spoffle

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 3 comments

Put the palm of your hand right in front of your mouth. Say skill. Now say kill. Do you notice a difference? Try still, then till. Now spill. Now pill. Feel it that time?

It’s a feature of English phonology that we aspirate our syllable-initial voiceless stops. What that means is that when a /p/, /t/, or /k/ is at the beginning of a syllable – the very beginning, not after /s/ – and especially when it’s at the beginning of a stressed syllable, we puff out a little breath of air, like a short /h/ added after it – actually, like devoicing the start of the vowel. We do this even if the stop is followed by a liquid (/r/ or /l/). Try it with tree and plea.

Most languages don’t do this. (It’s a good way to sound like an Anglophone when speaking Spanish or French, for instance.) In fact, in some languages, the two sounds (aspirated and unaspirated) are considered as different as /p/ and /b/. This is why, in a language such as Thai (when you see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet), you see things like ph and th that seem to be said like p and t.

One quite marked bit of evidence of these aspirations is the sound they make when you’re speaking into a microphone. Most of us have had an occasion at one time or another to discover what “popping the p” means, possibly by doing it ourselves and possibly by hearing it at someone’s wedding or a high-school assembly. And you may have noticed spongey things that go over microphones to help prevent this effect. What are those things called?

That’s what Stephen Fry said, or words to that effect, when he and Hugh Laurie were in a recording studio some years ago: What’s that thing called? And Laurie said that it’s called a spoffle.

Several years after that session, Laurie and Fry were in the studio again, and the engineer came over to the microphone and said he was just going to adjust the spoffle. The what? Laurie asked, incredulous. The engineer explained. Laurie laughed and declared that he had made the word up on the spot.

So there it is. It popped into his puckish pate and he spat it out. Stephen Fry says so in his book Paperweight, and why would we doubt his word? It’s a perfectly plausible explanation, and there’s no other proposed etymology.

But if it’s just a word he made up, then it’s not a real word, is it? Well, it is now. It’s an industry-standard term, even.

It’s simple. There was a thing that needed a word, and someone made one up. (Well, it’s also called a pop-shield, but, really, spoffle is better. Anyway, we know that just about any absurdity about language, confidently asserted, can be very convincing; there’s a lot of rubbish – and some rather good stuff, now and then – floating around out there just because someone decided it should be so.) And spoffle seems a perfectly suitable word for a soft baffle to muffle the pop and spit of aspirations, given its sound and the words it sounds like.

Most people, remember, are not all that aware of the various meats that go into the sausage that is a word, and don’t really think about them that much even when they do; they just bite in and see how it tastes. Would we have words like chocoholic if etymological morphology were a primary consideration for the average user? Every now and then a made-up word just sounds right. Like blurb. Or grawlix. Because while words don’t always wear their sources on their sleeves, they always have the flavour their sounds give them (unless you can’t hear them, of course). And sometimes a word just, you know, pops.

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Sanskrit

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 3 comments

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Question: from GoLeefs95
OK so my friend dragged me to see this opera movie thing today called Saythagr or sumthin like that and it was dum, they just stood around singing for like OMG FOUR HOURS, but anyway it was all in sandscript, and the interviews were talking about how hard it is to learn and sing this language because it’s like, from nowhere and ancient and everything. And it had no verbs or someting. So what is it? And why do they call it sandscript?

Answer forum:

HedKrushr
Its not sandscript you dumb blond its sans script cuz it has no writing. OK? Sans, like not have. Script, like writing. Learn French. Duh.

Trevs
It too is Sandscript! They wrote it in the sand. India is a desert country and all they had to write in was sand. So they would take their notes in sand and then at the end of class they would open the door and it would all blow away. Which is why it took them so long to learn anything. I saw this in a movie about the Dolly Llama, called Sanddune.

Aleeshya21
Actually, it’s Sanskrit. It’s a really ancient language. A lot of world wisdom was written in it. It was the language that the Buddha and Gandhi spoke. The word Sanskrit is a Sanskrit word for “written together,” because it was written all joined up. If you learn it to perfection you get to see Nirvana.

HedKrushr
OMG Aleeshya21 ur so dumb! Nirvana sang in English and Kurt Kobain is dead. Learn some music!

Sesquiotic
Aleeshya21 is right that it’s Sanskrit. The word Sanskrit comes from the roots sama “together” and krta “made” and means not just “put together” but “well put together”, i.e., perfected. Sanskrit is basically the Latin of India – it’s even related to Latin. Its grammar is quite similar in many ways to that of Latin, and was analyzed and refined into a formalized standard by Panini, who was really the first linguist. There was, as you say, a school of thought that it was the language of the divine and proper usage was a path to divinity; similar attitudes can be seen towards modern English in some quarters. And, like Latin, Sanskrit is the classic language of many sacred texts and religious observances. Just as Latin developed more common forms that eventually became modern Italian, French, Spanish, etc., Sanskrit had common forms called prakrits, among which was the language the Buddha spoke (Pali), and many modern languages are descended from Sanskrit, including Hindi. It originally evolved as a purely oral language, and its great texts have traditionally been passed down orally, but it has been written in all the different writing systems of India, and is commonly written now in the devanagari alphabet, which is what Hindi is written in.

GoLeefs95
TLDR.

HedKrushr
WTF OMG ur so dumb. Panini is a kind of samwich, not samscratch. Learn Italian!

RachelleJrnl
How can you say something so racist as that Sanskrit comes from Latin! Sesquoitic you need to learn some things. You think that all knowledge has to come from the Europeans. Well, I’ve been to India, and it’s nothing like Latin. They have a deep wisdom that no one in the west understands. That’s the whole point of Satygrha and what Ghandhi was saying. You have to have freedom of the spirit and be who you are and follow your desires and stand in the way of western racism.

Sesquiotic
Sanskrit is not descended from Latin; they come from the same source, as do Greek and of course all the other Indo-European languages. Sweden is nothing like Italy, but Swedish and Italian are both Indo-European languages. There is a lot of great wisdom to be found in Sanskrit literature, although there is much in it and in Hinduism in general that probably does not match your values, for instance the caste system. The Bhagavad Gita, which was very important to Gandhi and which is used as the text for Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha – which I also saw today, and I really loved it, but different people like different things – has a central lesson that you must be who you are, yes, but that means doing your duty and surrendering the ego and desire. Your duty done poorly is better than another’s done well. It, and Gandhi’s following of it, has played an important role in many movements for freedom and equality; Martin Luther King Jr. was also influenced by Gandhi, as Satyagraha indicates. At the same time, the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita can be read in a few different ways. But there is far, far more in Sanskrit than just that one text.

RachelleJrnl
Sesquotic you are such a hateful racist. How dare you invent this Indo-Europan idea. Sanskrit isn’t from Sweden! Look it up! How dare you say I value the caste system! It’s things like that that Sanskrit works against. You haven’t been to India. You need to go and see. And how can you talk about grammar when you write such bad English. You need to take a couse in grammar. GoLeefs95 Sanskrit is so hard to learn because it’s like no other language. It is sans kriteria, which means unequalled. It is the language of the divine. You need to find the divine in yourself and put yourself first. And by the way Buddhism uses Tibetan which is not the same.

qwaardChthulhu
It’s sam’s skirt cuz the guys wear skirts and the girls don’t.

HedKrushr
Rachelle u need 2 get laid.

Sesquiotic
Sanskrit isn’t actually that hard to sing for the most part, though it does have some sounds Anglophones will have to put some effort into learning. Russian is at least as hard for Anglophones. If, at any time, you would like to stop screaming at people and start reading things, start with something like this useful brief run-down of the connections between Sanskrit and European languages and how they were discovered. And if you’re interested in the English versions of the texts from the Bhagavad Gita that were used in Satyagraha, the Metropolitan Opera has a nice PDF of them. Here’s one great quote: “Let a man feel hatred for no being, let him be friendly, compassionate; done with thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ the same in pleasure as in pain, long suffering.”

RachelleJrnl
Sesquitic you should know you can’t trust everything you read on the web. And thanks for the sexism “let a man.” You should go to India and open your eyes. HedKrushr: DIE.

Responses closed.

Favourite responder chosen by GoLeefs95: RachelleJrnl.

Favourite answer chosen by GoLeefs95: “Sanskrit is so hard to learn because it’s like no other language. It is sans kriteria, which means unequalled. It is the language of the divine.”

Thanks for coming to Xpert Anserz Forum. Another crowdsourcing success!

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eulachon

Posted on January 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

Toss this word on the table in front of me and I would, without any prior knowledge of it, say “That’s Greek.” Easy-peasy: the eu is a good start – actually a “good” start, since eu is a Greek-derived prefix meaning “good”. So, now, what’s this lachon? It may remind me of Laocoon, the Trojan priest to whom is attributed the line “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” (that was actually Virgil who put those words in his mouth – “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts”). But clearly it’s not related to him. The first hint of something fishy comes when I pull my Classical Greek dictionary off the shelf and find lakhanon “vegetables” and lakhos “lot, section; fate” but no lakhon.

Hm. So good vegetables, or good lot or good fate, or a good lot of vegetables, but with that morphological or inflectional change… no, I really don’t think so. Perhaps my Classical Greek dictionary isn’t comprehensive enough.

Well, no, it’s not… It doesn’t include words from Chinook.

Yes, this word only looks like Greek. It’s a sort of linguistic Trojan horse, faking one thing to get in the gate but actually being another. But, oh, heck, it has other forms too… It also fakes Irish, or fake Irish English: the same word has also shown up as hooligan. But not as in thug – just a homonym. And it is also seen as oolachon, oolichan, oulachon, ulchen, uthlechan, eurachon, eulakane, olakon… It’s quite mercurial, a mockingbird, a Morpheus, a trickster. By now you surely will have smelt a fish.

Well, a fish will shed some light on this: specifically, a candlefish – a small fish, a kind of smelt, that is so fatty during spawning that you can dry it, stick a wick in it, and burn it like a candle. Yes, really. It gets up to 15% body fat. That’s why its real Greek name is Thaleichthys pacificus – from thaleia “rich” and ichthus “fish” (the pacificus is not Greek-derived; it’s Latin and would mean “peaceful” except it really just means the fish lives in the Pacific Ocean – though it spawns in North American rivers). The very word thaleichthys seems thick, rich, spreadable or burnable, with all those fricatives. But why burn this fish’s fat (or grease, as it’s often called in this case) when you can eat it? It’s pretty much the colour and consistency of butter, and has been a staple of the diet of the First Nations of the western coast of North America since, well, forever, pretty much.

But will it remain so forever? Never mind changing tastes; this fish may be facing a less happy fate than that of, say, vegetables. It has experienced dramatic decreases in populations and is now a threatened species. Why? It’s still being figured out, but in such cases, the threats tend to come largely from things humans have brought in that certainly looked appealing and helpful – hydroelectric dams, large-scale fishing, logging, factories… they feed people and create jobs, yes, but will they produce bad long-term effects in exchange for good short-term effects? Sometimes you luck on and sometimes you luck out; some of the fabulous things we have brought through our gates might make a Trojan hoarse shouting “Beware”. Is the eulachon a canary in a coal mine, or perhaps a candlefish in the wind?

I am grateful to several colleagues from the Editors’ Association of Canada, whose discussion of this word tipped me off to it.

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vaccine

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 1 comment

Dianne Fowlie has noticed I haven’t tasted vaccine yet, and asks whether it’s a tasteworthy word. Well, in my view, all words are tasteworthy – though I might have more ideas about, or inclination towards, one or another at a give time. Some words I take a long time to get to because I can see that there’s so much to taste, it will take me quite a while to write the note.

And some words I shy away from because I don’t really want to have to deal with the reaction some people will have to them. I don’t mean just vulgarities, and not just those and other offensive words such as racial epithets either. There are some words that are not per se offensive, but they are strongly charged because of a vigorous polarity of opinion on them. I have no immediate plans, for instance, to taste abortion. I simply don’t want my comments section to become home to a raging debate between assorted people who have happened by and have little to say about linguistics and phonaesthetics and so on but a whole lot to say about the word’s referent. It’s not that there’s no place for that debate; it’s that this is not the place for it.

Certainly, vaccine is not as much of a lightning rod as abortion – or I wouldn’t be tasting it today. But there has been a lot of upset about vaccines in some quarters. I don’t just mean the scurrilous rumours passed around in some third-world countries that the polio vaccine is really a means of infecting people with AIDS. I mean such things as the idea that there is a link between some vaccines and autism – a hypothesis at one time supported scientifically by just one study, but even that study has now been withdrawn by the journal that published it, nearly all of the co-authors have repudiated it, and the lead author (Andrew Wakefield) has been found to have committed fraud (and had a significant undeclared conflict of interest: he stood to profit from lawsuits that it would have supported) and was stripped of his medical licence. So far no other scientifically reliable evidence has been published. None of which has kept many people from feeling strongly convinced that there is a link, and in general that vaccines are not trustworthy, and voicing their conviction vehemently. And those on the other side of the question often mirror the strength of feeling and expression in response.

But why such strong feelings? Why such fear about something that has such an excellent track record over all, statistically among the most persuasive track records in all of medical treatment? Many preventable diseases have been virtually eradicated by vaccines, and where vaccination rates reduce, the diseases reappear – in Ireland in 2000, for instance, the vaccination rate for measles fell to 76%, and the number of cases rose from 148 to more than 1200 – and several children died. In 1995, a routine diphtheria vaccination was cancelled in Russia, and deaths from diphtheria rose from none to around 1500. Nor has there been any documented significant rise in other health problems correlated reliably with vaccines – with most drugs, long-term problems caused by them surface within a decade or two at most; vaccines have had up to two centuries of use now. When we look at the success rates of many medications, and the overall gain versus harm, a great many of them – common treatments that many, many people take – come nowhere remotely close to the success rate of vaccines. And yet some people – quite a few people, in fact – have very strong, emotionally charged, opposition to them. Not just the sort of cautious reserve you see in regard to most medications. The kind of passion more often reserved for religion, politics, and sports.

I can only make guesses as to why the emotional component is so strong for some people, but two factors that come to mind are that vaccines are often universally or broadly required and enforced by government, and vaccines are made with the same things that cause the disease, being injected right into your (or your child’s) body (or sometimes put in the mouth). Many people are reflexively mistrustful of government – I probably don’t even need to point that out. And the idea of having pathogens injected into you surely must by horrifying to many people, especially if they don’t know that, for most vaccines, the pathogens have been “killed” – well, viruses aren’t live per se (they’re bits of genetic material and protein, not cells), but they have been broken up. For some people, there are further specifically religious reasons for resistance, but those don’t seem to be strongly evident in the loudest voices against vaccination. I’d be interested in further insights to the strong emotional level of the resistance – though not in raging arguments in the comments section.

Actually, what’s in the vaccine isn’t always the same thing that causes the disease it’s being given to prevent. For instance, the first real vaccine prevented smallpox by using cowpox. It had been noticed that people who had gotten cowpox had immunity to smallpox. And cowpox isn’t nearly as nasty as smallpox – smallpox had a 30% fatality rate and was a very widespread cause of disfigurement and blindness as well, while cowpox is a blister at the site of infection, and it goes away. A little mild cowpox, just enough to stimulate the immune system, turned out to be an excellent way to keep from getting smallpox. (This is one case of a “live” virus being used for vaccination.) With the aid of cowpox, smallpox was wiped out – the disease was declared completely eradicated in 1979. I guess the scientific way of putting it is that infection with Variola major and Variola minor was eradicated through inoculation with Vaccinia.

Ah, yes, we’re back to the word: Vaccinia is the formal name for cowpox; vaccine is a Latinate word meaning “of, or relating to, cows” (compare bovine, which is based on the Greek root), and is also the French name for cowpox. (Cowpox is not limited to cows and people, but at the time vaccination was discovered – just before 1800 – it was most noted as something milkmaids got from cows’ udders.) It is something of a bovine coincidence that vaccination programs can produce a “herd immunity” effect: it is not necessary for absolutely all of a population to have been vaccinated as long as a substantial minority have; any new case introduced will almost certainly be limited to one or a few people. Likewise coincidental, of course, is the fact that some people have a cow about the idea of themselves or their children being herded into vaccination.

Aside from all that, what tastes does the word vaccine have? It starts with a bite of the lip, /v/, and then leaps to the back and rolls on the tongue from back to front – /k/, then /s/, then it releases a little to the tight high front /i/, then the nasal /n/ on the tip. In vaccine you see the sharp tooth or open collar of v at the start, and the two hooks or two soft curves of cc (which, come to think of it, is also a measure of fluid for injectable fluids such as vaccines – the usual term now is mL, though). And the a, the i, the n, the e – to my eyes they look like a cast of servants from a drawing-room comedy, but, then, so do a lot of other things. It’s all innocuous, hardly smacking of inoculation.

And the overtones? Vacuum, accident, accede, obscene, accuse, scene, maybe even cinema… If you swirl it on your tongue for a bit, and in your head, you can find a fair bit you don’t notice at first. We are exposed to some words so much that we don’t really notice their aesthetic potential – it’s sort of like drinking lots of wine without stopping to savour it. I won’t say we become immune to the word’s effects – indeed, at least some of them are persistently there, if at a low level. But we do tend to fix our attention much more on what they signify than on their aesthetic properties. It’s nice to be able to pause and look at all aspects of what a word brings, if we can.

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hiccough

Posted on January 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

“In answer to this, all that Gussie could produce was a sort of strangled hiccough.”

It was in that passage from Right Ho, Jeeves, or perhaps another like it from the works of Wodehouse, that I first saw hiccough. “Hm,” I thought (or something like it), “hiccough must be like a hiccup, I guess, but mixed with a cough.” Easy enough to imagine a hiccup simultaneous with a cough, perhaps a one-off thing rather than the insistent annoyance that is a bout of hiccups. The word brought to my mind – still brings to my mind – my brother, as an adolescent, laughing so hard he would hiccup and burp at the same time while still laughing.

Ah, but no, that actually doesn’t have a word of its own (unless we wish to try to divert this one to it). What hiccough is, more than anything else, is evidence of the real nature of the progress of English orthography over history: not so much a smooth evolution as a case of historical hiccups. Or should I write hiccoughs.

It started neatly enough: there was this human physical phenomenon in which the diaphragm twitches, causing a sharp intake of breath that causes the glottis to abruptly stop the airflow; in short, the body produces a marked ingressive glottal stop, almost a glottal pulmonary implosive. Then, typically, it does it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh.

So anyway, this irritating thing produces a sound. Want to name it? Imitate the sound. For the most part, Western European languages don’t have a glottal stop as a separate phoneme, and certainly not a strong enough one to do the job here – uh-uh – so a /k/ will do, and /h/ for the sharp intake before it. Dutch has hik, as does Danish; Swedish has hicka; Breton has hok; French has hoquet and Latin has hoquetus; and English had, first, hicket and hickock (with various spellings, including hitchcock) and shortly thereafter hiccup, which from the 16th to 19th centuries showed a variety of alternative spellings: hicke up, hikup, hickop, hickhop, hecup, hiccop, hickup, hick-up…

And somewhere in the 1600s, someone apparently got the idea that this word had come in part from cough. This was a time when words were being respelled by some people on the basis of their origins (real or false), which is how we got such weird messes as debt, people, and island (see “What’s up with English spelling”). Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as with falcon (formerly faucon). But in the case of hiccough, the spelling was simply changed to reflect what was mistakenly thought to be its origin, but the pronunciation was kept the same.

Yough. That’s right. I’m not making this ough. As though ough didn’t have enough different ways to be said, now the cough really runneth over. (If I had a buck for every different pronunciation of ough, the things I could have bought with the dough by the time I was through – um, well, a coughle of coughees, I mean a couple of coffees, anyway. Fancy ones.)

But, really, this word is a sort of ugly poughy, I mean puppy, isn’t it? The hiccough spelling, I mean. Hiccup has a certain cleanness to it, with that prim and proud p and the two gleaming hooks of the cc; even better, hic is Latin for “here”, so it can seem to say “here’s the cup” – i.e., the cup of water you will need to drink slowly while holding your breath in order to get rid of the hiccups. And of course the up brings to mind some words that go with up in reference to eructations and diaphragmatic spasms.

Well, true, cough also brings to mind diaphragmatic spasms. But not when pronounced like cup! And while the various subgroups of letters are not so odd when seen in sensible contexts – hickory, piccolo, accoutrement – hiccough is a bit less expected, most especially because, if you’re like me, your mind rebels against the very idea of pronouncing that gh as [p]. Noghe! Won’t do! Imghossible!

At the same time, though, it’s like a particularly ugly article of furniture that just happens to have been a famous forgery of four centuries past and is now in an antique shop with a breathtaking price tag on it. It puts me in mind of a vase I saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum that caused me to break out in laughter: it was strangely gaudy and ornate, and among other things had a honeycomb neck with bees crawling on it and a base that was three cat feet that looked as though they had been cut off Heathcliff of cartoon fame.

But it’s in the V&A, so it must be worth something! And hiccough is seen in assorted British texts – well, it’s their language, so they must know it, right? (actually, it’s our language too; in fact, their standard version is in many ways farther from the origins than the colonial versions are) – and, most importantly, it has a weird and unexpected spelling. So it must be the better, more formal way to spell it! That’s what people assume, generally: more silent letters and other orthographical perversities equals higher class.

But if you are tempted to jump on that wagon, do bear in mind the admonition of the Oxford English Dictionary: “Hiccough was a later spelling, apparently under the erroneous impression that the second syllable was cough, which has not affected the received pronunciation, and ought to be abandoned as a mere error.” In the end, though, it is ough to you…

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town

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 2 comments

Aina and I live downtown in Toronto (something of a change from my cowtown hometown of youth), and most weekends we stay in town, maybe go out on the town (I’m not really a man-about-town, but sometimes it’s nice to just go to town), maybe stay in (on Sunday evenings it’s Downton Abbey, which many people call Downtown Abbey). But sometimes we get out of town to visit family who live in some other town – a medium-small town on the shore of Georgian Bay, or a suburb of a border town that’s really just across the river from town but is much more like country, or a village near a small city in southwestern New York. This past weekend we visited the latter two, and we had occasion to discuss the word town.

The word town has an official meaning in New York, as in most American states, that may seem a bit odd to those not used to it. I don’t mean the Manhattan-originated distinction of downtown versus uptown, which arose because Manhattan rises towards the north (when you’re far uptown, it’s all pretty elevated, with steep escarpments down to the river). No, it’s this: just as the state is divided into counties, each county is divided into towns (in some other places these sorts of subdivisions are called townships, but New York is not in that boat). The only part of a county that is not a town is any part that is a city. Within the towns are incorporated settlements called villages and hamlets, as well as unincorporated settlements.

For instance, Chautauqua County (the westernmost county of New York State) is divided into 27 towns plus two cities – Dunkirk and Jamestown. (Yes, that’s right, Jamestown is a city, and is not a town or part of a town.) The city of Dunkirk is surrounded by, but not part of, the town of Dunkirk. Dunkirk is often referred to in the term Dunkirk-Fredonia, because it has a twin city, Fredonia, except that Fredonia is about half as big and has the status of a village; it’s in the town of Pomfret. Dunkirk is an industrial town of sorts; Fredonia has a campus of the State University of New York, so it has a little bit of a town-and-gown divide.

My grandmother used to live in Fredonia, but now she’s in a different town, Gerry (pronounced “garry”). She lives in a little town, more of a village or a hamlet, also called Gerry, but though it has a name, it’s not incorporated, so while we might think of this little town as a village or a hamlet, it’s just part of a town. (Every town in Chautauqua – and throughout the state – has quite a few of these little named places. Some are closer to ghost towns now, though they may have been boom towns in their heyday.) But it’s a quick trip from there into town – that is, into Jamestown, which of course is not a town or a part of a town, but is the local business and market town, and it has plenty of nice townsfolk, though it’s not too uptown – very towny for the most part.

So what she’s living in is probably too small to be thought of as a town, except it’s in a town, but that’s a different sense of town. And for me, the whole thing is just plain odd, because growing up I learned that a town was something bigger than a village but smaller than a city, while town (no article) was what you called your largest local settlement, and if you’re in a city you refer to it as town in a variety of phrases. As it happens, this is generally true in common usage, even in the US, so they have the added complexity in most states of the official town along with the colloquial uses of town.

Town really is one of English’s elementary, or should I say elemental, words. Just as chemical elements can combine to make a variety of different things with different characteristics – for instance, a reactive metal (sodium) and a poison gas (chlorine) combine to make an essential dietary component (salt), and different combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms can make molecules that you can drink, that you can fuel your car with, that you can scrape your car windows with, that you can clean your car windows with, and quite a lot of other variations, gas, solid, and liquid, safe and dangerous – elementary words likewise mix to have different meanings in different contexts.

I’ve put a number of those in action already in this note. There are also the compounds, such as townhouse (which means one thing in New York City and something a bit different in Western Canada – but always a narrow multistorey residence), hometown, Chinatown, and all those city and town names ending in town or ton – but make sure you get your town and ton straight, or a country manor could become a business district.

And where does town come from? It’s an old Germanic word, showing up in Old English as tuun, which meant “walled settlement” or “enclosed place”, but the original root referred to a wall or hedge – it came by transference to refer to what was enclosed by the wall or hedge. (Imagine a hedgehog being a townhog!)

And how does it taste to us now? It has all the resonances of its many collocations and compound uses, of course; as a word to say, it is quick and stays on tongue tip with the consonants (crisp start, warmer finish), while the vowel closes to rounded and raises the tongue in the back. For some reason, for me, town has a sort of windy or dusty feel to it, perhaps due to the aspirated /t/ and the rounded vowel. And the letters? You can see own but you can’t hear it; you can also anagram to wont (habit) and nowt (nothing). You may even see a hidden two lurking, and a little hint of twin… but I’m not used to hearing talk of twin towns, just twin cities.

But on the other hand, no one talks of city and country; it’s town and country, and a nice pair they make. After all, a country has parts that are country and parts that are town or city. There is much land in the land, though not all of it is landscape. Oh, yes – land, like town, comes from Germanic roots via Old English, while city and country come from Latin via French. There’s so much flavour and fun available with these words… you can really go to town with them.

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Presenting the future

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 3 comments

In an article in Slate that makes rather much of a little interesting observation in television news topic introduction syntax, Michael Kinsley tosses in this remark: “Long part of vernacular English: referring to the future as the present.”

I think it’s fair to guess that Michael Kinsley has never actually studied the topic, nor really spent all that much time thinking about it. The truth is that English, not just vernacular but all sorts, use present-tense inflectional forms to refer to pretty much everything that’s not the past – even our “future tense” (which we use only sometimes) is really a present auxiliary plus an infinitive. (I discuss this in a bit more depth in “How to explain grammar.”)

But that doesn’t mean we’re referring to the future as the present any more than saying “two fish” refers to the plural as a singular. It just means we have a semantic distinction that is not matched by a strict formal distinction. As with many things, we use our linguistic bits more loosely – English is a real ductape and WD-40 kind of language. Look, Chinese doesn’t have tense inflections at all, but that doesn’t mean that Chinese speakers are talking about everything as though it’s happening right now. Context!

Here’s a little poem, from my forthcoming Songs of Love and Grammar, illustrating our common use of present-tense forms to talk about the future and about timeless and durable states.

Christmas present

Now, Christmas has twelve days, of which the first one is tomorrow,
and I’m giving to my true love all that I can beg or borrow.
She knows that I’m a poet, so I’m giving her my words;
I know that she’s allergic, so I’m giving her no birds –
no swans, nor geese, nor turtledoves, nor even partridge one;
I know she’s introverted – lords and ladies are no fun.
Loud noises give her headaches. Drummers? Pipers? Please, not now!
And I’ll give her maids a-milking when she wants to have a cow.
But every year I give her something more than just a rhyme,
and I hope that she says yes to what I’m giving her this time:
on Christmas she is getting all the joy that I can bring,
for tomorrow I am giving her not five, but one gold ring.
She knows I don’t have money, but she knows she has my love;
with her I know I’m gifted by an angel from above.
So tomorrow I am proving what tonight I’m here to tell:
there’s nothing like the present to begin the future well.

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ballade

Posted on January 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well, we know what a ballad is. Don’t we? Um, it’s a long song or poem that tells a story. We know of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde, perhaps. And then there’s “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling. And we may know “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a song by the Beatles. Oh, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Which is actually a movie. Starring Will Ferrell.

They don’t have a whole lot in common, but they’re all stories. And they’re long. They’re not all good, but they’re not all bad. You sit down and listen to them. You may hear them quite a few times and get to know them back to front, maybe (or maybe not), and then notice that ballad looks the same in the mirror. But would you dance to them?

Well, that’s what ballad comes from: a root referring to dancing. When you go to a fancy ball, that’s the same root in ball. When some Spanish singer sings ¡Baila! it’s from the same root. And when you read a ballade, of course…

So, wait, what’s the difference between a ballad and a ballade? Is it like the difference between an old town and an olde towne? Mmm, no. The e isn’t just there to be fancy; the word came to us from French, so it’s organic. Ballad and ballade were originally two spellings of the same word, but this is another case where English has kept a divergent form to indicate a divergent referent. The words are sort of like the two brothers in that ’80s TV show Simon and Simon: one is freewheeling, the other tidy. Ballad just wants to go out there and tell its story. Ballade fell in with a set who like bondage and discipline – I mean bondage to a specific form and discipline in adhering to it, of course.

Does that sound a little medieval? Bang on! The ballade is one of the fixed verse forms that arose in France during the medieval period. The form got tidied up, whipped into shape, locked up in rules. A ballade is longer than many fixed forms, but not as long as many a ballad today. It features four stanzas with the same line at the end of each stanza; three are eight verses long, and the fourth is a four-verse envoi, originally typically dedicated to a prince. You may think of the envoi as like the e on the end of ballade, a finishing flourish. Thematically, you may expect some reflection in a ballade, some looking forward and then looking back, and finding parallels in the middle – b ll d. But really, the prescription is the form; the contents are up to the poet.

The rhyme scheme is punishing: ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC, where C is the refrain. Just as the word ballade stays on your lips and on the tip of your tongue, you will need a lot of rhymes – especially for the b rhyme – on your lips, and not just on the tip of your tongue. It’s the sort of thing a show-off – for instance Cyrano de Bergerac – might create ex tempore.

There are many good ballades out there, and seeking them out is left as an exercise to the reader; you may find some by Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. I present here, as something of an example, one of my own, from my set of poems “Forms on the Beach” – fiction, I assure you, and not really the sort of thing the medieval Frenchmen had in mind, but properly reflective, with a little fancy at the end.

Barbecue ballade

Hey, Johnny, grab the keg! The food is here
and Dylan and the girls have got a spot.
We hefted up the metal ball of beer
and ran with it, plus all the Coke we’d bought.
And I met Dylan’s girlfriend, who was hot,
all blonde and soft, with arm fuzz like a peach.
She grilled some wieners and some fish we’d caught
and laid them on the table on the beach.

We drank a lot, and, man, we had no fear.
We broke out some tequila we had brought.
We played Coke baseball, drank from a brassiere.
I used D’s girlfriend’s shorts to do a shot.
She said, I’ll show you something I was taught
but then you gotta promise to me to teach
somebody else. We tried it twice, then smoked some pot
and laid down on the table on the beach.

The night crawled slowly in. The sky was clear.
We sobered up, though we had drunk a lot.
Two girls and I walked out along the pier
and Angela said, Johnny, you know what?
The lake’s reflecting things that I forgot.
Diane leaned over, said, Hey, can you reach
my shorts? I said, No, lovely, I cannot.
You laid them on the table on the beach.

And later on, two of us sat and thought
in cooler air of what had come to each
and took the best of all the things we’d got
and laid them on the table on the beach.

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triolet

Posted on January 7, 2012 | 8 comments

A few years ago I decided to try a little form poetry – poetry following rigid rhyming and metrical schemes. I wrote a fair few but published nearly none of it, but it was a worthwhile exercise, and I still like some of the ones I wrote. Form poetry is regaining some popularity now, no doubt at least in part because one can get a bad taste in the mouth from the abundance of truly trite free verse circulating (schlocky wall plaques lately don’t rhyme).

The triolet is a little jewel among forms. It is not as lapidary as a haiku or a tanka, true, but those forms were invented for a language with very different structure and prosody. Like many tight poetic forms, it repeats some lines. But since it’s only eight lines long, and it repeats one line twice and another thrice, that’s a pretty high proportion of repetition. The trick is to try not to make it trite: vary the sense of the repeated lines so that while the words are the same, you get a new angle each time. This classic one illustrates (though it’s freer with the punctuation than the strictest version would allow):

Birds at Winter (by Thomas Hardy)

Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly! – faster
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The Flakes fly faster
And all the berries now are gone!

You can see the rhyme scheme: ABaAabAB, where the capitals mean the verse is identical rather than just rhyming.

A word like triolet is a nice word for this form, and not just because it describes it – it’s French for “little trio”, and you see that it’s built around three iterations of the first line. It has a taste of the little thrill a well-done poem of this type can give. At the same time, it has two pronunciations, one French-style (“tree o lay”) – more sublime, to English ears – and one English-style (“try a let”) – more earthy, basic, or ridiculous. So, too, the poem may use its repetition for some deeper insight, or for a joke. Or even both: something earthy that seems light but also gives an insight into the working of the human mind in even the basest circumstance.

The pair of repeated verses play into this dichotomy, though we see that one wins in the count; and as we look at the word, we see the t and t bookending it and the l in the middle, the tallest of a triumvirate. The resonances match the dichotomy: the tree echo gives us the branches of the poem, efflorescing and further ramifying; the olé resonance has a small taste of bravado, or is it an au lait with its milky coffee flavour? On the other side, try a let makes it sound like an attempt to score in a game, though the rhyme with violet still brings flowers; and we cannot escape the anagram of loiter and near-anagram of toilet, which take it out of the gardens and into the bus station, or onto a sidewalk with flowers growing through the cracked concrete, or to some other heavily used public place.

Such as the beach. I wrote a set of poetry, “Forms on the Beach,” presenting vignettes of various people on the beach in different strict poetic forms, ranging from wistful to sporty to peevish; I will present at least one more from it in a coming word tasting note. The triolet is this:

Toilet triolet

Ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
I’m gettin’ desperate for a sign –
like “men” or “salle de bain,” y’know.
Ya gotta go, ya gotta go!
I’m outta beer ’n’ outta dough,
’n’ all my chick can do is whine.
Ya gotta go, ya gotta go…
I’m gettin’ desperate for a sign.

I note, incidentally, that there was a Russian-French author named Elsa Triolet (she was born Ella Kagan and married a fellow named André Triolet; she subsequently divorced him and later married the author Louis Aragon). Among the works she wrote was an epistolary novel called Luna Park, which catches my attention because there are several other things by the name, including a Pet Shop Boys song. Triolet, by the way, can also (though rarely) refer to a triplet in music. But “Luna Park” by the Pet Shop Boys is in four-time.

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aleatory

Posted on January 6, 2012 | 8 comments

This evening I saw a lovely new film from Quebec called Monsieur Lazhar. It was in French with English subtitles, and I always enjoy comparing the dialogue with its translation – there are a great many things that can’t be translated as easily as people think they can (you can lose subtleties with subtitles). It’s not simply that it’s not exactly word-for-word, or that there are little inflectional things that exist in one language that don’t in another; entire ways of approaching subjects exist in one language that don’t readily exist in another. Even where both are capable of expressing pretty much the same thing, for a given language a given way of putting something may be more or lesson common, more or less formal, may have different connotations…

Obviously, if you use something like machine translation, you’re taking your chances (and Google Chinglish for some hilarious examples), but even the best translation by the best translator can be a chancy thing. You just have to roll the dice. As is said in Italian, Traduttore, traditore – literally “translator, traitor,” more anglice “A translator is a traitor,” or, as some people put it (those who think they are supposed to explicate when translating), “To translate is to betray” (really, I’ve seen that, and even still such a cack-handed handling of it leaves me downcast).

An example that particularly caught my attention in Monsieur Lazhar was when one character was explaining to another what shuffle meant (as in iPod Shuffle). What was especially interesting to me was that it almost seemed smoother in the English subtitle than in the French: where the English had random, the original French was de façon aléatoire. Which looks as though it would translate better into English as in an aleatory manner.

Except that aleatory is a low-frequency word in English. Meaning your odds of hearing it are somewhat lower, and so it’s worth more. We get our highfalutin vocabulary from Latin and Greek, often by way of French, but French gets its words from Latin by simple evolution – they’re as basic to it as Anglo-Saxon words are to English. And, while a passage of English may be direct and functional or ornate and luxurious or technical, like a meal in a fast-food restaurant or in an expensive dining room or on a space station, a passage of French of whatever level has an element of deliberate pleasure, be it like baguette and Brie on stone steps or like the the most elaborate assemblage à la Carême. They love the longer prepositional phrases just as they love the myriad silent letters. (Of course, it seems doubly exquisite when it is foreign.)

English does, as always, have a panoply of lexemes to suit the context. Random is popular among youth and has overtones of randy, dumb, and a sort of sense of wandering; stochastic is from Greek and is very percussive and technical, seeming almost as though the randomness were produced by some air-driven punch-press machine. But aleatory…

It’s as formal as stochastic, of course, but it carries with it a greater sense of a losing proposition (I’m talking about in English; matters are different in French). This comes from its reference to dice (I won’t presume it has any influence from the echo of alas). All of you who have ever loved Asterix know the phrase Alea jacta est, something the Romans in those comics like to say every so often; it’s what Julius Caesar said when he had crossed the Rubicon: “The die is cast.” The Rubicon was the line in the sand, as it were; actually, it was a river. Crossing it was a declaration of war.

War is always a gamble; you are always dicing with destiny. Romans liked to gamble with dice, too, their soldiers in particular being known for it. But does fortune favour the bold? You may think so, and then meet it in some dark alley and wake up chained in a laboratory… O Furtuna, velut luna, statu variabilis! (Do sit down and read a translation of the opening “O Fortuna” chorus of the Carmina Burana. Better yet, read three and compare them: here’s one; here’s another; and here’s another.)

Fortune is often seen as being a woman – by men, anyway. And what would this woman’s name be? I think Aleatory would be a good one; it sounds like a mix of Allie and Tori. It flows off the tongue, liquids rippling on either side of the /t/, hidden in the silken folds: a stiletto (but do I mean high heel or dagger?). And aleatory has a lovely set of vowels, but look: where are u and i? We own no piece of it.

The Gauls of Asterix knew the ups and downs of fortune well enough, as they had lost an epic battle at Alesia, which, come to think of it, sounds like a woman’s name too – and a bit like aleatory. And yet Caesar, who vanquished Vercingetorix at Alesia, was himself no so long afterwards brutally assassinated.

Randomizers on computers, such as on an iPod Shuffle, are not truly random; they simply use an algorithm of sufficient complexity that it is beyond your power and mine to predict the results. But, then, the same is true of a roll of the dice. If we knew exactly the force and direction of the throw, the spin imparted by the friction in the hand, the resistance of the table, the air currents, and so on, we would be able to predict the result exactly every time. But we lack the capacity to do so. We cannot deduce; we can only say “Aleatory, dear Watson.”

The plot of Monsieur Lazhar is driven by two precipitating events, sudden downstrokes, baleful occurrences that defy the characters to find meaning in them. And such events will always have different meanings for different people; we may be not truly able to make sense of them at all, but able only to translate them into something we can parse, if clumsily. They seem in some ways almost random.

But no, not random; it’s not like the output of a simple mixing-up algorithm where the various outputs are roughly equally fortuitous. They are catastrophes – catastrophe is from Greek for “downstroke” – and they have been cast like dice: snake eyes or boxcars. Abruptly, you must pay, and there is no appeal. The only point you can see is the stiletto in the satin folds. You do not know the telos, but you have found the end.

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