fized

Posted on October 24, 2012 | 2 comments

I remember that first day of junior high gym class in Exshaw – or what I thought was gym class. Mister Hogarth (a thirtyish guy who had formerly been a trucker) strode up to the board and wrote FIZED. And underlined it with a tossed-off stroke. We weren’t in gym class! We were in fized!

That might seem really odd to you if you don’t know how it’s pronounced. This is not a typo for fixed – actually it very often is, but not in this case – and it’s not one for fizzed either. It’s not one syllable; it’s two, and the stress is on the second syllable. It’s /fɪ ˈzɛd/.

My developing mind accepted it as yet another new word that one simply associates with a thing. At that age I wasn’t tuned into etymology. This was a thing, this class, and for some undefined reason it was something other than gym. It was this new thing with a name that seemed possibly rakish (as zeds will), possibly fuzzy or frowsy, certainly with a softer and buzzier name than gym, which echoes the sound of balls bouncing on the floor (drop a basketball: “gym, gym, gym, gym gym gym gymgymgym”). It was also vaguely reminiscent of the name of another kid in school (not my grade, the one above, but it was a small school), Peter Fisera (which we said “fizeera”). Ironic, because he was – like me and my brother – an unathletic nerd.

But there it is. New word. You hear it, it has some sort of phonotactic plausibility, it comes from a source that gives you new words every so often, you accept it. You don’t need to be a child to do that. Full-grown adults quite normally accept new words with no real bona fides. Don’t believe me? Read about classiomatic.

So where could this word come from? Does it look Turkish, maybe (would that be fezzed), or, um, I don’t know, Kazakh? How about Jurched? A Dutch family name, maybe (it apparently is one of those too)? And why do we not say it as “fee zed” or “fie zd”? Phonologically, it seems that it’s treated as /fɪz ɛd/, with the /z/ moving to the next syllable just because we automatically do that in actual pronunciation: prefer onset to coda for a consonant.

I imagine many of you have already guessed it. And in fact it didn’t take all that long before I saw the usual spelling of this and figured it out. Usual spelling? It’s this: phys ed. As in short for physical education. Mister Hogarth was making a funny (I assume). Which was likely lost on the whole class.

Well, syllable acronyms are nothing new. Sometimes they don’t even look like syllable acronyms. Near Johannesburg, a place first called South West Township was accordioned down to Soweto, for instance, which really does look like a very African word to those who don’t know better. In New York City, they have SoHo (South of Houston), Tribeca (Triangle below Canal), and assorted others. But the vogue has shifted now towards letter acronyms (as in Brooklyn’s DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and indeed phys ed is also called PE.

But really, Anglophones will generally find phys ed (or fized) easier to say than PE, because there’s that glottal stop in between two open vowels in PE, and that always seems like an extra effort – it requires less muscle than the tongue touch in fized, but it involves a full stopping of the breath flow, and with a muscle we may not be as used to using in a significant way.

So. Fized. A name for a class I didn’t look forward to, loaded with team sports and bouncing balls and shouting and ways to get injured. Why couldn’t I just go read more books? I can’t say my interest in it fizzled, because it really wasn’t much there in the first place. (Indeed, my lack of interest has fizzled; I still don’t like team sports, but I love individual sports and am an avid runner.) What I can say is that that word – attested then first, then last for me – has stuck in my mind ever since. First encounters can have lasting effects – as witness the fact that whenever I see a painting by the 18th-century British artist William Hogarth, his name makes me think of… yes, fized.

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bayonet

Posted on October 22, 2012 | 3 comments

I guess soldiers are using bayonets less and less these days. (Horses too.) Actually, even a century ago they were responsible for less than one percent of battlefield casualties. But they do have their uses.

Heck, I use a bayonet pretty much every day.

OK, no, I use a bayonet mount.

Let me back up a bit first. A bayonet is a blade that can be affixed to the front end of a rifle, allowing the soldier to use the rifle as a stabbing or cutting weapon. I’m put in mind of a cartoon – I wish I could remember where I saw it; MAD Magazine perhaps – where a man who’s about to be executed by a firing squad is asked if he has a last wish. “Yes,” says the man, “I wish not to be shot.” The colonel tells him his wish is granted. Ah, the condemned man smiles! Then the colonel turns and shouts to the squad, “Fix bayonets!”

Bayonet is a reasonably straightforward word. It’s pronounced like three English words, “bay o net”… seems almost too easy, doesn’t it? (It also has the ring of “ban it” in a strong Southern US accent. But bayonets have not been banned. They’re safer than most weapons – for the victim. Much more dangerous for the attacker than the means of killing preferred today.) I suppose if you buy one in an online auction, you could call it an ebayonet. After all, it looks like a San Francisco (or Boston) network: bay-o-net. But no, it’s a now well established symbol of military aggression and even valour. It may not be needed that much in battle, but the image of a knife plus a gun has such epic appeal – it’s two, two, two deaths in one!

It is thought that bayonet comes from French Bayonnette, referring to an origin in the city of Bayonne. What the French were doing in New Jersey I don’t know. Oh, wait – the other Bayonne, the one with the really good ham (a French equivalent to prosciutto – slice it thin!).

Anyway, when the bayonet was first attached to guns, the gun in use was the musket, and they took some time to reload – time during which a wounded enemy or animal (they were also used for hunting) could escape or attack, endangering the sporting baronet or his huntsman – or the soldier, of course. So the idea came along of fixing this flat dagger, called a Bayonnette or bayonet, to the front of the gun quickly so you had a nice long stabbing thing. (Yes, yes, you could just stab the beast or man with a blade in your hand, but that would mean getting very close. Better to have an extra several feet of reach. Even at that it’s awfully close.) Ere long bayonets were permanently associated with long guns.

But at first they fixed it on by sticking it into the muzzle of the gun. Well, that had its hazards, which I think are probably fairly guessable. When you had fixed bayonet, you could not shoot! So they quickly came up with the idea of attaching it to the side of the barrel at the front, so you could fire with the bayonet in place. Various styles and mounts were developed. You wanted something that was easy to use but would hold the bayonet in place no matter how much stabbing and pulling you did. Or digging and cutting – many bayonets were designed to be usable also for cutting wires (using serrated edges), digging in the ground (with a more spade-like shape), and other similarly utile applications for a sharp and pointy tool. (They’re useful detached, too; I’m sure many a bagel or beignet or even Bayonne ham has been sliced with one in a pinch.)

One kind of mount developed for bayonets involved rings with flanges – or pins and grooves – that would be matched and then twisted into place to overlap and hold the bayonet in place. As with many things developed for military purposes, it came to have civilian applications too. Some kinds of light bulbs, for instance.

Photographers who use cameras with interchangeable lenses are generally familiar with a bayonet mount: put lens against body, ring to ring, matching the dots, then twist a fraction of a turn until you get a satisfying click. And then – ironically – with bayonet fixed, you are ready to shoot. You may not be mounted (on a horse or otherwise), but your lens is, and we hope it’s nice and sharp. And you’ll be taking pictures, not lives.

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forty-five

Posted on October 22, 2012 | 1 comment

I have a collection of more than forty-five forty-fives, accumulated by when I was fifteen, a third of my current age.

My life has always revolved with music – not around it, and not it around my life, but spinning together. I have several dozen (perhaps a hundred?) vinyl LPs, each one made to revolve one hundred times every three minutes as it plays from outside in, each one twelve inches in diameter. And I have more like a thousand CDs, each one 4.75 inches in diameter and playing at a constant linear speed about 1.3 metres per second, making about 500 rotations per minute when it starts at the inside and slowing to about 200 RPM by the time it reaches the outside edge – if it does. Each of these is a collection of songs made to be played in sequence.

But a forty-five – originally made as competition for the 33 1/3 to replace the 78 – has one song per side. It has a large hole in the middle, made so that it would be easier to play them in quick sequence – a large spindle, easier to slide onto a tapered top, so a changer could play through a symphony on several discs with minimal interruption. It plays from the outside in, and it’s a one-shot deal; before you get to the large hole, the song is over.

There’s another song on the other side; it’s not expected to be as good. On the backside of “Rasputin” (which we played many times) is “Don’t Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night” (which I could not possibly say anything more about). On the backside for “Bette Davis Eyes” is “Miss You Tonight.” Backing “Industrial Disease,” it’s “Solid Rock”; the B-side of “Urgent” is “Girl on the Moon”; Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” is backed with “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got”; “Turn Me Loose” is backed by “Prissy Prissy”; “Echo Beach” has “Teddy the Dink”; for “Harden My Heart,” it’s “Don’t Be Lonely”; with “Start Me Up” you get “No Use in Crying”; for “Da Da Da” it’s “Sabine Sabine Sabine.” You may conclude that they didn’t want to have two hits on the same single – they could sell more records if they had one hit each. So you get the two sides of the record: one made to be number one with a bullet, the other to take the bullet.

There are exceptions. The back of “Seven Bridges Road” by The Eagles is “The Long Run”; on “Another One Bites the Dust” it’s “Don’t Try Suicide.” Both of those B-sides were also popular. And some of the forty-fives just have two versions of the same song – such as “How Long” by Rod Stewart and “Heat of the Moment” by Asia.

And there are hidden treasures, too. Listen to this: “Urgent” by Foreigner, as sung by the Doobie Brothers. Where did I get that? It’s just the 45 of the song by Foreigner, played at 33 1/3. Slightly less urgent, much more doobie flavour.

Forty-five thus has a taste of revolution (forty-five per minute), of double-sidedness, of one shot (and then a flip and one more shot). It also has a taste of a revolver. Something over a century ago now, when the bullets of the day seemed not to have enough stopping power for colonial invaders who wanted to quell the natives quickly, bigger bullets were specified. A few manufacturers stepped up to the plate, and the winner was Colt. We are familiar with the Colt .45, yes? It’s a revolver. Six shots. Big bullets, much more forceful than the .38s they had been using: these ones were almost half an inch wide (.45 means it’s .45 inches in diameter). You get not just one shot, not just two, but six, if you can. And it makes a big hole, fairly well guaranteed to cap the number of its target’s days.

Six shots with a forty-five. Six-forty-five: another term that relates to shooting – the nominal 6 cm by 4.5 cm negative format for medium-format cameras (actually 5.6 by 4.2). They fit 16 rather than 12 photos on a roll of 120 film. A 4:3 aspect ratio and a 4:3 ratio of number of photos. Just as you have 60 seconds in a minute and 45 revolutions in a minute – also 4:3. And then there’s 33: 3+3=6, yes, but consider this: the factors of 45 are 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15. They add up to 33. But there is no third. Oh, but 45 is still prettier. You have 3×3=9, and 9×5=45, and 4+5=9.

But what you really want to know is that it all comes around to 45, it all adds up to it: all the single digits. 0+1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9=45. Once around, and there you are, and then you’re back to 0 – the big hole in the middle. The needle is clicking against the inside track as it rotates over and over again, making its little “forty-five, forty-five, forty-five” sound. Time for the next song. Would that be the B side? Or did you save the A for the second spin?

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xu

Posted on October 21, 2012 | 4 comments

If you’re much of a Scrabble player, you know that two-letter words are the real base currency of the realm. Seven-letter words are the brass ring, but you often make them – and many other words – by playing a word alongside another word and making two-letter words in the process, adding points to boot. And you know there are some two-letter words that you never, ever use in real life but that save your bacon in Scrabble. Words like qi (not your IQ in a mirror; a Chinese loan word for a life force) and xu.

Xu. That’s a real shiny penny, isn’t it? Do you even know how to say it? Can you guess? Any idea where it comes from?

You might know that it’s one of the many currency names that have been granted automatic membership in English. When we speak of foreign currency, we have to use the name for the currency, but it’s not a proper noun. So words like peso and lira and rupee and baht get into English on diplomatic visas and have immunity from prosecution (by which I mean they survive dictionary challenges). Also in that gang of UN delegates: xu.

And how do you say it? In English, I mean. I had thought perhaps in line with “shoe,” since I was thinking of how it would be pronounced as a Chinese word, where the x is sort of like the ch in German ich, a voiceless alveopalatal fricative. I knew it would not be like “zoo,” which would be in line with English treatment of x in Greek loans. But, although the Vietnamese x is pretty much like the Chinese x, the English pronunciation of this word is /su:/. Rather like the French word sou, which means “penny”.

Oh, yes. What is a xu worth? Well, I should say was, since the xu-makers have stopped making xus. The main currency in Viet Nam is the dong. It used to be divided into 10 hao, and each hao was divided into 10 xu – so a xu is 1/100 of a dong. They stopped making the xu and the hao in the 1980s. But you can still use the words in Scrabble. It seems that diplomatic passport has eternal currency – which is good because, though xu may be an underling in its office, it is very useful to us here.

Ah, yes, these excellent exotics. That eye-catching x, matched with the unexpected u (I mean, if it were qu, OK, they go together, and we have mu and nu too thanks to the Greeks, but while we have exude and exult and so on, we just don’t start words with xu – or make whole words with it… except we do in Scrabble). So charmingly foreign and utterly un-European. It’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a bowl of pho.

Say, did you know that pho, that classic Vietnamese soup, has been around for only about a century, and the name is thought to come from French pot-au-feu? The Vietnamese word pho is said pretty much like French feu. Seriously! You know, the French were colonial overlords of Viet Nam for some time, and they had their influence.

So anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The sou. Oh, sorry, the xu. The exotic xu. Which – have you guessed it yet? – is really sou in Vietnamese dress.

Yup. It’s a French word, a coin of another realm, borrowed into Vietnamese and respelled accordingly. And here it is, no longer employed by its adopted country, now eking its existence in Scrabble games. Where it can be very valuable indeed.

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recrudesce, recrudescence

Posted on October 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

To become raw again. To have lain inert, latent, remissive, seemingly spent, curtailed, erased, and then to be refreshed, to resurge in vigor. At the risk of being crude: to regain virginity, to be renewed in nubility.

Is it possible? In fact, it is a perennial occurrence. After the raw, cold winter, the cracked ground is refreshed and the radices regrow. Green buds sprout once more. In the fullness of time they ripen, are picked. Last year this time: grapes grappled, crushed, then fermented, and from that comes wine. This year: again the grapes are raw, again they are ready for recruitment to the barriques. Then the first fresh wine, as always at that time of the year. And then the weather takes a turn for the raw. Meanwhile, the grapes of a million years ago, rotted into a potent liquor, are drawn from the ground in crude form, then refined to become fuel for the next crest of activity and the following long eons of decay.

Words recrudesce too. Old English ealriht, long gone from the lexis, reemerged as alright. An Old English man of the soil, a ploughman, was an eorðling, an earthling: bound to the ground of the planet. When, centuries later, we became aware how bound we were to our planet, and how unbounded the space around us, this word appeared, fresh again. Those words that are perpetually raw, never refined, manage always to maintain their freshness; others have their peaks and subsidences, and sometimes their peaks again.

And we, too, we recrudesce. After five or a dozen or a score of years gone to ground, seeming as though we wake up with six feet of dirt on our faces each morning, we may start to send out new shoots, grow new blossoms. Some who have seen their love etiolated or desiccated find it again, and, knowing now that both parties like piña colada and getting caught in the rain, sip again their cups and create an escape together. Others escape a suffocating sameness by choosing one of fifty ways to leave their lover.

It is neutral, recrudescence. Oh, that word, recrudescence, it has its flavours, its crude essence, its seventeen letters, its fourteen phonemes, its four e’s and three c’s and two r’s and handful of remainders. Its verb, recrudesce, lacks but the last of each. Each has a particular lexical crispness, accentuated by the liquid /r/ sounds and sharpened by the /s/ voiceless fricatives. We see the ec reemerge as the ce – even twice: thematically apposite. But we get that taste of crude – legitimately come by: the source is crudus, Latin for “raw”. These little crudités carry crudity. How can that be good?

It can be good or bad. A longstanding and technical sense is the return of a latent disease, as when the virus that gave you chickenpox as a child wakes up and gives you shingles as an adult. But another use is the reawakening of something valuable, a green blade rising from the buried grain. On the one hand we find Bertrand Russell speaking of the recrudescence of Puritanism and Baha’u’llah decrying “the recrudescence of religious intolerance, of racial animosity, and of patriotic arrogance”; on the other hand we have this much-quoted conclusion from Douglas MacArthur at the surrender of the Japanese in 1945:

We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

In the one kind, until someone or something decrees cure, we are cursed to random risk of outbreaks afresh; in the other, it is just such a resurrection that may rescue decency and ensure a renascence of creation. Something has been buried; many things have been buried; whether they are good or bad, we know only when they return, if they return – and we see what we bring to them too.

Thanks to Christina Vasilevski for suggesting recrudesce, which she spied in an article by David Quammen on popsci.com.

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binder, bind, bound

Posted on October 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Ash nazg durbatulûk, Ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk Agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all And in the darkness bind them. A three-ring binder. But what – or who – is bound?

Oh, yes, if you know your Tolkien you know his answer. But there are other binders, rely on it. We are in word country here now, and there is something I think you are ready to see.

You think the world is full of things, and then there are words that we attach to them. We see a thing, a creature, a person, and we turn to a book and we see a word there that we can use to bind it to the page, an ink tattoo on the paper. But we will now expand our awareness out of bounds, by leaps and bounds; where we were blind, we will now see. Take this pill. It is binding – yes, it can cause constipation, but I mean that it is a binding contract. Once you have bound yourself to it, we will be bound for a new world – without moving. We simply turn our perspective. It is a rebirth, and you’re going through the contractions.

And now you see in this view that it is words that are real. They grow freely, roam freely; the signifiers have no minders or blinders. But they cannot signify until they choose something to signify, or until something is chosen for them (but by who? everyone who chould choose is also a potential signified). And to find the object, we go to the binders. There are binders full of women, binders full of men, binders full of beasties and veggies and things, binders perhaps of brindled bandersnatches. They have been chosen to be bound, and now they are bound to be chosen.

The association is arbitrary: the objects are fungible. But when the words are bound to their objects, even though someone is bound to object, they are bound and tied, like Prometheus in binder twine: the rock his world, the eagle to de-liver him until Hercules delivers him. Bound for glory, bound for destruction, bound to set an example, bound in leather (deluxe edition).

Adam lay ybounden, too, ybounden to the Eve of destruction. Before they ate the fruit, did they know their names? Was it really Prometheus who gave them the fruit, the gift of words, the ability to bind a thing to a sign, to know where one thing stops and another starts by the semantic repulsion of their signs, Derrida’s différance? Be careful of that fruit; it’s binding. The only way to release the bonds is to prune. Unbind them and let them go free – but beware of verbal diarrhea. If the words detach from their binders, glossary becomes glossolalia.

But again you have been misled, led into bondage by what you have seen. Words are other words; in other words, you are out of bounds. This binder, it is a pigment of your imagination; it is the binder that causes the pigment to set, so that the colour stays together in the painting as you use your thousand words colourfully. This binder is the machine that harvests the words and binds them into sheaves or bales: the grim reaper, baleful but necessary in the circle of life.

The circle? The ring. The three rings: life is a three-ring circus, but when you snap the rings together you are back in the sheets… foolscap? Or night cap? Have you been dreaming? Are you homeward bound? When you awaken, when you rebound to awareness from sleep, are you re-bound to your body, bound hand and foot?

Are you awake? Look around you now, unbind your eyes from the screen. Yes, you. (Is there a you reading this?) You have been swimming in words. Where are their signifieds? Objects on the screen may appear closer than they are. These words you see, they are shaped by nothing other than absence: absence of their objects and absence of light – the letters are black. The darkness is the words, and everything is bound in them.

You are caught as in a web that spans the world wide. The web knows no bounds. But it knows no bonds either. Memes whirl like rubbed pennies, making three or four out of two; but when you stop the oscillation of species do you see there was nothing at all, not even two, and then you are left rubbing your eyes. Every thing is back in its binder. You too.

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ketchup, catsup

Posted on October 17, 2012 | 1 comment

My beautiful, cultured wife, Aina, has a thing for ketchup. She really loves it. That’s not such a bad thing; I like it too. Unlike her, though, I don’t put it cold on a cheese soufflé hot out of the oven. (I have taken measures to prevent a recurrence of that. Mainly, I don’t make cheese soufflés anymore.)

But let me tell you just how much she loves it. Once, while we were waiting at an airport for a flight, we stopped at a Harvey’s and got a small fries, and she used that little ketchup delivery system to deliver 13 packets of Heinz ketchup to her innards. That’s 13 as in a dozen plus one. I think that was about a half a packet per fry.

I think that might even beat Dennis the Menace. He loves ketchup. You know, Hank Ketcham’s cowlicked cartoon brat. (Yes, Ketcham. Coincidence? Hm.) I loved reading Dennis the Menace when I was a young menace. And I loved ketchup. One of the greatest inventions of my youth was the ketchup-flavoured potato chip. (Even today, nobody beats Old Dutch, which is very hard to get in Toronto.)

It’s such a sturdy, friendly word, ketchup. It has that k like a cowlick or an opening kick; it sails ahead like a ketch, so it can catch up with the food it adorns; it licks its chops with that chup (know Spanish? heard of the chupacabra?). It catches up in your mouth, too, moving in three steps – two stops and an affricate – from back of tongue up to the lips. But should it really be catsup?

Certainly, when I was a kid and first saw the rendition catsup, I assumed, since it was less common and was seen in a reasonably educated context, that it must be somehow better, more correct, classier, what have you. We tend to make those assumptions in English about unexpected spellings and usages. Its novelty appealed to me, that’s for sure. So did the cat part. I love cats (but I’m allergic so I can’t live with them). And of course the sup – which I knew best as a consumption-related word from Andy Capp comic strips (that football-mad alcoholic British runty tough). And now I have my beautiful Aina, who has been known to some of her fellow ice-show skaters as Ainacat, so catsup seems perfectly right. Even if the actual sauce has such a vinegar-and-sugar edge that the k and the ch might seem somehow more in line.

But any bottle of ketchup you buy that calls itself catsup is unlikely to be quite as good as what you’re used to. Let’s be honest: just as there is one brand of Worcestershire sauce and the rest are just wasters, there is one brand of ketchup and the rest are just playing catch-up. And that one brand says ketchup. True, there is a vogue now for house-made ketchups in restaurants, and some of them are quite pleasing in their way. But they also mostly spell it ketchup.

But could they all be wrong? Ha ha ha ha ha. Once the poll of popular usage is in, “right” is generally whatever it has elected. This is why we have an apron and an orange and some peas rather than a napron and a norange and some pease. And only in America, and not much there, do you still see catsup at all. But is catsup more original? If by “original” you mean “someone’s own invention,” perhaps…

Actually, catsup is just a different attempt at transliterating the same thing that ketchup transliterates. Evidence indicates that ketchup is more successful. The source seems to be Malay kecap (sounds kinda like “kay-chop”). In Indonesian cuisine you may see the Dutch-style rendering, ketjap, as in ketjap manis, which is a very nice dark sauce, sweet and viscous and salty, in the neighbourhood of hoisin sauce and soy sauce.

Oh, yes. What we’re used to as ketchup is not the same as what kecap refers to, which is in turn not exactly what its original source referred to – though there is some debate as to what that source was. Something Chinese, most likely; most say an Amoy word for “pickled fish brine”, though it might have been a Cantonese or Hokkien word for “eggplant sauce” or “tomato sauce”.

But even in English there has been non-tomato ketchup. That’s why those bottles of the stuff you buy specify that it’s tomato ketchup – there’s also mushroom ketchup, still made by Geo. Watkins and home-made by anyone with a recipe and the inclination. (There’s also banana ketchup, mainly in the Philippines; it’s like tomato ketchup but made with bananas instead of tomatoes.)

But that Watkins stuff looks kind of runny. And there’s one thing ketchup is famous for: its pseudoplasticity – that is to say, its considerable viscosity that lets up some if you can get it running. It holds together until it avalanches – or spurts. The traditional glass bottles have accentuated this feature for years; change seems not even to have been sought out until quite recently, perhaps because everyone has so loved the humour available from its near-thixotropic spurtling – and the displays of skill required to get it out of the bottle reasonably (so many different techniques, each proudly promulgated as the best). Only squirt bottles, which have their own great potential for redecoration of clothing and environs, have managed to compete.

Surely the lurid red, which makes it extra dangerous in accidents, is part of the appeal. Heinz tried marketing different colours for a few years. It never did catch on. When you whack that bottle and it splats ka-chup on your burger, you expect a tomato massacre.

I think I see a link now… my sweet wife also likes gory crime shows… hmm…

Credit for inspiring me to tackle this topic today goes to Wil Wheaton, @wilw, who undoubtedly did not know he would trigger this sudden flow of information with a brief tweeted question.

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ocelot

Posted on October 15, 2012 | 1 comment

What marplot Lancelot might plot to allot a shallot to an ocelot? Certainly not a polyglot zealot!

Well, yes, that’s just silliness. But I do love the slicing and slotting sound of this word, ocelot, that seems to pad through the language with such occult subtlety. It susurrates like a rustling of foliage as the slick, lissome feline slides through – you may glimpse it through the leaves of other words once you look for it. It can cross a lot closer to you than you might think in the forest of your text, by letter or by sound.

O, is this a tyger burning bright? No, subtler, smaller. A panther? Still slighter. A leopard. Yes, Leopardus pardalis, also called the dwarf leopard. But though it may be gnomic in character or dimension, it looks like no gnome. It is rather the lean spotted lizard of cats: the patterns on its skin seem more made for an amphibian (though not an axolotl; those are generally spotless). I have known house cats that approached the size of an ocelot; adult ocelots are two and a half to three feet long (plus tail) and weigh not so much more than a large Thanksgiving turkey. But they are the largest of their genus; the related margay and oncilla are smaller still. Do you want to see ocelots slipping through leaves and streams, and an adolescent ocelot splashing for a fish or salamander? Watch this: Ocelot kitten learns to fish.

I just can’t get over how much I like this word, ocelot. It has a razor-sharp liquidity like Ucluelet, but softer. The claw of the c slices smoothly. The word suggests multiplicity to me, but only because I am aware of Finnish and Hebrew words that end in ot in the plural. I think, too, of Acela, that fast train that slips up the eastern seaboard of the US. I may think of ocellus, a simple light-sensing organ found in invertebrates. Perhaps I see an ocelot sitting as a scribe inserting forgery with utmost economy, a cross between Occam and Ossian.

But how do you locate an ocelot? Look in Central America and in most of South America (except Chile and most of Argentina) – not in the cities, of course, except where they may be kept as pets (some do; Salvador Dalí had a pet ocelot that he called Babou). Could you collate them? Not a lot; they are generally solitary.

And where does this shiny metal word ocelot come from? A gold star to you if you guessed Nahuatl. That language of the Aztecs had a word ocelotl that generally referred to a jaguar but could be used for an ocelot as well (the c in ocelotl stands for a /s/ sound and the tl is a voiceless lateral affricate as in the Tibetan word Lhasa). The Spaniards took it (they knew gold when they saw it) and made it ocelote. In English we allow the loss of the e, allowing us to elocute it with a crisp last stop.

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martini

Posted on October 15, 2012 | 4 comments

Where to start? The martini is perhaps the ultimate high-society cocktail. It is strongly associated with suaveness and James Bondage (in his case a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred). It is also likely the most legendary cocktail of the entertainment world. It has managed to work its way into more wit than just about any other drink. I think of Dorothy Parker:

I love to drink Martinis,
Two at the very most
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.

George Burns said, “I never go jogging, it makes me spill my Martini.” Someone or other famous from the ’20s or ’30s (there are different attributions) said “I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini.” And then there’s the story of the man who walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a martinus.” The bartender says, “You mean martini.” The man says, “If I’d wanted two, I would have said so.” (Ever wonder why we keep plural forms with borrowings but no other inflections, not even the possessive, and certainly not conjugations of verbs?)

But ordinary people drink martinis too. Salesmen used to go for “three-martini lunches.” Even Jack Torrance, who is taking care of a mountain resort hotel over the winter in The Shining by Stephen King, thirsts for martinis (which he calls “Martians”).

So why all this attention? The image of the conical glass helps give it good branding. The fact that it’s usually stronger than the average cocktail helps too (it’s the pale counterpart to a Manhattan: lotsa liquor plus vermouth). No doubt the fact that martinis are delicious can’t hurt.

But there’s certainly something about martinis that turns otherwise sensible adults in geeks having the kind of hair-splitting prescriptivist and categorizing arguments usually reserved for YouTube comment threads on heavy metal videos – or, of course, inane grammar assertions. Either shaking or stirring (depending on your source) is supposed to “bruise” the gin (really). There is an amazing amount of pretentiousness regarding the amount of vermouth to use: some people famously used to set a bottle of vermouth nearby, or whispered “vermouth” to their gin, or nodded in the direction of France or Italy (countries where vermouth is made). Arrant silliness: if you want a straight gin, just call it a straight gin.

And for some reason many people seem to assume vodka when one talks of martinis. James Bond drank vodka martinis, true. (And in one episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, Johnny Fever, sober, is said to have the reaction time of someone who has had “nine vodka martinis” – I would like to point out that gin martinis are the same strength.) Mind you, that’s still reasonably close to the standard form. There are many drinks called “martinis” in various bars now that are fruit juice with some liquor in a spilly glass – things we used to call highballs when they were served in non-spilly glasses. Of course they’re “built” by mixologists… It’s as though the word martini is a licence to be pretentious.

Not that I can make a reasonable plea for people to stick to the original. I don’t do that with words, after all. And, as it happens, nobody drinks the original now. Actually, nobody’s 100% sure what the original was, because there are different accounts, but it was made with sweet vermouth for sure, and perhaps maraschino cherry juice. My friend Reid has an old cocktail shaker with measures on it for different cocktails, one of which is a martini – and it gives half-and-half proportions of sweet and dry vermouth, and about three or four times as much gin as the total vermouth. But of course that’s why the dry-vermouth-only kind is specifically a dry martini.

Even the place of invention is up for dispute, though there are several stories putting it in or near San Franscisco around the time of the gold rush. One thing seems reasonably agreed on: the cocktail was first named Martínez, and the name was later modified probably under the influence of the Martini brand name of vermouth (now Martini & Rossi). Imagine its cultural position if it were still called Martínez. It would be thought of as Spanish, and you might be expected to have corn chips with it or to put a jalapeño in it.

Anyway, if you want as much martini geekery as you have time for – facts, opinions, recipes, all responsibly reported – I recommend The Martini FAQ by Brad Gadberry. (He doesn’t say so, but I think I can assert confidently that the name has no direct connection to the Latvian holiday of Mārtiņi on November 10, which marks the transition from the warm season to the cold one – yet another of the million good excuses for having a martini.)

And the name martini? It certainly is fluid, though it has that nice crisp edge with the /t/ in the middle – and since it’s on the stressed syllable, it has an extra puff of air on it. The mar doesn’t much seem to call to mind marring; rather, it has a purr as in Margarita, Marmaduke, marmalade, Martinique, marvellous… And the tini gives it a coy diminutiveness, like a “teehee” from a teeny-bopper in a bikini, perhaps. The high front sound of the /i/ vowels aids in the impression. As to echoes of other words – well, the cocktail has come to dominate the name, so that any other instance of the name (and it is a reasonably common Italian family name) will likely make you think of the drink.

By the way, I’m a bit of a weirdo when it comes to martinis: I keep my gin in the freezer and my vermouth in the fridge and simply pour vermouth, then gin, into a glass and swirl – no stir, no shake, no ice. Sometimes I add a drop of Cointreau or Chartreuse. And I usually use a wine glass. They spill less.

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xyst

Posted on October 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

This is an eye-catching word, a word you probably didn’t know to exist. It has a certain zest – one might even think it sexy. Some people might think it has no vowels, but of course you can hear the vowel when you say it: /zɪst/. The y is used to spell the vowel sound. And the x is used to spell /z/ for no other reason than that English does not currently permit a /ks/ onset (or a /gz/ one).

Does its form give any clue as to its meaning? Perhaps it got mixed up trying to cross the Styx? Or is it a particularly male (xy) street (st) (or does that seem sexyst)? The latter might seem closer to what it is. The source is ultimately Greek ξυστός xustos “polished”, which in this case refers to a polished marble floor in a porch or portico of a gymnasium, and thus to the porch or portico itself, where exercises (such as wrestling) would take place during poor weather. By extension it also came to refer to the whole gymnasium building.

The Romans took up the word as xystus, but used it to refer to a promenade in front of a portico, or an open colonnade or a walk flanked by trees. But they also took the Greek word for “polished” as a name – however, finding the /ks/ onset lacking in polish, they metathesized it to Sixtus, which was used as a name for six popes, the first of which was the sixth pope after Peter… and yet there is no link to the word six. (On the other hand, while John Paul II may have been the first Polish pope, there were six “polished” popes before him.)

This polished root has produced other words too: xyston, straight from the Greek, which, by reference to the polished shaft of a spear, referred to the spear itself; and xystum, an architectural term that can refer to any of several different things: a wall, a promenade, an alley, a path… seems kinda mixtup.

We brought the word xystus into English in the 1600s, and it’s still available as such; however, word collectors and Scrabble players will delight in having this clipped version available as well, just one of the little extra things English does for its players. If you’re going to wrestle with words, you might as well have good equipment to use – and a nice, polished place to do it, of course.

Do you have a vague feeling that there’s another word for “porch” or something similar that also has an x? There is: narthex, a vestibule in a church where (at least formerly) catechumens would stand. Perhaps if you put the two together, you would have a narthexyst. Oh dear, that rather looks like it’s had a collapse at the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s what you get from wrestlers taking down the catechumens.

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