fulgurant

Posted on July 26, 2012 | 2 comments

In the gargantuan canyons of the urban troglodytes, the lightning pops like a paparazzo’s flashbulb, making famous for a millisecond every late-night window watcher. And then the thunder, mere tardy herald of the fulgency, gives a name: fulgurant. Filling the ungrateful gulfs, it echoes like a waterfall of the Sambatyon, and then is digested by the great glass and granite until it is mere borborygmus and grunt and echoing eructation.

Fulgurant: this is the adjective that is thrown to it. The air and the eye are full with the coruscating crack, the intense scintillation, the crooked white river on which rides for an instantaneous eternity the angel of death. (Imagine a flash of this order every time a soul shucked its shell: an instant’s intense glow over there, then over there, then over there, and sooner or later where you were standing.) It purifies the vulgar; its white heat foments a corybantic ecstasis among the atmospheric molecules and, like Bacchae, they issue forth in destructive trance and dance, no guarantee on the outcome, but their collisions impel and expel and this ague causes crashes that argue and rant and at last dissipate and even out.

For there can be no flash without bang. What, a mere dropped white hanky in the sky, a flash in the pantheon, with no report? Cheated. An idea without expression. This word fulgurant names what we see: flashing like lightning. Lightning, Latin fulgur. The /g/ may seem too soft and guttural for the atmospheric Lucifer, but a name – any name – is what binds it to the earth. The lightning does not exist because of the thunder, but without the word would the thing be real? Would we know it? Has it in fact come just to send forth the thunder? What is priority? Why, indeed, would we think that time is for lightning as it is for us?

Why has the sky given us this word, this bright idea and its rumbling name? But while lightning may flash across the sky or between sky and ground, it is never a simple giving. There can be no fulgurance without potential. When the earth is increasingly positive, there is a moment of mutual recognition of potential between ground and cloud. Both sides are ready. The word does not simply descend from heaven; the connection happens only because our need to take matches its need to give. And in that bright instant exists the illumination, which shocks the air into reporting: yes, fulgurant. The unity is divided, the soul is released, the exaltation of the flash makes all famous for fifteen microseconds; the fractal branches and breaks. Blissful ignorance is incinerated in blitz, in einem Augenblick – in the blink of an eye. Your wish has been granted in full.

And then, as the echo passes, it all evanesces. Not to be frugal – the sky is prodigal with its prodigies. But the world works its wonders with myriad myriads of words, a lexical googolplex. Every scintilla of insight is an instant of scintillation; when you figure it all out you are engulfed in fulguration, and each light is a light of a word that will soon enough be heard.

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ekker

Posted on July 25, 2012 | 1 comment

Ekker.

Yes, a bit of ekker would be lekker.

I’m a bit of a trekker, but best on a good brekker. I don’t play soccer. Can’t afford a chukker – but you might as well ride an ekka! I’ll take shank’s mare. Kick up the Sauconys. Excellent for eking one’s existence. And you can explore the local ekistics.

So kick, kick, bend the knees k k. It’s e’s e once you get into it. Break free of your restraints.

What am I talking about? Some kind of gymkhana? Could be, or anything gymnastic, take your pick. Just exercise your options, as long as your option is exercise. No trickery, no cookery. Keep correct; there’s no double-checker.

Latin arcere meant “restrain, shut up”. The prefix ex means many things: “out of” for one; “forth” for another. Put them together and we got exercere. Put that into English and we got exercise. Put that into the mouths of Oxonian toffs and we got ekker – a jaunty cutting down to size (and excising of cise) that breaks phonologically (between syllables, /k/ from /s/) and not morphologically (after the x).

Such er words were popular enough: brekker for breakfast, soccer for association football (yes, that one is a bit of torture in the derivation). It works here: at the echo of the starter’s pistol, you’re off and running. The word is just quicker. And the er ending, like the s ending (and a fortiori the ers ending, as in champers for champagne), has a certain moneyed air to it, unlike the infra dig a and o endings popular with the tabloid press (Macca, Gazza, Jacko).

It matters little or not at all that it sounds, in that British accent, about like ekka, which is a small one-horsed vehicle (in India), though it may gain some flavour from chukker, also chukka, a period in a game of polo. Other eks – such as Hindi “one” and Afrikaans “I” – don’t come into play. Nor, except for those who know Afrikaans or Dutch, does lekker – “good” or “enjoyable” in Afrikaans and “good-tasting” in Dutch – though a good bit of ekker certainly is lekker. And ekistics – a name for the science of human settlements – is something I’d like to work in more, but you may or may not be aware of it when you work out.

But of course now you know all that, and when you go for a bit of ekker it will all rise from the soil of your mind like petrichor after a rain shower. Which, by the way, is pleasing to get a bit of ekker in.

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vex

Posted on July 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Her brows were spiked angrily v. Her eyes were cut to half-open e. Her mouth was puckered tight x. His face looked afflicted.

“I am vexed,” she said, her mouth puckering bitterly and her nose wrinkling as she said the word. “Vexed. We’re in a fine fix thanks to your vacillation.”

He faced his vehicle. “It’s not my fault!” he said, his arms as on a crucifix. “The road is excessively convex! It was quite inadvertent!” The truck teetered on an apex, its axle transfixed. He gave the vehicle a couple of swift kicks, to no effect. He circled around to the back and pulled out a flag, which he affixed to the antenna.

“Well, this is just the sort of wreck that one expects,” she growled, crushing gravel beneath her Blahniks. “Wicked with words, but sucks with trucks and such mechanicals.”

He swept his hand to direct her look to their context. “We are in word country.” Syntax trees branched on all sides. Close by was heard the chuckle of an onomatopoeic brook.

“And what word is this?” She indicated the vexing convexity.

“I – um…” he bent close to look, genuflected, peeked. “I think it’s a root. It looks green…”

“A root?” One eyebrow arched. “What’s the root of convex?” Her tone was not expectant or respecting.

“Well… one wants to say vex…”

She gave a triumphant look, threw her arms up and started to walk away.

“But it’s not that vex!” he said. “The vex in convex – and vexillum –” he indicated the banner affixed to the aerial – “comes from vehere, ‘carry’, same as in vehicle.”

She paused and looked back towards him. “No wonder,” she said, “your vehicle” – her voice dripping with pique – “is such” – she spun and started to walk again – “a vexation!”

“But vexation – vex – vexed” – he started to walk after her – “is a different root! From vexare, ‘shake, agitate, disturb’!”

“Go shake, agitate, disturb yourself,” she growled, unstopping, shaking.

He exhaled, exasperated. “Well, you’re doing dick to help fix this!” He turned back. “Vixen.” She kept walking.

He muttered to himself as he approached the truck once more. “Why is there a root in the middle of the route?” He paused, transfixed. “Root. Route. Vex Route. Vex Rte. Vertex.” He ducked back down to look again. “Yes, there’s our mix-up! Vertex – the peak, the angle, the point on a curve or surface where the axis meets it.” The truck’s axle met the root in one spot. “But what’s the root?”

He turned again, looked at her back as she walked away. Then he turned back. “Vert. It only looks green! Vert, from vertere, ‘turn’. Inadvertently hit vert… What can turn this around?”

He vaulted into the cab of the truck and turned the steering wheel hard right, then, all four wheels engaged in reverse, pressed the accelerator. The front right wheel caught a grip and pushed the axle loose. He continued in a backward circle until he was turned completely, and free. “Vert-uoso!” he said, exultant.

He put the truck in forward and accelerated, leaving the convex vertex reflected in his mirror. And behind it, breaking her Blahniks in a sudden sprint, was vexation.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting vexed.

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sofa, couch

Posted on July 23, 2012 | 1 comment

Dear word sommelier: I notice that in your note on chesterfield you used sofa and couch interchangeably. Isn’t there a difference?

Of course there’s a difference. Sofa has two syllables and four letters and is soft, with just two voiceless fricatives at the front of the mouth and a round vowel (“ohhhh” like a sound you might make sinking into a plush sofa), and it has overtones of sol-fa and soda and perhaps Sufi and suffer and so far and shofar and maybe even loofah… Couch, on the other hand, has one less syllable and one more letter, but just three phonemes – of which two are compound: a diphthong and an affricate. It is a harder word, to be sure, with its voiceless stop onset and its voiceless affricate ending. But somehow that doesn’t seem to bother the people who sit on couches – not even the echo of ouch or the taste of crunch and catch and cow and crutch…

Words are, as I have said many times, known by the company they keep. But these two words actually have very similar collocations – here’s what wordandphrase.info gives for them: sofa: adj asleep, comfortable, sectional, plush, living-room, Victorian, sagging, convertible; noun chair, room, table, living, cushion, leather, bed, back, arm, pillow; verb sit, lie, sleep, watch, lay, fall, lean, settle, seat, face; couch: adj asleep, comfortable, living-room, comfy, overstuffed, lumpy, sagging, upholstered; noun room, potato, chair, living, leather, back, arm, cushion, TV, bed; verb sit, sleep, lie, lay, fall, settle, lean, seat, face, sprawl.

Mind you, they do keep some different company socially. You can’t draw a nice isogloss for them – a line on a map that shows roughly where people stop using one word and start using the other, like with soda and pop (and, in the southern US, generic coke). The divider, inasmuch as there is one, is more one of social set. People whose lives are softer seem to like sofa better. If you see the play Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare (or watch the movie made from it, starring Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, and Stockard Channing), you will see a scene in which a rich kid who went to prep schools is teaching a poor black kid how to fit into the rich social set, and one point he makes is that the piece of furniture is not a couch, it’s a sofa.

Not that it’s as tidy as that. Many people use both, depending on context or whim, even if they prefer one to the other (usually couch to sofa). If they want to emphasize the softness or sound somehow more high-class, they might go with sofa. Or they might associate one word or another with some particular person or social set from their own lives. Each word is couched differently for each person.

Oh, yes, couch has a verb, too, which sofa does not. In fact, it has a much wider set of uses, noun and verb. It shows up in many contexts where something is lying or set together or into another thing. Which is reasonable enough, given its etymology. You very likely know that French se coucher means “go to bed” or “lie down”. A couch is not simply something you sit on; it’s something you can lie on – like the psychoanalyst’s couch, not sofa. So you see that there are these extra little collocations that show up farther back.

Oh, yeah: that’s where the French coucher comes from, by the way. Latin collocare. Meaning “put in its proper place” or “lay with” (not “lie with” – that comes with the French).

And sofa? It comes from Arabic. You may have seen, in real life or in pictures, an Arabic room furnished with a low platform on which is laid a carpet or carpets and various cushions for sitting or reclining on. That is what Arabic ṣoffah refers to, that platform and its cushy furnishings.

And the different denotations? Don’t they refer to different things? Well, the analyst’s couch has only a half back and one arm (or head end), and that matches a particular type that can be distinguished from a sofa with its full back and arms. But in actual common usage, especially in North America, one simply can’t draw a neat distinction, not even a fuzzy-bordered distinction like between cup and mug. You just have to go by feel and whim. You know what effect you would get by saying sofa potato instead of couch potato; go from there.

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chesterfield

Posted on July 22, 2012 | 2 comments

In this dream, you are named Chester. You are in a field near Chesterfield, wearing a Chesterfield, sitting on a chesterfield, smoking a Chesterfield, listening to The Chesterfields. A Roman army is camped nearby. You look over to the town. The steeple of its church is twisted around and leaning towards you, as if looking over its shoulder at you.

It all started with the Roman army, really. Their encampment: castra, Old English ceaster. Near it, a field. Ceasterfeld. Eventually Chesterfield. The town – near Sheffield – with its church dating to the 14th century, Saint Mary and All Saints, with that famous spire, twisted and leaning. There are many folk tales as to how the spire got that way. A local blacksmith mis-shod the devil, who leapt over the spire in pain and made it crooked. Or it bent over in curiosity when it heard a virgin was to be wed in the chuch, and will straighten up when one is. Or, or. In reality, mistakes were made by builders and roofers.

Chesterfield has had earls. The fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope (1694–1773), was a noted statesman and man of letters. He also, incidentally, commissioned a piece of furniture: a sofa with a squared back and arms of equal height, plush, with buttons deeply upholstered onto it, and upholstry often of leather. A Chesterfield sofa. In Canada, for quite some time, any sofa – any couch – was called a chesterfield. That usage is dying out now; the Canadian linguist Jack Chambers studied it 20 years ago and found a clear age grading. But for many Canadians, me included, the first thing they think of even still when hearing chesterfield is a couch.

Philip Stanhope was also popular in the colonies, at least until they rebelled. There are several Chesterfield places named after him in America. One is in Virginia, Chesterfield County. They grow tobacco there. A brand of cigarette, once quite popular but seldom seen these days (especially in America; it can still be seen in Europe), is named after the county. You would be well advised to avoid smoking a Chesterfield on a chesterfield, as the embers may land and burn in and smolder, leading to a fire. Perhaps this is why the steeple is canting towards you.

The sixth Earl of Chesterfield, George Stanhope, also made something popular, a bit of upholstry, as it were: a coat for men. Around 1860, he decided that he had had enough with the fitted coats of the time, made for wearing indoors and out; he took to a less shaped version, a straighter coat with lapels and buttons (single or double breast), that was meant to be doffed when one was indoors. The Chesterfield coat. You may well have one without knowing it. I have one hanging in my closet.

The Chesterfields, for their part, were a British indie rock band of the mid- to late-1980s. I should tell you that they came from Somerset. They came out with a number of songs that will be liked by the same people who like The Smiths. “Goodbye Goodbye.” “Nose Out of Joint.” If I were you, I would be listening to “Ask Johnny Dee” while reclining on that rural sofa smoking.

And I would be thinking about that word: chesterfield. Three syllables, like the three cushions of a chesterfield. All consonants are voiceless or liquid, except for that last voiced stop /d/. An affricate to start with, then a fricative plus stop – the reverse of an affricate. After the liquid /r/, another fricative to move the sound from tongue-tip to lips. But it goes back to the tongue-tip after that. It is soft for the most part, like cushions or ashes or perhaps a long coat, but with a bit of crispness.

And there is a contrast between the expansive feeling of field, the images we get of open plains, and the solidity of chest, like your chest which you may smite through your coat, or a chest of drawers, or a treasure chest.

Yes. You snuff your Chesterfield and toss your Chesterfield on the chesterfield. The treasure chest must be buried here, in the field near Chesterfield. You had gone all the way to the Chesterfield Islands in the Coral Sea looking for it, but, though you felt you were following Philip Stanhope’s advice, “The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it,” you now realize the treasure is at the source, a place much less exotic. No doubt this is why the Romans are here, these thousand soldiers – mille milites.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in Nunavut, Canada, a chest lies buried in the permafrost at Igluligaarjuk – also known as Chesterfield Inlet. You will wake before you get there.

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quondam

Posted on July 21, 2012 | 2 comments

How fitting that I set to tasting this word just after reading a brief article on obscure quaint imported liquors and the ever-so-arcane-and-cute cocktails one may make with them. This word is a Sazerac served on the marble counter of your prose – or a brooklyn cocktail made with coyly copied Picon, or an old-style martini: two parts gin, one part dry vermouth, half a part sweet vermouth, and a dash of Angostura. It is a sometime word for “sometime”, an erstwhile or whilom usage for “erstwhile” or “whilom”, a former way of saying “former”.

Never mind why we have all those words that denote pretty much the same thing. Listen, I have six bottles of different kinds of Scotch in my liquor cabinet. I have three different kinds of gin in various places around the suite (freezer, cabinet). I have five kinds of rum, four kinds of brandy; for heaven’s sake, I have two kinds of cachaça. Some people even keep several different kinds of vodka. For much the same reason, I see no issue with keeping sometime, erstwhile, whilom, former, and quondam in the lexis cabinet.

Each one has its own sounds, of course, with their associations: two have the grey whiskers of whil, of which one has the Teutonic greying temples of erst and the other smokes the meerschaum of om; one is a common word elevated to pretension by the docking of an s from the tail; one is really quite common; and then there is the one with that quirky-yet-recondite pure Latin qu formation. Quondam. It smacks of Gregorian chant, and yet it also rather sounds like a Brooklyn prophylactic, doesn’t it? Add to that the clowns and acrobats of Quidam, at least for those who like Cirque du Soleil.

These several words, like all words, are also known by the company they keep. Quondam, perhaps more even than any of the others in the set (with the possible exception of whilom), sets a particular tone, a register, an air; it tells you something about the person using the word. If the user is male, you may reasonably expect that he owns real bowties and knows how to tie them, and can tell the difference between a tuxedo (black tie) and tails (white tie) and knows when to wear each. A woman who uses this word is surely not an utter stranger to elbow-length white silk gloves, nor to the arched eyebrow and arch comment – delivered not over tea or even juleps but something a little stronger, if you don’t mind, and another after that.

Roberto De Vido has drawn my attention to its use in a letter (quoted in The New Yorker) by none other than the great New York acid wit of round table and reviews, Alexander Woollcott:

To me you are no longer a faithless friend. To me you are dead. Hoping and believing I will soon be the same, I remain

Your quondam crony,

A. Woollcott

There’s a shot of bitters for you! But the words live on.

Indeed, anyone who uses it now may be assumed to be aspiring or pretending to a status of erudite wit, whatever their topic. It may even be used for contrast, as in this quote from a 2006 National Post article: “The future of ‘Hart House’, quondam home of the first family of professional wrestling, was secured by a new development plan.”

Ah, yes. House. That’s actually a less common usage. One further detail is that quondam is used more often of people. One not so often will hear of “my quondam domicile”; much more likely “my quondam domestic partner.” It was in its oldest English usages (and still is, occasionally) a noun meaning “former holder of an office or position” (as the OED says). It can also be an adverb, which is what it was in Latin – meaning “formerly”, of course.

Well, enough for this evening. The weekend awaits. As does a bedtime cocktail… with, let us say, Cointreau and Zuidam gin? Ah, I’ve finished the latter (sometime since, in fact). Well, there’s my quondam cocktail, then: Cointreau and – damn, I’ll have to use the Magellan gin. And a little whisper of Becherovka, for the requisite bitters.

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mortadella

Posted on July 18, 2012 | 6 comments

“What’s this?” Edgar Frick held up a pink cube of some kind of comestible.

His better half, Marilyn, glanced over. “I’m pink, therefore I’m ham.”

Maury, who – as often – was bustling about setting up the food for this month’s Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting, stopped long enough to say “Mortadella.” Then he continued setting foodstuffs out.

“Baloney,” Edgar said, and popped it into his mouth.

“Not exactly,” said Maury over his shoulder as he bustled about. “Bologna – or baloney – is an American version of mortadella, but this is the real thing. From Bologna. The city.”

“No,” said Edgar, “mortadella is a great big pink slice. Like this.” He gestured with his hands. “In fact, an end of a mortadella looks pretty much like –” he reached over towards his better half, in particular a rounder part of her anatomy, but she swatted his hand away. “Hm!” he said. “Cruella!”

“It’ll be the morta della you,” she said, more leering than indignant. Then, to Maury, “Isn’t that what mortadella means? ‘Death of the’? Death of the what? Do they know?” She looked skeptically at the white stuff dotting the pink mass.

“That would be morte della,” I volunteered. “Or morte dello, or del, or delle, or degli, or dei.”

“Well, I’m still wondering what fell into the sausage grinder,” she said, impaling the cube on an inch-long vampire-red little fingernail. She waggled it at Edgar and then ate it as though she were doing a community theatre version of Tom Jones.

“The white lumps are pork fat,” Maury said from partway across the room. “It is also seasoned with black pepper and myrtle.”

“Myrtle!” Marilyn exclaimed. “That was my aunt’s name. I always wondered what happened to her…”

“So it’s myrtle-della,” Edgar said, and found it not beneath him to eat another cube.

Maury’s orbit drew him nearer again. “It’s thought that the name mortadella comes from Latin murtatum, meaning ‘seasoned with myrtle berries’, and a diminutive ending ella.”

“Ella was my other aunt,” Marilyn said. “Her ending was not diminutive. If you think mine is something to see…” She edged her leather-cased rotund end towards Maury, who quickly jumped over to the next table.

“Perhaps this is morte di Ella,” I suggested, spearing a cube with a toothpick.

“It has also, on the other hand,” Maury said, “been long held that the name comes from mortaio, referring to the mortar in which the meat was pounded.”

Marilyn cocked her head at Maury and raised a leering eyebrow. Maury sighed, realizing his unintended double entendre, and drew further away.

“It’s a big-sounding word,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to divert the conversation from its downward trend. “I mean, four syllables, that rather big back round effect on ‘mort’, uh… Della could be a name of someone big, though it could also be small…”

“But really,” Edgar said, eating yet another cube, “mort a deli ever serve it this way?”

“In the orbit of Bologna,” Maury said, trying to remain in the conversation without getting too close to Marilyn’s centre of gravity, “it is often served this way at the beginning of a meal, with rustic bread.”

“So where’s the bread?” I asked.

“I was just about to bring it out,” he said.

Marilyn stepped forward and reached her hands towards Maury, rolling the fingers in the air in her best vampirella fashion. Impaled on her nails were the last ten cubes of the mortadella. “Just bring your buns here, dear boy,” she purred.

Maury stepped back. “You will be the death of me,” he croaked, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Marilyn shrugged and proffered her digits to me and Edgar. “Finger food?”

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ecchymotic

Posted on July 18, 2012 | 1 comment

You want an author with a taste for the words of the English language and how they fit together? I recommend Vladimir Nabokov.

Yes, Nabokov, that great nabob of books, who grew up in Russia – though he could write English before he could Russian. Nabokov, author of Lolita, which, aside from treating a topic that is still shocking today (and incidentally providing a useful eponym to certain kinds of classified ads and websites), opens with a little word tasting on Lolita. (I’m not going to quote it here. Go read it, for heaven’s sake.) A man whose prodigious vocabulary was matched by an ability to string these marvellous ingredients together into some of the most sapid sentences ever set in type. He truly squeezes the juice out of words to make the ink of his page.

It is in a work of his that I confess I have yet to read that you will find today’s word. I was talking with a fellow regular passenger on the bus recently, a school teacher, and she was reading his book Speak, Memory, in which he described his governess’s hands thus (you can read a longer quote at the blog Riverside Rambles):

In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature; Mademoiselle’s were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss on their tight skin besprinkled with brown ecchymotic spots.

I want you to read that whole sentence out loud. Do it carefully. Savour the words. Read it out again. Find the sound patterns and the rhythms. The sounds feed forward and back like sephiroth: live – hover – level – stature; froggy gloss versus tight skin; not sprinkled but, for rhythm and to foreshadow brown, besprinkled; the echo in ecchymotic spots; the rhythm of that whole last clause: Mademoiselle’s were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss on their tight skin besprinkled with brown ecchymotic spots. You see? It holds a three-beat rhythm that it interrupts at the most important parts with a shorter, punchier cut rhythm. (I cannot resist suggesting that Nabokov may have been extra sensitive to rhythms since the Anglophone world is full of people who say his name with the wrong one – it’s really Vladimir Nabokov [with the final v said “f”], not Vladimir Nabokov.)

In all that, there is really just one word that most readers will not know. They can tell from context what it must mean – and just as the spots are icky or yecchy, the word, too, is the yecchiest, stickiest one there, and it has a sort of unappealing peeling ugliness. The cc is like eczematous scales (though ecchymosis is not eczema); its heart holds most of chyme (related, as we will see, though stomach juices are not involved here) and mote (though an ecchymosis is not quite that either). It starts with ec and ends with tic – but while the usage of language here may be ecstatic, there is nothing ecstatic about ecchymosis. Nor, in spite of the rhymes, anything erotic or psychotic. Exotic, perhaps.

But if you want to squeeze the juice out of this word, well, you have an etymological basis. Ecchymotic is formed from its noun ecchymosis, which comes from Greek ἐκ ek “out” plus χυμός khumos “juice” – the Greek verb ἐκχυμοῦσθαι ekkhumousthai meant “let or force out blood”.

Which means that the spots on the hands of this governess, Mademoiselle O, were not liver spots or freckles; they were hematomas, or at least something caused by the rupture of capillaries. Nabokov was fluent in French – indeed, he learned it at the hand of Mademoiselle O – so he certainly will have known the French word ecchymose, which means “bruise”. Which is what ecchymosis generally is. It’s something caused by ruptured blood vessels under the skin (but a larger spot than you get with petechia), and that’s going to be a bruise as a rule. The blood pools into the tissue, phagocytes and macrophages eat the red cells, and the ruddy hemoglobin is converted to bilirubin, which is blue-green; that is then converted to hemosiderin, which is brown. And the process is converted into the word bruise, which is typically black and blue, or the word ecchymosis, which is purple.

Nabokov will also have known very well the common French word for ecchymosis: bleu. A bruise is a “blue”. Now read again what he wrote: brown ecchymotic spots. So these were not fresh bruises; they were blood that was long pooled there. I am inclined to suspect that these were really telangiectasias, little spider veins, that had burst. Manual aneurysms. But there’s more to writing a good sentence than just choosing the most clinically correct word. If you want to construct a succubus of prose, ready to seduce your reader, you must feel the flow of the sounds. It is not that your prose must be immaculate; it is that it must have the spots in all the right places.

I should mention, as a postscript, that I showed the school teacher – a woman named Reet of Estonian extraction – my book, Songs of Love and Grammar, and she bought a copy. And, oh! By the way! It’s now available on Amazon.com – though if you can get it through Lulu.com, that’s better.

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thoroughfare

Posted on July 16, 2012 | 1 comment

There is a Fairmont not too far from where I live (two blocks), and the other day I noticed a sign in front of its unloading area advising motorists that there was no throughfare.

Now, tell me: haven’t you always thought that throughfare seemed more sensible than thoroughfare? I mean, it’s a through road, not a thorough road, right? Have you perhaps once or more questioned yourself as to whether you even remembered correctly which it was?

And, by the way, why are we talking about fares when it’s a road, not something you pay to ride? Shouldn’t throughfare be the money you pay to go all the way through to somewhere?

Well, those are all fare, I mean fair, questions, and they deserve a reasonably thorough answer.

Let’s start with the fact that through and thorough used to be the same word. Old English had a few variations on some words, and the word þurh got a version that had an extra vowel added to make þuruh (that letter þ is a thorn, the way “th” used to be written; for more on how English used to be, see “An Appreciation of English: A language in motion” and “What’s up with English spelling?”). Other words that got this epenthetic vowel include burrow, furrow, borrow, sorrow, and marrow. As for the one-syllable version, it swapped the two middle sounds around and then let go of the velar fricative at the end (though we still write it: gh).

So through and thorough are from the same? Yes: to go through is to go all the way, from side to side or end to end; to be thorough is to do something all the way, from side to side or end to end. In fact, thorough has a solid history of use as a preposition and adverb quite in parallel to through; you could still see it as such in an 1847 poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame.”

But now, in the age of thru, we have no thurro or anything like that. But we still have that old fixed form thoroughfare on our lexical bill of fare.

Ah, yes, fare. Cognate with German fahren – indeed, thoroughfare in German is Durchfahrt, which is thoroughly cognate (cognate through and through). Originally a reference to a road or way or journey; then a passage or conveyance (and there’s the verb, as in How are you faring?); then the price for the passage; then there was the mode of proceeding, and on the basis of that a list of a food to be provided – as in bill of fare.

So there. And we need go no further for now. We can content ourselves with tasting the sounds of this word: it is soft, with its voiceless fricatives like wind siffling and soughing in the heather. As thoroughfare, it requires no pursing of the lips as throughfare would; it has that extra fractional syllable, almost just a lengthening of the /r/ in many cases, that gives it a bit more rhythm and length. Thoroughfare is more like the sound and sway of a night trip on train or bus, whereas throughfare would be more like an arrow or two, or some rapid means of conveyance (bullet train or air), with its one-two swing and whiffle.

Either way, it’s a long word, with (ugh) three orthographic unphonological (silent) letters in the middle and another at the end. Its heart is rough, but it doesn’t give you a rough ride. But let us address that Fairmont question: can you spell it – and say it – throughfare?

Well, I mean, you can, but will people look at it and think “That’s wrong”? Will it in fact be wrong?

The answer is that it has been spelled that way at times in the past. And I would not at all be surprised, especially now that thorough meaning “through” is not used, if in the future it came to be that normally. But in the here and now, I’ll just say it’s not in the dictionary as such. I think that’s thorough and fair.

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riffle

Posted on July 15, 2012 | 1 comment

The brook that licks the roots of the syntax trees growing on the monadnock in the heart of word country is a variable stream. As it reaches the plain, it meanders, makes oxbows, in some places fills pools – here limpid, there turbid – but in others really books it, like the fluvial version of a page-turner. Sit with me here by this riffle and reflect on it.

Riffle? Can you reflect on a riffle, with its turbulence from shallow passage over rough bed? How much reflection could you get from a riffle through a book, the pages flicking by like a deck of cards? Surely your images would be shuffled, ruffled, filleted perhaps, less careful than a raffle? Indeed, the light laughing on the rippling surface of a riffle may leave you feeling unfulfilled, if not rueful, in its fitful flickering.

But it is not so awful: all is reflected, and there is something to be said for a new order. Just as the surface affects a photographic afflatus, below it there is a sedimental journey taking place: the rapidity and turbulence and helicoidal flows of the waters in this short stretch of stream achieve velocities sufficient for erosion and transport of small particles, to be precipitated when the aquatic traffic slows, in fulfillment of the Hjulström curve.

This is a way the language changes: bits are picked up from here and there and left in another place. We have rifle, we have ripple, we have ruffle; we find reflections of each in this word, like flecks of gold left in the riffle of a sluice. Riffle the cards and see what flips up: how mixed, and of what value? Is riffle, with its uncertain source, glittering bits of these words like water in rough ridged patterns (shaped as iffl), sufficiently artful?

Some seek always the calm, deep, still waters. But between pools you must have riffles, lifting, refreshing, snaffling particles in little scuffles, breaking the light. Shallow, fast, but not effortful; although deep pools have gravitas, it is simple gravity that effects this flow to refill the flatter floods. But it is not mere filler: much goes on. The bed this brook flows on is rough here, stirring. And above, leaves fall from the syntax trees, flutter, flop, float, flipping over the riffle: the pages of this brook.

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