carapacity

Posted on January 4, 2012 | 1 comment

I’m going to be a bit capricious today: my word is not to be found in a dictionary. But I’m not the first to use it. Indeed, a very likeable poem is to be found on the web titled “Carapacity,” and I think it expresses the ethos of this word quite well – see it at bluemoonhuntress.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/callous/. The word itself is crisp and flavourful, with its full set of voiceless stops caroming the tongue across the mouth, added to by the quick liquid of the /r/ and the passing hiss of the fricative /s/, and it presents several overtones – which will caper about on my page shortly.

This word is not derived from car capacity, nor is it a merger of capacity and rapacity. But cars of whatever capacity do have a notable carapacity – and a certain rapacity. I have seen many a car rape a city, while subway cars are crammed to capacity and certain politicians thicken their hides and hide thickly. Thicken their hides? Indeed, they have not mere hides but carapaces – the exoskeletons of turtles, lobsters, crabs, and so on. The word comes to us from French, which took it from Spanish carapacho “upper shell of a tortoise”; it may or may not be ultimately related to Latin capa “cape”.

So. We know what rapacity is: the condition of being rapacious, which is to say, greedy, predatory, devouring, like a raptor or a rapist. Raptors are often admired – a basketball team has been named after them (actually after velociraptors, which are dinosaurs; raptors are birds, for example falcons, eagles, goshawks, kestrels), and so has a movie star (Noomi Rapace, who with her husband took the name from the French for “raptor”). Rapists, not so much. Some say greed is good; others, not so much.

Capacity, on the other hand, is seldom seen badly. Physical capacity is almost always a big boon; the more the merrier. It’s one of those things, like having long fingers, that have almost no downsides. Too much stomach capacity may result in overeating, but it’s better than too little. Mental capacity – which adds perspective to increase perspicacity – has no downside at all that I can think of; perhaps I lack the capacity to conceive of it. No one wants overload, of passengers or of information; overmax your lines and you may blow a capacitor and be incapacitated.

By analogy, then, with the other bearers of acity – of which in total there may be, if not a city full, then at least a capacity crowd (there are nearly 100 in Oxford, from audacity to voracity) – carapacity is the condition of having a carapace, or the extent to which one has one. Is it admirable or detestable? I think it’s a matter of context and perspective. It can be good to be thick-skinned as long as one is tender-hearted, though impervious obduracy is seldom a virtue and can often produce craptacular results.

For me, I would rather soften my shell a bit and relax with a carboy of ripasso (not that I advocate crapulousness) and a plate of carpaccio.

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place, plaice

Posted on January 3, 2012 | 2 comments

The Order of Logogustation’s Christmas feast was taking place. We had scheduled it this year on the tenth day of Christmas (January 3), at the usual place: the Rather Good Hall of Domus Logogustationis. This year, as a plus, we had planned for the playings of Placido, a fellow whom Maury introduced as his second cousin once removed. Placido is a minstrel, and he came equipped with pibgorn, shawm, and theorbo, but commenced the evening with juggling all over the place, followed by storytelling from place to place.

Storytelling has its place, to be sure, but it seemed a bit out of place when we wished to be passing pleasantries and plotting plans and, of course, tasting words. As dinner – a poached flatfish, not flounder but plaice – was being placed before us, we became somewhat plaintive; I pulled Maury aside and asked him to plead for some pleasant pluckings or pipings. He sidled over to Placido.

“Placido, old pal,” Maury said, “it would be a plus if you could play us a piece.”

“A piece? A piece for a piece,” said Placido. “If you place a piece of plaice at my place, I’ll play you a piece.”

“Plaice at your place?”

Placido pointed to the fish. “I sing for my supper. Place a piece of plaice on my plate at my place, if you please.”

“That seems a bit out of place.”

“You’re out of plaice? You seem to have a plethora.”

“No,” said Maury, “it’s just that there’s a time and place for everything.”

“Yes, and it’s now time for my plaice.”

“Your place is playing for our pleasure.”

Placido looked over his shoulder at the place he had placed his instruments. “Sounds fishy to me. I think you’re codding me. And I wouldn’t want a cod piece.”

“Neither cod nor plaice. We’re paying; play, please.”

Placido spied Maury’s plate, freshly placed, and slipped over and planted himself in Maury’s chair. “I shall displace you.”

“You shall displease me. You should know your place.”

Placido, implacable, pointed at the fish. “This is my plaice, and I know it. What are you going to do, replace me?”

But Placido had not observed who he had planted himself next to: Marilyn Frack. With a creak of her black leather pantsuit, she leaned over and placed her hand on the plush pleats of Placido’s jaunty jacket. “Is that pleather?”

Placido turned his head to her. “Pleather? Please!”

She stroked it some more. “It just seems too… plush… for leather.”

Her other half, Edgar Frick, chimed in from beyond her: “Indeed, it seems plain it’s some kind of plant matter. Or plastic.”

“People!” Placido said. “I may not be a plutocrat, but I can… Please!” He pulled away as Marilyn planted her lips on the sleeve and proceeded to bite it.

Marilyn looked back up at Edgar and shook her head. “Doesn’t taste plausibly like leather.”

Placido stood up. “In the first place, I paid good money for this…”

Maury took the chance to sit in his place. “And we’re paying good money for you. For which you get neither pride of place nor a prime piece of plaice. You just get to play us pieces. Please. After which you can eat fish in the kitchen.” He leaned closer to Placido and said in a dangerous purr, “You’re once removed already. Shall we make it twice?”

Edgar, drily eyeing his wine glass, said, “Must we implore you?”

Marilyn reached over and plopped her palm on Placido’s posterior. “Or should we explore you?”

Placido pulled back so rapidly he almost ran in place. “Your pleasure is – um, my command is – ah, I was just playing around. I’ll play some now!” And he picked up his pibgorn and – as we ate our plaice and had a pleasant chat about place and plaice both likely being related to flat through Greek πλατύς platus (“broad”) – played a merry hornpipe on the far side of the place: pretty, but perhaps a little flat.

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toque/tuque

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 4 comments

’s gettin’ cold out, eh. And you know what that means. Put on your toque.

Well, you know what that means if you’re Canadian. Of course, even if you’re Canadian, you may spell it tuque. Or you may not. Doesn’t matter. When I was a little kid I thought it was spelled twok, because, you know, two plus k. (I never sorted out what a threek might be, but of course you eat with a fourk.) It’s not as though it’s spelled phonetically anyway. It’s a short word, cold and hard as ice, and easy to say without opening your mouth too wide (handy when it’s –30˚C), but it has that fancy French que at the end. Which is because, like many of the best things in Canadian culture (poutine leaps to mind immediately, and maple syrup too), we get it from Quebec.

Dictionaries can be surprisingly thick-headed on this word. Some only allow the tuque spelling for what I’m talking about, even though I’m more used to toque (your results may vary). The definitions can be really a bit behind: the OED gives us “A knitted stocking-cap tapered and closed at both ends, one end being tucked into the other to form the cap; formerly the characteristic winter head-dress of the Canadian ‘habitant’; now chiefly worn as part of a toboggan or snow-shoe club costume.” I bet a lot of Canadians wouldn’t immediately recognize their habitual cold-weather headwear from that. On the other end of the scale, Dictionary.com says simply “a heavy stocking cap worn in Canada.” The Collins English Dictionary gives the version I like the best: “a close-fitting knitted hat often with a tassel or pompom.” Yep, that’s about it.

Outside of Canada, you will occasionally see the word toque to refer to other kinds of headwear (the tuque spelling is Canadian and specific to our national headgear). Depending on where you see it, it may be naming a small, close hat worn by women, or it may be referring to one of those tall white chef hats that look like stylized overgrown popovers. But for some reason, even though you may see what Canadians would call toques on the heads of people in the US and England, they don’t call them toques. They’ll call them caps or hats. (But, then, these are people who don’t know that gravy goes with fries.)

Now, yes, technically, a toque falls into the broad category of hats. But if I were wearing a toque and someone said, “I like your hat,” I’d wonder at first what they were talking about. I’m not wearing a hat right now… Oh, this! My toque, you mean, yes? A hat is a thing you place on top of your head; it typically is vulnerable to being blown off; it usually has a brim; in general, it holds its shape. A toque is a stretchy thing that fits over your head and keeps it warm and stays on. And it has the same kind of logo-bearing potential as T-shirts and baseball caps. Look, a hat is dressy, generally. A toque is absolutely not. It goes with skis, show shovels, parkas, and Tim Hortons.

Another thing: all those other toques are pronounced like “toke”. The word is cognate with Italian tocca (a kind of cap) and Spanish toca (a woman’s head-dressing or coif). But in Canada, the pronunciation shifted, and so did the spelling – partially: lots of us still write it toque and may even find tuque odd-looking. But don’t pronounce it “toke” no matter how we spell it. We’ll probably think you’re talking about smoking marijuana, or we won’t be sure what you mean. And then, when we realize you mean /tu:k/, not /to:k/, we’ll probably laugh. And think, “Well, these Americans can’t tell ‘ow’ from ‘oo’, so whaddya expect? Don’t mention poutine; they’ll think we’re talking about the Russian head honcho, and they won’t understand the concept of fries with gravy and cheese curds anyway. Weirdos.”

But who knows. Tim Hortons is expanding into the US. Many of the funniest people in the US are Canadians, and some of the most popular singers too (seriously, they can keep Celine and Justin, OK?). We might yet manage to civilize them.

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maya

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 2 comments

Happy new year!

Why does the new year start on January 1? Why have a new year at all? Well, why not? It seems reasonable enough to measure time on the basis of revolutions of the planet (days) and periods of its orbit around the sun (years), and periods of orbit of its satellite (months). But of course we don’t always get it exactly correct (months!), and the decision where to draw the line is somewhat arbitrary. We say days begin at midnight (not exactly the nadir, necessarily, but approximated to the time zone, and perhaps adjusted by an hour), but they could begin (as they do for some) at sunset, or (as seems intuitive to many poets and singers, including the Moody Blues) at dawn. And the year, well, pick a time! Winter solstice? Summer solstice? One of the equinoxes? How about, um, ten days after one of the solstices?

That’s fine; it’s arbitrary, something we’ve settled on, just as we’ve settled on the word year to refer to the period it demarcates. As long as we understand that these things are arbitrary designations, cultural creations agreed on collectively, and not some natural law like, say, gravity, we’re fine. Our problems begin when we reify the distinctions we make, when we take the convenient illusion as reality. Jim Taylor (jimt@quixotic.ca) talked about this in his most recent “Sharp Edges” e-newsletter:

New Year’s Day reminds us that we humans tend to fixate on our creations rather than on natural phenomena. We set up systems – such as a calendar that fixes New Year’s Day on January 1 or any other date – and then treat them as immutable.

For example, David Suzuki speaks about living on a finite planet. There is only so much land, only so much water, only so many molecules of oxygen. Human effort and technology cannot increase those quantities.

But his detractors say, “What about the economy? David, you’ve got to face reality!”

The economy, retorts Suzuki, is not reality. It is an imaginary construct, an idea, a concept. We invented it; we can change it. But, like our calendars, the system takes precedence in our thinking over the reality that all life on this planet depends on a yellowish ball 93 million miles away. Everything else is secondary.

Going back to the calendar, we know we count by tens as a cultural standard, though other cultures have counted by twelves and twenties, and sixteen is a more important number for computers. But imagine if someone from a culture that counted in twelves and that started counting in the year 284 (for whatever reason – the ascension of Diocletian or the birth of Emperor Huai of Jin or who knows what, or maybe they miscounted) told you that this is the year 1728, which is the cube of 12, and so the world would end this year. Ha – seriously? That’s kind of like thinking the world would end in the year 1000, base 10.

Which, of course, many people did think at the time. And many thought it might end in 2000, too. And furious arguments erupted over whether it would be 2000 or 2001 (see “When does the new decade begin?” for a taste). Arrant silliness, of course. I mean, it’s nice to make special celebrations for arbitrary time points, such as anniversaries that are multiples of 25, or birthdays with ages ending in 0. Conventions can be quite fun. But they’re conventions. The mistake of believing our illusions – of thinking that our arbitrary divisions are real (and all divisions are in fact arbitrary; even what you think is your body is really changing all the time – a physicist can tell you you’re a very complex wave function – and the division between body and not-body can only be upheld if you don’t look too close) – has a nice name that we get from Sanskrit: maya, which in roots means basically “not that”. It’s a nice word for it: bounces from the lips and rebounds elastically from the body of the tongue. You could say it in endless cycles: “mayamayamayamayamaya…”

But isn’t that a charming coincidence? You know, of course, what I’ve been circling: the weird fantasy that some people have that because the Mayan long calendar starts a new cycle this year (on December 21), the world will end, or at least we will have a new Chicxulub. Somehow the Maya are thought to have known things we don’t. I recall happening into a Q&A session with the publisher of a local weekly newspaper a few years ago; she averred that something big was going to happen in 2012, because they Maya, “who were a very technologically advanced civilization,” had their calendar set to roll over then. I wonder if she thinks her car will explode when the odometer reaches 100,000 km… after all, the people who made it are way more technologically advanced than the Maya ever were, and the Maya no more said (or say; they still exist as a people) that the world will end then than the manufacturer of your car says it will blow up at 100,000 km (though maintenance every so many kilometres is advised). I also wonder if, in her advocacy of listening to their superior wisdom, she advocated returning to their cosmology and their incessant warfare and regular practice of human sacrifice.

But, ah, there it is: the foreign is an excellent target for projection. We have values we want to integrate into ourselves, but we must see them in others and bring them in that way; it’s what Jung called the transcendent function. I published a paper on this a while ago: “The Transcendent Function of Interculturalism” – you can read it at harbeck.ca/James/JH_trans.pdf. We have this idea of division, of incompleteness of the self, and in order to complete ourselves with what we already have, we have to say someone else has it. A prophet is without honour in his or her own country.

It’s just a handy coincidence, of course, that Maya of Central America and maya of Sanskrit sound and are spelled the same. It’s also coincidence that it sounds rather like Mandarin mei you (sounds like English mayo), which means “doesn’t have” or “have not” or “isn’t there” or “doesn’t exist” (literally “not have”). Another coincidence is the female personal name Maya, as in Maya Rudolph, Maya Deren, and Maya Angelou; in Angelou’s case, it’s a nickname taken from her baby brother calling her “maya sista,” but other Mayas generally get the name from the Roman and Greek goddess Maia, one of the Pleiades, the mother of Hermes.

Hermes? I don’t mean those very expensive fashion accessories (there’s a case of arbitrariness and agreed-on illusion: you know that the price and perceived value of such luxury goods has very little connection with their cost of production). I mean the god with winged feet, the one who communicates between the gods and humans (between you and the big Other, which may turn out to be not separate from you) and who is also associated with obscure mysteries and secret knowledge and so on. In some ways, then, a god of illusory divisions. It’s perfect that illusion (maya, Maia) should name the mother of illusory divisions.

But it’s also perfect that maya should name the mother of enlightenment. Indeed, the mother of the Buddha – of Siddhartha Gautama, the original enlightened one – was (we are told) named Maya, and that is the same maya that means “illusion”. Illusion may be a movement away from truth, but while that may lead to further movement away from it, it can also lead to returning to it to see it with fresh eyes: as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Four Quartets,”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Yes, and returning is the motion of the Tao, too. And of the years. Meet the new year: same as the old year, but also completely different. Make of it what you will.

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architrave

Posted on December 30, 2011 | 1 comment

Architecture can be a rich trove of arch trivia. It has many fine and lengthy words for things you may never have noticed, words that bear a patrician stamp of virtue and distinction, as though clad in a chiton or a toga – or both. Words that have the elaboration and delicacy of an epistolary novel (“Dearest ——: Would that our names were for aye engraved in each of the myriad Architraves of the Eternal City!”). Words that have the swash and filigrees of an archduke’s épée stylings.

And the fineness of detail with which these things can be defined! It matches the geekery applied to heavy metal subgenres and ballroom dance. Consider: “The architrave is different in the different orders. In the Tuscan, it only consists of a plain face, crowned with a fillet, and is half a module in height. In the Doric and composite, it has two faces, or fasciae; and three in the Ionic and Corinthian, in which it is 10/12 of a module high, though but half a module in the rest.” (Thank you, Geekypedia, I mean Wikipedia.)

What are we talking about? Well, we know it must be something very important. After all, it has that arch in it, which brings us such arched eyebrows: belonging perhaps to an overlean sort with greying temples, rings under the eyes, a turtleneck, and a vintage Saab (must be an architect), or perhaps to a bearded bloke who sips sherry and prefers purple with a pointy headpiece (ah, the archbishop), or a mustachio-twirling or cat-stroking twitchy twerp with evil designs tattooed in his thought bubble (the archvillain!), or maybe a forty-foot-long slimy ocean-dweller with enormous head, enormous eyes, and incredible tentacles (Architeutethis dux, the giant squid). Arch (and in this case archi) comes from Greek ἀρχός arkhos “chief”. OK, but chief among what? Top dog of what?

And what of this trave – one may think of travertine, a rather fancy-sounding building material (a kind of Italian limestone), or rave, or brave, grave, crave: words with such fervour, such intensity. Or travesty, of course.

Travesty? You may wish to avert your eyes, turn your chair; this macaronic miscegenation of a word – half Greek but half Latin (for trave comes from Latin trabs “beam”) – signifies the lowest division of the entablature, a beam resting directly on the abacus of a column, a row of stone surmounted by the frieze (ah, the frieze! such artistry is seen thereon!) and the cornice (oh, the giddying heights!). The entablature is in a lofty position, true, atop the columns, though not so high as the pediment (which has a name that sounds suggestive of feet, for heaven’s sake), but the architrave has the lowliest job of the three and, perhaps in compensation, the most impressive name (like a janitor named Phineas Melchior Winthrop III) – in fact, it has two names: it is also called the epistyle. But though it be lowest, it is truly chiefest; rest assured that the frieze and cornice would not rest assured without it.

Say, which name do you prefer for it? The complex and deceptive architrave, with its ch making a “k” sound and its t making (thanks to the r) the “ch” sound, its progression from hard at the back of the mouth to half-soft at the tongue tip to fricative on the lips, and the first a mid-mouth but the second narrowing in the front? Or the pure Greek epistyle, with its delicate touch and smooth style, suited to épées and epistles? Shall the names duel, or shall we accept a dual name?

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foolscap

Posted on December 28, 2011 | 2 comments

The terror of the blank page: a full landscape stretching incoherently, inchoately… awaiting the running river of your black ink. Will you make it full? Will you escape without playing the fool, the eccentric?

Does anyone even write on foolscap anymore?

Or is it just an archaism, as the word itself is an archaism, bahuvrihi – an exocentric compound – formed with terminal morphology internally?

I bet the first time you saw the word foolscap you thought maybe someone was pulling your leg. It’s fullscap, isn’t it? What kind of fool would spell it with fool? And what kind of scrap is scap, anyway? Oh, but before ever pen made river on this paper it was marked with water – a watermark in the shape of a fool’s cap, a jester hat. It was in evidence on large writing paper by the late 1600s, though who did it first is disputed.

So we’re not clowning around here. But the morphology of this word seems like more folly: when do we ever take a genitive – a possessive – and use it as the first part of a closed-up compound? If it were fool’s cap or even fool’s-cap, that would be normal. But this? It’s like writing monk’s hood as monkshood. …Which, actually, we also do: monkshood is a poisonous plant with pretty blue flowers, sort of like wolfsbane. (Oh, yes, wolfsbane.) But that’s not so normal anymore, because we’ve gotten into the habit of adding an apostrophe to possessives, and of not inflecting nouns when used as modifiers.

Anyway, whether poison pen or simply fooling around, your big piece of paper gets its name by a – now vanished – association. Just as the blank page is absent your words, so too the compound that names it does not include the noun for it; it is like lowbrow and highbrow and silver-tongued and polymath: exocentric. It could be metonymy – the paper is associated with the fool’s cap – or synecdoche – the watermark at least used to be part of the paper.

But in the end, it is you who are the fool, for this paper is not the court jester… It’s just a page.

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hark

Posted on December 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of classic songs sung at this time of the year. But the singers don’t always seem to pay all that much attention to what they’re singing – to mark their words, as it were. Or else they hear the words and try to make sense of them according to syntax they’re more used to. “God rest you merry, gentlemen” (using an archaic sense of rest meaning “keep” or “make”) is interpreted as “God rest you, merry gentlemen.” And more often you hear it with you altered to ye because it seems more old-style – but ye was always the nominative; you was originally just the accusative… so when ye was in use, it would not have been used here.

And, of course, “Hark! The herald angels sing” is often misunderstood as “Hark the herald, angels sing.” Not that those who read it that way can necessarily say exactly what hark the herald means. Is it some combination of, say, ring the bells and what the heck? Or is it that hark is taken as transitive, so that rather than saying hark to the herald or harken to the herald (or hearken to the herald), it is hark the herald (sort of like how some people will, with the awkwardness that comes from dysfluency in formal English, put assist you do something rather than assist you in doing something)?

What does hark mean, anyway? Well… listen. Pay attention. Give ear to. It has a nice, sharp, commanding sound to it – not the weaker liquid and hiss of listen, but the military force you get with march and charge and other orders barked out starkly. It’s not the mere inclination of the head but the sudden pricking up of the ears. When you hark, you hear and ken.

Which reminds me: hark but hearken? Certainly the words are related – harken is another spelling for hearken. But why is it not heark? Perhaps because it would look too much like it’s pronounced /hirk/? Yet we have no problem with heart and (sometimes) none with hearth. Is it just simpler to follow the the pattern of mark, bark, dark? (Hmm… Mark! Hark to the bark in the dark!)

Well, yes, it’s simpler to follow the pattern of bark and dark, which came up from Old English as beorc and deorc, then went into Middle English as berk and derk, and arrived in Modern English as bark and dark. Hark had just the same route: OE heorcian to ME herken to ModE harken and hark. So the real question is, Why hearken? Why not just harken?

And the answer seems to be along the same lines as why God rest ye rather than God rest you: we have these ideas about what is an older, more classic, more formal style – we prefer what linguists call the more marked form (that means the more exceptional one). Just as many people will try to emulate older English by adding eth randomly to verbs or tacking on e to nouns here and there, and will assume thou is more formal (in its time it was actually the familiar term, equivalent to French tu and German du), so they will also go for ye rather than you and will assume that anything with a silent e must be classier. Add to that the force of analogy – with heart and heartening and hearth and (in spelling) hear – and you have sufficient force to make the variant spelling seem more correct.

So why not heark? Perhaps without the en it lacked enough sense of formality; perhaps hark was better established in common usage. Or perhaps heark just didn’t make it into the dictionary… you won’t have trouble finding some examples of that spelling. See www.wordnik.com/words/heark, for instance.

But, really, we can’t always expect archaic usages and modern singers to be reconciled. Especially when more current usages aren’t always heard correctly either. As in the fourth line of our song du jour, where “God and sinners reconciled” is sometimes heard as “God and sinners wrecked in style.” Well, if we’re going to wreck the songs, at least they’ll be wrecked in style… Like many a holiday reveller.

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rhizomatic

Posted on December 26, 2011 | 4 comments

The rh and z in this word are good hints that it has Greek roots, as indeed it does. It came up from Proto-Indo-European *wrad- “branch, root”, appearing in Greek first as ῥίζα rhiza “root” and ῥιζοῦσθαι rhizousthai “to take root” and then ῥίζωμα rhizoma “stem, race, element”. The same PIE root also pushed up sprouts in Latin with radix and in the Germanic languages with words that became (among others) English root and wort. But it also jumped across from Greek to English via Latin, to give us our rhizome and rhizomatic (and rhizomatous).

But why would we need another word for it? Well, there are roots and then there are roots. When we think of roots, we think of a stem that branches and branches and branches underground (as it does aboveground). It’s an easy kind of fractal. It’s the model we use for a great many things. Look at biological history: the various kinds of life form branch apart and apart and apart; at some point, the primates split off, and at another the monkeys split from the apes, and later homo splits from other apes, and Neanderthals split off closer up. In language history, we trace English to West Germanic, which traces back to Proto-Germanic, and that traces back to Proto-Indo-European, as do, from their separate branches, languages such as Italian, Greek, and Russian (but not Finnish or Estonian or Hungarian, which are Finno-Ugric). And in syntax we can split up a sentence into components that draw a nice tree, with each phrase having a possible specifier, a head, and a possible complement, and the complement being another phrase, and so on.

But not all root systems are like that. Some plants have incredibly involved root systems – not even actually roots, botanically speaking, but actually underground stems – that spread horizontally underground and have multiple plants springing up from them (like the ascenders and dots poking up from the word form rhizomatic), all connected together underneath at nodes. If you cut away a part of this system, another plant can spring up from it – and it may even reconnect with the original system. This brings to mind another kind of fractal, one where you may follow a split from a lower level to connect at a higher level, one where everything is downstream and upstream from everything, an infinity of Klein bottles and Möbius strips all connected: the World Wide Web.

But botanics didn’t have the World Wide Web to refer to when different kinds of root (and underground stem) systems were being described, so English (and other languages) just borrowed from Greek, allowing the root to sprout with a different shade of meaning. And, for that matter, the World Wide Web wasn’t around in the 1970s when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wanted to describe an approach to knowledge that was more interconnected than the standard branching model. So they, too, used rhizome and rhizomatic to describe their vision of multiplicity, with its principles:

* Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.
* It is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.
* A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.
* A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a map and not a tracing.

(Extracted from A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi.)

Indeed, even systems that we think of as being standard branching models have rhizomatic characteristics. It is thought that at least some modern humans have Neanderthal DNA from interbreeding. English has borrowed vocabulary massively, and has even borrowed some syntactic structures from other languages, nor is it the only language to do so. (And Finnish is loaded with borrowings from Germanic too.) And our nice, tidy syntax trees turn out to involve lots of movements and involutions and to present difficulty with diagramming neatly even some fairly casual and unexceptional sentences such as we might say on the phone.

In such things as language, the multiplicity of interconnectedness goes well beyond what you get with plants. A word like rhizomatic is almost like a rhizome connecting with a different kind of plant and sending up a hybrid sprout. Consider that rh is not a native English beginning for a word, nor is the sound it represents in the original (a voiceless or aspirated /r/); we keep the spelling (given it by Latin) but change the prununciation. The z is also a sign that a word does not originate in Anglo-Saxon, as in Old English /z/ was just a way s was pronounced in some places (as /v/ was a way f was pronounced in some places) – the letter was borrowed later when we needed it. As to the vowel in between, i, we say it /aɪ/ rather than /i/ (as in pita) because the way we say our “long” vowels changed over time, and when we borrow words we may (but don’t always) say them according to the way our English words have come to be said.

And then there’s the tone the word gets from the matic ending, which adds to its lexicalized meaning with associations and overtones from words such as automatic, with its technological edge, and pragmatic, with its philosophical note, and asthmatic, which may lead us to detect a bit of wheezing in the rh or z. We may get some rhythm from its double trochee. We may hear this root system rise to the attic. We may even rhyme it with try some haddock. A myriad of connections are available, variously strong, and it will sprout up a little differently in each different mind in each different instance.

Thanks to C. Fletcher for asking about rhizomatic.

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Saturnalia

Posted on December 23, 2011 | 2 comments

Ah, the eternal season, as a turning of the year comes around: work pauses, and we enter a liminal week, where we cast off our quotidian fetters and eat, drink, give gifts, and be merry. True, it is for some a time of saturnine alienation, but for the most part we party like Australians. And it all climaxes… today.

No, I don’t mean Festivus, something that was designed to replace Christmas. I mean something Christmas was designed to replace – or, really, co-opt: Saturnalia. That annual Roman period of social inversion, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, et cetera, a sort of turn for the satyric, which was at first a single day on December 17 and then extended over a week, to end on December 23. The slogan in the air was not “Merry Christmas” but “Io Saturnalia” (I’m sure you’d say “io!” if you had a satyr nail ya). It was truly a liminal time, an inversion; all people, masters and slaves and freed slaves, were treated as equals… Well, everyone knew who was really who, but it created a freedom that was a pressure release valve for a grossly unequal society.

Saturnalia was so popular, Christianity (which has in many times and places historically been nearly as much of an amoeba as the English language, assimilating existing practices barely altered) simply planted its flag on it: “We will celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25.”

I won’t say planted its tree… Christmas trees, like Easter eggs, are also pagan borrowings. Actually, in terms of core Christian teaching, Christmas is at best peripheral. But that doesn’t keep it from being overridingly popular – the biggest Christian celebration by far – and held up as a great emblem of the faith. I’m put in mind of how white wedding dresses are seen as a great timeless tradition, though they were an innovation under Queen Victoria, and for that matter how a variety of comparatively recent innovations are held up by some people as essential points of English grammar. In general, “inviolable timeless tradition” means “I remember it from my childhood.”

But don’t take this as a criticism of our modern Saturnalia, which I enjoy as much as many others do. It has some lovely music, and some lovely traditions, and much quite charming paraphernalia, and for many people really does have a genuine spiritual focus (and after all, Christianity didn’t keep everything from the older festival, and it did add some details of its own), even if it is also an appalling time of hyperconsumerism for which businesses are so desperate that they start pushing it up to two months in advance, just so people can max their credit cards and spend much of the next year poor from paying it off, plunging the stores into the same desperation again. Aside from all that, revelry is loverly. It would seemsoddly mixed-up to be as a rule anti-Saturnaliae.

But what, exactly, is Saturnalia, aside from an anagram of Australian and (with the pluralizing e) of as a rule anti? Its tastes of sat and turn and alien and alias and its rhymes with paraphernalia, genitalia, and perhaps Alitalia don’t really point you in the right direction. Nor does saturnine – obviously a related word, but it refers to a gloomy, quiet, sluggish temperament. That’s rather opposite to the seasonal revelries.

Well, there’s more than one Saturn. There’s Saturn the planet, which was once thought to be the most distant, and coldest, planet, and people born under its influence were considered to have cold, distant dispositions, hence saturnine. It’s actually a glorious planet – with its archetypal rings and moons, planetary paraphernalia one almost wants to call Saturnalia – and it’s huge, bigger than Christmas or Santa’s belly, even; see blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/12/19/the-scale-of-saturn.

And then there’s Saturn the god, who presided over agriculture and the harvest; he’s typically seen holding a sickle and wheat. He was actually a sort of Greek refugee – he started as Kronos, son of Uranus, and one of the Titans; he was also the father of Zeus, and was overthrown by Zeus. So he decamped to Rome and was mainly a good-times guy after that. OK, that’s a gross simplification, but the mythology is so rhizomatic, anfractuous, and inconsistent, I’d much rather just have another eggnog and move on. And, wandering back to the planet, the nomenclature of the solar system has resulted in Saturn’s father Uranus becoming the next planet beyond Saturn (and not nearly as big as Saturn) and Titan being the name of Saturn’s biggest moon. (Also among its moons: Europa and Io – Io Saturnalia! But it’s not Io how a rose e’er blooming; it’s Io’s volcanos e’er erupting.)

And then there’s Saturn the cars, and Saturn the moon rockets, and so on. And of course there’s Saturn’s day, Saturday, which is a kind of weekly mini-Saturnalia for many of us. The very sound of /sæ tr/ may provoke a sense of relaxation and fun – and shopping. And then the week turns again, or in the year the Yuletide turns again, inter alia. But before Chronos there comes Kronos (don’t confuse the two); before you pay again, you play the pagan. So happy Saturnalia, mutatis mutandis.

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rebar

Posted on December 22, 2011 | 7 comments

“Oh, look, there, where the building was. That large claw thingy is piling the rebar like straw into a truck.”

“Indeed. First entropy was encouraged and now they’re putting things in some sort of order again.”

“So it goes. The building was built up – arriba, arriba – a concrete construction with rebar…”

“A visual barrier.”

“Well, yes, you may have found it rebarbative, but there it was. They smashed rocks and then rebuilt them; they were reborn as concrete, with reinforcing bar in the bargain.”

“To keep the concrete from crumbling?”

“Concrete is strong when you push it but weak when you pull it. Steel is strong when you pull it. And it expands and contracts with temperature changes about the same as concrete does.”

“So better rebar than rubber.”

“Rather. But now they’ve taken the air out of the building and broken its bones, and pulled the reinforcing bars out…”

“That Liebherr looks like a ballerina at a barre.”

“I think it’s a reaper. More grimy than grim, though.”

“It only took three machines to pull the building down. Now they have five picking through the rubble. They called for reinforcements.”

“It looks like Rome after the barbarians.”

“It’s been razed as by a barber. First it was raised, and now it’s rubble.”

“Crumbled. Rudera from a ruder era.”

“I think it was a cute building. Now it’s grave.”

“Now its grave is being robbed.”

“They’re steeling and baling, stealing and bailing.”

“Looks like branches from a wind-ravaged arbour.”

“Weetabix, baby.”

“Wonder why save it?”

“Probably a rebate.”

“Welp, looks like they’re packing it in.”

“Packing it into the truck and then booting off to the bar. Bye-bye.”

“And when this building has been buried? Will they bridge it to rebirth via the architectural Bardo Thodol?”

“Barring resistance, they’ll probably rebuild.”

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