whitebait

Posted on February 5, 2012 | 4 comments

On uncommon occasion, reading some British book, I have seen a reference to eating whitebait. This has generally struck me as one of those pretentious understatements, rather like calling an enormous mansion a country pile, the pile in this case being short for pile of stones. After all, bait is something you use to catch fish; it’s not something for human consumption. Might as well be referring to a salad as rabbit food – only referring to it that way and no other way, since any time I saw whitebait it was used just that way with no further explanation, paraphrase, or context, as though absolutely everyone knew just what it meant.

Rather frustrating, aren’t they, those in-group cultural references? Terms used in an everyone-knows manner when you have no idea what they might be referring to. Do you know, it was years and years between the first time I saw consumption referred to as a disease in a work of fiction and the time I finally learned that it was just another term for tuberculosis. (That was before we could just Google everything up on Wikipedia on teh interwebz.)

I gathered, anyway, that whitebait must be some kind of fish. The context made that plain enough; also, I knew that fish were sometimes used as bait for other fish (it’s a fish-eat-fish world), and, having done fishing on occasion in my youth, I knew that the other things you might bait fish with were less likely on one’s dinner plate. I figured it must be some term for some set of white fish.

In fact, it refers to very young fish of actually quite a variety of species – mainly herring and sprat, but varying from place to place. The original fish to which it referred were caught in the Thames around Greenwich, and given the name because they were used as bait to catch bigger fish. But they gained popularity as snacks and light eating. After all, they’re just one to two inches long. You eat them whole, head, bones, and all. I think whitebait might make about one bite.

The word whitebait, on the other hand, makes two bites, or anyway two touches of the tongue, one at the end of each syllable, and each syllable is a morpheme, a whole word in fact, an entire Anglo-Saxon root. In saying whitebait, the mouth starts more forward, and ends up pulled farther back. If you make it sprat whitebait it will have three short, crisp syllables, but it seems that generally one doesn’t bother specifying what species they are; indeed, they’re all so small, you could lose them altogether if you were to batter them for deep-frying. Mind you, they often are coated in flour or some kind of batter for deep-frying, but you may feel sure it’s not the thick kind of batter you’re likely to get with full-size fish that’s served with chips.

I’m not sure exactly why this word came into my mind today, but it was brought back some hours later when Aina and I went for fish and chips at Off the Hook, which has five different kinds of fish available in four different kinds of batter (one of which gluten-free) – but no whitebait. It happened that on the TV screen in the back of the place the movie Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck was showing, and it reached its conclusion just as we reached ours: the small white men in their small wooden boats going after a large white whale; they want it for consumption (I mean oil, mainly, but perhaps food too), but it becomes all-consuming for Captain Ahab, and in the end he, small mouthful that he is, is fully consumed by it – not eaten, but caught up in the harpoon lines and dragged under, and his whaleboat likewise lost. You might say he was the white bait; at any rate, his life was abated when he was ablated. He was no less fish than the whale was, and in the end he was battered and deep-sixed.

But at least he was not in his infancy. Whitebait are so small because they have not yet reached maturity. They are cut off before they can reproduce. The result can leave us hard of herring and short of sprat. Better to stick with the thicker batter rather eating something that’s just one biteweight.

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realm

Posted on February 3, 2012 | 1 comment

This is a magical word, a word of resonant voice, redolent of wonder, royalty, the more-than-real. It rolls in with the soft regal thunder of the /r/ and drives forth with the mid-front vowel moving smoothly into the liquid /l/, which is then closed off with the pensive, appraising hum of /m/. There is nothing abrupt, nothing infra dignitatem; it is smooth like a sweep of a cape or a wide wave of a wand, or the expansive swing of a hand’s commanding gesture displaying the full breadth of a realm. It is firm as an elm. And it has the added expense of a silent a in its heart.

We do use this word today, and not always in especially regal and evocative contexts; it shows up in public realm, political realm, realm of possibility, realm of theory, and such like, as well as in the stock phrase the coin of the realm, but into each of these contexts it imports an air of something beyond the mere local scope. As it does such yeoman service it is like a king incognito, or like the god Krishna serving as charioteer to the warrior Arjuna: the majesty will out.

What is a realm? Not a simple place; it is an expanse, a region, a land, even a new universe unto itself. A realm is something you may enter (perhaps the realm of possibility) or move into or descend into (perhaps the realm of fantasy); things may be within or in a realm, or they may even be beyond or outside it; something may open up new realms for inquiry, investigation, or the like, as though pushing through a mass of coats at the back of a wardrobe and discovering the entry to a new kingdom.

Kingdom? No, realm. But what is the difference? Surely a realm is a region ruled over by a king? After all, it comes from Middle French realme, reaume, reaulme (and similar spellings), which traces back to Latin regalis “regal” – “of a king”. Over history, the l has sometimes been present, sometimes absent from the word, and for some time not standard in the pronunciation; but we may say this l is like the sceptre, and it will ever return. Not only kings and queens have sceptres, however; any territory ruled by a sovereign can be called a realm – the Grandy Duchy of Luxembourg, for instance, is a realm. Realm can also cover parts of a country’s territory that are not part of the country itself but are owned by the country.

More broadly, of course – in the extended uses – a realm is, as Visual Thesaurus puts it, “a domain in which something is dominant”; in that sense it has synonyms in land and kingdom. It can also be a domain of knowledge – also called a region. And I would say that in general it is the bounded (but not always precisely bounded) expanse that is more key to the semantic essence of this word rather than the specific monarchy – or any specific borders.

After all, we do not talk of the animal realm rather than the animal kingdom; if Disney had a magic realm it would not be quite the same as a magic kingdom; things do not enter the kingdom of possibility or open up new kingdoms of knowledge. A kingdom has a king, castle, borders; kingdom is the state of being a king, too. A realm may have a king and castle and borders, but those are not the focus; it is the pervasive majesty and dominion and the contiguity that are more important – the power and dominion distinguish it from land or region, but dominion is not quite as grand as realm (and in Canada it’s a fairly common word, found in the names of such things as banks, grocery stores, and such like, due to the official use – until 1982, and in fact still occasionally – of the name Dominion of Canada).

Realm also has specialized usages, such as in the sciences – a major biogeographic division – and in geometry – a hyperplane – as well as in traditional Buddhist cosmology, in which there are several possible realms of rebirth. One of those – lower than that of animals but higher than that of hell – is the realm of hungry ghosts. And a well-known reference to that is In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a best-selling book about addiction by Gabor Maté, a physician who works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Most of the other top results for realm on Amazon.com, however, fall into two realms: that of fantasy novels and role-playing games (Forgotten Realms, Into a Dark Realm, Keeper of the Realms) , and that of New Age mysticism and magick (Realms of the Earth Angels, Wisdom of the Hidden Realms, Practical Advice from This Realm and Beyond). Which brings us back to the wondrous power of this word, like a purple velvet curtain that encloses, occludes, but parts to reveal and to allow entry. Consider the magic it brings in to set the tone in John Keats’s “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

It is, too, a word long associated with the ancient glory of England. Queen Elizabeth I referred to her land with the term – for instance, “I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom,” and “I … think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”

But the best place to hear it in this role is in John of Gaunt’s great speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II. I enjoin you to listen to John Gielgud deliver these lines; the video, on YouTube, is ten minutes long, but this speech is near the beginning – be warned, though: you will want to watch the remainder. Here is the passage, which so thoroughly seasons the dish that this word and a few others will ever give you the savour of it:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth.

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noisome

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 3 comments

You’re sitting, let’s say, on a streetcar, bus, subway, in a food court, whatever. And all of a sudden it’s as if Pepé Le Pew has pranced past: something odiously malodorous has been unleashed on the environs. You companion coughs, waves, turns, eyes watering, to you: “Was that you?”

You, shocked, taken aback, defensive, wanting to protest your innocence of the noxious nuisance, can only say (between gasps), “No – I – some…” and then asphyxiate.

Oh, those mercaptans, like olfactory cacophony: annoying noise for your nose. How much better it would be to be merely bored: who would not take ennui over a noisome nastiness?

But why would we call them noisome? Is it by some runaway metaphor, cacophony turning to phony caca, so that just as you may say “your singing stinks” you may conversely say “your stinking sings”? And, by the way, can we use noisome for things other than smells?

To answer the latter question first: Yes, you can use noisome for anything annoying, though it is most commonly used for odours that make your nose say “Oy!” and for other things causing nausea. If you look for synonyms on Visual Thesaurus, you get two sets, one clustered on “offensively malodorous” – words such as fœtid, foul, funky, and stinky – and the other on “causing or able to cause nausea” – words such as sickening, queasy, vile, and loathsome.

But what, then, is the link between noisome, noise, nausea, and annoying? If you think you can sniff it out, you may be after a rotting red herring. Oh, there are links, and there are also disconnections, but they may not all be where you expect.

Let us start with something odious, hateful (in fact, we did). In Latin, est mihi in odio meant “it is hateful to me”; this phrase was apparently the source of the old Venetian inodio, which spread through other Romance languages, wearing down in the process, turning up in Old French as anoi and in modern French as ennui. English took anoi and made of it annoy, which was first a noun – the verb annoy came along just slightly later from the derived verb in French. From this annoy was made an aphetic (trimmed) form noy, possibly through reanalysis as a+noy. And from noy plus the same some as we see on loathsome, toothsome, winsome, and so on we got noisome.

But what about noise? What a nuisance! Where does it come in? Heh. Well, it seems likely that it comes ultimately from nausea – by a semantic shift from “seasickness” to “upset” to “uproar” and “din” – but it may instead come from noxia, which is in turn from nocere “harm” (whence innocent); noxia is the source of noxious and nuisance. But none of this is related – except by coincidence of sound and consequent reanalysis – to noisome.

Well, if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog, smells like a dog… Hmm, well, it’s still not a dog really, but it may dog you even after doggèd digging. Words usually diverge over time; we have plenty of cognates, words that come from the same original word. But sometimes they converge. And sometimes they come to look like something that they specifically are not, and when you have learned them it’s a badge of knowledge that you use them in the “correct” sense, rather than what they look like they mean: words like enormity, meretricious, wizened, noisome… They lurk in the language like invisible mephitic clouds, just waiting for you to walk into them.

Thanks to Cathy McPhalen for suggesting noisome.

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fortitude

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 1 comment

I glanced over at the copy of Vanity Fair my wife was reading and noticed a pull quote: “Jon has lots of fortitude.… This is good when life requires being resilient, but it’s bad when it requires change.”

Fortitude! Not a word you see all the time, and the particular sentence struck me as a bit odd. How often do we say that this or that person has fortitude? I almost rather think is strong or, perhaps, is fortitudinous would be more expected. But beyond that, to have lots of fortitude – right next to each other you have a very colloquial term, lots of, and a rather formal, erudite, poetic, or at the very least officious term, fortitude.

The article, by the way, is on Jon Corzine, former head of Goldman Sachs, former governor of New Jersey, most recently in charge of the brokerage MF Global in its $40 billion meltdown. The actual text in the article is just slightly different from the pull quote: “‘He has lots of fortitude,’ says someone who has worked with him. ‘The winds don’t buffet him. This is good when life requires being resilient, but it’s bad when it requires change.’”

And that’s a nice little gloss of fortitude: “The winds don’t buffet him.” He’s not the sort of guy who dives for cover at the first sign of opposition. I am put in mind of Major Chaterjack from Spike Milligan’s World War II memoir Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (page 99):

He was this kind of man. Autumn morning – the early sun had melted the night frost, leaving glistening damp trees. Battery parading – small wafts of steam are appearing from men’s mouths and noses – the muster roll is called – B.S.M. is about to report to Major Chaterjack: ‘Battery all correct and present, sir!’ The roar of a plane mixed with cannon shells all over the place – M.E. 109 roof top, red propellor boss – panic – Battery as one man into ditch – not Major Chaterjack, M.C., D.S.O. – stands alone in the road – unmoved – produces a silver case, lights up a cigarette. He is smoking luxuriously as well all sheepishly rise from what now feels like the gutter. He addresses us: ‘Very good – you realise you did the right thing and I the wrong.’ What can you say to a bloke like that?

I can tell you what you say of the other sort of bloke, the kind who dives for cover when his neighbour sneezes: the stock term is lack of intestinal fortitude, and in fact intestinal is the word that goes most often with fortitude now. (Post-traumatic stress disorder is a whole other matter, of course, and has often been mistaken for lack of intestinal fortitude – as happened later in the war to Milligan, too.) Intestinal fortitude doesn’t mean you can survive a bowl of five-alarm chili – well, it may mean that too, but it’s not a literal reference to your bowels. It’s really a fancy, often jocularly fancy (perhaps jocular in that army way), way of saying “guts” – in the figurative sense.

Fortitude, anyway, by itself, is stiff upper lip, “keep calm and carry on,” but it’s more than that. It’s courage, moral strength, but specifically the strength to endure pain or adversity, as opposed to the strength and courage to take action. It’s actually one of the four cardinal virtues (did you know there were four cardinal virtues?): prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude.

Is it me, or do three of those four sound quite reserved, cautious, and conservative? What about kindness or helpfulness or cheerfulness? Are the “cardinal virtues” the virtues you most seek in a person? Does it make a difference whether you’re evaluating the person as a role model or as a friend? Edmund Burke, in On the Sublime and the Beautiful, certainly thought so:

Those virtues which cause admiration, and are of the sublimer kind, produce terror rather than love; such as fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like. Never was any man amiable by force of these qualities. Those which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of loveliness, are the softer virtues; easiness of temper, compassion, kindness, and liberality; though certainly those latter are of less immediate and momentous concern to society, and of less dignity. But it is for that reason that they are so amiable.

Heroes are great for doing great things, but are they the sort you want to hang out and party with? Grim, stoic determination hardly seems like great dinner company. But on the other hand, a sort like Major Chaterjack shows you can combine fortitude with amiability and wit.

Fortitude is, of course, from Latin for “strength”; the root fortis “strong” shows up in quite a lot of places. Fortitude could have been an expensive synonym for “strength” in the literal sense, and in fact it formerly was used that way; however, it’s useful to have separate terms for inner strength of endurance and for physical strength, and that is how it has developed – indeed, it has developed to the point that even in the figurative senses it has split a bit from strength, so that you can even find references to having or needing the strength and fortitude.

The word’s bare phonetics don’t carry a whole bunch of intrinsically “strong” sounds; /f/ is the softest fricative, and /t/ the lightest voiceless stop, and the whole of it taps lightly along in three steps. Words like guts and strength may be said to have a bit more basic oomph to them. But on the other hand, fort is well associated with strength and strongholds, so the word comes on stronger with that.

As for other echoes, fortitude carries ones of such words as attitude and other tude words as well as fainter ones of more distant arrangements such as ratatouille, but the one that comes first for me is the one that says fortitude is what you need when others are at sixes and sevens and problems are multiplying – after all, six multiplied by seven is forty-two.

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quadruped

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 1 comment

Allowing purple cows to graze in your plum orchard may be purported to be a good proposition, but it can get out of hand: you will know you’ve been duped if the quantity of purple quadrupeds in your drupes has quadrupled.

Yes, I wrote that just to bounce quadruped around. But I hardly need to – the word has legs of its own, as it were. And I don’t just mean the four limbs projecting from it, qdpd; it gets around in your head, looking like an l-less quadrupled, having the appearance of rhyming with duped but actually having three syllables of three letters (and three phonemes) each – three squared, nothing about four in that, is there? Except that a square has four sides.

Different quadrupeds have different patterns of walking – different orders of foot placement. This word has four touch points (represented by the four stemmed letters, as it happens), and the order is back – tip – lips – tip. It almost seems intentional that q and p are opposite ends of the mouth, given their shapes, but it’s coincidence. But wait, there’s more: because the /k/ is followed by – almost coarticulated with – a /w/, the word starts with the lips puckering out, then they relax back a bit (but round a little with the /r/), then push together again /p/, then relax: almost more like a bipedal sequence, or anyway like a two-stroke sequence in a piston engine (which powers things that replace feet altogether).

Speaking of wheels, this is a word that almost asks to be rotated. Do so – spin it 180˚ – and you get pednɹpanb, which could almost be a word – actually could be a word in some other language if you use the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which ɹ stands for the retroflex version of /r/ we use in English. It’s a little messier than pədɪq, which is biped rotated (to the extent possible), but biped has three legs, so it’s ironic rather than apposite.

I’m assuming you know what quadruped means. It’s an uncommon word but not an unknown one. The roots are Latin and well known: quadru “four” and ped “foot”. (This “four foot” does not refer to the inner ring in a curling rink.) The ped is what you see in, for instance, pedal, but you will often see ped that is adventitious and unrelated – duped does not mean “two-foot” and hoped does not mean “skank-foot”. On the other hand, there is no morpheme pled; the ple in quadruple comes from plus – yes, that plus.

But does quadruped just mean “four-footed”? Is a table a quadruped? And, on the other hand, given that cats are quadrupeds, is a three-legged cat also a quadruped? (Does it matter whether it was born that way or lost a leg later?) As I spy the u and u in this word and think of an animal on its back, I also find I must ask: If you consider that quadruped means “animal of a kind that typically has four legs” and that animal includes the characteristic “animate”, is a dead cat still a quadruped? Oh, and are monkeys – which also use their arms for locomotion – bipeds? If not, they must be quadrupeds, yes? But monkeys have hands.

When you get into some antics of semantics of this sort, you may soon find that your possible referents have quadrupled – and your possible different definitions, too. You thought meanings of words were clear, easy, and fixed? Better ask for quarter – you’ve been duped.

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sketchy

Posted on January 29, 2012 | 4 comments

“Well,” said Maury, “it was all a bit sketchy.”

“Seedy, you mean? Unpleasant?” I said. Maury was telling me about his blind date of the night before.

“No, it’s just that we hadn’t made very detailed plans. I suppose I was a touch skittish. So we had no clear picture of where to go.”

“Where did you meet up with her?”

“At a coffee shop in the west end. I wasn’t sure what to expect – the description of her was rather sketchy.”

“I’m going to assume you don’t mean disreputable.”

“Correct. Our mutual friend said she looked vaguely like Christina Ricci. But she had said she would have a Gucci bag and a crutch, so she was easy to spot.”

“A crutch?”

“She said she’s a soccer coach, and caught a kick in the shin. But this also meant we chose somewhere not too far to walk. Neither of us had been to the place, but it looked fetching, in a sketchy way.”

“I don’t usually eat at sketchy places…”

“No,” Maury said, “I meant the décor. It was a touch kitschy, but the walls were covered in sketches and etchings of bocce players.”

“Italian food, then?”

“That’s what the menu said. Well, the details were sketchy, but, then, so, as it turned out, was the food.”

“Your food was lacking in definition?”

“No, it was dodgy. Wretched, in fact. They called it chicken cacciatore, but what came out of their kitchen was scorched and botched and drenched with ketchup.”

“Oh, dear.”

“She found a good excuse for ditching the joint. She said her leg under the cast was getting itchy and she wanted to go home and do some tai chi to make it feel better. I was invited to join her, or anyway to sip a Scotch and watch.”

“Um,” I said. “That almost sounds sketchy.”

“It was an acceptable proposition in a clutch. I was a bit surprised that she lived nearby.”

“Why?”

“Well, the neighbourhood is rather sketchy in my mind.”

“Huh. Usually you look things up and get to know the details…”

“No,” Maury said, “I mean that to my knowledge it’s a seedy area. At every corner there was a clutch of sketchy characters. But her place was nonetheless quite nice, not dicey at all.”

“So how did it go from there?”

“She marched me into her kitchen and poured me a Scotch, then dropped the crutch. As I reached for it, she made a switcheroo.”

“Your drink?”

“No – with a quick rip, she undid the stretchy velcro on the cast and fetched me a swift kick in the tush. Not brutish, just a little wicked. And shouted ‘Gotcha!’”

“Whoa.”

“It turns out she’s a bit of a joker – a kittenish character. And she uses the cast on blind dates to have some control over the situation. If it gets touchy, she can just back out. Or if she wants it to get touchy, she can do what in fact she did.”

“So how was the rest?”

“Sketchy, I’m afraid.”

“Uh-oh.”

“No, sorry, I just mean that I had too much Scotch and I can’t put together a complete picture. I believe I had fun. There was some opera involved. A CD of Gianni Schicchi, if my recollection is accurate. Rather catchy, as a matter of fact.” He sang a snatch of a well-known aria: “O mio babbino caro…” He coughed.

“You were singing along? Your voice sounds a little scratchy.”

“It has been scotched.”

“You are looking a little under the weather, actually. Just a bit, ah…”

Maury nodded and rubbed his head. “…Sketchy, yes.”

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Dear Kitty, Hi, Kitty, Love, Kitty

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 1 comment

In the matter of salutations and signatures in correspondence, many people are confused about comma placement. Here is how the standard rules go, and why.

In Dear Kitty, you are addressing a person (the technical term for this is vocative) and are declaring her to be dear; it is an adjective, and you don’t put a comma between an andjective and what it modifies. Saying Dear Kitty is like saying Sweet kitty as in Sweet kitty, won’t you come lie on my lap?

In Hi, Kitty, the Kitty is again in the vocative, but Hi does not modify it; Hi is an expression of saluation, a performative. Salutations are self-contained in much the same way as imperatives, and the vocative is effectively an interjection; if you want Kitty to listen, you say “Listen, Kitty,” rather than “Listen Kitty,” and likewise it’s Hi, Kitty, how’s your cat rather than Hi Kitty, how’s your cat (unless her name is Hi Kitty). It’s true that many people leave the comma out there; that’s not considered standard, however, as there is a structural disjunction.

In a closing signature, the name is yours, so you are not addressing anyone with it; the signature function is a particular performative, sort of like Amen. It closes the text and expresses that it is from you. (We don’t do it in direct personal speech because it would be silly – it’s obvious that you’re saying what you’re saying.) The Love is short for “with love,” which means “I am sending this to you with love,” so it’s also a performative – but a different one. If you leave out the comma, you are making a direct connection between Love and Kitty, making it read like an imperative: Love Kitty! (With Sincerely it would be less snicker-worthy but still mistaken to leave off the comma: Sincerely Kitty would mean “I sincerely am Kitty” rather than, as you want, “I say this sincerely, and sign it Kitty.”)

So:

Dear Kitty,
Hi, Kitty,
Love, Kitty.

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smite, smote, smitten

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 5 comments

One of the great classic Far Side cartoons by Gary Larsen is captioned “God at His computer”; it shows the deity (looking like the same bloke from the Sistine Chapel) at a computer, on the screen of which we see some schlimazel walking down the street as a piano is hanging on a rope above his head, and God is about to press a button on His keyboard labelled SMITE.

Ah, smite. The word struck me most recently in a chorus I (and the Mendlessohn Choir) have been singing from Handel’s Israel in Egypt: “He smote all the first-born of Egypt…” Yes, the word reeks of Biblical death. Of course we know that in general it means “strike, hit” and that “kill” is an extended sense in the same way as “copulate with” is an extended sense of lie with (or, for that matter, know in, as they say, the Biblical sense). But it is now a deliberately archaic word – that is, it is actually still used more often than many words that are seen as perfectly current (e.g., slug, cuff), but it calls forth an antiquated tone; it has the honeyed, dusty smell of foxed old books. Try these variations (related words served up by wordandphrase.info):

I will hit you.
I will beat you.
I will strike you.
I will punch you.
I will smack you.
I will thump you.
I will thrash you.
I will smite you.
I will slug you.
I will cuff you.

Some are more specific than others, some more colloquial than others. But only smite carries the weight of divine justice, of a great Gothic fist, of a rusty broadsword, of some great hero or medieval ogre; if you are smitten, you don’t just fall, you are laid low.

Ah, though, smitten. That’s a different case, isn’t it? Yes, it’s the past participle of smite, but that’s not its main use. Go to visualthesaurus.com and look the two up. With smite you get three branches: one, “inflict a heavy blow on,” leads to hit; one, “cause physical pain or suffering in,” leads to afflict; one, “affect suddenly with deep feeling,” leads to affect, strike, move, impress. With smitten you get two: one, “(used in combination) affected by something overwhelming,” leads to stricken and struck; the other, “marked by foolishness or unreasoning fondness,” leads to enamored, in love, infatuated, potty, soft on, taken with. All of a sudden it’s not the grave God with the long white beard ready to send a thunderbolt or press the smite button; it’s the cherubic little Cupid with his little arrows ready to pierce you through the heart with an unwonted fondness.

There are always a lot of reasons for shifts in sense: historical influences, chances of usage, little fads, great literary references. The King James Bible has done much to preserve and enhance smite; as it has passed out of common unmarked usage, some of the extended senses have fallen away – you would not now say, as you could 250 years ago, She smote him and mean “He was smitten with her” (by her, yes; with her, no), but it has kept and reinforced its majestic might. Smitten has through most of its history had a distribution largely the same as that of smite, and a fair bit of figurative use for affliction by any strong emotion (not just love), but perhaps its use by such lights as Pepys and Thackeray in the “infatuated” sense has added to its tilt in that direction as an adjective (as opposed to as a past participle proper – the latter takes “by” and the former more often “with”).

And just perhaps it has some cutesy air from echoes of kitten and mitten. It does also rhyme with bitten and written, true, but, then, you can be bitten by the love bug too, or so it is written. It is at any rate a lighter, cuter sound than that of smite; smitten has quick vowels and a bit of pitter-patter in middle stop, as though just bouncing off the surface. Smite has that diphthong swinging down, /aɪ/, and a sudden stop at the end, without bounce, and it echoes with might and spite. Yes, and more weakly with white, kite, write, slight, and so on.

And smote? Does the past tense lack the sharpness of the present? The vowel is mid back to high back rounded, not low central to high front unrounded, and that tends to give it a duller, hollower air. The echoes are more of smoke and mote (another very Biblical term now). I find it seems more natural to say it on a lower note than smite (try this: say “I will smite him” and then “I smote him” – is there a difference in pitch for you?). An old alternate form would have made it smate; either way, it’s a case of ablaut, vowel gradation, common enough in English “strong” verbs. It’s not that there’s something intrinsically past about the sound; indeed, when Dr. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, he made as the present tense verbal suffix (havas, “have”), is the past tense (havis, “had”), and os the future tense (havos, “will have”). But o is further back in the mouth, so if you match that to the ablaut pattern to take it as the past, it seems natural enough.

Now, naturally, a word as majestic as smite is readily amenable to being used jokingly, ironically, in a cutesy sense, as you might imagine. Indeed, deliberate archaisms used anew in the present always come with quotation marks, as it were, and so with a wink and a nudge. The word is just too solemn to use entirely ingenuously; it would bespeak an excessive pomposity. Thus smite, too, releases a little kitten while it conjures a massive medieval ogre wielding a mace. You expect it from geeks in role-playing games. Or in other playful contexts, as perhaps from some masochist: “She said ‘I’ll smite you,’ and she smote me; I was smitten by her, and I was smitten with her.” So mote it be.

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Going forward, it’s an adverb

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 8 comments

A colleague recently asked what part of speech going forward is when used in the annoyingly common way such as Going forward, we’ll do it this way. Here’s what I said:

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rhabdomyolysis

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 3 comments

Does this word look threatening, even frightening? It does to my eyes; the rhabd in particular seems like something worse than rabid, worse than a raptor. It can’t simply be the rh; that shows up quite happily in rhetoric, rhapsody, rhyme, rhythm… I think it really is the grabbing of the /æbd/ after the quick growl of the /r/. The length of the word is also daunting, along with its two y’s like the extended claw feet of a raptor coming down to snatch you – or like drains to suck you down.

But undoubtedly it’s also because of what it signifies. After all, rhabdomancy manages not to be quite so nasty, though it is a bit of a hairy word for what is more calmly called dowsing. You know, when you use rods to tell you where the water (or sometimes other liquids) are. Now, you may well know that mancy is the part that refers to divination (as in cartomancy, necromancy, etc.). It thus follows that rhabdo means “rod”. Which it does. It’s from ῥάβδος rhabdos “rod” (you see that the ‘ over the rho means it gets “rough voicing,” which is represented in our spelling as the h after the r – and is resolutely ignored by us in pronunciation).

We can thus set aside any relation to abdomen – well, any etymological relation, anyway. But what about the myolysis? Some of you may recognize myo from words such as myocardial and myoelectric. It’s from μῦς mus “mouse, mussel, muscle” (yes, all three) and, in English words, refers to muscles. And lysis? It shows up in words such as electrolysis and is also present, mutatis mutandis, in words such as catalytic; it comes from λύσις lusis “loosening, parting” and refers to breakdown, decomposition, disintegration, dissolution.

So: rod, muscle, breakdown. No, it does not mean breaking down muscles by beating them with rods; although it may look like a name fit for a torture technique, we may spare those rods. Oh, being beaten with rods may lead to rhabdomyolysis. But the rods in this word are the muscle fibres. The word is not rhabdo+myolysis but rhabdomyo+lysis: breakdown of striped muscle.

It’s actually even worse than it sounds. If muscle is damaged enough to start breaking down – and this can happen through quite a lot of different causes, not just injury or overexertion but metabolic imbalances, infections, poisons, and even drug side effects – the products of the breakdown go into your bloodstream and can cause electrolyte imbalance (leading to confusion, nausea, coma, etc.) and kidney damage (possibly leading to death, etc.).

News reports on the cholesterol drug Baycol, which was taken off the market after it was associated with risk of rhabdomyolysis, sometimes described it as “muscle liquefaction” or words to that effect. That’s not exactly it, but the broken-down muscle passes into the bodily fluids (a notable sign is very dark urine), so “dissolution,” anyway, is not altogether inaccurate.

And how, by the way, do you say it? It’s tempting to give it a nice three-beat trochaic rhythm, like confutatis maledictis without the dictis. But actually it follows the grand old tradition of accenting Greek-derived words on the antepenult (the third-last syllable), making it a pair of dactyls. Pterodactyls? Eeks – that’s even worse than raptors.

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