scumble

Posted on December 21, 2011 | 2 comments

If you want to get an idea of what adolescents think a word sounds like it should mean, go to UrbanDictionary.com. You may get real definitions there, but you will certainly also get various instances where some juvenile has seen the word and decided to make his mark on it like a dog pees on a fire hydrant. The Urban Dictionary definitions for scumble are quite unsurprising:

1. “To unintentionally trip or fall headlong into something disgusting (stumble + scum).” (9 thumbs up)

2. “The words fumble and scramble together … Only happens in football (or Pro Evo) when somebody ‘fumbles’ the ball in the box and when there is a ‘scramble’ for the ball so a scumble is formed” (11 thumbs down)

3. “Scum + crumble. Scumbles are gross (unknown) crumbs of goo. Unlike a cookie crumb, which isn’t disgusting.” (2 up, 14 down)

Now, of course, among adults, one might, on seeing a new word, consider the context and perhaps even look it up. But even then it is true that with a word such as this one, the form of it may remain as a sort of surface layer that is only half-scraped away to reveal the lexicalized sense. The form is, after all, fairly obtrusive.

There are several parts that give the phonaesthetic impression with this word. There’s the sc (/sk/) onset, which may connect to surfaces that can be scraped, or the scraper or the result – skin, skim, scalp, scrape, scale, scalpel, scallop, sculpt – and the tumbling, crumbling, rumbling, rambling /mbl/ ending, with the dullness of the mid-central vowel in the middle. Beyond that, it has the echoes of scum and stumble, as the kids say, plus fumble, scramble, crumble, and assorted others that it somewhat kinda resembles. For me, the scum echo is not as strong as those of humble and stumble and crumble. But your results may vary.

As it happens, scum appears to be the source, along with the frequentative le suffix. Scum (verb) means to skim the scum (noun) off the surface of something. (Scum (noun) has always meant what it means.) But what scumble refers to is a painterly technique whereby a layer of opaque or semi-opaque paint (usually lighter in colour) is scraped or dry-brushed thin over the layer below to create a softening blending effect. (See a demonstration at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgWn5A8xRyE.)

You’ll often see this word in inflected forms: scumbled or scumbling. You’ll usually see it in literal use. But it has a certain mouthfeel to it, a certain texture of sound, that invites broader, more figurative use in literary fiction as well. A Nabokov might use it, with his feel for the lusciousness of the language: “The summer tan … would scumble, I knew, the liver spots on my temples.” (Look at the Harlequins) Or perhaps Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass): “The moon was brilliant, the path a track of scumbled footprints in the snow, the air cutting and cold.” Or, or, or. If you write fiction, the odds are now pretty good you’ll use it sometime, too. It’s a word as delicious as shortbread, and yet with that tangy pong of paint: a gallery opening right there on your page, giving a glow with your story shining shyly through.

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Illecillewaet

Posted on December 20, 2011 | 2 comments

Is this not truly a word to fall in love with? It is an excellent long word, and it presents to the eyes parallel lines in parallel sets: Ille and ille, by coincidence Latin for “he” (or “that one” or sometimes “the”), two waterfalls or fast-flowing streams with but the icy c between them, leaving a wet finish. This word is filled with similar shapes, not just the repeating lines but also the echoing e e e with the partial image c and the tumbling a, and then the angling and breaking w and t. It may confuse the eyes – who expects an ae there, and who can easily pass through that forest of lines on the first try? One might as well read it backwards – at least teawellicelli looks legible, and you can have a tea from the well with a bit of vermicelli or a glimpse of a Botticelli.

But to hear it is to hear liquids, those paired /l/s, with a soft voiceless /s/ and the smooth glide of /w/ before stopping at last at /t/. Though some may think it like “Illy, silly, what”, you will more likely hear “ill a silhouette” or “illa Scylla what”. But we will not say one is illicit.

And what does this word elicit? Fluids. Swift water and slow ice. In Glacier National Park in British Columbia, there is a glacier called the Illecillewaet Glacier, and from it flows the Illecillewaet River. The river was thus named by Walter Moberly, who used the word for “swift water” in the language of his guides (who were from the Okanagan Valley). Moberly was a surveyor and was looking for trade routes through the mountains. He followed the river upstream, looking for a pass; when it forked, he took the north fork. After he looked that way, he had run out of time to check out the east fork before winter came. It would be another 18 years before Major A.B. Rogers went that way, found a pass, and named it after himself, leaving Moberly with some ill feeling. Now the Trans-Canada Highway runs along the Illecillewaet River as it flows from its glacier towards Revelstoke. (For much of this information I thank Glen W. Boles, William Lowell Putnam, and Roger W. Laurilla, for their book Canadian Mountain Place Names: The Rockies and Columbia Mountains.)

But for a truly ill silhouette, consider the figure the glacier cuts. Oh, that one… since it was first photographed about 125 years ago, it has receded more than two kilometres. Even in the late 1800s and early 1900s it was retreating rapidly. You can see comparative pictures at www.cmiae.org/Resources/glaciers-lichens.php. There is still a heart of ice, and the river is still wet, but the reserves are being drawn down further and further, and with ever-reducing deposits, it’s caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Is it soon to be “dies irae, dies illa” for the Illecillewaet? Or may we somehow reverse the flow of time?

I thank Jim Taylor for suggesting this one.

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upsot

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 6 comments

You surely know this short word – with its sound like a rimshot – from one place (if you know it at all): “Jingle Bells.” The second verse goes as follows:

A day or two ago
I thought I’d take a ride,
And soon Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side.
The horse was lean and lank;
Misfortune seemed his lot;
He got into a drifted bank
And then we got upsot.

Not every version of “Jingle Bells” you’ll hear has it this way; aside from all the ones that don’t have this verse at all, there are quite a few that change the wording a fair bit – Bob Yewchuk, who suggested this word, has saved me the research time; he tells me the following:

* Rosemary Clooney and Boney M use “upset” instead.
* Elvis Presley’s version is baffling. He uses the word, but two lines earlier he sings “Misfortune seemed his life”; he could have made a rhyme, but for some reason he chose not to.
* Natalie Cole changes the entire couplet to “We got into a drifting bank, and then we kissed a lot.”
* Smokey Robinson sings the first four lines of the verse, and then the last four lines of the chorus.
* In my collection of Christmas carols, the following artists use the upsot in their version of “Jingle Bells”: Mitch Miller, Mormom Tabernacle Choir, Patti Page, Perry Como and Willie Nelson.

So… why upsot? You can guess, I’m sure, that the word we would normally use there is upset. And the upshot would seem to be that with the setup of “seemed his lot,” the rhyme was playfully changed to upsot.

But, though we will only encounter it in modern usage in direct reference to “Jingle Bells,” upsot can be found in a variety of usages that don’t all refer to James Pierpont’s 1850 composition and 1857 publication of the song. (Pierpont was 28 when he wrote it.) Bob has again saved me the research time; he has sent 15 different citations (not bad for a word that’s not in the OED), found with the aid of Bartleby.com and Project Gutenberg.

There’s this one, from The Attaché, or Sam Slick in England (1843), by Thomas Chandler Haliburton (the first international best-selling author from Canada, and the man for whom Haliburton County in Ontario is named): “they couldn’t build one that could sail, and if she sail’d she couldn’t steer, and if she sail’d and steer’d, she upsot; there was always a screw loose somewhere.”

And then there’s this one, from Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Georgia Narratives, Part 1: “She remembers the days of war, how when the battle of Atlanta was raging they heard the distant rumble of cannon, and how ‘upsot’ they all were.”

And on the other hand there’s one from Confessions of an Etonian (1846), by “I.E.M.”: “On my getting into the saddle, to try him along a few streets, Mr. Turner added this very disinterested advice— ‘Now, don’t you go and hammer a good horse like that ere over the hard stones. A parcel of little ragged, dirty-nosed boys, run athwart, and upsots a respectable individual.'”

In every case it’s in the context of a nonstandard dialect. But should we stop and wonder how it got there, well, if get becomes got, then why mightn’t upset become upsot? Although vowel gradation (ablaut) is supposedly no longer a productive inflectional form, we still do it occasionally, as witness the oft-scorned dove past tense of dive (dived is the “proper” form, people sniff). And indeed the OED shows sot as a dialectal past-tense form of set that had a certain presence in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Upsot may have also carried an overtone of drunkenness.) As to the present-tense form in the third quotation – well, it could be the author’s inventive overextension; all the other instances Bob has found are past tense or past participle.

But if you don’t like change, well, you need to go back to the original version of the song, anyway. Oh, the word upsot is in it, though the words of the verse are slightly different – the last line in the original is “And we – we got upsot.” But the music is actually noticeably different. The modern version is very simplistic major-key stuff suited to easy singing by small children. The original version sounds rather more like a Victorian parlour song, with slightly more angular progressions. Give it a listen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYLRZMooJm0.

I first heard the original version in a concert very near where it was composed. I was at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts. The university was founded two years after Pierpont composed the song, less than two miles away by street (meaning less than five minutes twenty seconds for a bobtail nag with, as the third verse says, a speed of two-forty – i.e., 2:40 per mile). It was written about sleigh races on Salem Street in Medford… around Thanksgiving, actually. Its original title was “One Horse Open Sleigh.”

There’s a plaque at 19 High Street, Medford (where it was composed), commemorating its composition. It notes that Pierpont was living in Georgia when it was copyrighted and published in 1857. He stayed in the South for the rest of his life, in fact. He wrote a lot of songs in his life – including several supporting the Confederacy in its effort at secession. His father, a Unitarian minister, was a chaplain with the Union army. We can imagine they got somewhat upsot at each other over this.

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concupiscence

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 1 comment

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this charming quote from Catholick Christian Instructed by Richard Challoner (1691–1781): “Q. What are the ends for which matrimony is instituted? A. For a remedy against concupiscence.” My immediate thought was, “If you’re married to an exceptionally attractive person (as I am), it doesn’t decrease carnal desire (= concupiscence); it just increases its fulfillment.” (Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis, had already accounted for this: “marriage is ordained a remedy for unlawful concupiscence; and natural concupiscence seemeth as a spur to marriage.”)

But concupiscence doesn’t always mean plain old sexual lust. It is sometimes used to refer to not only the lust but its fulfillment; but it is also at times used to refer to other strong material desires. But what nearly all of its uses have in common is that they are high-toned condemnation; they speak against it, it is a trap, a fetter, a distraction. They wish to toss a porcupine into the lustful bed, to conk the hot one as cold as a cucumber or a fish, to knock him into sense and out of sensation. To decompose concupiscence to conk + porcupine + cucumber + fish + sense.

I did say “nearly all” – Arlene Prunkl tells me I epitomize lexical concupiscence, and I have to assume that she didn’t mean that in condemnation. Nor would she and I be the only people who fancy that a lust for words is a perfectly delightful thing; Mark Peters, a euphemism collector for Visual Thesaurus and a blogger for Oxford University Press, tweets as @wordlust and blogs at wordlust.blogspot.com. I don’t see anyone self-presenting as verbal concupiscence, but I’m sticking to Sesquiotic anyway.

Did you notice that I used word lust but verbal concpusicence? If you still don’t have enough evidence that English (like many languages) is not really a unitary invariant code but rather a language system with many variations and levels of play (English is the Dungeons and Dragons of languages, but there is no dungeonmaster), here’s another bit. Concupiscence is a high-toned word; it is suited for texts that partake of an air of erudition, clarity, precision, dryness, or some parody thereof. (I have used it in my notes on iniquity and avarice, greed, cupidity; I leave it to you to determine why I chose it.) And so it automatically goes with the more high-toned modifier – not a monosyllabic Germanic attributive noun (word) but a proper Latinate adjective (verbal). This is a word that exists expressly to move people away from Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.

So, thanks to the different register, we easily overlook the “conk” and “piss” we hear in it. We do, of course, hear the percussive voiceless stops, /k/ /k/ /p/, followed by hisses /s/ and /s/ – as though the lust were some overinflated thing that is being hit until it pops and lets out its excess air (the nasal before the second /k/ giving a sense of weakening, and the nasal before the second /s/ giving a sense of more complete deflation). We see this monster of a word as a unit, a big cold fish in your bed. And not just any cold fish: a coelecanth, a prehistoric beastie with its fins c c c c and p (and maybe i as well).

What it’s not is cute like Cupid. But it has the same root: cupere “desire” (verb). The con here does not literally mean “with” (concupiscence can be, and often is, a solo experience); it’s just an intensifier. So it’s Latin for “really wanting something”.

And if you really want long words (excellent words!), well, your concupiscence is fulfilled with this one. But is it sated? Or whetted?

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365 words for drunk

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 145 comments

I mentioned in my word tasting note for crapulous that I could do blog entries on words and phrases for “drunk” for a whole year. I don’t intend to do that, but I have decided to rise to the challenge and accumulate 365 words (and phrases) for “drunk”. I’m up to 263 351 362 so far (with the aid of several from other languages), and would like the assistance of my readers and their bibulous compatriots in making up the gap. Have a look at the list so far, and use the comments to add any I’ve missed.

And now you can have words for drunk on your shirt or mug! Buy the “drunk words” merchandise at Café Press – your handy reference for 302 ways of saying “drunk” in English!

Continue reading →

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Index, icon, symbol: a tale of abduction

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 2 comments

Published in The Indexer 29:4 (December 2011)

In the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, an index is a type of sign that signifies by having a direct connection to what it signifies – smoke is an index of fire, and a pointing finger is an index of what it indicates. The index is one of a trichotomy of sign types, the other two being the icon (which signifies by resemblance) and the symbol (which signifies by conventional association). Most semiotic constructions have elements of all three, and book indexes are no exception. The way signs are interpreted involves another trichotomy, of types of inference: abduction, deduction and induction. What readers take away from your index will depend on how you manage it – and your process of creating it – to optimize its indexicality, iconicity and symbolicity for optimal abduction. Continue reading →

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allure

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 1 comment

The quote of the once-faddish computer-game dysfluent English “All your base are belong to us” that I used in yesterday’s note on merry led me to think about allure. Not because I was wondering what the allure is of such games but just because of the sonic resemblance of all your to allure.

Part of the allure of English, for people who like to play with language, is of course its inconsistencies. And allure figures among them. It makes me think of adult, not because allure is an adult thing – though it’s probably more often seen in reference to “adult” things – but because, just as adult is a word that may make you stop and think how you want to say it (“ADult? aDULT?”), so is allure.

The opening a is fairly unproblematic. Generally it’s said as a schwa, that mid-central reduced vowel we often use in English in unstressed positions; if we don’t want to reduce it, it will probably be said as /æ/ as in hat. But it’s the second syllable that brings in the variations. Mostly it depends on your dialect, but there are still options. And I think many a Canadian has used – or even puzzled over – several or all of them at one time or another. It’s all about the end of the word (after the /l/). Is it like “you” plus /r/, or like a clearly said “you’re”, or like “oo” in fool plus /r/, or like “u” in full plus /r/, or does the vowel fold into the following liquid so the second syllable is /lr/? And will it depend on the context and the price of the item in question? Will you say it differently between “I don’t understand the allure of Justin Bieber” and “Not needing a car is part of the allure of living downtown” and “Succumb to the timeless allure of this beautiful art”?

The pronunciation is indeed liquid – it is not quite fixed, but it always has those two liquid consonants, /l/ and /r/. And it has certain allure to its look. Those paired l’s add a tall, lean something, like pinstripes or the legs of a willowy miss or a champagne flute or… Well, parallels are available.

We have a few particular ways we like to use this word. We will use it when analyzing some thing: its allure, its central allure, its timeless allure, its exotic allure… Often we will talk about an aspect of something that is part of its allure. We will talk about something that has lost its allure; we will talk about trying to understand the allure of something. And a thing may often be said to hold a unique (or special, or considerable, or…) allure. When we account for the allure, we say it lies in something. As in The allure of English lies in its flexibility and inconsistency.

Which is to say that’s what draws us. We hunger for it (we being not everyone but the sort of person who reads this sort of thing). We return to it like the falcon to the falconer. After all, when you train a falcon, you feed it from an apparatus of thong and feathers called a lure (from Old French leurre, from a Germanic word for “bait”), and it learns to come to the lure; add a meaning “to” to lure and you get (with a doubling of the joining consonant) allure.

Which is fair enough. If you succumb to the allure of something – be it lovely scenery, a unique voice, a fashion magazine (called Allure, for instance), a cruise ship vacation (on the Allure of the Seas), or even just a pair of lovely eyes – you take the bait. And then all your base are belong to them.

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merry

Posted on December 17, 2011 | 4 comments

I arranged for the usual coffee bunch to meet at Starbucks this time. I did this solely for the enjoyment of provoking Margot with their latest seasonal campaign slogan. I succeeded.

“‘Let’s merry’? ‘Let’s merry’?!” She was frothing more than a cappuccino would.

“You’re not merrying,” I said. “It’s Christmas. Or advent, anyway. You should merry!”

“I’m not the merrying kind,” she said with some asperity.

“Don’t I know it,” said Daryl sotto voce. Margot was momentarily nonplussed and decided to blush.

“It is rather odd,” Jess said, blowing on her eggnog latte.

“I would have thought you would be defending it,” Margot said, regaining her voice. “Your precious verbing and all that. And no doubt there’s some historical usage of merry as a verb.”

“The latter is confirmed,” Daryl said, scrolling through the OED on his iPad. “Both transitive and intransitive. I merry you, you merry me, let’s merry.”

“Enough,” Margot said in a barely audible whisper, her skin colour increasingly Christmassy – red with shades of green.

Daryl continued, waving his hand at his iPad with an almost studied casualness. “Interestingly, merry has a lot of cognates in Indo-European languages, and most of them have something to do with brevity. Indeed, even Latin brevis is a related word: there’s a predictable transformation between /b/ and /m/ and between /w/ and /g/. It seem that pleasantry and mirth – that’s another related word, mirth – it seems they make the time pass more quickly.”

“Ironically,” Jess said, “getting short with people has rather the opposite effect.”

“But that’s all adjectival originally,” I said. “And it’s not really in current use as a verb.”

“The OED has intransitive use into the 20th century,” Daryl said. “Latest citation is from James Joyce. It’s figurative, mostly. ‘Warm sunshine merrying over the sea.’ The transitive use is cited up to 1961… Oh, but with up: ‘merry up their hearts’; ‘people merrying-up themselves’…”

“Oh, well that’s a bit different,” I said. “You can use quite a lot of words with up to make causative transitive verbs. ‘She prettied up her face and uglied up her attitude,’ for example. It’s a sort of modular formation. And for the intransitive, as a figurative usage, it’s less surprising. Again, ‘A warm sunset oranging on the horizon’ would not be such an odd figure.”

Margot seemed genuinely surprised. “So you really don’t like it,” she said to me.

“Didn’t say that,” I said. “I’m just accounting for its seeming odd. We don’t verb adjectives of state as much as we do adjectives of activity and nouns, I don’t think. Anyway, you’re going to have to get used to it.”

“It sounds like Chinglish,” Margot said. “Or Japlish. Like some packaging or some cheap Xbox game.”

“Starbucks say ‘All your base are belong to us,'” I said.

“But why not be merry or make merry?” Margot protested.

“Or even get merry,” Daryl mused apart as though to no one in particular. “‘We got merried on Christmas.'” He sipped his caramel brûlé latte and looked at not Margot.

“Would you really go with be merry?” I asked Margot, whose lower lip seemed to be shaking slightly. “Don’t you tell your English tutoring students to avoid forms of to be when they can? There’s a certain prejudice against them. Admittedly, many texts can be greatly improved by moving away from be- and noun-centred constructions and into action verbs. But sometimes it leads to rather forced results.”

“Make merry is nice and active,” Jess said.

“It’s still two words,” I said. “There’s an idea that one-word verbs are better than compound predicates. Some people absolutely hate adverbs. Most verbs could of course be paraphrased as another verb plus an adverb, and there’s no reason in principle that a given verb-adverb combination couldn’t be expressed as a one-word verb if one existed. It just happens that many of them don’t have single words. And a single word is punchier. It occurs to me that make plus adjective, intransitive, tends to show up in phrases referring to intercourse: make love, make whoopee, makin’ bacon…”

“Merry, meanwhile, gets around quite a bit,” Daryl said, again with the iPad. “Merry and bright, merry-faced, merry-hearted, merry-lipped, merry-mouthed, merry-voiced, merry Monday, merry night, merry Christmas. The more the merrier. Two are merrier than one. ’Tis the season to merry, it seems. So let’s! Time’s a-wasting.”

“Then why make it pass more quickly,” Margot said quietly, eyes downward. She stood, pulled her coat around her. “A happy Christmas to you,” she said, looking at me and then at Jess. She glanced quickly at Daryl, then turned and hurried towards the door.

“Have a happy,” I said. She broke her stride for half a moment, her hands tensing perceptibly, but then passed through the door. I looked back to see Daryl stuffing his iPad in his bag and getting up.

“Gentlemen,” he said, nodding at me and Jess. He made towards the door.

Jess raised one eyebrow, and then lifted her cup in a toast towards him. “God rest you married,” she said, slightly indistinctly, as he exited.

“Yow know,” I said, relaxing back in my chair, “that conversation couldn’t have happened quite that way if we had British accents.”

“Where merry and marry are not homophones. Indeed.” She looked into her cup and saw residue encircling it. “Oh look. Starbucks has even given me a ring. I guess they really do want to merry.”

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edentulous

Posted on December 15, 2011 | 2 comments

Words are wonderful things. They can be quite delectable, giving you something to sink your teeth into or at least to roll around on your tongue; they can be bright, shiny toys, too. And sometimes that’s a problem. One has to be careful exactly where and how one uses spicy or shiny new words – you don’t toss a whole jar of a new spice into your stew (imagine doing that with cloves, for instance – gaaah), and you certainly don’t toss in a shiny new toy; you’d break a tooth.

A couple of aggravating factors in this issue are the frequent desire not simply to have fun but to sound impressive, and the fact that uncommon words tend not to have accretions of strong positive or negative values, so they look like good alternatives to some more common words.

So, when there is a particularly delicious and erudite-sounding word, even if it is really quite unfamiliar and frankly a bit ridiculous in context, it may be prone to appearing unexpectedly in place of something rather better known, especially under the digits of lexically edacious pseudo-didacts. An example is the little Canadian Press factoid box that showed up in newspapers on November 6: “QuickFacts about edentulous Canadians.”

What does edentulous mean? The article doesn’t tell you directly. The first sentence repeats it: “Many Canadians are edentulous but cannot afford workable false teeth.” The rest of the article is light statistics about Canadians with no natural teeth, plus some general toothcare-related factoids. So… you can figure readily that the dent refers to teeth, as it tends to. You may also reckon that the ul is the Latin diminutive, which shows up in assorted words such as capsule and macular. That leaves the e, and you may recall that e pluribus unum means “out of many, one”; it happens that edentulous is an adjective (as shown by the ous ending) that means “out of teeth” – because the teeth have gone out of you!

Of course, you could prefer to see Eden and some echo of Dracula, but Eden is where Eve met a snake and bit an apple, and snakes have fangs and it’s hard to bite an apple without teeth, and Dracula is surely not edentulous either. On the other hand, if it sounds more like eventual, that may be appropriate, depending on your standard of tooth care, especially if it’s rather sedentary.

The Oxford English Dictionary presents some nice quotes using this word. From a 1782 Essay on comparative anatomy by Alexander Monro, “The chin and nose of edentulous people are much nearer.” And in 1784 the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London noted that “Fishes… [are] apparently utter strangers to edentulous old age.”

Edentulous? Toothless, for heaven’s sake. But, now, is it apposite or ironic that edentulous is said without any direct involvement of the teeth – all done with the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge? And that, on the other hand, toothless requires the tongue to touch the teeth, as though checking to make sure they’re still there?

Thanks to Amy Toffelmire for directing my attention to this one.

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bisphosphonate

Posted on December 13, 2011 | 2 comments

The first thing to note about this word is that it is not biphosphonate. That opening syllable is bis, as in “again” in Latin. And what comes again? In this word, spho – not a real morpheme, but just a coincidental sequence. If bis repetitia non placent (repetitions don’t please), one might subject it to haplology and kill one spho to make bisphonate, which, ironically, would seem to mean “sounded twice” or “spoken twice”, as long as we allow the Latin bis to wed with the Greek phone without thinking it phony (a more classical Latin formation would use bi in place of bis, but that’s not our bis-ness here). We have to watch that our derivation is from ϕωνή phóné, “voice”, rather than ϕόνος phonos, “murder”, though… we wouldn’t want to kill it twice (if we killed both sphos we would end up with binate, which would seem to mean “born twice”, even more ironically, and where would we go from there?).

This is a formal-looking word, suited to a bishop, posh, neat. It has many flavours peeking from its orthography: hints of shop, hops, pose, phone, hosp(ital), p(r)onate, tea, and a big bite enclosing a heart set on Sappho (with a spare h). And for those who seek bliss from phonetics, that pair of paired fricatives /sf/ and /sf/ make a sufficient bed as soft as sphagnum moss between the headboard of /b/ and the foot at /neIt/. This is a word with no bones in the heart of it.

It is also a word for something that works on the hearts of bones. Bisphosphonates are a class of drugs used to prevent bone loss. They are used to treat people with osteoporosis; they reduce the risk of bone fracture. How much they reduce it by depends on the specific drug, the fracture site, whether you’ve had a fracture before, and whether you figure by absolute risk or relative risk: they may claim as much as a 45% relative risk reduction but with a 2% absolute risk reduction. I’ll explain the difference. Say you had 100 people with osteoporosis, and without treatment 4 would get a certain fracture, and with the drug 2 would get a fracture. In such a case, the drug cuts the fracture rate in half, from 4 to 2 – a 50% relative risk reduction – but in absolute terms it reduces the risk by only 2%, and you would on average need to treat 50 people for just one to get any benefit. But the problem is you don’t know which one, so you treat all 50. And more than one of them will get the side effects.

If you think you get a taste of phosphorus from this word, you are right. Bisphosphonates are so named because they have tandem phosphonates, and a phosphonate is an assembly of a phosphorus atom, three oxygen atoms, and some other stuff. Binding the two phosphonates is a carbon atom, and also hanging off that are a couple of other chains of stuff; it’s those other chains that differentiate between the different bisphosphonates, just as if along with bisphosphonate we had some other words like trisphosphonation and tetrakisphosphonetics. (Of course we don’t; that’s just philosophical phonetics.) Bisphosphonates work like decoys – when enzymes come along to break down the bones (bones are constantly being broken down and replaced, and the problem is when the rates differ), they step in for the enzymes’ usual dancing partners and keep them from doing anything. It sounds a bit like a seductress in a spy novel stopping an assassin. Perhaps James Bond… I won’t say you only live twice, but a new lease on life is a step in that direction. For the 2% who benefit.

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