geoduck

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 1 comment

This word, at first sight, seems to be a paradoxical mix: geo says “earth” to us, and duck says “waterfowl”. Put them together and you have something that is, as the saying goes, neither fish nor fowl.

But, oh, that’s not even the half of it. This word and what it denotes have nothing to do with ducks, and only arguably something to do with earth. Not only that, it’s not pronounced like it’s spelled. OK, well, it often is pronounced like it’s spelled, but that’s not the original pronunciation and is still not the preferred pronunciation for those in the know. But let’s get to that anon. There’s lots of other weirdness to get through first.

Let’s establish that it’s a critter of some sort. Given that, what kind of critter would have about as little as you can think to do with ducks or with earth? Hmm, how about some kind of a marine critter. Let’s say it’s one that basically sits where it is and sucks in and spits out water its whole life, which can last well over 100 years. And let’s give it a shell. OK, yeah, let’s make it a clam. Unducklike and un-earthy enough for you?

But tell me about clams, now: what are they? Well, things that have their body inside a shell – they can close the shell and hide in it. And they’re usually pretty small. Well, now, let’s make this one up to 5 kilograms, and let’s make it so its shell can’t actually close over its body. In fact, let’s also give it a tail – OK, a siphon – that can get up to 70 centimetres long. This is a clam that is around the size of a turkey. And it looks rather phallic, too, thanks to that long siphon. (The Chinese name, 象拔蚌 xiàngbábàng, means “elephant-trunk clam”.)

Now, admittedly, it does have something to do with earth – the earth that is under water. It’s a burrowing clam. It digs in, then sits and sucks and blows water. Aaaaaaaand that’s about it. You think your life is boring. Well, meet zen master clam. I am sure that it is as happy as a clam. A very big clam. The biggest burrowing clam in the world, and one of the longest-lived critters on the planet, too.

They get to live to such a ripe old age in part because they have few natural predators. Not none, mind you. The most dangerous one is willing to pay more than $150 a pound for these things (imagine dropping $1600 on a turkey). So they’re a protected species. But they can be eaten, and in fact Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that geoduck meat is delicious. The siphon meat is best used in chowder (diced, I presume), and the body (the mantle) can be sliced into escalopes and prepared a variety of ways. You won’t be suckin’ ’em back like raw oysters, though.

And is the word geoduck delicious? Well, first you have to know how it tastes. It may look like the name of some environmentalist avian comic superhero (“Step away from those protected clams!” “Gaaahhh! It’s Geoduck!”), but it’s actually kind of gooey. “Gooey duck,” to be precise: that’s how you would do better to say it. That makes it less crisp, more round and dull and perhaps muddy. Um, yeah, so what’s with the spelling?

Well, as far as can be determined, the word comes from a west-coast first nations word, perhaps the Salish word gʷídəq, “dig deep”. It is also seen spelled as gweduc in English. But back in the 1800s the spelling goeduck gained some currency… but then got miscopied as geoduck: goe looks odd to English eyes, while geo is well known. The respelling has also led to people who don’t know better pronouncing it as the spelling would suggest; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary gives only that pronunciation for it. (But they don’t have geoducks in England, and the OED entry is rather brief.) And so we have a word that looks like it means one kind of thing and is said one way, when actually it means something quite different and is pronounced in a rather unexpected way. Weird enough for you? Welcome to the English language.

What would be a capper for all that? Well, a couple possibles come to mind. One would be a fake etymology. And indeed there is one noted by Davidson, which he found in a 1917 edition of the Tacoma Daily Ledger, involving some dude named John F. Gowey who was out hunting for ducks and shot at the jets of water emitted by the clams (yes, those long spouts do squirt) and bagged several, leading to their being called “Gowey’s ducks.” (Anyone who has studied much etymology would snort with instant disbelief at a story like that; they abound, and are almost never true.)

Another would be a collegiate athletic team named after them. Never mind Spartans and Trojans. Make way for the Evergreen State College Geoducks! Yes, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (yes, Olympia, the original of which is in Greece), have named their basketball, volleyball, soccer, track and field, and cross-country teams the Geoducks. Well, why not name an athletic team after something that just sits and sucks and spits water? If a Chevy truck ad can feature a song that has the line “like a rock, charging from the gate,” why not geoducks, which are at least theoretically motile? (At least they won’t run into the problem of the Corner Canyon school in Draper, Utah, whose school board ruled they couldn’t call their team the Cougars because it might be offensive to middle-aged women. No, I’m not making that up.)

I feel that this odd and paradoxical word and its sui generis referent are best capped off with the fight song for the Evergreen State College Geoducks, in case it all hasn’t been fun enough (I also encourage you to see their mascot on their website):

The Geoduck Fight Song
words and music by Malcolm Stilson, 1971
hear it on YouTube

Go, Geoducks go,
Through the mud and the sand, let’s go.
Siphon high, squirt it out,
swivel all about,
let it all hang out.

Go, Geoducks go,
Stretch your necks when the tide is low
Siphon high, squirt it out,
swivel all about,
let it all hang out.

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espadrille

Posted on January 24, 2012 | 5 comments

This seems like a nice, frilly word. It strikes me as somehow redolent of the a Southern Belle, standing under the espalier at the cotillion ready to dance a quadrille in her best gown and high-heeled shoes. Or perhaps she is gazing at some dashing Spaniard doing fencing drills con capa y espada (with cape and sword). But at any rate the word does not taste lean, laconic, or spartan; it has ruffles and frills in its appearance, the p and d and ll and that extra curlicue e at the end.

Do you happen to know what an espadrille is? If not, please take a moment to hazard your own guess. If you do, think about what you would think it meant if you didn’t know what it meant. I’ll grab a sherry and be right back.

So? It is not a curly salad green (escarole) or a snail that might crawl on it (escargot). It is not a trellis, not a ball, not a dance, not a dress, not a high-heeled… Oh, wait, they do make high-heeled espadrilles too. But mostly they are flat-soled. Yes, they are shoes: those shoes with rope soles. They are fairly un-fancy, with their canvas uppers like tennis shoes (without laces); the intricate bit is just the jute braiding that makes up the sole. They’re worn all over the world, but they’re originally from the Pyrenees.

And originally, I should say, the soles were made with rope not of jute but of esparto (sometimes they still are). Esparto is a tall grass that grows in northwest Africa and southern Spain. The word esparto is the source of espadrille; you can see that the /t/ and /r/ underwent metathesis (reversal of order) and the /t/ became a /d/. The immediate source of espadrille is Provençal espardillo.

But what does esparto come from? From Latin spartum, from Greek σπάρτον sparton “a rope made with σπάρτος spartos”; spartos was the Greek name for the plant or for another similar one.

Does that make you wonder if Sparta has the same origin? Indeed, it seems that it does, though it is not known exactly what the association was between the plant or its rope and the famous Greek city (that was known for its disciplined and laconic warriors, who played a major part in the defeat of Troy – Helen was, after all, queen of Sparta before being taken by Paris to Troy). Where, by the way, is that city? In Laconia – whence the word laconic.

Which, as we can see, I am not. Nor spartan. But I also own no espadrilles. Unless you ask someone from Quebec, that is; in Québecois French, espadrilles is a normal word for runners or sneakers.

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Troy, Trojan

Posted on January 22, 2012 | 5 comments

On Friday night, we went to the opening night of the Alumnae Theatre’s production of Gwendolyn MacEwan’s beautiful, lyrical, memorable version of The Trojan Women, the original of which was written by Euripides. It is set at the crumbled wall of Troy, where the women of Troy are gathered in the pre-dawn dark. Over the course of the play, the sun rises, but it brings not hope or beauty but the inescapable aftermath.

The Greeks came, with their horse; now Troy is destroyed and the women are soon to be de-Troyed, deployed on Greek ships as trophies. Their husbands? Dead, of course. “In their tattered black robes,” MacEwan tells us in the stage directions, “the women resemble crows.” Hecuba, Priam’s queen, is an old crone in rags (though, as Poseidon says at the play’s beginning, “negotiable (like old gold). . . . both worthless and highly valuable (if you know what I mean)”). Her son, Hector, is also dead, and Hector’s wife Andromache is about to face the loss of her young son, too: the death even of the future. Hecuba’s daughter, the nubile prophetess Cassandra, is to be Agamemnon’s trophy… to find out how that turns out, read Agamemnon by Aeschylus. (Hint: very badly indeed.) And Menelaus comes to reclaim Helen, the woman who started the whole thing: a vain pathological liar, to whom MacEwan has given the great line “I am not a slut, I am not a silly bitch! I am Helen, I am beautiful!”

At the end of the play, the city burns behind, and the women are led off to the Greek ships. Talthybius, the Greek messenger, looks back and sums it up, echoing lines already heard in the play:

As the moon bends the oceans
So this darkness bends the mind.
Even the planets are weary.
Everything awaits a series
of wretched and unreal tomorrows.

Goodbye, you splendid towers,
You once magnificent citadel,
You horrible heap of stones…

Sing for the great city that cries out
like a soul,
That falls like a shadow
On the threshold of Nowhere…
This place, this place was Troy.

MacEwan’s play holds a special place in my memories; I’ve seen three different productions of it now, and the first was when I was a drama student at the University of Calgary. I have never had the chance to perform in it, but have many times savoured the lines I could have said – and the many lines I could not have, as most of the parts are female, and none of the productions cast men in female roles.

But of course for most people Troy and its adjective Trojan carry no such flavours. It is true that (to quote Led Zeppelin) “the pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath,” but we don’t so often pause to think of the aftermath of the historical battles, in spite of the many poems and songs and plays of aftermath (I am quickly put in mind of Robert Burns’s “The Battle of Sherramuir” and the little-known Tolkien work “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” and, for that matter, songs such as “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye” and the very affecting “My Youngest Son Came Home Today”).

Rather, we think of warriors. We think of fights. We think of heroes. The popular movie Troy was certainly not an elegy for the widows. What sort of a boy is named Troy? Stereotypically the football hero, the square-jawed popular guy, maybe a fraternity brother… Try to picture it as the name of someone nerdy, quiet, thin, pale. Difficult, no? That tr is so truculent, so strong, perhaps trustworthy; it has traction, like a tractor-trailer truck. Oh, Troy is the golden boy – they may even weigh him in troy, that standard of weight that is used for gold (and is named after Troyes, France, which is not connected etymologically to the Troy of Greek legend). He is shiny, he is solid, he is a fighter. Ironically, he is lighter – a pound troy is lighter than a pound avoirdupois, which is what we use to weigh people and poultry and pillows and so on. (Incidentally, this means that a pound of gold is lighter than a pound of feathers.)

There was a real Troy, by the way, and it really did fall as a result of a battle – and, it seems, a few other times in history, too, once by natural disaster. We don’t know what the reality was of the personalities and motivations involved. But the ruins are on the Turkish coast (or near it – the coast has moved in the intervening 3200 or 3300 years), on a hill in Anatolia now called Hisarlık. It was named after its founder, Troas; one of his sons was Ilon, from whom Troy got its alternate name, Ilion (in Latin Ilium), whence the name of Homer’s epic, the Iliad.

Troy, in Latin, is Troia, and that i became written as y in modern English, but in Troian the i took on its alternate longer form, which in modern English has come to be a separate letter standing for a sound that Latin and Old English didn’t have: j. That jaw-jutting tongue-tip affricate adds even more solidity to the word. And the places you are most likely to see Trojan include the condom racks of drugstores and the gymnasia and stadia of high schools (how many high-school sports teams are called the Trojans? To follow legend, one would expect all the teams called Spartans to beat the teams called the Trojans, but I wonder how many of those students even know much of anything about Homer’s epics… I’m sure most of them know the word from drugstores, whether they’ve ever bought any prophylactics or not).

Well, well. Mindless violence and the prevention of future generations. And so we’re back at the play. And all those golden boys are weighed in the balance, and their pounds of flesh are still outweighed – and outlasted – by the black feathers of the “old crows,” the widows they would leave behind.

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scattermalia

Posted on January 21, 2012 | 2 comments

It’s a typical pattern: in the characteristic tatterdemalion paraphernalia of liminal natterings that rattle on between email aliases in the category of business chatter, a simple task may disintegrate into a flurry of a million fluttering missives, frittering away details in trails to failure in alienating malaise, until, muttering scatalogically, you send the kit and caboodle skittering and scuttle the lot. We’ve all had such projects, I’m sure: not a big bulk of business brought forth in a ball; rather, little details passed back and forth one at a time until you lose track entirely of who said what when in response to what and what comes before what and obviates what and… At such times you would love to bare your sword and plunge it into the belly of one big fire-breathing dragon of a task, rather than darting your stiletto at ten tons of little lizards swarming you from all directions.

After a day of just this sort of thing, my colleague Heather Ebbs gave it a name (so much easier to pronounce a malediction on something when you can name it): scattermalia. She defines it thus: “odds and ends of queries or information scattered through several emails instead of being nicely cleaned up into one clear listing.” The sort of thing, I might amplify, that leaves you at last to say, “OK, so what has been decided? Where are we with this?”

It really is a 21st-century problem; emails can allow you to have multiple conversation threads at the same time with the same person. It’s as though the two of you are singing one of those opera quartets all by yourselves, with each line sung antiphonally. The cyber-world may allow people to accomplish things more quickly, but among the things that can be accomplished are making a mess and getting confused. We are the authors of our own befuddlement; Pygmalion may have made a statue and then fallen in love with it, but what we have animated can come to be more of a cross between a siren and a hydra, and we are chasing it in an echo chamber covered in mirrors.

But it’s a lovely fun little word, isn’t it, scattermalia? Scatter skitters and rattles on the tongue, while malia is the soft nasal and liquid other half. The rhythm is smooth and charging. In spelling, the i before the l has been dropped as unnecessary and by analogy with, for instance, animalia. The word has tastes of various other words, several of which decorated my first paragraph, above. It also has a strong taste of Saturnalia, which sets a solid, familiar pattern for the sound – but, oh, how much less fun scattermalia is than Saturnalia, though they both involve misrule.

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There’s a couple things about this…

Posted on January 20, 2012 | 4 comments

Quick: How many things are wrong with the above sentence?

Those who know me will not be surprised when I say that it depends on the variety of English you’re using. In casual English, it’s fine, though the speaker may be aware that it’s non-standard (“not good English”). But it presents a few interesting issues. I’m going to start at the end.

I’ll leave off any real address of ending a sentence with ellipses (…), which some people dislike; I used it because I intended it to be “leading,” and that’s different from a flat-out statement.

But there are many people who will insist that a couple things is wrong and should be a couple of things. This is based on couple being a noun. The thing is, though, so is dozen, and we no longer (as we once did) say a dozen of things; so, too, is a million, and actually, in English, so too are numbers generally, though they are a special class of noun. (Numbers are not adjectives in English. Try using them in all the various places where you can use adjectives and you will see that.)

We no longer say a million of people, though we still say a milli0n of them. And couple is coming to be like other numbers, as dozen has and myriad is in the process of doing; you still can say a couple of things, but you can also say a couple things.

Can you say it when there are actually more than two things, as in fact there are with this sentence? Shouldn’t we say several things if there are three or four? Well, if you wish to be precise, yes, but several gives a sense of significant quantity, whereas couple downplays it. Like it or not, a couple is in use as an informal indefinite quantifier. True, it’s a bit weaselly. But English is a very weaselly language – or can be when we want it to be.

The interesting thing is that many of the people who will insist on a couple of will also insist, in this sentence, on There are rather than There’s. Now, if couple here really is a singular noun (like pair or brace), you might think it would take the singular. But of course with collectives we will use the plural when we are emphasizing not the totality but the mass of individuals. So There are a lot of paintings means there are many paintings, but There is a lot of paintings means that there is a lot, probably for auction: a single group.

Likewise with, for instance, the majority of voters – you may say The majority of voters decides the vote, because it is the fact of a majority that is decisive, but it is only (and not always) in newspapers and similar places where a writer is striving to be correct but doesn’t fully understand the grammar that you will see The majority of voters doesn’t want this rather than don’t want this.

So, since I have already said that a couple here is equivalent to “two”, “roughly two”, or “a few”, you would expect that it should be There are a couple rather than There’s a couple, right? And in fact in formal standard English that is so, because in formal standard English we match the number in there is/there are to the number of the predicate. But in casual English we often don’t do so, and it’s not because we’re ignorant or illiterate – it’s because it’s an arbitrary decision.

There is is really just an existential predicate, and there’s nothing other than convention that forces us to match it to the object. Spanish and other languages that use a version of “have” rather than “is” don’t do it (Hay dos cervezas sobre la mesa; Il y a deux bières sur la table); German doesn’t do it with its “give” verb (Es gibt zwei Biere auf dem Tisch); even some languages that use a version of “is” don’t do it (Tá dhá beoir ar an mbord – Irish).

Remember that what comes after there is is structurally the object. In normal usage (in English), objects have no effect on the number or person of the verb – it matches the subject. We don’t normally force the copular verb to match its object, even when adhering to the nominative object “rule”: not It am I but It is I, and not It are we but It is we… which, of course, normal people say as It is us, even when the It is empty. The famous quote from Pogo (appropriate with respect to grammatical confusion and disputes) is “We have met the enemy and he is us,” not “he are us.”

It’s just because the there in there is is just a placeholder, and not even a noun or pronoun, that we have the habit of matching the number of the verb to the object – the object is the only noun in the area, so we conclude that it must be the subject. There is also a mistaken belief that There is a person is an inversion of A person is there; this is not true – there is no spatial reference in there is. When we use there to point to a location, we have to have a location to point to, either present in context or established in text. If I say There is a mistaken belief, there is no “there” there.

In some languages, a subject isn’t even supplied for existential predicates; there’s just a verb. English doesn’t like bare verbs, so we always put something – there or it – in the subject position. Which works fine until someone stops and says “What is it? Where is there?” It gets to be like a person who starts analyzing the muscle movements in walking and finds he/she can’t remember how to simply walk anymore.

Thus, the use of there are rather than there is with plural predicates is learned behaviour, and is not truly natural – as witness the fact that even highly literate people often use the singular in casual use or unguarded moments. That doesn’t make it correct in formal English, but it does explain a couple things about it.

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Koocanusa

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 5 comments

After I tasted Spuzzum, Jim Taylor sent me an email listing a bunch of other delectable B.C. place names. Of one of them, he wrote, “no one has ever known how to pronounce the lake near Cranbrook, formed by the dammed and backed-up Kootenay River.” The name of the lake? Koocanusa.

The non-word-geek might quite reasonably assume that Koocanusa is, like many a place name in B.C., taken (probably somewhat mutated) from one of the local indigenous languages. There probably would not be a question on the order of “If there’s a K to stand for /k/, what does the c stand for, given that these place names are as a rule meant to be at least roughly phonetic representations? Why would c stand for /k/ there when k stands for it elsewhere? But would it really be used to stand for anything else in this context?”

But, word geek though I am, I didn’t even get to that question; just about the first thing I saw, when looking at it, was the canusa: I’ve seen that sort of thing before. Canada and USA. Given that the lake straddles the border, that seemed immediately plausible. But the Koo? I didn’t get that part right away because Koo for me is a recognizable surname – actually, I have a friend of that name who was born in south central BC, but I didn’t think that the lake was named after her family. No, of course, the lake is on the Kootenay river. The name for it was the winner of a contest to name it; it was submitted by Alice Beers of Rexford, Montana. I don’t know what other names were submitted, but Koocanusa has, aside from a nice portmanteau kind of quality, a look and sound that seem to fit in with other place names in the region that are based on indigenous words. (One such is Okanagan, which, amusingly, has in at least one place been made into a spurious Irish name, O’Kanagan.)

And, after all, Kootenay is a word from an indigenous language – it’s the Blackfoot (Siksika) version of the name of the local Ktunaxa people. Come to think of it, Canada is generally thought to have come from an indigenous word, too (Iroquois, likely). Anyway, if Koocanusa had been entirely fake-indigenous, it still wouldn’t have been the first. Two great examples of words that were made up because they sounded “Indian” are Nakiska (the ski area that was built to host the 1988 Olympic alpine events, near Calgary) and Idaho.

Have you noticed, by the way, how often faux-Indian words have /k/ or /h/ in them? They seem to somehow be stereotypical “Indian” sounds (from the view of Anglophones), earthy or “authentic” or whatever – at the back of the throat, close to the source of breath, not on the dainty “civilized” tip of the tongue. True, they are both pretty common sounds; any given sentence of reasonable length in English is likely to contain one or both, perhaps several times. But I do feel – I don’t have survey data to back this up, but it’s an impression, so take it as you will – that they seem overrepresented in “Indian” words (names used with an intent of signifying some “Indianness” for non-Indian people). In actual indigenous languages, of course, /k/ and /h/ are present in a much more reasonable proportion (for a quick lesson in some of the Nakoda language, for instance, see “Meaning of a Nakoda Stoney prayer and âba wathtech”).

What Koocanusa is, anyway, is something not really new in place names. Not new at all, in fact. It’s a syllable acronym – well, except for the usa part, which is a letter acronym, so really Koocanusa is a mixed acronym, like canola. We all know what an acronym is; a syllable acronym is one that uses whole syllables rather than individual letters. Other examples include Kenora (Keewatin, Norman, Rat Portage – they left off the final t), Soho (South of Holborn in London, South of Houston in New York), Tribeca (Triangle below Canal), Soweto (South West Township)… Oh, there are a great many. An interesting variant is the spelled-out pronounced acronym; the first example that comes to my mind is Ceepeear, the name of a neighbourhood in Calgary that was built near the CPR railyards (I once heard a newsman mangle it as “si-pee-er” in an evident attempt not to say it like “C P R.”)

So how do you say Koocanusa? Heck, if Jim isn’t sure, neither am I. But I rather suspect the split is between those who say “coo canoe sa” and those who say “coo can you sa” (cool! can you canoe in the lake, sir?). Perhaps someone local to the area can say more.

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How possessive should you be?

Posted on January 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

A colleague has asked about whether it’s better to use, for example,

a close friend of Jack’s and Diane’s

or

a close friend of Jack and Diane

She notes that the first one looks a bit funny, but that you’d use possessive (genitive) with the pronoun:

a close friend of theirs

In fact, both are actually correct. With pronouns, we use the genitive (but see below); this is a holdover from when English had a more thoroughgoing use of case (and indeed in German, which kept the inflections, you would use just the genitive and no preposition: ein enger Freund Jacks und Dianas). We used to match case variably to prepositions; this is why we can see from whence in old texts as normal.  But we have moved away from heavily inflecting nouns in general, and we no longer generally vary case according to preposition, which is why those who “stop and think about it” sometimes declare that from whence is redundant — we think of case as a paraphrase of preposition plus noun, or vice versa, which it isn’t really. To return to the issue at hand, in Modern English, as a standard rule (to which the genitive pronoun structure shown above is an exception), the complement of a preposition is structurally in the accusative case (though non-pronouns don’t manifest a difference morphologically between nominative and accusative), and so the non-’s version works.

There is a distinction that can be made in some contexts: compare

that criticism of his

with

that criticism of him

We use the possessive (genitive) in cases where there is a sense of belonging or attachment; we use the accusative where the of is functioning not as a genitive but as another kind of relation. In theory we can make the same distinction with regular nouns, and it works in some cases:

that criticism of John’s

that criticism of John

But in the case of a word such as friend there is no important distinction to be made. And in fact we can get away with the accusative even on the pronoun:

a close friend of them

It’s not quite as nice as

a close friend of theirs

but it is acceptable. When you go over to the actual nouns, however, it tends to be more natural the other way. Adding the ’s on the names might give a greater sense of belonging or attachment (and without it of a greater unidirectionality), or it might not; your results will vary.

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musk

Posted on January 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

This word has an unmaskable manly, musty smell to it. It has the urging /mʌ/ like the sound a man may make when hefting some heavy thing, and the abrupt rustling stop of the /sk/; it rhymes with husk, rusk, tusk, and has a rough, brusque thrust to it, that musky scent perhaps mingled with labdanum… It starts with the m like muscles or a moustache (or mom, of course, but any manly man loves his mom) and ends with that hard, kicking k. The word is soaked in testosterone, or something like it (though it probably appears more often in romance novels than anywhere else).

And look what terms it shows up in. There are many compounds, certainly, that involve musk; the OED gives a long list, including musk apple, musk beaver, musk bladder, musk buffalo, but also musk carnation, musk cherry, musk geranium, musk hyacinth, musk orchid, musk-perfumed… well, no one talks about those, really – although, as we shall see, musk orchid is quite apposite.

But musk also shows up as a pseudomorpheme in assorted other manly words: imagine going out hunting for muskrat and musk ox and even muskwa (black bear) out on the muskeg with a musket and fly fishing for muskellunge like a musketeer… Hm, well, mustering that much muscular manliness may require a few mugs of muscatel or perhaps the influence of Amanita muscaria, the toadstool also known as fly agaric.

Not that flies seem all that manly. Except for fly fishing. But, then, Latin musca “fly” served as the basis for muschetta “sparrowhawk”, which came also to refer to an arrow from a crossbow, and then, it seems, from that it referred to a crossbow and (by this time having passed through the mutations of time and language transfer) then to a gun, specifically a musket. So when firing a musket you let fly from a little fly, so to speak.

This is not the origin of musk, however. Musk, I should first say, is specifically originally a greasy, odorous substance secreted by the male musk deer from a gland that hangs like a sack under its abdomen. The word comes all the way from Persian mušk and is related to or possibly even comes from Sanskrit muṣka, which means “scrotum, testicle” (the Greek word for which is the source of our word orchid, so, as I said, musk orchid is apposite – or perhaps redundant; nuts).

So you have flies, and you have what lies behind many a fly. And you have a word that sounds like heavy breath and presents a manly scent that will probably lead to the ripping of bodices…

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toadstool

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 3 comments

One of my favourite translation fails was in an article on food poisoning. There was a list of things that one might eat that could cause poisoning. In the English, one of the items was toadstools. The French translation rendered this as excréments de crapaud. That’s French for “toad excrement” – i.e., toad stools. Ah, yup, that will probably make you sick too, but…

They might about as readily have translated it as outils de crapaud, “toad’s tools”, I suppose. But, then, why didn’t the original English just have mushrooms? The translator probably wouldn’t have mistaken that for “rooms of mush”. (What kind of mush? um, could be toad stools, I guess… or are those the furniture in the mush room, put together with the toad’s tools? or held together with metal ribbets, I mean rivets?)

Thing is, toadstool and mushroom aren’t perfectly fungible. I mean, they do refer to the same thing, broadly speaking. But you don’t eat steak and toadstools or cream of toadstool soup. Toadstools tend to be thought of as the poisonous counterpart of edible mushrooms (yes, people will sometimes speak of poisonous mushrooms, but edible toadstools? not really). This may be related to the fact that toads were long thought of as poisonous – though toadstool has been around since the 1300s (the earliest spelling is tadstole), and the specifically “poisonous” sense didn’t start to stick to them until around 1600.

And toads are ugly. Frogs may be nice and green (and sometimes poisonous, too), but toads are nasty-looking things, the amphibian equivalent of those decorative gourds you see all over the place in later October. Toadstools, by comparison, are often seen as particularly garish. And always, of course, shaped suitably for sitting on. It’s true that there is a stereotypical image of mushrooms, but try this: do a Google image search on mushroom. There’s a certain amount of variety: white, brown, some polka-dotted. Now do one on toadstool. You will see almost nothing but red ones with white polka dots.

Trippy, eh? Why is that? Who came up with that stereotype? Well, if you look over the pictures, you will notice that some of them are photographs. There’s an actual kind of mushroom that is red with white polka dots. It’s Amanita muscaria. Ah, Amanita! Deadly, right? Actually, the deadly kind of Amanita is the plainer-looking Amanita phalloides, along with a few other types. Amanita muscaria is quite unlikely to kill you. But it will take you on a trip, and not just to the emergency room. It’s a hallucinogen. Eat it and you may see all sorts of vivid things, not limited to polka-dotted mushrooms with toads on them.

Funny thing, though. Look again at all those pictures of toadstools. A lot of them are freakin’ cute. Check out this little girl in a toadstool costume. And all those little houses in toadstools, and that little Nintendo toadstool guy. Come to think of it, my mom’s kitchen always had – still has, I think – flour and sugar jars shaped like toadstools. What other poisonous or psychoactive thing would you model food containers on?

So we have a bit of a bivalency here. We have this word that really is trying to be ugly – toad is a word that names an ugly creature and sounds kind of like turd but with that groaning /o/, and stool is at best a dull, serviceable word and at worst, well, we’ve already covered that – and it names something that is poisonous, but something that is also magical (the old word for “hallucinogenic”) and kinda girly-pretty. And those polka dots are even visible in the word, those little o’s. (Are the t’s like fungi? Is the d like a toad or bunny or the l like a rearing caterpillar? Your call.)

I guess what flavour you get from toadstool depends on which side you eat… Go ask Alice.

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xylol, xylyl

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 4 comments

Yes, you’re right, I’m doing these words because of how they look. Seriously, xylol looks like a web-geek way of referring to a “guy joke” (laddish humour), since xy can refer to male chromosomes (while xx is of course female, but XXX would be laddish for sure), and lol is “laugh(ing) out loud”. I think lol also looks kind of like the entrance to a temple – or perhaps to a tunnel, with columns or trees flanking it. And xy is also the ending of sexy and a few other things (such as apoplexy).

And xylyl? No lol, but otherwise even better. Nothing but straight lines! It’s almost architectural, like iron bridge buttresses. Or like the crossed swords and various other weapons of an enemy army heading your way – probably more in the line of how welcoming the word would be to many people’s eyes. Seriously, it starts with x, and then it has that ylyl. If you tried to say it with the usual consonant value of each word, [ksjljl], it would sound like a sound made by someone who’s being strangled. (Or a Czech name, of course.)

Because, really, xylyl? Ths wrd hs n vwls! Except that, as we know, it does. It’s not that, as is often said, “y is sometimes a vowel.” It’s that y sometimes represents a vowel. Letters are not sounds. A special thing about xylyl is that, while it has five tokens of three types of letters (types x y l, and there are two tokens each of types y and l), it has four distinct phonemes and five actual different sounds (counting a diphthong, /aɪ/, as one sound – it’s really a moving sound, one that starts in one place in the mouth and moves to another, but it’s not two sounds actually).

The first sound, /z/, is not even the sound x is supposed to represent, but in English we think we can’t say /ks/ at the beginning of a word. (It’s just a mental block, not a physical inability, but it’s quite a solid block for many people.) Then the y comes in as /aɪ/. Then the /l/ in its more front version (not as purely front as in some languages, such as Spanish; the tongue still rises a little in the back, and it touches at the tip but not around to the sides, usually). And then another y but this one standing for /ɪ/. And then that final /l/, which is actually an allophone – a different version of what we consider the same sound: the tongue is raised higher in the back; in many British accents the tongue doesn’t even quite touch at the front in the /l/ that comes after a vowel. So the International Phonetic Alphabet representation is /zaɪlɪl/, which is also kind of cute, but has nothing on xylyl.

Can you guess what xylol and xylyl are? The two are (unsurprisingly) related. If you conclude from the forest of x’s and y’s and l’s that these are chemical names, you’ll be right. The yl and ol endings are pretty reliable, modifications of Greek and Latin roots used as standard suffixes (the ol originally a reference to oil, but now often an echo of alcohol; the yl from ὕλη hulé, originally “wood, material” and seen in ylem as well). If I tell you that xylol is a synonym of xylene, you’ll be even more certain. But the xyl? Where have you seen that before? Right, xylophone. What’s a xylophone? The one you played in kindergarten may be metal, but originally they made their sound (phone) from wood: Greek ξύλον xylon. (Now, doesn’t that look like some sci-fi cartoon character, or a commercial product, or maybe some Niagara Falls attraction?)

So, um, xylyl is wood wood? Well, no. Wood comes into it in the original source of these (sometimes way back there, since they can also come from charcoal or petroleum). To cut to the chase, xylol is a clear solvent, not highly toxic (but of course don’t drink it), highly flammable, with a sweet smell that would probably seem oddly familiar to you; it’s used in the printing, rubber, and leather industries, among others; in dentistry, it can be used to dissolve gutta-percha, which is sometimes used for root canal treatments. It is actually a mixture of three isomers of dimethylbenzene, and if that means nothing to you, I’d say it’s best for you to look up further details if you’re interested, because it gets pretty abstruse pretty quickly.

And xylyl? It’s a radical formed by removing a hydrogen from an isomer of xylol. What’s a radical? A molecule (or atom) with an unpaired electron, which makes it highly reactive. It’s denoted by the formula (CH3)2C6H3, in case that means anything at all to you. Or it might be all Greek to you. Which would be fitting.

Words like this are examples of what makes English orthography so much fun and so much trouble. But there are so many different accents of English, and so much existing printed material, a complete reform of the spelling would be a senseless undertaking. There is no solution for English spelling. But there is a solvent: xylol.

LOL. TTY. XO.

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