benighted

Posted on February 14, 2012 | 2 comments

I was listening to CBC radio today and one of the talking voices was going on about what would happen if Chinese factory workers started getting paid decently – she suggested the jobs might be sent to “some benighted African country.”

My second thought was, Mmm, benighted. I’ve been meaning to taste that word for some time.

But my first thought was, I wonder if someone is going to send in a complaint about her saying that. The implication, after all, is that there is a set of countries in Africa that are benighted. It’s a vague slur, but it’s nonetheless condescending. And reeks of the colonial worldview and first-world hegemonism.

Oh, yes, benighted has that taste. That taste of arrogance, condescension, imputation of moral and intellectual darkness. I’ve used the word myself, but always to refer to specific persons whose particular character or political theories I find distasteful, or to specific objects that seem to be possessed by the prince of darkness. But there was a time when it was ordinary to see not just princes but kings and their kingdoms descibed as being in darkness. After all, you are probably familiar with the phrase deepest, darkest Africa. Do you suppose that the speakers really thought the sun doesn’t shine there? Or simply that these poor souls were as yet unacquainted with the shining sun of civilization and enlightenment? Oh, how soon shall the white reign be nigh? My, oh, my.

Do you think that this was just a view held by the nastier sorts of colonialists? Not something you would hear from a free-thinking poet? Try on this passage from Walt Whitman’s universal embrace of the dignity of all peoples, “Salut au monde,” from Leaves of Grass:

You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly-hair’d hordes!
You own’d persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!
You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!
I dare not refuse you—the scope of the world, and of time and space, are upon me.

You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon, for all your glimmering language and spirituality!
You low expiring aborigines of the hills of Utah, Oregon, California!
You dwarf’d Kamtschatkan, Greenlander, Lapp!
You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip, grovelling, seeking your food!
You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
You haggard, uncouth, untutor’d, Bedowee!
You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
You bather bathing in the Ganges!
You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian! you Fejee-man!
You peon of Mexico! you slave of Carolina, Texas, Tennessee!
I do not prefer others so very much before you either;
I do not say one word against you, away back there, where you stand;
(You will come forward in due time to my side.)

My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the whole earth;
I have look’d for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

This poem is about Whitman’s ideal of human brotherhood, of democratic equality. And yet he might as well be saying, “We’re all alike, even the little, insignificant, stupid people.”

The word benighted is not, of course, intrinsically racist; it can certainly be used in non-racist ways. Anyone, including oneself, can be described as wallowing in intellectual or moral night. (I’ll stick to using night in its usual negative figurative way, even though I actually quite like night – because I live in a big city, and that’s when a lot of the most fun things happen. I must concede that, growing up in a large house at the foot of a mountain surrounded by trees and wild things, I was rather less fond of the night.) Consider this line from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady: “‘Do you know you are the first lord I have ever seen?’ she said, very promptly, to her neighbour. ‘I suppose you think I am awfully benighted.’” Or this line from David Copperfield by Dickens: “The poor, benighted innocent had never seen such a man. He was made of sweetness.”

For that matter, it has an original literal sense too. You will see it in, for instance, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: “How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread those steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once; yea now also I am like to be benighted, for the day is almost spent.” It was used in this sense into the 19th century: “overtaken by darkness where no bed is nigh” – a real concern in previous times, when one might be forced to ride a road after dark or to bed down in a field. These days we just wait for a Motel 8 to show up in our headlights…

But in the literal sense, the original condition is daylight, and the darkness – temporary, even if threatening – overtakes, whereas in the figurative sense the people have not yet been in light; they are still in a primordial darkness, awaiting the delivery of lux by fiat from those who will bring it to them. That’s in spite of the be prefix, which, when attaching to a noun to make a verb, signifies addition, entering into, or overtaking by: bespeckle, beguile, bewitch…

Benighted, in spite of its general negativity, does have a certain loveliness; although the gh is silent, it always seems to me to insert a breathy sigh in the sight of the word. The whole word suggests the shape of a bed with a foot and a head the b and d; the sheets are rumpled and hanging loose in the middle, ight. But the word also has much potential for other words to find in its letters: bed, bend, bight, end, thin, thing, hinged bet, the big end…

The big end: is it bright, or is it dark? Does darkness overtake us, or do we emerge from it? Or, in thinking we bring the light, do we ourselves bring darkness? In wanting to be knights in shining armour, are we not benign but benighted and benighting?

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galangal

Posted on February 13, 2012 | 4 comments

When I was growing up, one of my favourite cookbooks from my mother’s collection was the More-with-Less Cookbook. And one of my favourite recipes from it was Nasi Goreng, which is a fried rice dish from Indonesia. It is made with a half-score of spices, but among them are two that, in the Bow Valley of Alberta in the early 1980s, were not readily available: “sereh powder (lemon grass or citronella)” and “laos (Java galingale root).” The recipe had a note that those two could be omitted, “but the dish loses some of its Spice Island authenticity.”

So omit them I did until, one day around 1990, after we had moved to Edmonton, I spotted a section of spices imported by the Dutch company Conimex, and among them were serehpoeder and galangal. Score! I was not surprised by how lemon grass tasted; the name gives a pretty good hint. But galangal? Huh. Really! Whaddya know.

What would you guess from the taste of the word? Does it taste somewhat of guggul? Is it something that might be eaten by Gargantua and Pantagruel, perhaps by the gallon? Does is jingle and jangle, like shang-a-lang or bangarang? Or two western girls, gal an’ gal? But what about the other form, galingale – what does a nightingale taste like? Or a farthingale? The word may have a little echo of angular, but I don’t find the sound of it sharply angular; the voiced stops are blunter, and the second one has a nasal before it for added cushioning – and the liquids are no more angular than flapping sheets of paper or thin slices of ham. Nor are the letter shapes angular. The l and l are straight, no angles; the other letters prefer curves, in the main.

The thing itself is a rhizome. It looks rather like ginger – so rather knobby and round and tawny – and in fact it is related to ginger. But it doesn’t really taste link ginger. Ginger (that good old Zingiber) is a zinger: pungent, somewhat zippy, even hot on the tongue. But galangal? No zip; more like a dusty mustard flavour. As a flavour by itself, about as charming as pure turmeric, but it works in combination.

And whence this word? The form galingale gives some indication that it’s been around English for some time, and even if it couldn’t be found in the Bow Valley in 1982 it could be found in Chaucer in 1405 and Caxton in 1480: “A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones To boille the chiknes with the Marybones And poudre marchaunt. tart and Galyngale”; “Ther groweth galyngal, cytoual, gynger canel & encens.” But English got the word, like the spice, from distant lands. What distant lands? South Asia and Southeast Asia and East Asia… such a broad designation is not problematic for a herb; they do grow over various areas. But one does like to be more precise when it comes to languages.

Well, one does when one can. The problem is that words mutate much more quickly than wild plants, generally. If you have a plant that grows in one place and it spreads to another place, it stays pretty much the same. But when you take a word from one place to another, it gets changed. And, for that matter, even in its own native soil (as it were), it changes too. And the trail is much muddied for this word. But most likely it comes from ultimately from Ancient Chinese – and has spread to Arabic, Persian, Latin, and on to many other Western European languages.

As the spice did to their kitchens. Over time, the spice and its name became much less in evidence in common cookery in Europe, for whatever reason (other spices certainly held on). But things get around much more readily these days. Spices need not travel by hazardous ship journeys or long camel overlands. And the world wide web has become an enormous spice cupboard of words.

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retiarius

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 6 comments

In a fight between a heavily armoured guy with a sword and a guy without armour (more of an air-suiter) but carrying a net, a long trident, and a dagger, who would you favour?

This was once a viable real-life question, and you could ask which of each: which secutor and which retiarius? In the Roman circus, such match-ups were common. The retiarius, with his net and trident, would face off against a secutor, or even two of them. Secutor meant “follower”, and mayhem would typically follow; retiarius meant “net user”, and he would try to retain the secutor in order to retire him and hope to return, as there was no retreat. Nor any retrial – nor trial at all: no judge, jury, or prosecutor, just one pro secutor. Ready or not, ready your net. And try to retain it and use it on your adversary – don’t be reticent.

The retiarius would actually do the damage with the trident or the dagger, but it was the net he was associated with – that’s what the arius is about, often showing up in English as ary: actuary, apothecary, secretary, adversary. Or, of course, in the original in Aquarius, the sign of the water-carrier. And the ret? That’s the net. It’s not made of flax – ret may mean “soak flax”, but that’s unrelated, Germanic. This ret is from Latin rete, “net”. As in reticulated. There are numerous other English words that start with ret, but pretty much none of them are derived from rete.

This word has that pleasant tongue-tip effect that Latin often gives: the consonants are /r/ /t/ /r/ /s/ – a trill, a stop, a tap, a hiss, but all at the tip of the tongue. In form it has little resemblance to a net; its most salient visual trait is the two i’s sticking up. Actually, what makes me think more of a net – or specifically a web – is the trident. After all, the w in world wide web has the three upward points.

And today’s net user is not a gladiatorial contestant, not exactly. No, the net user is you – and me. And I cast my net on the web, the www – a triple trident – by my blog and via Twitter. Which is where I hope to ensnare followers. Who will, I hope, retweet.

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Canada ≠ America

Posted on February 10, 2012 | 4 comments

It has become a fashion for people in some places to “point out” that the USA is only part of America, and that “Canada is America too!” I would like to ask them to stop doing that.

I don’t think I know any Canadians who would say that Canada is part of America. Canada is part of North America – North America is Canada and the US and (if you include Central America) Mexico and so on down to Panama. South America is, well, South America. In total they are the Americas. But only the United States of America is simply America. Canadians are North Americans but not Americans.

That’s just plain and simple established usage. It’s so well established, I am reflexively offended when I hear someone say Canadians are Americans. (Canadians often complain about Americans. They don’t mean themselves.) It really doesn’t matter if your sense of logic tells you it should be otherwise; logic, as most people tend to think of it, has precious little to do with language use. North America can’t be shortened to America; would you call West Virginians Virginians?

So take it from a Canadian. Take it from as many Canadians as it takes. Canada is not America.

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monoubiquitination

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 3 comments

Oh, you do see some of the most eye-grabbing words in the pages of journals such as Nature. In the last issue of 2011, I was snagged by this article title: “GlcNAcylation of histone H2B facilitates its monoubiquitination.”

What a smorgasbord of dishes bigger than your head! I won’t even dive into GlcNAcylation other than to say that it is addition of GlcNAc, which is O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine, to an organic molecule in a cell, and, really, if you want to know what that’s all about, it’s more space than I can reasonably take here. But in spite of its long and arcane name, it happens a lot.

Now, histone is in a way an easier thing. It may seem like it’s a man’s note (his tone), or an elevated rock (hi stone), but it’s actually the name of a kind of protein found in cell nuclei. And, speaking of things that take more space than is reasonable, or taking long things and making them shorter, one thing that histones do is act as spools for winding DNA around them. This may sound like a nice bit of tidiness, but you don’t know the half of it. You may not even know the ten-millionth of it, which is the ratio of a DNA strand’s width to its length. Yes, the DNA in each one of your – or my – cells would, if stretched straight, be about as long as I am tall, and I’m six feet when standing straight. That’s quite the spool job.

But the word that caught my eye in particular was monoubiquitination. It’s made of such clear Latin parts (and so many of them), but the sense of it is not immediately certain from its parts. What are the parts? We start with mono, “one”; then ubiquit, “everywhere”, from ubi “where” and que “and” (so it’s literally “and where” – que tacks onto the end of a word but means “and [that word]”); the in is a suffix used for naming certain organic molecules; ation is a normal English suffix (based on Latin) that typically refers to making something into something or adding something to something. So, really, is this a one-word expression of the joke, “A Buddhist monk goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, ‘Make me one with everything’”? Or is it some three-musketeerish thing, “all for one and one for all”?

In fact, ubiquitin is a small protein – small is relative, of course; it’s made of 76 amino acids and can be represented in one-letter code as MQIFVKTLTGKTITLEVEPSDTIENVKAKIQDKEGIPPDQQRLIFAGKQLEDGRTLSDYNIQKESTLHLVLRLRGG (seriously, James Joyce would have stuffed that one into Finnegans Wake if he could have – take the time to look and see how many English words just happen to show up in it). It’s called ubiquitin because it’s sort of like the Tim Hortons of the body: you find it everywhere. (That’s a Canadian reference, for all my international readers.) And what does it do? A whole bunch of different things, but a key one is marking certain kids of proteins for recycling.

What does that mean? Well, you could think of it as being like when parks department guys go around spraypainting X onto trees that are to be cut down and mulched: having a ubiquitin attached is like having that X. Or you could think of the old Steve Martin routine where he plays a “wild and crazy guy” from Czechoslovakia talking about their way of breaking up: “You say to the woman, ‘I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee,’ and then you throw dog poop on her shoes. Then me and my cousin, we go looking for women who have dog poop on their shoes.” Ubiquitin would be the dog poop on the protein’s shoes.

So what’s with the mono? Well, you can add one ubiquitin, or you can add more. If you add more, it can flag other things to happen. When you’ve added just one, it’s monoubiquitination. When you add more, the word becomes macaronic: it mixes Greek and Latin – polyubiquitination.

But monoubiquitination is enough as it is: one a, two u’s, three o’s, four i’s, three n’s, two t’s, plus m b q. That’s classically sesquipedalian. Actually, sesquipedalian means “foot and a half long”; that would be 18 inches, and this word is 18 letters – but three metrical feet: two dactyls and a trochee, da-da-da da-da-da da-da, like the chorus of “I Like It Here in America” (from West Side Story) but missing the last syllable. Try singing it if you know the tune (if some guy near you has perfect pitch, follow his tone):

Monoubiquitination: it
Flags things for recirculation; it
Causes a word nerd elation; it
Leaves you unclear where to station it.

I defy you to facilitate that with GlcNAcylation!

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groceries

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 3 comments

My friend and co-worker Scott Bradley asked me yesterday about the origin of the word groceries. I had to admit I wasn’t sure. “It has the word gross in it,” he said. This is true – in the sound. But it’s not spelled that way. What are the odds that it has any connection?

Look at the form of this word, after all. Where does it come from? It’s true that groceries include a series of things you may grow, especially if you’re Ceres – from rice to cores to, well, ices I suppose (Roger that), plus partially eaten cress and eggs. We will overlook the ogre and orgies hiding in this word, and will not try to score some corgis. But where are the etymological hints in this word?

We know the English derivation, to be sure: groceries is the plural of grocery (rarely used as a singular noun except in the attributive – you go to the grocery store but you don’t buy a grocery); grocery comes from grocer. And a grocer is? Aside from someone who is famously bad with apostrophe use, that is (grocer’s apostrophe being a name for an apostrophe used on a plural, e.g., twelve egg’s). I’ll tell you: a person who buys and sells food in bulk. From Old French grossier, from Latin grossarius, from grossus “thick” (and thus “in bulk”). It is that “thick” and “coarse” sense that gross retained into English that has lent itself to the ultimate development of the colloquial sense as in “That’s really gross” – something you might say of a messy spill in a grocery store (and then, of course, there are the grammar grumblers who complain of gross negligence or gross ignorance when spotting some orthographical peccadillo on a grocery store sign – if you’re not sure what I think of the sort of people who would take out a pen and correct someone else’s sign, see “A new way to be a complete loser“).

So, yes, it’s the same gross; the c spelling existed alongside an ss spelling for a long time and finally prevailed (why the c? just because it sounded that way – but remember that it was scribes and law clerks doing it then, not grocers). Grocers have been around a long time – the Worshipful Company of Grocers was founded in 1344. At first they were dealers in spices and other imported goods (or is that spice’s and other imported good’s?), for sale in quantity. Nowadays you can buy quite a lot of things in small or great quantity, of course, but if you really want bulk you don’t deal with a grocer – you go to Costco, and there’s nothing grosser than some of the 144-packs that you can there. Or 288-packs – but those really are two gross for me.

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hyssop

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

How this word tastes to you will surely be strongly affected by your religious background. For many people, it’s an unfamiliar word, or at most the name of a herb that may be used medicinally to treat coughs, fevers, and similar symptoms, and may be used (though not commonly in North America) in cooking to give a slightly bitter minty flavour. But hyssop plays an important role in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, though not all members of the Jewish and Christian faiths will be equally familiar with it.

For me, as someone who has sung in choirs, it immediately brings to mind the “Asperges me,” a text based on Psalm 51 that is sung in the Latin mass in conjunction with the act of sprinkling holy water:

Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor,
Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

(Listen to a stirring setting of this by Cristóbal de Morales.) In English, this is translated as

You will sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed,
You will wash me, and I shall be washed whiter than snow.
Pity me, O God, according to Your great mercy.

The hyssop’s central association is indeed with bearing water or other holy fluids – and with sacrifice. At the time of the Passover, it was with a hyssop branch that the Israelites were told to sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the lintel and doorposts of their houses. It was also used in other rites of purification, with the blood of a sacrificial dove or with water. And in the Christian tradition, add this: According to the gospel of John, when Jesus on the cross said he was thirsty, he was offered a sponge soaked in vinegar on the end of a hyssop stick. You can see that this herb, and thus this word, comes with a solemnity, a flavour of sacrifice and purification, for those who have encountered it in this context.

What is the word, anyway? Where does it come from? The hy may make you think it comes from Greek, and indeed it does, via Latin: ὕσσωπος hussópos. But Greek seems to have borrowed the word from Hebrew ezob. Interesting how the voiced/unvoiced difference affects it: ezob seems more to me like a name for a desert herb; hyssop – pronounced “hissup,” by the way – has a whispering quality to it, like a breeze, like waters, like a whisper in a basilica, the voice of a purifying spirit. But, then, that’s also because of the associations I have for it.

But there is another thing: as sometimes happens, names shift (chalcedony is another example of this). The plant referred to in the Bible is probably not the plant we now call hyssop. It was more likely Syrian oregano or a similar plant. But that fact is not meant to cast aspersions on the taste of this word. Indeed, this word – or its object – is what will cast aspersions: it will asperge, which is to say, sprinkle. And purge, and wash, and make white as snow. Yes, that’s what hyssop sounds like: pure snow, with the breath of the spirit passing over.

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cissoid, sistroid

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Apparently there was some big sporting event over the weekend, some game played by men with odd-shaped balls. It’s supposed to be macho or something, but the people I’ve talked with about it have focused mainly on the fact that the men were wearing lots of padding and spandex and had a liking for dancing around and patting each other on the buttocks. Now, it happens that a lot of the most likeable guys I know are comfortable with padding and spandex and dancing and so on, but that hardly seems to go with beating other guys to a pulp on a field of grass and mud, which is apparently supposed to be an important component of this game. Guys who like that kind of thing, by my experience, usually call guys who like dancing and padding and so on sissies. So this whole thing is throwing me a bit of a curve.

That might seem like a bad metaphor, since throwing a curve is a baseball reference, and I’m talking here about what Americans and Canadians call football. But when those football players throw their ball, well, that ball has a curve, and brother, that curve is kind of sistroid. And if they say they’re not a bunch of sissy-pants just because they wear spandex and pat each other’s bums, remember that those tight pants of theirs reveal a definite cissoid curve in the butt.

What are cissoid and sistroid curves? They’re really planar geometry, so I’m cheating a bit when I describe 3-D objects with these terms. But the short of it is that a cissoid is the shape formed when two concave curves meet at a point. Consider the bottom of someone’s bottom, and how the lines that describe the lower limit of each cheek meet in the middle. That’s not a classic cissoid (describable in Cartesian terms as y2(2a–x) = x3), but it’s of the general type. Another example would be the line described by a ball bouncing off the ground. A sistroid is the converse: two convex curves meet at a point. Sort of like a cross-section of the tip of a football (an American one), or the nose of a blimp (perhaps one flying over the game to get an aerial view).

But where do these words come from? When we say them, they sound the same except for the /tr/ in the middle of one, but when we spell them, one has ciss where the other has sis. It’s all hissy, but it also makes us think of sissy – also spelled cissy – and sister. What’s the relation?

Well, sister is an old Germanic word. Sissy is just a diminutive formed from sister and in use in its current sense since the later 1800s (and sometimes spelled cissy or cissie since around 1915). Cissoid, on the other hand, comes from Greek κισσός kissos “ivy”, since the curve resembles the tip of an ivy leaf (and here you thought a kiss was always under the mistletoe – well, mistletoe doesn’t even have a cissoid curve). And sistroid comes from Greek σείειν seien “shake” via the noun σείστρον seistron “sistrum” – oh, and a sistrum is a kind of metal shaker made of a frame with rods in it. The sistrums (a.k.a. sistra) I’ve seen haven’t looked sistroid to me, but perhaps when the converse of cissoid was desired they wanted a sister term and that one sounded good.

I suppose I could leap off from that to ask whether, in football, the Ivies are getting their fair shake – the Ivies being the Ivy League schools, not really as focused on sports as some other universities, although the first collegiate football game was played between Harvard (an Ivy) and Tufts (not an Ivy but a similar kind of place). But the truth is that while I am rather uninterested in professional football, I am if anything antipathetic towards what collegiate sport generally is now in the US (much less so in Canada): the tail that wags the dog for a lot of universities (not the Ivies, however). The athletes who are pushed through to fill out their teams aren’t always graded on a curve – other than the curve of the balls they play with.

So I will leave that undiscussed (see paralipsis). We may close instead with a picture of the sissy sisters of spandex and super bowls, their cissoids and sistroids soaring and whistling through the air like asteroids.

Thanks to Michael Corrado for suggesting these words.

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springe

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 2 comments

This is a word of deception. It looks like spring – but is it a false spring? Indeed, it ceases to be spring even before the unexpected silent ending: it rhymes with hinge, and has a taste of injure.

It is not related to hinge, though a springe can lead to swinging; a springe is a snare attached to a spring such as a green branch. The arrangement varies, but those who want a bit of iconicity in the form of this modestly symmetrical word may see the i as the attachment point of the spring and the p and g as the pegs holding the rope to the ground. But, really, springe looks more like a hinge; a springe looks more like an an upside-down U next to a small o. It simply sits ready, the wood cocked, until some unsuspecting bird errs into it and is caught up: the spring is released and the bird is suddenly aloft, and not in the way it wants to be. Just as the tongue of the speaker is suddenly not at the velum but touching the tip and coming to a hard end with the silent loop of the e, the bird is not on the soft ground but at the tip of a tree and silenced by a loop.

Oh, and what kind of bird? Well, springes can catch many kinds, but they are most associated with woodcocks. And not per se because springes are made with cocked wood! We most owe the association to Shakespeare. As it happens, I heard this pairing with my own ears on Friday night, at a performance of Hamlet starring my friend Kyle McDonald. You hear springe twice in the play. The first time, Ophelia is talking of Hamlet’s protestations of love, and her father, Polonius, says, “Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.” Now, isn’t that a phrase with a crisp flavour? It starts at the lips and tip of the tongue, then moves into tongue-tip affricates, and at the end of this quick consonantal scuffle it hits hard stops at the back of the mouth. The second time is in the final scene, when Laertes says, “Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric; I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.”

And is springe related to spring? Yes, it is. The cocked wood – that green wood of spring – is a spring made of green wood; it is something that is made to spring, and thus it is named with an old causative formed from the verb spring (just as fell as in fell a tree is a causative from fall). And during the green season of the year, life and greenery spring forth, just as water springs forth from a spring – all of these springs spring from the same source. But the spring of the year and the spring of water are life-giving; not so a springe.

Not so a false spring, either, come to think of it. Right now around where I live, the woods are cocked and ready to spring forth, and indeed birds are chirping and buds sprouting – even though it’s supposed to be the snowy season. If too much of the spring ventures forth into this false spring, it, too, may be caught out and silenced by an unexpected turn of the weather. As it goes for the rest of nature, so, too, can it go for us, in the long term. And when the weather is like this, people may stop and ask whether we have had some effect on that. Are we woodcocks to our own springe?

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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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