grits

Posted on November 22, 2012 | 7 comments

Naturally, after talking about chitlins and grits yesterday, I wanted to have grits today.

Fortunately, this was possible. I have some Quaker Instant Grits, and I made some for breakfast.

grits

Does it look like cream of wheat? It’s not all that different, really, except that it’s made with corn and so has a different taste and a bit of a more granular consistency.

And what is the difference between grits and polenta? Less than you might think. Mainly, grits are made with hominy, which is skinned and bleached corn – though apparently sometimes they’re made with just normal corn meal. Oh, and you eat grits mainly in the US, and mainly in the southern states, and so you typically have them (or it) with other good southern food. (I do love me some southern cooking. You shouldn’t eat it all the time – fat and starch are maybe a little predominant – but one of my favourite cookbooks is White Trash Cooking by Ernest Mickler, basically a collection of recipes from his family and friends for good ugly flavourful food.)

This also has some phonological implications for grits. If you have a Canadian accent, or any of quite a lot of other Anglophone accents, you of course say it [grɪts], with the [ɪ] variously high or low depending on where you’re from (some places you’re likely to get something close to [grɛts], likely in concert with a certain amount of creaky phonation, a.k.a. vocal fry). But that’s not how /grɪts/ is realized in many a southern US accent. “Short” vowels are often diphthongized in the southern US, and /grɪts/ can be realized as [griɛts] or [griəts] – a manifestation of the same phonological process of splitting a vowel into two parts with contrast between them that led to the Great Vowel Shift, wherein all our long vowels became diphthongs in the couple of centuries before Shakespeare.

A warning, though: if you do not speak with a southern US accent, you will likely sound stupid saying grits in the southern way in the middle of a sentence that is otherwise in a non-southern accent. It’s like saying “Nollins” instead of “Neworlins” or “Norlins,” or “Cans” instead of “Cairns” (Australia), when you normally pronounce /r/. People who sound like they’re saying “Nollins” or “Cans” are saying the /r/; they’re just saying it as a lengthening of the preceding vowel. You, in your accent, should say the /r/ the way you normally say it. Otherwise you’re shifting for just one word into someone else’s phonotactics, switching phonological realization patterns for one word. It’s desperately incongruous.

But back to the southern connection. I bet a lot of people just know of grits as “something southern people eat” without knowing exactly what they are, let alone ever having had them. Millions of people will surely think first of Flo (played by Polly Holliday, from Alabama) in the TV show Alice – a southerner working as a waitress in Mel’s Diner in Arizona. Her catchphrase was “Kiss my grits!” (Hear her say it near the end of this clip.)

So naturally you’re likely to fancy yourself feeling mighty southern if you eat some grits. It seems almost like the haggis of the south in regard to the regional pride attached to it (except that people generally don’t think of grits as disgusting, as many – not including me – do of haggis). It’s a signature bit of southern cuisine in spite of the fact that it’s not breaded or fried or barbecued or covered in some sort of sauce. Well, it’s made of corn. Shut up and eat. I suspect that it has a certain grab-and-stay power just because of the grabby sound of the word ([gr] onset) and the other tastes grit has – notably pluck and courage, but also stubble and dirt: an emphasis of honest poor-folks origins.

Grit as in “dirt” and grits as in “ground corn” are, by the way, from different Old English roots, but they are likely related further back and have also mutually influenced over the course of English history. On the other hand, groats is considered a variant of grits – one that tends to refer specifically to oats (or as otherwise specified, for instance buckwheat groats), which grits seems originally to have referred to as well – or wheat.

But, you know, as Wilson Fowlie pointed out to me today on my note on chitterlings, there’s probably someone somewhere who will insist on saying groats when talking about grits. After all, grits is what normal people call them – people who don’t have a whole lot of education and don’t speak “formal” English. So therefore if there’s a version of the word that’s more associated with England and less associated with those southern people, it must be the more correct or better version, right?

Just like I’m sure there are restaurants that do the most precious imaginable variations on grits, too. You know, “Crawfish Grit Croquettes with creole mustard foam and green onion ‘dust’” or “Herb crusted Maple leaf duck breast Smoked and sliced over Creamy herb infused grits and finished with Wild berry confit salad.” (Note the arbitrary capitalization.) Now, I like novelty in foods, and fusion, and so on, and I eat for flavour, not ethnology (“authentic” is a deeply self-deceptive concept in intercultural food explorations), but precious fads can sometimes make me grit my teeth a little. Some of those chefs can kiss my grits… actually, they can leave them alone, thanks.

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chitterlings

Posted on November 21, 2012 | 4 comments

Ah, newspeople. Who was it that said that news was like sausages – you don’t want to see how it’s made? Oh, wait, that was laws. But they are like sausages in that they want to get to the guts of the issue, but they have to do it presentably – and in a way that they think is palatable to their audience. And they are like people of the law in that they are often very concerned with appearing impartial and correct.

Indeed, you can see some of the most egregious hypercorrections in newspapers. And broadcast news, the same place that brought us “harris-ment” for harassment and “urine-us” for Uranus, is about the only place you may hear an [r] after the [b] in February or – o hypercorrection indeed – hear the hump day of the week pronounced [wɛd nɛs deɪ] rather than [wɪnz deɪ] (even the Oxford English Dictionary does not include that three-syllable spelling pronunciation).

Or hear tell of chitterlings. As I recall hearing on the news when there was a recall related to some chitterlings in Alberta once.

Before going any further on what chitterlings are and what they’re usually called (things you may or may not know), let’s stop and enjoy the look and feel of this word. It has the crisp skip of the voiceless affricate and stop in the first part, and then it softens to liquids and a nasal and a voiced fricative. It seems to skitter, chatter, perhaps even glitter; the lings may make you think of earthlings, and you may wonder if chitterlings are denizens of Chattanooga, say. Or could they be little critters, monkeys perhaps?

Naw, they’re pigs’ guts. Or guts of other animals, but usually pigs’ guts.

“Um,” you may be thinking. “Why would they recall pigs’ guts? And what do they do, take the pigs back to the factories for gut replacements?” No, these guts have been taken from the pigs already and the pigs are not going to need them again. These guts are for cooking (at length, as usual with digestive organs) and eating. (They were recalled due to contamination. With what, I can’t recall. Pig poop?)

And the more common word for them is chitlings, or chitlins. Which is of course just a rubbed-down version of the original, sort of like vittles for victuals. It is, naturally, newer (1800s rather than 1400s for the first known use in print), and is associated with the Southern US in particular.

Did you know that was what chitlins are? If you didn’t, now you do. My guess is you’ve probably heard of “chitlins and grits” or something like that. So, uh… do you know what grits are? Have you had them? (I certainly have, and I quite like them.) I’ll tell you this: I can’t see how a newsreader could possibly hypercorrect the word grits.

But if we’re going to go the whole way with chitterlings, following the formally correct and extremely WASPy model, why not have some more guts and go with a spelling from way back when – I like this one from 1440 (thanks, OED): chytyrlynge. That really looks more like fried porcine intestine. Note that it’s singular, though… like guts (and grits), chitterlings has come to be a plural (also conjugatable as a singular).

And where does it come from? Well, words are like sausages. I don’t mean that you don’t want to know how they’re made. I mean sometimes you just don’t know what the heck went into making them and you’re probably never going to find out. So just enjoy the flavour.

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distill

Posted on November 19, 2012 | 1 comment

I sing with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and we started rehearsing tonight for our Christmas carol concert. One of the pieces we’ll be singing is The Huron Carol, in Robert B. Anderson’s arrangement.

As soon as we started singing it I was in the still calm of a Christmas Eve somewhere in my past, any one of many I’ve lived, outside in the crisp Alberta air with snow lightly here and there, house lights, Christmas lights, the beautiful calm and the sense of quiet anticipation – not of getting presents; the commercial side of Christmas is increasingly repellent to me – anticipation of, well, comfort and joy and new beginnings. And, honestly, I just love beautiful nights filled with silence and music. As we sang, frissons ran over my skin – not chills, not from the frosty air; we were, after all, singing inside where it was light and warm; simply the nerve endings and the little hairs up and down standing up to look up at the starry sky.

Christmas Eves aren’t like that anymore. And never have been. I know perfectly well that every one of those Christmas Eves felt like a normal enough evening at the time, pleasant but not really matching the strength of memory. Well of course. One might as well say that speech is not like singing, does not produce the same frissons. But in both cases it is, I think, not a question of something being added that wasn’t there. It is a case of distillation.

You know what distillation is. It’s what we use to produce purer water, purer alcohol or more intense liquor… Not to add what is not there, but to keep what we most especially want and remove most of the rest. How? Let it evaporate, turn it to steam, let the most volatile, the most savorous, the lightest, the most desirable parts slip up and away from the weighty watery hold of gravity; and once it has flown, has known the freedom of swirling in its little hot empyrean, has slipped the surly bonds of earth, let it come against the glass that will keep it from escaping, the wall it could see through but never surpass; and let it cool into tears, weeping for its lost chance, dripping down again into a pool – but a pool only of those spirits that escaped, a pool so much purer than what had been before. In this metamorphosis, the flying part is the chrysalis, while the shimmering butterfly returns to gravity.

Does that seem overwrought? Do you know what distill comes from? Latin distillare or destillare, “drip or trickle down”; the Oxford English Dictionary gives the first meaning of distill (in English from the 1400s) as intransitive, “To trickle down or fall in minute drops, as rain, tears; to issue forth in drops or in a fine moisture; to exude.” From which we ultimately came to our sense referring to the purification process that makes use of distillation in the first sense. But rain falls because it has condensed around dust; tears are salty as they roll down your face; but the distillate that drips at the end of the purifying process has left such things behind and has only condensed because it could not be free.

And so our memories, the experiences of our minds, the most volatile elements, capable – like alcohol – of carrying flavours so much more strongly, are distilled. Even as we experience these things, that spirit of emotion is there, a subtle current weaving through or just a dilute mood barely noticeable, tasted at best perhaps as a faint yearning. It comes through in the still of memory, spirit condensed on the glass of the window through which we view the world.

It is so with music too. Our speech tones carry some emotion, but it is scruffy, everyday emotion, like a once-beautiful antique chair hiding under a dust cloth in a rumpus room, or a hint of whisky in a glass of ginger ale. Perhaps it comes from a pure source and is watered down; perhaps it comes like alcohol from fruit juice, not there from the beginning but a product of what is there. But words want to distill; the tones of our speech want to fly loose and make their page the stained glass window of song, condensing on it in tears. You doubt? Meet the speech-to-song illusion: a spoken phrase played back enough times begins to sound like music.

And what will we remember or sing of this word distill? What spirits does it carry? You see every letter but the coiled and fluid s reaching up away like steam. You see in its alternate form, distil, a partly turned pistil – the female, receiving part of a flower, which gestates the new flower seeds. You see till, which is a temporal or pecuniary expectation – “We will sell till we fill our till” – with negating dis before it, rendering it free of future time and money. You see still, calm, peaceful, hushed like the [st] in the heart of this word. These are the parts I will take with me and savour quietly much later from the crystal flask of memory; the rest I can leave behind.

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gallimaufry, salmagundi

Posted on November 18, 2012 | 4 comments

What have we got to eat tonight?

It’s gallimaufry or salmagundi, I’m not sure which. Maybe both.

You made it. How can you not know?

It’s a tosspot hotch-potch, a hodgepodge like hopscotch with a splash of balderdash, a farrago of foraging. Fish, flesh, flashes in the pan, catch as catch can. Potluck from a potlach. Edibles all agee, etymology unknown. As incongruous as a semolina filigree.

We can go through it and see what there is and decide what to call it.

There’s a gallon of small fry, silver and swirling, and some salmon gumbo, pink and green like a youth at the railing of a heaving ship. There’s gall and gum and a lamb sandwich and a sloppy Joe and maybe a muffuletta, all mingling like yesterday’s lunch in your gut; there’s a slop of slumgullion garbled with subgum and a muddled mug of mulligatawny, middling inelegant and glumly tawny. There’s a gamelan with a gun, banging through revolving scales. There are fumes from a fumarole and undies from a gun moll named Selma. A mafia gallant slammed some alms down in it: “For your family.” Swirling within I see dualism nag and a Gaul firmly in d’ slum again, a sad mauling à la filmy rug, as kooky as a coati mundi in the belfry… If I pick bits out like fishbones, I get a, a, i, u to go with the g, l, m; on the one side I am left with l fry and on the other with s nd. They are like hidden messages, partially obnubilated.

Sip it or gulp it. It tastes of two trochees, like Latin lines: confutatis maledictis, tuba merum spargens sonum, o Fortuna velut luna, testit David cum Sibylla. A bumping, gulping rhythm. It has an [æl] in the first syllable, a [m] in the second, a [g] somewhere in it, an [i] at the end. It sounds like a big jug of whatever-it-is being poured out, galumphing into overloaded bowls, glugging down a drain burping like mud pots.

You won’t get anywhere by comparing the original recipes. A gallimaufry is just a merry gorging of ragout or hash, any crazy stew; salmagundi has many different specific recipes, and they seldom resemble each other in any particular detail, although one might think of a mixture of meat, anchovies, eggs, capers, perhaps olives, oil, lemon juice… or not. Look them up in different sources and get different recipes. They seem to be culinary pranks, a sort of “aristocrats” joke of the kitchen.

Very well. It’s what there is to eat. A verbal smorgasbord for galloping gourmets: astonishing gastronomy, a Solomon Grundy, a gallery mouthful. Give it a name.

Fillmagasundry. Let’s just call it that.

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plunger

Posted on November 17, 2012 | 2 comments

You are a plunger if you plunge – if you lunge into the water, or fall like a plumb line: fill your lungs and dive in, and sink like lead. The direction is down, the image liquid; you may plunge into work or conversation or adventure, but it is like splashing into a lake, or a big bowl – perhaps of punch. The sound of a body entering deep liquid at speed: “plunge” (first, of course, you jump – and “jump” is like a sort of reversal of “plunge”, sonically: the voiced affricate ge or j, the central vowel and nasal un or um, the voiceless bilabial stop p… a difference is that there is a liquid l in plunge). And you do not make a plunge; you take the plunge – always one, and definite, and taken.

Usually, of course, the you that is a plunger is not a person. There are a few things that are called plungers, and they generally operate with a piston action – as in a coffee press, or a switch that one operates by pushing down on. Anything can plunge, but a plunger is conceptualized as having a piston-like shape: a larger head, circular but flattened or cup-like, and a long handle, extending back like a motion line in a cartoon. You could shoot it like an arrow. A suction-cup arrow.

A suction cup is, of course, what we think of most on the end of a plunger. Your toilet is clogged and you need an unplugger to purge it. You take the plunger and plunge into the work: plunge it into the disgusting water, lunge forward and pull backwards repeatedly; it intakes and expels like a lung (or something rather less worth naming). Push down u pull up n and repeat until the lump loosens and gurgles and chugs down, expunged. It may take some work. If the plunger is not of good quality, the rubber may lose flexibility in the cold water and simply break after a time, the rod punching its way through the cup. I had to go buy a new one today. How annoying.

Plunger, like so much of our vocabulary, has been brought back in a knapsack from a trip to France, pressed into service like a souvenir French press; the French word is plongeur, and the French for the verb plunge is plonger. The trail follows a curving route downward to Latin and plumbum, “lead” (Pb), as in a plumb bob or other leaded line cast and suspended. (I will avoid commentaries on lead bellies and plum bums.) In fishing terms, if you plunge, you drop in like a sinker.

And you can drop a plunger in a sink, too; they’re not just for toilets. Any clog in a pipe may be susceptible to forcing by compressing the water column with an abrupt pumping action. Oh, yes: plungers may look like suction cups, but they often suck at suction, so to speak; they are much more effective in the pushing part, typically. Which is suitable: when we think of plunging, we just think of the entry. Can you even tell me an equivalent word for exiting the body of water?

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fry

Posted on November 15, 2012 | 4 comments

The streams of word country are sizzling with fry. Freyja has worked her magic, that goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, and will be back for her portfolios of war and death later. Now Frigg has bestowed motherhood on the waters (no naughty jokes about Frigging, please). The inchoate caviar has dehisced into a whitewater of whitebait. The Old Norse seed fræ has become first those eggs and now the young fish, the myriad glittering flutterings swarming the riffles and rills: the fry, stirring.

Oh, how they coruscate in the sun filtered through the water. You can see the flip of the fins in the f and the flick of the tail in the y; you can feel in your mouth the urge to fly, the recoil and wide hurl and return to the original liquid and glide, [fraɪ]. Yes: it is your tongue, the fry. Your native tongue, ever swimming in the stream of your mouth, ever longing to fly free, ever spawning.

And diving deep, deep sometimes. That vocal slouch, the low final growl, “creaky phonation,” vocal fry, something more common than we notice but lately often associated with young women, sounding like a rehearsal for senescence, the recollection of Freyja.

But words and tongues last variously long. Some fry early in the sun. Some get burned out, try and try until they’re fried. Some are elected for electrocution and fry: the char in the chair of elocution. Some are a flash in the pan, fish flesh in the pan, our native tongue battered and twinned with its forever frenemy: French fries too. The Old Norse word meets its Latin doppelganger, scion of frigere, and fry fry. Is it even Steven?

It’s even Stephen – Stephen Fry. The British wit of eternally youthful mind loves to let the fry free on the river of his tongue. When he expatiates on language – a celebration of the spangling brook of lexis and syntax and a condemnation of those who would dam it and damn its fly fishers – the stream of his consciousness enjoins and enfranchises us all to become what I would call streamkeepers of the language, protecting against those who would poison the discourse, fostering its fecundity, mothering its multiplicity.

Fry is free. Literally: the family name Fry is related to its German homophone frei, “free”. Fry is free, and the fry are free, and as they are free to leap to a fry height we are free to sauté in the fry pan, to catch and taste and enjoy our Freiheit, our freedom. It is love, beauty, and fertility; it is seed, caviar, and it is the million young; it is the ways of ending and cooking and the side dishes; it is firm definition finding itself friable and soon frittered; it is the war of words and the death of tongues. As you shiver in the river you sit with Shiva. But all is fervid and free in the cycle of change, this incessant gallimaufry.

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mediochre

Posted on November 14, 2012 | 5 comments

I was reading a snotty restaurant review on TripAdvisor today (you can count on at least one snotty review no matter how good a place is), and I saw the word mediochre in it.

I’m sure most of you are thinking, “That’s mediocre. There’s no h in it.”

And indeed the person was not talking about a forgettable shade of drab. Nor was he making a pun. More’s the pity; it’s a perfectly good pun, and it’s not the first time it would have been made. In fact, it even has its own Urban Dictionary entry: “A shade of dark yellow that just isn’t living up to its potential.”

You can get more than 37,000 Google hits for mediochre, but most of them are not colour puns. No, they’re evidence of the effect of the weirdness of English spelling. In some languages, if something is spelled differently from how it sounds, you doubt the spelling; in English, the stranger variant is often likely to be assumed to be the more correct one. English even gets it in the neck – there are many people who assume that it’s spelled kneck.

Well, it’s not as though they lack precedents; there’s knock and knick-knack and knuckle to set a pattern for kneck. And for mediochre there’s euchre, sepulchre, Christmas, catachresis, and of course ochre. Since we don’t have a reliable, consistent system of spelling, if we’re unsure of a spelling, we think of other words of similar sound, and we will prefer the ones that stand out somehow.

Which is why mediocre is such a put-down. The definition of mediocre is supposed to be “middle of the road, neither good nor bad”; it comes from Latin mediocris, from medius “middle” and ocris “mountain, peak”, from Greek ὄκρις okris “point, protuberance”. So midpoint. The peak in the middle. The Romans didn’t have Gaussian curves, but the image is pretty much right on: the mediocre is the median, that big mass in the middle. It just happens that we generally despise that big mass in the middle. That’s where the shiny iron of excellence gives way to rust, and fails to “exceed expectations.” (Somehow we always expect that our expectations will be exceeded, and if something doesn’t exceed expectations, then it doesn’t live up to expectation. It’s a sort of Lake Wobegon Effect.)

So if someone writes “The food was mediocre,” it means “The food was really disappointing.” That TripAdvisor review I mentioned was a one-star review, not a two-star or three-star review. A mediocre talent is the worst kind: not good enough to be at all good, but not spectacularly, entertainingly bad. Mediocre stands right in the middle, and none of us want to be right in the middle, it seems, just not living up to our potential. We want standouts, exceptions. And, similarly, we want words with weirder spellings, silent letters and so on.

We want, in short, to paint the town red, not ochre. Well, rather, we want someone to paint the town red. Most of us do not really want to extend ourselves and take the risk. But we really do like those exceptions. Ochre is nice enough for decorative purposes, with its muddy yolk colour, and its name derived from Greek ὠχρός okhros “pale yellow” – nothing to really jump out at you there. But it’s, you know, rust. Literally – ochre colouring comes, historically, from iron oxide. You need some vivid accent colours to go with it, or you get a sort of ochlocracy (mob rule) of the middling.

And, likewise, your food has to have some spark of genius or insanity, or it’s just yuck, crap. Not that there’s any great spark of genius or exceptionality in using a middle-of-the-road word as a putdown. And, ironically, misspelling words in some exceptional way under the influence of other words with nonstandard spelling is an entirely too common and unexceptional thing to do. So a review that criticizes food for not going that extra mile as being “mediochre” is… well… need I say it?

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bulrush

Posted on November 13, 2012 | 4 comments

She sits by the reeds and reads. The water flows by, bluish, burbling, past the hedge of sedges. She leans on a bush, a shrub; behind is the brush land, subfusc, scumbled with stubble and rubble. But words grow even here. Words flow from the water; words grow in the tall grass, the cattails, these bulrushes. Grow? Well, she doesn’t know. They catch them, the words, and she plucks them out and dines with her eyes and mind.

Does she have the right to seize the incipient words? Is it not bullish, hubristic? An act of piracy, or papyrusy? Were they not meant for bigger things? Ought she not to blush?

She would sooner shrug. Send not to know for whom the words flow; they flow for thee, and they are filtered by these bulrushes. The water rushes them along and they are caught in the rushes, like the dailies from filming: words upon words. She needs no rush of motion; this other rush, that says hush as it soughs in the breeze, is only a coincidence of sound: a plant. Who planted it? Oh, these things just grow. They grow large, large as bulls.

And she grows, grows old, second by second, watches time and the words pass, reads by the reeds, reads the reeds. She does not seek a knot in a bulrush, as the Romans said: I mean, she does not look to make difficulty where there was none. But there are knots, and involutions, and forms that hold different senses, and Möbius strips of bulrushes. Thefts of form: piracy, papyrusy. She recalls “The Pipe-Player” by Sir Edward William Gosse:

Cool, and palm-shaded from the torrid heat,
The young brown tenor puts his singing by,
And sets the twin pipe to his lips to try
Some air of bulrush-glooms where lovers meet;
O swart musician, time and fame are fleet,
Brief all delight, and youth’s feet fain to fly!
Pipe on in peace! To-morrow must we die?
What matter, if our life to-day be sweet!
Soon, soon, the silver paper-reeds that sigh
Along the Sacred River will repeat
The echo of the dark-stoled bearers’ feet,
Who carry you, with wailing, where must lie
Your swarthed and withered body, by and by
In perfumed darkness with the grains of wheat.

Time will roll on, but every moment is a new birth. She has been impregnated by Etaoin Shrdlu, an act of lexical intercourse, and her gravid thoughts spawn new language, but still she wants a word that has some flesh.

Oh, the words are solid enough. When they are caught by the papyrus – this is what bulrush means here; there are so many things bulrush can mean, cattails, other sedges at the edges of bodies of water – when they are caught by the papyrus, they are visible, they darken the nature. But their every movement is a dance in her own mind. What she desires more is a new breath. Her word-love, the Morpheus of morphemes, uses only hers. And this Morpheus is a Möbius Morpheus, for he can hold the same form and change who he is. So she, holding her form, seeks to change who she is, by extending herself… to whom?

And then she hears a brushing, not a susurrus but a friction, as of paper, or future paper, rubbing against more of the same. She leans, kneels, walks on hands and knees, pushes aside the bulrushes. And sees a small boat, a boat made of bulrushes. A little papyrus ship, with a passenger, barely three months old. Not yet speaking. But so many words to come, inchoate, borne on this potential paper, breathing. What you may find in the bulrushes.

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evite, Evite, evitable

Posted on November 11, 2012 | 2 comments

The party, this time, was chez Maury: an evening of liquor, words, and liquor words. Most of the usual suspects from the local Order of Logogustation were there. I was surprised, given the paronomastic potential, not to see our local vulgarian, Ross Ewage, in attendance.

“I thought,” I said to Maury, “that he would inevitably be here, given the theme.”

“In fact,” Maury said, “he turned out to be evitable. Advertently so.” He gave a wry smile and sipped his Collingwood. Then he added, “Although only just. Thereby hangs a tale.”

“Whose tail?”

“Marilyn’s. And I have learned a lesson about not using arcane and archaic vocabulary too freely.”

Marilyn Frack. This was sounding entertaining – as long as I wasn’t the one being discomfited.

“I happened to be talking with Edgar,” Maury continued – he meant Edgar Frick, the other half of the leather-clad duo of incessant lasciviousness. “I said I was going to be hosting this party – I don’t know why I was talking with Edgar about this, but really, Ross may be evitable but Marilyn is inevitable.” He sighed. “Anyway, he asked whether Ross would be coming. I said we should evite him.”

“And for some reason,” I said, “you assumed that Edgar would know you were using the old verb meaning ‘avoid or shun’.” (It’s from Latin evitare.)

“Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson used it. Edgar is a well-read man. But he is also more used to current usage.”

“So Edgar sent him an electronic invitation,” I said. Of course Evite is a specific website, but it’s being generalized like Kleenex lately, surely to the annoyance of the owners of Evite.com.

“No, he wouldn’t have done that; he wasn’t in charge of the invites. But what he did do was mention it to Marilyn. What he said, however, was ‘Maury wants to send Ross an Evite.’”

Maury paused to let that sink in for as long as it took him to toss back the rest of his glass of rye. Then he reached over to a bottle of Balvenie on the nearby sideboard and reloaded. Wheels were still turning in my mind.

Maury raised an eyebrow. “Marilyn decided she would be the Evite.”

The penny dropped.

“Did she bring Edgar as an Adamite?” I asked.

An Adamite and an Evite, you see, are a man and a woman (respectively) who dress as Adam and Eve did. Which is to say with no – or very little – clothing.

“She may have asked him,” Maury said, “but if she did, he demurred, and she wasn’t adamant.”

“So she went over to Ross’s place…” I said.

“Unannounced,” Maury said, “and wearing only stilettos, a thong bottom, and body paint that looked like her usual black leather outfit.”

I clutched the sideboard so as not to collapse with laughter. Raising my glass of Old Sam, I managed to catch my breath to say, “That sounds like a rum thing!”

“It just happens,” Maury said, drily, “that it was a bit of a rainy day. And Marilyn’s paint was, shall we say, delible.”

“So by the time she got to his place” I said, “it was beginning to streak?”

“And so was she.” He nodded and sipped his drink. “When she reached his door, it was running. Shortly thereafter, so was he. And that –” he raised his glass – “scotched that.”

Thanks to Duane Aubin for inspiring this. As to his wondering why evitable and delible fell away while their negatives persisted, I cannot say for sure what inclines us more to the words that refer to permanence and inescapability, although the negatives seem always to have been more used in English and appear to have entered the language first as well. It’s something worth more digging…

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rondeau

Posted on November 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

We come around a round like o
Because what goes returns, you know
If mouth does not, then letter will
If letter not, mouth fills the bill
It always comes – it goes to show

That history’s a poem so
Involved in form we follow though
We think it free but if free will
We come around

In verse we make our garden grow
We do – forget – repeat – the flow
Is water in a turning mill
Or swirling step we dance until
As line turns back to make rondeau
We come around

This is a rondeau: a poem that comes around. Round like the o, round like your mouth when you say the eau. The poem is a fixed form, set as if to music – and there is also a musical form called rondeau. The word rondeau recalls round and French ronde, related words; by accident it also carries water, French eau.

The form has a most famous exemplar, one that is not so much a dance as a returning remembrance. It is the poem that is read everywhere in Canada – I don’t know where else – every Remembrance Day, November 11:

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Either way, we come around.

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