” famous), and even Halliday (a name known to linguists: M.A.K. Halliday, inventor of systemic functional linguistics). It’s a word with rather more vertical in its orthography than most: three ascenders and a dot, and a descender at the end – it looks to me like it’s more in the mood for a party than for lounging on the beach. It stays rather light: licking and tapping the tip of the tongue in the middle, with a soft breath to start and a smooth off-glide on its final diphthong.

It is, I think, a happy word, a word associated for the most part with happiness, and I wish everyone happy holidays (they’re still a couple of weeks ahead, but the season has started). And one way to keep them happy is not to get all atwist about lexical choices. Yes, yes, you could go on about them for a whole day, but at the end you’ve just lost a whole day. Take a holiday instead.

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stollen

Posted on December 3, 2012 | 3 comments

Ah, advent. The holiday season. The draw-up to solstice and saturnalia, and, for those inclined, religious festivals of quiet and light and joy. A time of stolen moments, stolen silences, stolen silent letters and diacritics, and hyperarchaisms and hyperforeignisms.

Oh, come, oh, come, now. You know. I was just at a lovely Christmas market near where I live – they did the favour of not calling it Ye Olde Christmas Market (with the silly e Quayled onto old and the forever misread ye, which was always really just a representation of þe – which is the – using the letters available in European type sets). And what do you suppose I saw there?

Well, I saw some stollen. Mmm. I love stollen. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a German cake (or bread) that appears around advent (a time when bakers were for a long time not allowed to use leavening, only oil; finally certain German bakers got a dispensation to use butter, and then, with the Protestant reformation, such strictures were dispensed with anyway). It’s white, sweet, flavoured with orange rind and raisins and such like, and often with a core of marzipan (which is one of the most wonderful foods in the history of everything), and dusted heavily – jacket-redecorating heavily – with powdered sugar.

But I saw something extra on this stollen. I saw two errant dots.

Stöllen.

I tawt I taw a hyperforeignism.

I did! I did taw a hyperforeignism!

Yes, yes, stollen is a German word (it comes from the noun Stollen, meaning “post” or “stud”). So, hmm, better make sure it’s all Germanic-ish and all that, right? So, um, add an umlaut (a.k.a. diaeresis – umlaut is the name for the phonological process it represents but also, as with accent, has come to be a name for the symbol itself). Just like with assorted heavy metal groups, e.g., Mötley Crüe, Blue Öyster Cult, and assorted others. Teutonic is two-dottic! But the metal groups at least know they’re oversaxoned. The Christmas market merchant probably thought stöllen was the right way to spell it because, you know, German.

Sort of like how people trying to emulate “old English” – by which they really mean Early Modern English, but of course they’ve never been taught that fact – by adding random “olde-fashioned” endings and so on. As in “I thoughteth it woulde maketh it seemeth moore olde fashioned if I addedest ye olde umlaute to it.” (Pause here while I try to stop gagging and retching.) I wonder if they know that the German (and “proper” English) pronunciation is with a “sht” sound at the beginning, not “st”. Some people do – and misspell it as a result: you can find references to “schtollen” on teh interwebz.

(Just by the way, if you want to see someone emulate an older version of English rather well, there are a few to follow on Twitter, notably @SamuelPepys and @DrSamuelJohnson, who emulate 17th- and 18th-century English, respectively, and @LeVostreGC, a.k.a. Chaucer Doth Tweet, who does a pretty nice impression of Middle English.)

Well, there it is. Christmas is always full of ersatz emulation. We have ideas of great ageless Christmas traditions, many of which are actually quite new – even our idea of what Santa looks like was strongly conditioned by Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem, which also gave us the eight reindeer (and Rudolph was invented in 1939 by Robert L. May). We like the sweet liquor of ancient memory, but as long as it has the right taste for us we don’t need it to be so accurate. Indeed, not everyone even likes the real accurate stuff.

But I digress. I do love stollen, even if they overspice the spelling. So did we buy some?

Nope. The “stöllen” was not just overspiced but overpriced. Made by a local high-end pastry shop of repute. Yeah sure OK fine, I’m sure it’s wonderful, but Aina can’t eat it anyway (gluten), and I’m happy enough with the normal-priced stuff (some of which I had had a mere hour earlier). I don’t need to pay $4 a dot for extra diacritics. At that price it’s more like stolen. It’s so high-end I wonder if I’d need to pay for instollation. So we just contented ourselves with wandering around drinking mulled wine and trying an abundance of free samples of sweet liquor.

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painstaking

Posted on December 2, 2012 | 1 comment

He was splayed painfully on the hot, dry ground: a stake for each limb, stretching him like a Feynman diagram. She walked up, surveyed him from a distance of two feet, arms crossed. Kicked away an adder that was slithering towards his head. She was wearing an apron that had some fruit in it; she pulled one out. “Would you like an orange?”

“No, please, that’s what has gotten me into this in the first place.” But he did sound rather dry.

She started peeling the orange. “Who has put you here like this?”

He shook his head. “It was due to a grafting accident.”

“Grafting…”

“Compounding. Two words.”

“You are a word grower.”

“I used to be.” He said it oddly: not as most people do, with a voiceless [s], like “use to,” but actually as the two words used and to.

“You used to be…” she said, in the normal way.

“No, please, don’t say it that way.”

“I don’t have to.” She said this also in the normal way, as though it were “half to.”

The ropes tying him to the stakes seemed to tighten. “Please,” he said. “Have to.” He said it with the [v] voiced. “Just now, just for me here now.”

The orange was fully peeled. She broke a segment off it and knelt down by him. “Here. Have a wedge.”

“Thank you,” he said. She put it in his mouth, then another. Once he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “It’s phonology that has taken me to this pass. Devoicing by assimilation with the following consonant, like what happens to used and have before to. Shift of a consonant from one syllable to the adjoining one, like what made nadder, napron, norange into what they are now.” He looked at the orange. “Can I have an other?” Not another, like “a nother”; he said “an other.” Something had really spooked him.

Well, yes, when you’re staked splayed and supine on the dry, hot, hard ground, you may be a bit spooked.

“What would you give to be let loose?” she said quietly, close in, almost to his cheek.

“What would you like?” A little bead of sweat crawled down to the side of his left forehead.

She stood up again, looked him over. “Would you… stake your pain?”

The ropes seemed to tighten. He moaned a little, writhed as he could. “I think you’re a sadist.”

“I’m just… taking pains to see what the situation is.” The ropes eased a little.

“Please,” he said, “take my pains.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will not take pain, but I will take pains.” She took off the apron with the oranges, set it aside, and went over to his left hand and started undoing the rope there. “But have you been doing this long? Compounding?”

His hand came free. He swung his arm and held it in front of his mouth for a moment. “There’s a calm pounding in my wrist.”

She smiled, nodded to herself: Thought so. “A punster. You can get into trouble.” She moved to the right hand.

“If you take away my pain, I will take pains not to do it again.”

“I think,” she said, liberating his right hand, “you have done enough pains-taking for some time.”

He sat up, slid forward, managed to start undoing his feet. “But that’s the nature of the job,” he said. “It’s pains-taking work.” The ropes came loose and he rose.

“And sometimes,” she said, “pain-staking.”

And then, as if nothing had moved but everything had changed, it was she who was staked in pain on the ground… She had staked pain and lost the bet.

“Thank you,” he said, backing away. He turned towards her apron.

She grimaced. “Have an orange,” she said with some asperity. “Have another one. Have a whole nother one.”

He jumped back, then turned and started to walk, faster, speeding up to a run. She grimaced, was about to shout something. Paused. Shouted, “You don’t have to, you know!”

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prusten

Posted on December 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Prusten is the quietest of tiger calls,” Yann Martel writes in Life of Pi, “a puff through the nose to express friendliness and harmless intentions.”

The sound, if you’d like to hear it, can be heard at www.lairweb.org.nz/tiger/Tiger3a.wav; you can see a tiger walk by and do it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeUVut0iXvY. It seems to me that the /pr/ at the beginning of this word can make a similar sound. You may note a resemblance between the pru and purr, and perhaps between the prusten sound and purring; however, they’re not quite the same thing. Sonically and physiologically, I’d say prusten more closely resembles a horse’s snort.

The word, though, has the feel of one of those odd specialist words that you encounter only in limited contexts, but that somehow you feel you are expected to know – a word that its users will feel certain is the correct term, though it is generally unknown, perhaps because its object is not well known either. But how unknown is this word? It’s not in the Oxford Engish Dictionary. It’s not in the American Heritage Dictionary. It’s not in Merriam-Webster. No, but you will find it in references to tigers in various articles. And you will find it in Wikipedia – in English, French, Spanish, and Catalan.

Not in German, though. Would you have thought that this word seems like a German word? Oh, indeed so. That en makes it seem like a plural noun or an infinitive verb – either of which would be oddly converted to a singular mass noun in English. It also seems like a family surname (in fact, it is one, too) or a girl’s first name (perhaps a cross between Prudence and Kristen). Or perhaps a town in Germany somewhere (nope).

But it is a German word. You may be interested to know that it also has something in common with salsa and chai. What? All three words have taken on a more specialized meaning as loans into English than they have in their languages of origin (they’re not the only ones – and it happens in other languages, too: smoking is Polish for a blazer, for example, from smoking jacket; in German, Handy means a moble phone). Salsa is just Spanish for “sauce” and chai is just Hindi for “tea” – although it is true that what we call in English salsa and chai is a version of sauce and tea, respectively, popular in the source countries.

Prusten, on the other hand, is a German verb for “snort” – an infinitive verb, borrowed as a noun into English (what kind of ignoramus would do that? perhaps the same kind as borrowed the Latin conjugated verb ignoramus, meaning “we don’t know”, as a noun into English – but that happens often enough; and after all, the Germans borrowed an adjective to use as a noun for a mobile phone). But what we call prusten in English (and, at least per Wikipedia, in French, Spanish, and Catalan) is done by jaguars, tigers, and some kinds of leopards, none of which are indigenous to Germany.

I imagine the word was first used by a German zoologist describing the sound, and it got picked up and borrowed by zooligists in other languages who preferred to use a distinct new word rather than just call it snorting, which has coarse and derisive overtones anyway. “Snorting? Please! That’s prusten!” Rather like “What do you mean, ‘Pass the sauce’? This is salsa!” or “This is no ordinary tea. This is chai!”

But there is actually another English word you can use – or two, in fact: chuffle and chuffing. And those seem perfectly English. They almost seem undignifed, indeed, looking as they do like a cross between chuffed and shuffling. And chuffle is in the American Heritage Dictionary. So why do we need prusten? I don’t know. Perhaps it sounds more formal, technical. But I’m sure it will spread and end up in the dictionary. Life of Pi is a popular book, after all.

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mantissa, meniscus

Posted on November 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

Mantissa was a lovely little number of Etruscan extraction. She was small but significant, a details person who was always helping the powers that be – she was seen with the greatest exponents of her time. She knew what her base was; she knew when to go on indefinitely and when to be brief or even disappear altogether. She always got the point, and she never forgot where her roots were.

Meniscus was a Latin of Greek extraction. He had a name that smacked of greatness – like a warrior or a playwright. But he found himself ever at the edges, on the rim. A connector. Not great in himself, but capable of magnifying others. He always had a lens on the glass of the times; any time tension surfaced, he was there. But he was never sure if he was waxing in power or waning.

When Meniscus heard of Mantissa, he was over the moon for a sight of her. He felt sure that they were made for each other. Both were small in themselves, seemingly minor and accessory, but both were inescapable. He knew that Mantissa might be more indispensable than he was. But they seemed so compatible – right down to the names, so similar, the m, the n, the crisp stop and soft s, the three syllables amphibrach – and each with the same sound at heart, that soft and relaxed but certain I.

How would he contact her? He was not calculating as she was, as were those around her. But he had a fluid intelligence. He beat a natural rhythm on a log, and with ease he brought her to him.

Immediately he knew he had her number: he could see she was not rational. She voiced her devotion. Such expressions as would appear hyperbolic to others seemed straighforward to her. But amid her protestations there was a reserve.

“Can we ever get together?” Mantissa said, at last. “You spend your life above the line; I work below the line. You must know I will never be a whole one.”

“But I, too, am ever incomplete; this is how I am made,” Meniscus replied.

“How do I know this is not simply an angle you are taking to contact me?” she said.

“But, Mantissa, how do I in turn know you are not simply preying on me?”

“Do not trifle with me.” She took his hand lightly, touching barely more than the lunulas of his fingernails. “I cannot have men; I can have only one man.”

Meniscus was torn. How could he be other than he was? At length he prevailed. “I spend my life forever halfway between sea and ground,” he said. “You add a new dimension to my existence. Will you take my measure?”

“If you will keep my point floating,” she said.

“I will not let go,” he replied.

They professed eternal devotion. But in so doing, they undid themselves. As they made perpendicular contact, and she declared “You are my one and only,” he disappeared and she disintegrated, and nothing was left but the flat surface where they had been.

Perhaps this needs some explanation for those less familiar with the words.

A mantissa is the decimal part of a logarithm. A logarithm is the power you put a base number to in order to get another number. For instance, the base 10 logarithm of 1000 is 3, since 1000 = 103. Natural logarithms, useful in many areas of math, have e as their base, which is not a rational number – the decimal goes on indefinitely (it is, to 3 decimal points, 2.718). Any number that is a perfect power of the logarithm base will give a logarithm with no mantissa. The logarithm of 1, for any base, is 0. A mantissa is also the number on the left in floating point notation – for instance, in 6.022 × 1023, the mantissa is 6.022.

A meniscus, on the other hand, is a few things, all shaped reminiscent of a crescent moon, whence the name. It can be a bit of connecting tissue on your knee, or it can be a concavo-convex lens (as in reading glasses), or – in its best known usage – it can be the bit of liquid that curves up (or in some cases down) at the sides on the top surface of liquid in a container. The specific liquid and container material determine the angle of contact; if the angle of contact is perpendicular, there is no meniscus – the surface of the liquid is flat from edge to edge.

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aspidistra

Posted on November 28, 2012 | 1 comment

This word seems to me to have layers of ensiform leaves, like its object. It has a neat partial symmetry, with the opening and closing a’s and the mirroring i’s flanking the not-quite-central post of the d. The layered feel may come in good part from the pair of /s/-plus-voiceless-stop clusters, sitting neatly at syllable boundaries – many a linguist will tell you flatly that in both instances the /s/ is fully at the beginning of the latter syllable and not at all part of the former, but others will point out that the phonological effect is as though the /s/ is at the end of the former syllable. Ask someone what the third syllable of this word is and they will probably readily say “dis.” (Ask them to say the first syllable and they’ll probably think you’re being naughty.) We don’t, after all, have “short i” in an open syllable. So even if, in saying it, we tend to glue the [s] onto the [p] or [t], that’s something that happens just at the moment of articulation – and possibly not completely even then.

For quite a few years I added, in my mind, another layer to this word. Somehow aspidistra seemed like it didn’t have quite enough to it, so I thought of the word as aspidispstra (and no, this was not some mere dipsomaniacal fantasy). That made for a rather larger-than-usual version of aspidistra! But not perhaps the biggest in the world. That would be the one in Gracie Fields’s song “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World,” which she came out with in 1938 and which was popular during World War II.

Why an aspidistra? This plant has become emblematic of British middle-class dull respectability – even the Oxford English Dictionary includes this aspect of its social significance right in its definition. George Orwell’s 1936 book Keep the Aspidistra Flying cemented its place as epitome, but by that time it was already past its peak in that role. It happened to have been one of the few plants that could thrive presentably in the dim cold and mildly toxic air of the gas-lit households of the British middle class during the Victorian era and on until electricity took over. (It occurs to me that I could probably get away with using one – perhaps the kind called “cast-iron plant” for its resilience – to replace the scraggly seven-year-old poinsettia that my wife keeps threatening to dismember and put down the garbage chute. I’m sure there’s a local aspidistribution centre somewhere in the aspidistrict I could get one from.)

This word has tastes of other life forms too. It opens with asp, which is a snake; its form is perhaps reminiscent of Latin names for bugs, such as Coleoptera; the stra makes it look like a Dutch family name (cf. Feenstra, Hofstra, Keegstra, Kooistra, et cetestra). But for all the menagerie of its letter salad the plant is not fantastic or exotic or exceptionally colourful; its leaves are like wide swords, but the name gladiolus is being used by something else, and somehow this plant got named after a shield instead – Greek ἀσπίς aspis plus some modern Latin morphology to finish it off. The word entered English about the time Queen Victoria was born.

Of course you could always call it by its Mandarin name yè lán or its Japanese name haran; after all, the plant’s originally from that part of the world. But those seem like such simple words, lacking the aspiration to sophistrication and respectability of the broad British middle class. The aspidistra keeps it flying, full banners in the breeze: the escutcheon of the world’s salary slaves.

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