salacious

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 3 comments

Some words make me salivate, they’re so saucy and delicious. This is one such. It doesn’t hurt that it has a naughty tone that I deeply appreciate, but even less lubricious words of its sonic ilk – featuring voiceless tongue-tip fricatives and perhaps a liquid – are a pleasure on the tongue: salsify, loquacious, sausages, lissome, saucy, luxurious, Alsatian, shillelagh, relishes, English usage, Carol Fisher Saller…

Who is Carol Fisher Saller? She’s an editor, the author of The Subversive Copy Editor. I am put in mind of her not just because of the sound of her name (though that comes into it) and not just because I have a durable case of lust for words, but because when I think of salacious I think of words. Specifically, I think of a book of salacious poetry about English usage: Songs of Love and Grammar.

No, I’m not making that up. I’ve already made it up – it’s written and lain out and is at last available on Lulu.com. It’s my new book. I’ve already used one poem from it here, “My veil of tears.” Herewith I would like to present another. In case you were uncertain whether it was possible to be indelicate about a split infinitive, I’ll let you judge for yourself:

To sweetly split the infinitive

by James Harbeck

A fetching young virginitive
sought out a buff grammarian
both lusty and contrarian
to split her sweet infinitive.

She said, “Please do it neatly –
I’m sure ’tis not a sin
to slip an adverb in
to split an infinitive sweetly.”

He asked, “Where would I fit it?
It seems an imposition
’twixt verb and preposition.”
But she asked him sweetly to split it

before her mood had passed,
“for all the best writers do it.”
So together they went to it
to sweetly split it at last!

Ah, there it is. And I assure you some of the poems are more salacious than that (others merely deal with romantic and grammatical highs and lows, and a few just play with words).

But let us return for just a moment longer to salacious. What kinds of things are usually called salacious? The Corpus of Contemporary American English tells me that we most often read of salacious details, salacious material, salacious allegations (lovely sound, that one), salacious stories, and salacious gossip, among a few others.

And what other words may be seen to have similar senses? By Visual Thesaurus, one branch touches obscene, lewd, raunchy; the other ramifies to lustful, lubricious, prurient – I like that better: those are pricier words, even if their common nexus is the sense “characterized by lust.” Oh, but lust is my favourite deadly sin. Gluttony leaves you full and fat, sloth leaves you sleepy and fat, greed and envy eat at you, pride comes before a fall, and wrath is just plain old unpleasant. But a dirty mind is a constant source of entertainment… as long as you don’t go trotting after it wherever it leads.

Where does salacious come from? From Latin, of course, the tongue of Catullus and Martial, two noted Romans of lubricious loquacity. Its source is not so salty; it is rather a salto, a sally, a flying leap – salire, “leap” (verb). Yes, prone to leaping. If you know what I mean. Well, the Latins did: it was they who went from salire “leap” (also “jump, spurt”) to salax and salacius “lustful”, the immediate etymon. It is suggested that it is related to the sexual advances of male mammals.

But that’s all so beastly and brutish in its literal sense. I much prefer the literary sense. There are many tricks a well-trained tongue may get up to…

Now go buy my book at http://www.lulu.com/shop/james-harbeck/songs-of-love-and-grammar/paperback/product-20080621.html.

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condign

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 3 comments

This word was mentioned to me today at work by Christina Vasilevski, who was in the kitchen dining. It has a couple of interesting aspects: first, even if you don’t recall ever seeing it before, you can probably guess how to pronounce it – in spite of its pronunciation not being exactly what people would call phonetic. Second, the odds are very high that if you see it you see it before one word in particular: punishment.

Let’s just look at the spelling of this word for a moment. The con is no problem. If you take it to condi, it still seems to be no problem – it just looks like the nickname of Condoleezza Rice – but the pronunciation has already gone off the rails. If you look at the back half, dign, how you see it depends on context. If I tell you it’s a root, not a word, how do you want to pronounce it? As in dignity, indignant, and so forth? But if it’s at the end of a word, we can’t do that: you just can’t end a syllable with /gn/ – actually, you can’t have them together in the same syllable at all in English. So the i becomes “long” and the g is elided. Go figure – typical English.

Except that, like so much of our spelling weirdness, we got it from French. Which also does not permit such combinations. So the /g/ was weakened to the point of being a mere palatal push-up of the tongue before the /n/, and this resulted in a lengthening of the /i/. Which was then taken into English when the word was borrowed in the 1400s. And then English shifted that /i/ sound to what it has become today, a diphthong.

You need not condone it, but you cannot consign it to the indignity of the rubbish-heap. It works the way English spelling-pronunciation relationships work: by the common law of resemblance and pattern. It is aligned with other signs, whether by design malign or benign; resign yourself to assigning it that pronunciation. You may wish to campaign to arraign it, though I would not deign to feign to do so. But, notwithstanding the occasional ensign from a foreign sovereign, the pattern is set.

Well, it’s no more or less than we deserve, as you can discover in greater depth in “What’s up with English spelling?” Our perverse orthography is condign punishment for our lexical pilfering and various prescriptive perversities.

And what, thus, is condign encoding? Well, it’s from con “together” and dignus “worthy”; originally it meant “equal in worth or dignity”, or “deserving”, and thence “fitting, appropriate”. It just happens that since the late 1600s its pattern of use has tightly followed that set by Tudor Acts of Parliament, which use it in reference to punishment. You may rarely see it with related words such as justice and vengeance. It could be suited to a variety of other high-toned uses, condign with its Latinate formation and silent g and rarity of use; as Thomas De Quincey noted, it would be nice to speak of condign honours, condign reward, condign treatment. It seems, in some contexts, more fitting than fitting.

But, ah, you can try, and perhaps you will get somewhere, but these tides of usage can be so inexorable as to seem divignly ordeigned…

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cerumen

Posted on April 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

This word has a low, flat, thick look to it; every letter in it is rounded in at least one place, and none of the letters ascend or descend. It is rounder at the front than at the back, but it gets a bit of symmetry from the two e’s: each one a letter in from the end, poised flanking the middle like a pair of ears. And each of those e’s stands for an unstressed vowel; the main vowel is that long /u/ in the middle, making the heart of this word a “room”.

There is something about this homely word that makes me want to wax fantastic – to enter into the realms of fantasy created by such as Tolkien and Rowling, realms presided over by great long-bearded white-haired old wizards, almost superhuman (should I say surhuman?). It makes me think of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, mainly because of the sound of his name of course. It also makes me think of Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books, at least in part because of a scene in which, after talking with Harry, he eats one of Harry’s Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans and, on tasting it and discovering the flavour, says, “Alas, earwax.”

Yes, alas, earwax. You see, another thing all those old wizards have in common is hairy ears, and that makes me think of, alas, earwax. (Which in turn makes me think of Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax, who is also old and magical but has a few noteworthy differences from the Dumbledore-Saruman-Gandalf type.) And earwax is the more Anglo-Saxon word for cerumen. Or should we say that cerumen is the Latin-derived word (from cera, “wax”) for earwax. Voilà: we have moved from exalted wizards to Shrek.

It’s interesting that both words, cerumen and earwax, have round and soft sounds but with a sharper hiss at one end; earwax is more contrasty because it has the truly round rolling /rw/ and the crisp /ks/, while cerumen has just the soft hiss of /s/ and rolls on through a liquid and a round vowel to nasals. Also, earwax has that x, which always catches the eyes. And for ears it has a and a, not the e and e of cerumen.

I suppose it’s indelicate to use the word taste around words relating to bodily excretions, but, then, J.K. Rowling had that jelly bean, so I will continue: I find that cerumen has little tastes of serum and sermon and perhaps cumin, with a set of letters that may add to b t to scramble and make recumbent; the swapping of an i for an e would allow an anagram of numeric.

None of which really has much of any relation to earwax. But just as well. Earwax should be left alone; any otorhinolaryngologist will tell you that (the usual line they give is “Don’t stick anything smaller than your elbow into your ear”). It’s there as your ear’s natural crap-trapping and cleaning mechanism, and it gradually works its way out thanks to the movements made by the motion of mastication. You can think of it as like a glacier of your head – although glaciers are not as a rule so sticky (or, for some people, especially of some East Asian gene pools, crumbly).

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paraphernalia

Posted on April 19, 2012 | 2 comments

Look at this long word, with its six syllables and assorted bits and pieces of letters, a pair of p’s, a pair of r’s, a quartet of a’s, and five other miscellaneous ones, sticking out in various directions. It sounds a bit like a puff of wind blowing through a window and flapping the curtains and causing the papers to flutter. It makes me think of the multitude of little bits and pieces sometimes seen hanging off of and out of the bag of my remarkable wife, such an asteroid belt of small flapping and dragging things that some fellow figure skaters once compared her to Grizabella from Cats.

But paraphernalia refers to more than just random stuff, and the length of the word – and its evident Greek origin – give it a more technical air too: it sounds like a word you would see on a police report.

Probably in the phrase drug paraphernalia, in fact, which is one of the top places you’ll see this word. Also marijuana paraphernalia and cocaine paraphernalia and injection paraphernalia. But also medical, fishing, camera, and quite often ritual. And very often other paraphernalia.

Because it’s too unkind to say junk and too brutishly vague to say stuff and too vulgar to say shit. You could say things, but that’s not a very spread-about-and-scattered word. You could say appurtenances, but that mainly has a sense of “belongings”, as opposed to paraphernalia, which seems to imply assorted things all in orbit around a central function. As Visual Thesaurus puts it, paraphernalia is “equipment consisting of miscellaneous articles needed for a particular operation or sport etc.”

So here’s a question, raised by my colleague Rosemary Tanner: what about if you have just one? Paraphernalia are miscellaneous associated articles; what if you have just one of those associated articles? You have a paraphernalium?

I like that. But actually it’s not quite what you have. The singular is in fact paraphernalis. (Sounds sort of like three women’s names, doesn’t it?) It’s Latin, yes, but it’s borrowed from Greek: παράϕερνα parapherna, from παρα para “along with, beside” and ϕέρειν pherein “carry, bear, bring”. So it’s bring-alongs, yes? And a paraphernalis would just be a thing you happen to have with you?

If you’re a new bride, perhaps. The original use of paraphernalia (and of the now-disused word parapherna), you see – in English as well as elsewhere – was specifically those things a woman brought with her into the marriage other than her dowry. It used to have a legal sense: though the paraphernalia became the husband’s property, the wife was entitled to their use and enjoyment, and on the husband’s death, she would retain them. They did not include furniture. (Remember that Shakespeare had to will his wife a bed.)

That legal situation changed more than a century ago, of course: women have more rights now. The various socks and laces and scarves and pins and so on hanging out of my wife’s massive shoulder bag are her paraphernalia, sure, but they haven’t become my property. (I have enough crap of my own anyway.) And since the word isn’t needed officially for that, it is no longer part of the legal lexical paraphernalia of a marriage contract, and it is free to attach to whatever else.

So it has largely moved from one addictive, mind-altering thing to another: from marriage to drugs. But I will admonish you that if you speak of a paraphernalis, it may be you who are thought to be on drugs. And if you write it, it will be taken for a typo. (Anyway, the thing about paraphernalia is that there’s never just one piece of it.)

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expletive

Posted on April 19, 2012 | 3 comments

I was back at the house of Marcus Brattle, my adolescent ex-Brit mentee, tutoring him in the finer (and sometimes coarser) points of grammar.

“One thing I’ve always wondered,” he said. “In a sentence like It’s raining, what’s the it? The sky, the weather, what?”

“None of the above,” I said. “It’s just there because in English we need an explicit subject. It’s just a filler. An expletive.”

“A wot?”

“Expletive.” I wrote it down so he could see the spelling.

“Oh,” he said, “ex-plee-tive. As in deleted.”

“In North America,” I said, “it is pronounced ex-pla-tive. In spite of the fact that the ex is a prefix. It’s from ex ‘out’ and plere ‘fill’.”

“Right enough,” Marcus said. “I’ve said a few expletives when I’ve had to fill some things out. But, to return to the first question, I didn’t say ‘It’s bloody raining,’ I just said ‘It’s raining.’”

“Yes, the it is an expletive.”

“You’re missing a ‘sh.’”

Pause. I sighed. “Not ‘Shit’s raining.’”

“For which let us be thankful,” Marcus said. “That would be excretive.” Some days I wondered whether I had succeeded in teaching him anything other than my own worst habits. “And perhaps explosive,” he added.

I waved that one away with both hands. “Well, let me be explicative. Expletive refers to all sorts of verbal padding and empty filler.”

“Things that may be well deleted.”

“If they’re emphatic vulgarities, they may be trimmed without grammatical damage. Note that not all vulgarities are really expletives; some are main verbs and nouns.”

“No shit. You’re shitting me.”

“Two good examples.”

“Thank you. I will accept the bonus points.” Marcus smiled.

“Anyway,” I continued, “syntactic expletives such as the subjects of It’s raining and There’s a duck on the table are there precisely because they can’t be deleted. In a complete English sentence, you need a subject to receive the nominative case from the verb.” I stopped, realizing that case theory was probably a bit beyond the curriculum. “They’re spear-carriers,” I said.

“Well, you can’t shake a spear at that, but it sounds a bit exploitative.”

I nodded. “Theirs is an empty existence. Look, I’m sure you will like the take on it on The Nasty Guide to Nice Writing. It’s by that dirty old man, Dirk E. Oldman.” I wrote down the URL, nastyguide.wordpress.com.

“I like the sound of it, though… expletive.” He said with with drawn-out relish. “It sounds excellent and complicated. Crisp and clicky and mechanical, rather like the sound of some of the naughty words it refers to, with their ‘sh’ and ‘f’ and ‘t’ and ‘k’ and so on. Actually,” he said, getting up, “I think I know what it sounds like.” He trotted into the kitchen. “How’s this?” I heard a sound that was evidently a cultery or utensil drawer being rattled.

“Sort of like that,” I said.

“No, no, wait for it…” he shouted. There was a sound as of pots and pans being banged around. “I think it sounds like an egg being cracked into a frying pan.”

Oh brother. Adolescent boy. Another excuse for a snack. I got up and headed into the kitchen. Where I promptly collided with Marcus, on his way between fridge and stove. “Bollocks!” he said, stepping back.

“Now that,” I said, “was an exclamative expletive.”

“Actually,” he said, indicating the yellow-and-clear goo and shell bits now running down the front of my shirt, “that was an egg-splat-ive.”

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chirality

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 3 comments

Let’s start with a little combinatorics problem.

Say there are four friends gathered for lunch. Let’s call them Alana, Alex, James, and Trish. They are sitting in a restaurant booth, two on one side, two on the other. Now let’s say that the two men – Alex and James – are right-handed and the two women are left-handed. As they are about to start eating, it is observed that they have managed the most unfortunate arrangement of conflicting chirality: on each side, a left-hander and a right-hander are seated so that their active elbows are towards each other and thus will be in conflict throughout the meal. Now: assuming that all possible seating arrangements of two and two are equally probable, what are the odds of this state of affairs?

This is the question with which we challenged ourselves while waiting for our pancakes, eggs, bacon, et cetera on Sunday. I invite you to ponder it. I will give an answer at the end.

I will say that we decided not to rearrange ourselves, and we managed suitably well anyway. But, ah, the bedevilment of chirality.

We know chirality is bedevilling. How many times have you used, or heard, “The other left” when a direction to look or act left was responded to with a look or act to the right? Or vice-versa? We may know which hand we write with (except on certain mornings), but we still manage to confuse the sides from time to time.

Mirrors, those semiotic prostheses, highlight the issue. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of chiral (from which we get chirality) is “not superimposable on its mirror image”. It is often thought that a mirror reverses the image. It does not; it just happens that when someone turns to face you they rotate on a vertical axis and so they reverse on that axis. You might as well think mirrors reverse front and back: if someone has their right on your right and their left on your left, their face is away from you, not towards you as the mirror would suggest. Indeed, if we turned by flipping so that our heads were down and our feet up, some people would say that mirrors reversed head and foot, not left and right.

But, although these thoughts are automatically prompted by today’s word, I am risking drifting away from the word at hand. And chirality is a word at hand, quite literally. Its more plain-spoken English equivalent is handedness. It comes from Greek χείρ cheir “hand”, which shows up in various other words, probably the best-known of which is chiropractor (they use their hands to work their medicine). You will also see chiropodist, which is not someone who uses their hands on your feet but someone who treats both hands and feet (compare otorhinolaryngologist, an ear-nose-and-throat doctor).

There are few other cute words that use this root. Among them are chiromancy, palm-reading; chirognomy, the form of the hand and the study of one’s character from that form; chirosophy, a synonym for either of the previous two; chirography, handwriting; chiromachy, hand-to-hand combat; and my favourite, chirapsy, touching or rubbing with the hand. (Ah, good hands are a rhapsody, and a good touch of a good hand can lead to rapture.)

In every case, the ch is pronounced /k/ in English; the original Greek has it as a velar (or postalveolar) fricative, but it came through Latin, which made a /k/ sound of it, and English has long since lost its velar fricatives anyway. So chirality starts with a hard stop at the back, and then moves to the tongue tip: a liquid, a liquid, a stop. The vowels gradually and with a slight hesitation proceed from low-central to high front. But it exhibits no right-left chirality.

Could a speech sound exhibit chirality in its articulation? Actually, yes. Ask a speaker of Xhosa or another language containing a lateral click which side they click on. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s the sound many Anglophones use to summon a horse. I do it on the right, but can do it on the left if I want. Other than that one, you will see little chirality in speech articulation. And even with that one it doesn’t have a meaningful effect on the sound.

But chirality can have a meaningful effect in other areas. And I don’t just mean the stats that show that left-handers don’t live as long as right-handers. There are many things in nature that have chirality, from seashells right down to certain molecules – DNA, for instance. A mirror image of a molecule (an enantiomer of it) is a different molecule. Sugars twist to the right; the mirror-image version of them tastes the same but isn’t digested. There would be sweeteners made of left-handed sugars, except no one has found a way to make them economically. (Naturally, such apparent tampering with nature would be seen by some as sinister. Fittingly, since sinister is Latin for “left-hand”.)

Similar issues of chirality appear in electromagnetism, particle physics, and mathematics – including geometry and anything else that has spatial implications. Such as some combinatoric problems.

Oh, yes. To return to our opening problem: one in six (22/4!). There are 24 ways to sit (4×3×2) and 4 ways to sit in the chirally pessimal arrangment (2×2). The optimal seating arrangement, from an elbow perspective, would have males on one side, females on the other, with elbows away from the wall. The odds of that are also one in six. That’s assuming that the four of us won’t by habit have a male and a female on each side, always a possible inclination for us dioecious humans.

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coccygeal, coccyx

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Oh, look at that chick! The backs of her shirt and pants have parted ways a bit! See? Oh, see? See?

Why?

There’s a tattoo there! She has a coccygeal tattoo!

A what?

C-O-C-C-Y…

No, no, no, I mean what do you mean by coccygeal? Are you going cuckoo?

Ha! Thereby hangs a tail!

A tale? I have a bone to pick with you.

I’d say you’re picking a tailbone. Specifically a beak-shaped one.

A beak? But a beak pecks. That’s why in England they call your nose your pecker. Which I am aware means something else in North America. Here, though, you’re talking about a tail. No, not that kind of tail.

I’m talking about the coccyx.

The cock six? What? This is really going downhill.

No, no, no, coccyx. That means “tailbone”. It just sounds like “cock six.” It comes by way of Latin from Greek κόκκυξ kokkux “cuckoo”. Apparently your tailbone is shaped like a cuckoo’s beak.

At least cuckoos’ beaks are still useful. A tailbone is just there for jarring on things. And what was that other word you used to refer to the sigil she has intagliated on her vestigial entailment?

Not really intagliated, just inked. The word is coccygeal. The adjective relating to the coccyx.

“Cock sidgy all.” It occurs to me that it sounds a bit congealed, concealed, or occluded.

Well, not that one. I won’t say you can see the tip of her tailbone, but…

Yes, you can see her butt, a bit. Perhaps a bit to excess.

But don’t look now.

Did you just say “coccyx” again?

No, that was the sound of her boyfriend cracking his knuckles. I said don’t look… he might cold-cock you one and clean your clock…

Say, what is that tattoo?

It’s some kind of cyclic form… an ouroboros?

Ah, yes, the snake eating its tail. You know who dreamed of those and unlocked the molecular structure of the benzene ring?

Yeah… Kekulé.

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peristalsis

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 3 comments

I’ve just finished reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, an exceedingly well written and entertaining book. Towards the end is this wonderful passage:

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.

Zzzzzinggg! Man, what a scalpel-sharp tongue that Steinbeck had! On reading that, of course, I immediately thought, “I haven’t done a word tasting note on peristalsis yet.”

I imagine there is an off chance you may not know what peristalsis is. Well, you know how worms move, right? They move by peristalsis: a smooth-muscle flow of contraction and expansion (from Greek, περι peri “around” plus στάλσις stalsis “contraction, constriction” – which in turn is derived from στέλλειν stellein, verb, “set, place”). But Steinbeck did not have worms in mind, and neither do most people when speaking of peristalsis. Indeed, one does not want to have worms in the place one normally encounters peristalsis.

And where would that be? Follow your gut. Food passes through your innards from mouth to stomach through intestines to back door propelled by peristalsis. It happens automatically and regularly, and thus is not, to Steinbeck’s mind, spontaneous – although, given that it occurs without conscious impetus, it does meet a definition of spontaneous. And as to the interest factor… well, some people do study the stuff. It’s a necessary thing.

I don’t want to put you off your bedtime snack, breakfast, or whatever you’re eating as you read this, though. I think we can taste the word without thinking about all that shi… stuff, I mean. For one thing: does the movement of the mouth in saying peristalsis have any similarity to that of actual peristalsis? The closest movement of the mouth I can think of to peristalsis would be the swallowing you do while drinking a glass of something. This word has little of that – just a small reverse wave at /rɪst/; aside from that, it pops off the lips to start and then stays mainly on the tongue tip after. You may think of the s and the s and the s as having some resemblance to the contractions, but aside from that the shape of this word is a little too prickly, to my eyes, to cue the sense.

But, ah, what to make of this word? You take it into your mouth and mind and swirl it around and chew it up and pass it into your system. Perhaps it gets rearranged in the initial mastication: plaster sisi, ’tis ripe lass, sassier plait, rises at lips, sir sips late, is as tripes, retails piss, spirit seals, triples as is; perhaps the sounds are picked apart, “Paris tall sis, sis tips all air, pall stair sis…”; perhaps the associations and echoes are turned one way and another. As a reader, you digest. And you gain mental nutrition from the words. It’s an interesting process. In the end what comes out is not waste but something more like a fertilized plant.

I imagine Steinbeck’s mind worked in a similar way. Words and images and concepts and relations and sounds were taken in at one point, and mixed and matched and turned this way and that, and they passed through the unconscious processes that propel them through the brain with some things taken and some things given, and at the end the product is quite interesting.

Still, I think I see Steinbeck’s point. I would not want to be at one of those peristaltic parties.

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ignotum

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 1 comment

There’s a poem I wrote several years ago that I never published anywhere, don’t know why. It would probably be best suited for a kids’ book, or at least a book for kids who don’t mind a couple of bits of Latin tossed in (in other words, just the best kind of kid). It’s not serious poetry, but I’m fond of it. Here it is:

Absent
by James Harbeck

This is a picture of something I lost.
I bought it somewhere; forget what it cost.
I’m pretty sure that it didn’t get tossed.

I took this picture the following day
just to recall that this thing got away.
It’s not for art; it has nothing to say.

There on the table you’ll see there’s a space
where it would be if it sat in its place.
I’m holding that spot for it now, just in case.

Have a good look so you’ll identify it
if, on some mission, you happen to spy it –
just bring it back here and end my disquiet.

You see, it’s the absence ’twixt table and air –
just look at the picture; there’s no need to stare,
you can see at a glance: it’s the thing that’s not there.

So bring me my thing and I’ll toss out this photo
the moment I have it concrete and in toto,
as large as the life and no longer ignoto.

Until then, I’m keeping this space in its spot.
But if it comes never, it won’t get forgot—
I still have my snap of the there that it’s not.

Now, what’s the unknown word in there? Ignoto. (You’ve probably seen in toto before.) Indeed, you won’t find it in a dictionary. Certainly not in an English dictionary. It’s unlikely you’ll find ignoto in a Latin dictionary, either.

So I just made it up? No… I knew the word ignotum, Latin for “unknown” (neuter; masculine is ignotus, feminine ignota). A dictionary will give you the nominative form. But the dative/ablative form is ignoto. Meaning (according to context) “by, from, or to the unknown”. So there. Now you know.

But this word ignotum, now. I like it. It’s a good word. As I sit here writing this, I’m listening to Magnum Ignotum, composed by Giya Kancheli and performed by members of the Koninklijk Filharmonik Orkest van Vlaanderen. It’s a delicate and dark piece, full of the great unknown. Which is what magnum ignotum means: “great unknown” (I admit it does look like it means “large bottle of wine without a label”).

The taste of ignotum? I’m tempted to say “I don’t know,” but actually I do. It has a strong taste of ignorant and other ignore words, naturally; they’re related. It may also remind you of ignoble, though I would not say that the unknown is per se ignoble, though the anagram gum on it rather is. And it has airs of ingot and I got ’em, both of which convey senses of gaining value – does the unknown add value? Often it does. Omne ignotum pro magnifico, as the saying goes: “everything unknown is taken as great” – the unknown tends to be exaggerated in value or importance.

At the heart of this word is that /gn/, the tongue stopping at the back and releasing with a nasal at the front; it makes me think of having a cold. But it made the ancient Greeks and Romans think of knowing: the gno root shows up in a variety of words relating to knowledge.

I don’t suppose we really need this word as an addition to English; we have a word already, unknown, which happens to be cognate – the un like the in that became i in ignotum, the know coming from the same Indo-European source as gno. But it fills a nice little spot, an obscure word for the obscure, even an unknown word for the unknown. Why not? If you look up ignotum you’ll likely first find the potted phrase ignotum per ignotius, “the unknown by the more unknown”, referring to an explanation that is more obscure than what it is explaining. Mounting confusion – sure to put some gum on it. How ignoble. But sometimes fun.

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An invitation

Posted on April 13, 2012 | 3 comments

I will be on vacation for two weeks in the middle of May. Rather than just stop the word tasting notes then, I’d like to invite other word tasters – you all – to fill the slots. If you’d like to write a word tasting note, of whatever word you choose, in your own style, do so, and send it to me at seamus@harbeck.ca (with a suitably perspicuous subject line so I don’t mistake it for spam, of which I get a lot) by the beginning of May. I’ll schedule them all for posting and sending while I’m away.

Things to think about when tasting words:

  • What does it look like on the page?
  • How does it feel in your mouth? Where does your tongue move?
  • How does it sound? What is the feel of the individual sounds and what is the rhythm of the word?
  • What does it sound like? What other words does it have resonances of?
  • What words does it go with? What words is it often seen with?
  • What contexts is it used in? What tone does it have – casual, formal technical?
  • What quotations is it found in?
  • Where does it come from? How did it come to be as it is? What other words are related?
  • Oh, yes: and what does it mean? What interesting things about its object catch your attention and come to mind when you think about it?

And of course have fun. Play around with it as you wish. Do your own thing.

I look forward to your submissions!

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