iniquity

Posted on December 13, 2011 | 1 comment

It’s Messiah season again, which means the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir owns my evenings for the next week. Tonight was the rehearsal with choir and orchestra (tomorrow we do it with the soloists as well) and, of course, the conductor – Nicholas Kraemer this time. It will be good.

During the chorus “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs” Maestro Kraemer pointed out that the long note on “our” in “he was bruised for our iniquities” was resulting in loss of precision on the following word so he couldn’t quite hear the quit. Well, there it is: sometimes we don’t know when to quit.

Is that a fair perspective on iniquity as well – not knowing when, where, and whether to quit? Deadly sins have a way of being normal things taken to excess: gluttony is simply eating too much food, greed is just wanting too much, lust is letting one’s attractions go a bit far, and so on. So is unquittingness in the propinquity? Not quite, though there is something to it.

Iniquity is often associated with elastic morals – I might more readily say with liquid morals, with a deliquescence of morals (caused by moral turpentine?), or perhaps even a deliquium of the conscience. It is also associated with archaism – that is to say, it shows up in old texts, and in texts that wish to call forth an old and formal style with strong Biblical overtones. In modern English its most common collocation is den of iniquity, and we know what that is: to quote Star Wars, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” – especially of those things considered grave moral transgressions, such as drinking, gambling, and fornication, and perhaps just incidentally theft and so on.

We see a particular eye on the most delectable kind of flagrante delicto in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter: “A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!” We see it in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: “as the old woman shared in the profits arising from the iniquity of her daughter, she encouraged and protected her in it to the utmost of her power.” Oh, those three i’s in iniquity – are they candles on the dresser, are they the torches of the morally offended coming to smoke out the offenders? Or just the all-peeping eyes of the moral judges?

But concupiscence, favoured object of scorn for the gossips, is not the sole or original form of iniquity. (Nor is drug use or alcoholism, though both seem implied in many modern uses of den of iniquity.) Certainly we see theft and similar villainy covered by it; a good example is from Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering: “Glossin, though a bold and hardy man, felt his heart throb and his knees knock together, when he prepared to enter this den of secret iniquity, in order to hold conference with a felon, whom he justly accounted one of the most desperate and depraved of men.”

If we look back to the Bible (the King James Version, of course; we no longer use the word iniquity much, so it would be an odd choice for a modern translation), we see it used in many places as a general word for sin, for breaking the commandments of God, but if we are to find a specific kind of sin, then it is of the sort indicated in Psalm 53: “Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, Who eat up my people as they eat bread, And call not upon God?” Yes, people who devour others, who have no care for others, who show no mercy and give no justice.

What is justice? Equity. Fairness. Indeed, not grabbing all you can. So iniquity is inequity? Well, I can tell you that inequity is just a more recent reflex of iniquity. The Latin root is æquus “even, just, fair”; from it we get equal and equity. In Latin the negative of æquus was iniquus, and from that came iniquitas, whence iniquity. But though we’ve had iniquity in the language since the 1300s, its meaning shifted enough towards sin and moral transgressions in general that it was not functioning so well for “lack of fairness”. So by the 1600s we had inequity as well, formed in English from equity.

Which ought to remind us that harm to others is a very important factor in this, and lack of concern for others – and glorification of grabbing all you can – is surely much higher on the list of iniquities than grabbing a bit on the side, as Hester Prynne was labelled for doing. The greatest modern dens of iniquity, in truth, tend to be boardrooms and corner offices at the tops of financial district towers, and the computer desks where they trade in equities.

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cattery

Posted on December 11, 2011 | 9 comments

My friend Alex Goykhman forwarded an ad to me offering a deal: “$49 for 7 Nights of Cattery at the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel ($140 value).”

To modestly modify an Amy Winehouse song: What kind of cattery is this?

Well, we can feel quite certain that it has to do with cats one way or another. Aside from its being the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel, the formation cattery is quite unlikely to come from any false cognate such as the cata in cataplectic, catabasis, catastrophe, and so on. And cat is cognate with words throughout European languages (even borrowed into the non-Indo-European language Finnish as katti, which I particularly like). It even shows up in Byzantine Greek as κάττος kattos (meaning we could justifiably have had cattophile and cattophobe rather than the more opaque ailurophile and ailurophobe). The best guess is that the etymon was in Ancient Egypt, but we – hey, look, a kitty!

Spy cat (Jaggie and the bench)

Now, where were we? Ah, yes. The issue with this word is twofold. First of all is the issue of the multiplicity of meanings of cat (as opposed to The Multiple Cat, which is the name of a musical group who made a CD that I happened to pick up in a bargain bit titled “territory” shall mean the universe). This is illustrated by the assertion that the Web has gradually transformed from a cathouse to a cathouse – i.e., the videos occupying most of it, the joke goes, have shifted from smutty to kittycat. (See thedailywh.at/2011/11/14/all-cats-all-the-time-of-the-day/ for an amusing extended riff on this.)

Second is the ery ending. There are different kinds of words that end in ery, as illustrated by just the set of words ending in ttery: lottery, battery, buttery, cattery, chattery, cluttery, flattery, fluttery, God-wottery, guttery, hattery, hottery, littery, lottery, mattery, muttery, nattery, nitwittery, nuttery, plottery, polyglottery, pottery, rattery, rettery, ruttery, scattery, shattery, skittery, slattery, slottery, sluttery, smattery, spluttery, sputtery, stuttery, tattery, tittery, tottery, twittery. Some are adjectives formed on words ending in er; we can rule that out in this case, as there is no catter for something to be like. Some are mass objects referring to a kind of thing, such as pottery; others are mass objects referring to some more abstract thing that is pervasive in some context, such as polyglottery and God-wottery; others are mass objects referring to a condition or state of being, such as sluttery; and some are referring to a place where things are made and/or kept, such as hattery.

So here’s the thing: cattery, according to dictionary definitions, and as shown in general use even still if you search it on the web, is a word for a place where cats are raised and/or housed. So, yes, it’s a cathouse, but the kind where actual cats sleep – the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel is a lodging in Toronto for cats for when their owners are away. (Now, think for a moment: $49 for 7 days for the other kind of cathouse? Or even $140? Really?) But in that case it would be 7 nights of a cattery, no? Where’s that indefinite article? Its absence makes the word a mass object: the ad appears to promise 7 days of kitty-catness, or of being surrounded by or playing with cats, or something similar – no need to catalogue all possible nuances.

I must admit, 7 days of that kind of cattery would be quite appealing – if only I weren’t allergic. Let me tell you, the thought of seven days free of allergy and playing with kittens honestly brings tears to my eyes, I would enjoy it so much. But you can’t always get what you want. Just as the word cattery is double-crossed in the middle, tt, I have been double-crossed by nature.

So it goes. But cats are all around us, and their action in inaction and inaction in action is the way of the play of the world. For the multiplicity of cats, territory shall indeed mean the universe: we are in a cattery of cattery, all of us from the bottom of the gutter to Cat Deeley and Kim Cattrall; all is a fractal of cat fur. Just as your tongue, in saying cattery, reaches quickly like a paw from under the couch to pull in a bit of string or food, all things are subject to the subtle little paw of the cosmic cat, catching at the catenary from catabasis to catacomb, catalyzing all from cataract to cataclysm, alternately cataskeuastic and catastrophic. But I don’t wish to be catachrestic. I will simply say that the world is cattery, seven times a cattery, seven times seven – which is 49, which is how much it would cost for week of cattery.

I was going to end with that, but, given the season, I will tack on a poem I wrote almost exactly 20 years ago:

Cassandra the Cat

Cassandra the cat sits smugly, placidly purring;
outside, a violent winter storm is brewing.
Cassandra wants none of that; she’ll stay by the fire
and enjoy guests who give the odd drop of egg nog to her.

Cassandra goes vaulting off the top of the couch,
scampering under the chair of a startled guest,
and, after a whirlwind tour of the house,
comes back to the fire and quickly returns to rest.

Cassandra is master of all that she surveys;
that small plate of cakes could be hers, if she wanted,
but no, she won’t bother to get up off her duff –
she’s just finished eating, so she’s not even tempted.

Cassandra, in later evening, covers the heat vents,
and, purring, prowls the hallways and the stairs
searching for hitherto unforeseeable e-vents
and mice and spiders to catch all unawares.

Cassandra the cat, you furry door-mat, you owner of home and hearth,
you never pause to realize your net equivalent dollar worth,
but content you lie by fireside and sit on the laps and lick the cups of specially invited guests,
never believing that you could be freezing in cold and snow with nowhere to go in a darkened alley on a hungry belly, if it weren’t for your magnanimous hosts!

Cassandra the cat twitches her tail, looks up
with one eye, smiles, purrs and returns to her nap.

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fractal

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 13 comments

Romanesco broccoli, whole

This week I ate the most beautiful vegetable I have ever seen.

I was shopping at Golden Orchard, the organic greengrocer in St. Lawrence Market where I buy my fruits and vegetables, and I saw, on the shelf, something labelled Romanesco broccoli. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Instead of the usual bumpy shape of broccoli, this had cones that were perfect spirals of cones that were perfect spirals of cones that were perfect spirals of cones that were… I had to have it, this fractal broccoli, this fractali, this fraccoli, this… beautiful vegetable.

I was, in a way, sad to break it apart and steam it, but that’s what it was there for: if I had left it untouched, it would have wilted and lost its beauty anyway. Steamed, it was delicious, sweet, mild, more like cauliflower in flavour – which is right enough, as it turns out actually to be more of a cauliflower, although the difference between broccoli and cauliflower is not as clear-cut as you might think.

But this is not a vegetable tasting note. I am here to talk about the word that described this vegetable’s form, a word I have already used: fractal. The odds are fairly good that you have encountered this word before, and as likely as not you have some image in your head of swirling geometric shapes that are emblematic of the beauty of mathematics in some ineffable way. They have perhaps a fragile beauty in their tracery, or perhaps a spectacular one; you may see them as evidence of craft or as something quite the opposite; or you may see them as infractions of your sense of order, causing you to rack your brain to the point of fracture. Your taste of this word will follow.

But the concept of the fractal is something other than what most people think it is, and at root involves an elegant simplicity. Ah, yes, another term mathematicians love – elegant. Ordinary people think of silver and china and linen and formal wear; mathematicians think of power in simplicity.

Fractal comes from the Latin fractus, broken. This may seem odd for things that appear to be very complex but entirely connected. But what they are is breakable: break one into smaller parts and you will have smaller parts that look like a whole breakable into smaller parts. It is self-similar recursivity: it contains a replica of itself, which contains a replica of itself, and so on. It’s the hall of mirrors.

I’m reminded of the Apple Lisa computer – the computer (a precursor to the Macintosh that did not meet with great success) was actually named after Steve Jobs’s illegitimate daughter, but the marketing explanation was that it stood for local integrated systems architecture. Now, you might think that that is somehow a definition for recursivity, but what I’m coming to is that the in-joke among the engineers working on the computer was that it stood for Lisa: invented stupid acronym. The first word of Lisa: invented stupid acronym is of course Lisa, which stands for Lisa: invented stupid acronym, and so on.

Some other examples of self-similar recursivity are in order. An easy one is Russian dolls: inside each one is a smaller one, and so on; in the world of math, unhampered by the limits of materials, these could continue all the way down to the infinitely small, and even at the infinitely small be just like the original size, with an infinity of nested smaller parts. This is what those swirling geometric shapes do: at whatever magnification, you see something much like the original, a shape having smaller echoes of the shape that have smaller echoes of the shape and so on. You see this in the Romanesco broccoli.

Romanesco broccoli, ready for steaming

Adding the dimension of time, you can even see it in humans. A girl is born, grows, becomes a woman; then she grows a child within her, which is born, grows, becomes an adult; and so on. And in the greater web of life, what we eat feeds the future, as it has been fed by the past. Is each generation less than the previous? No – with infinite recursive self-similarity, the idea of absolute scale is meaningless. To quote Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself,

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it
with care.

All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

Something else that bumps up against the limits of meaning is how many dimensions a fractal has. Consider one of those fractal illustrations you see. It’s made of a line with curves and angles. If you zoom in on the curves and angles, each one has the same curves and angles within it, but smaller. And so on. Now, this shape is just a line, so it has no area; in math, a line is simply one-dimensional with no thickness, only length. But say you try to measure its length. You might look and see what appears to be a measurable bit of line with curves. But inside each curve is a smaller curve that adds some more length, and inside each smaller curve is a smaller one that adds a little more length, and so on to the infinity of smallness. While material limitations prevent something like a vegetable from actually continuing to infinite smallness, an abstract line of this sort has no such limitation, and within each curve is an infinity of smaller curves, meaning that the line has infinite length, and every segment of it has infinite length. In one dimension it is too full; in two, it is too empty.

If the idea that a fractal could have zero area but infinite length doesn’t make sense to you, then good. It shouldn’t. It means we’re not measuring it the right way. Consider: if you ask about the area of a line or the volume of a square, you get zero, because you’re measuring it using too many dimensions. But if you try to get the measure the volume of a cube using two-dimensional squares, or the area of a square using one-dimensional lines, you will get infinity, because a square has no thickness in the third dimension, and a line has no thickness in the second. So one dimension is not enough dimensions in which to measure the fractal line, but two is too many. It actually exists with fractional dimensionality: 1.25, 1.33, 1.5… depending on the specific pattern.

It also stands to reason that my beautiful Romanesco broccoli, which is a three-dimensional object, represents (imperfectly, because of physical limitations) a shape that has more than three dimensions, and less than four.

I will stop there before I fracture the heads of any of my readers, but if you are intrigued by this, I recommend Yale University’s site on fractal geometry, which gives very clear and friendly explanations without dumping too much on you at once. A warning, though: to pursue a topic, you will find that you click a link, and that page has subtopics so you click on a link, and that page has subtopics so you click on a link…

Which brings me to the point that the World Wide Web, with its hyperlinks in hyperlinks in hyperlinks, is also, in its way, fractal. That’s right. You are reading this on a fractal that exists (by the calculation of J.S. Kim et al., arXiv:cond-mat/0605324v1) in 4.1 dimensions.

And you, too, of course, are part of a fractal. Like Walt Whitman, you are large, you contain multitudes, just as you and Walt are contained within the same fractal web in time, in the fractal folds of time. And you say, with Whitman,

The past and present wilt – I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

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solfatara

Posted on December 7, 2011 | 6 comments

I’ve just come home from singing in the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir’s annual Festival of Carols. I really do love (most) Christmas music; it has such nice associations for me, of course, but the sounds are to my taste too. A good choir can make the harmonies so beautiful and clear, from crisply quiet to erupting with force. And it’s especially something when the organ blasts in – like a volcano, a cracking good Krakatoa of sound. So much air displaced! So many people moved! Such divine afflatus!

On the way to tonight’s performance, I happened to see, in a magazine I was reading, the word solfatara. Now, isn’t that a musical-sounding word? Sol, fa, like two notes (G and F), and tara as in taralala and ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay and so on. But I knew from the context that the note emitted by a solfatara is a steady one, often low, not always so pleasant, and don’t expect the smells of Christmas pudding and turkey and pine trees and so on. A solfatara displaces a lot of gas, but it’s not the CO2 of exhaling choristers. In place of divine afflatus we have chthonic – Stygian – flatulence. Miasma.

Yes, alas. A solfatara is a fumarole – a volcanic vent – that emits sulphurous gas. The G and F of sol-fa here may as well stand for gas and, uh, flatulence. Somehow I feel the word is too nice – perhaps if we rearranged it to something like asolfarta or something like that. But that would obscure the origin. You can probably spot sulphur in solfa; the word is Neapolitan Italian from Latin sulpha terra, “sulphur land”. It’s actually the name of a specific volcanic crater near Naples; from Solfatara we get the generic solfatara, just as from Geysir in Iceland we get the generic geyser.

That makes it rather more difficult to link to a Christmas concert. I might try to connect it to a reading done during the concert: “The Little Match Girl” used matches, which have sulphur… Bit of a reach, though. I can’t do “Gift of the Magma” – solfataras don’t erupt magma anyway. They just blow off steam, vent, produce noxious gases… Not a very Christmassy attitude, though common enough among those stuck in shopping malls. But that can be quite disconcerting. Better to welcome in the crisp, fresh air and the falalalalas.

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odalisque

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 4 comments

Were you as enchanted as I was by Delacroix’s rendering of the Sardanapalian odalisque being held unwilling to her early demise (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delacroix_sardanapalus_1828_950px.jpg)?

I am assuming you know the word odalisque. It is possible, however, that you do not. Everyone must encounter this word first sometime, and it may be fairly late in life, odalisques not being standard features of the modern quotidian. My recollection of first encountering the word was as the title of a dance piece. Since I am a lover of modern dance, especially the abstract kind, I do not think that even at the end of the piece I had a clear idea of what an odalisque was.

The word does not lead you to its referent, does it? With its strong taste of basilisk and obelisk it seems more primed to turn you to stone; with its oda it may make you think of counting miles (that would actually be odo, as in odometer, but the hint is there). But it also has that fancy French ending… not quite esque, but, one may say, somewhat esqueesque. But, now, the esquire may enquire as to what it is esque – or ish, since the old English cognate of esque is ish. Is it model-ish? Perhaps. Especially if the model is risqué.

The truth is that the lisque in this word is from a suffix, but a Turkish one: lık. It expresses function, sort of as English er or ary might when added to a noun. And oda is a room – in this case, a chamber in a harem. An odalisque is an odalık, a woman in a Turkish harem (or any other kind of harem, more broadly) – originally, a slave, a servant to the concubines, a chambermaid to the ladies; in more common usage now, it serves up an image of a concubine herself. The s was added in the French and English because it seemed to make sense – it matched a pattern. Words are our harem, and we will abduct and tattoo and dress them as we will. (That’s much better than doing the same to humans.)

It may have been odious to have been an odalisque (though it may, for some, have been better than the alternatives), but this word is not odious, the resonance notwithstanding. The /l/ in the heart in particular is lithe and lissome; the /s/ slips as silk sliding to the tiles; the que is pure ornamentation, a simple /k/ as in kiss but with a curly q, and the rest is silence. The contexts of this word always bring it forth with a flavour of the exotic (pure orientalism), of a place far away and a time long ago; painters have liked odalisques because they give an excuse to present the nude or half-nude female form in an alluring context.

We would not tolerate the keeping of odalisques now, but we have idealized it then: a beautiful woman, dressed lavishly or lavishly nude, ready to do as the sultan bids, even to the point of fraudulently altering official documents – oh, sorry, wrong Oda, and sorry for the image. You may wish to erase it from your mind with the results of a Google image search on odalisque. You know already what you will see: models, risqué, but great painterly art. Brace yourself for an ingress of Ingres.

Thanks again to Allan Jackson for suggesting today’s word.

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Laxity and language

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 9 comments

It is a common assumption that lax language is an indicator of lax thought – that a careful thinker will use careful language. Typically riding along with this assumption is another: that “careful language” means formal language adhering to a particular set of prescriptive norms.

The first assumption may seem reasonable enough, prima facie, though, as we will see, there are important limitations and reservations to it. The second assumption is a non-sequitur, the sort of idea that would have a person wear a tuxedo to a construction job. But its effects are pervasive. In fact, it’s been shown that people will rate more highly a weak argument expressed in formal language than a good argument expressed in casual language.

Part of the problem is a general conflation of formality with care. One can use formal words without being careful about them, and one can quite deliberately and carefully use slang and other casual language for effect. Some of the most effective messages in politics and advertising have been crafted in informal language. Indeed, great philosophical insights and thoughtful analyses can be expressed in language that seems sloppy. “You oughta do the same things to other folks as you’d like them to do to you.” (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.) “Look, the only thing I know is: I know. Ain’t nothin’ sure beyond that.” (Cogito ergo sum.) “If you got one thing in a place, you can’t have another thing in exactly the same place just then.” (Two bodies cannot occupy the same space.) True, the flavour is different, and the language may be less concise (though in some cases the plain version of an analysis is actually more concise – see below). But the understanding conveyed is the same. And beyond that, there are many professional engineers and similar people who are very vigorous and careful thinkers, but whose English is riddled with errors and nonstandard usages. Their drawings and equations are, of course, perfectly reliable.

Among world languages and cultures, sophistication of morphosyntax, whatever that may be (is it greater complexity or greater elegance? it’s almost undefinable), does not seem to correlate with sophistication of thought. And, more importantly, adherence to prescriptive norms can actually evince lack of thought – dogmatism without regard for effect – while masquerading as intelligence. A mind that can only manage one mode of communication regardless of context is not careful, it’s inflexible. And, in spite of what many people would have you believe, inflexibility is a mark of an inferior mind, not a superior one.

In short, it is reasonable to expect that careful thinkers will also more likely be careful users of words. But care in use of words is often misunderstood. Colloquialism can be very inventive – in fact, the inventive spirit is the source of much slang – and “proper” language can be very thick-headed.

To look at the limiting effect of the formality prejudice, consider academic writing and similar registers such as medical jargon. They present themselves as being more precise, and in academic writing the expectation is that this apparently rigorous language is giving a rigorous analysis and adding new perspective. But much of the time they don’t say anything truly new or present a truly fresh perspective. Consider the difference between medical jargon and regular speak: “Sildenafil is contraindicated in hypertension.” “Don’t take Viagra if you have high blood pressure.” Both mean the same thing; the first simply adds the medical in-group sense (“I know this subject, so listen to me”) and uses standardized terminology – and is less likely to be understood by the people who actually use the drug. Much academic writing does the same: the words are not the keys to new understanding; they are just the keys to the door of the private club, the secret passwords to the clubhouse.

This is a topic of which I have some knowledge. I read a lot of academic jargon while getting my PhD, and wrote some of it too (though I always tried to be readable). Defamiliarization, properly done, requires new metaphors, new perspectives, new angles, and not simply more obscurantist ways of saying the same old thing. The only insight given by “Senescent canines are unreceptive to education in novel behaviour modes” that is not given by “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is that it’s possible to say something in ten-dollar words that you could easily say in two-bit words. And, on the other hand, “Adaptability is inversely correlated with age” may seem the most direct and precise statement of the concept, but it’s not as effective in conveying the idea and making it stick. What good is precise information if it’s not retained?

True, new angles of thought and deeper analyses can lead to different use of language, can even demand certain kinds of novel terminology, and one does need to write with precision and key the reader’s mind to receiving the information in a certain mode. I’m not saying don’t write using the academic register! Those expensive words are like expensive wines: people may pay more attention to what they can get from them. But there’s quite a lot out there that is really unremarkable thought packaged in bloated syntax, like a taxi driver who takes you through Jersey and Staten Island to get from Manhattan to JFK Airport – you pay more, it takes longer, but the end result is no different.

I don’t want to say that all academic writing is BS. “Academic BS” does not equal “all academic writing.” And I don’t want to say that people should write in an inappropriate register. As I say so often, language is known by the company it keeps; people will receive your prose on the basis of the expectations created by your choice of words and syntax. But one ought not to hide behind needlessly abstruse syntax and vocabulary; there is still a responsibility to produce actually fresh ideas rather than just putting new lipstick on the old pig.

And, more generally, as many a salesman and preacher knows, putting things in nice, direct language can be very effective and clear. And, as many a body in universities and business management knows, you can often hide the fact that you have little to say by saying it with impressive-sounding words. But that’s often, not always, and you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

So don’t fool yourself. Hiding behind formal language is one of the most pervasive kinds of laxity in English usage – not evidence of careful thought but a means of avoiding it. Remember: if you can’t explain something clearly in plain language, you don’t really understand it.

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Sardanapalian

Posted on December 5, 2011 | 2 comments

This is a luxuriously long word; it avails itself of six vowels, five of which are spelled with a – a sort of AAAAA rating, like a five-star restaurant. It mostly taps the tip of the tongue, with a little pop of /p/ in the midst of it all. It presents a platter of mixed and sometimes exotic flavours: sardine, Sardinia, sardonic, sardonyx, Naples, Neapolitan, Nepal, pall, appalling… wait. The pal is actually said like “pale”, so the tastes become pay, pale, pail, paling, alien… and the whole word smacks a bit of Sarah Palin.

Well, the sound does. How about the meaning? You can guess from the capital S on it that it’s a proper noun or is based on one – either a place or a person. You will likely guess (correctly) from the ian ending that it’s an adjective. The echoes of place names might lead you to think it’s geographical, but in fact it’s formed from Sardanapalus, a probably at least partly mythical person: the last king of Assyria, as presented by Diodorus and, more recently (and influentially), Byron and others.

The image we have of Sardanapalus from these stories is of a man devoted to luxury, a hedonist, a voluptuary, a sybarite, an oral-retentive thelemite (so, really, rather Lord Byron’s kinda guy, one might say), an omnivorous omnisexual who liked to wear rich, “effeminate” clothing and make-up. Ruling was almost too much bother for him; he just liked the luxurious perks and the attention. And then, when a misjudgement led to the imminent threat of certain defeat, he had all his goods and treasures and servants piled together around him (yes, the servants and assorted odalisques too) and immolated himself and all of them. If he can’t win, why try – might as well take everyone down with him, eh? You get the picture – by Eugène Delacroix.

Not that it likely happened exactly like this in real history. The last king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal (on whose name Sardanapalus appears to be based), was rather more of a warrior. And it was his brother who was burned to death, not voluntarily either. And it was in Babylon, not Nineveh.

Oh, yes, Nineveh. That’s where Sardanapalus is supposed to have been for all of this. Does that name seem familiar? In the Bible, Jonah went to warn Nineveh that the wrath of the Lord was coming upon them and they had to repent. (Well, first he tried to escape having to do this, and there was a little adventure with a whale or big fish and so on.) Jonah was of course not Sardanapalian; he was the sort of agelast who wanted to see all Sardanapalians suffer and be destroyed. He was not inclined to mercy, and so he was mighty upset when, after the Ninevites repented as instructed, God actually spared them. (God gets one of His best lines, often quoted in the King James Version: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”) Clearly this was a different story line just happening in the same place! The king in the story of Jonah repented in sackcloth and ashes. Sardanapalus wouldn’t be caught dead in sackcloth – though he was, of course, caught dead in ashes.

So anyway, Sardanapalus liked to throw a good orgy, rather like Varius Flavus and Curius Odus in Asterix in Switzerland. (Yes, my image of orgies comes first from Asterix comics. Obviously nudity and copulation were not an early key feature for my definition.) He just wanted to party all the time; he loved luxury. It is this aspect of his life – the clothing, makeup, luxuries – that Sardanapalian refers to. Actually doing work and facing adversity was too much for him; he gave up readily and took his retinue with him. So you tell me… is the resonance of Sarah Palin appropriate?

Thanks to Allan Jackson for suggesting today’s word.

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Why not the Silicon Valley?

Posted on December 5, 2011 | 3 comments

A while back, a colleague was faced with an author who wanted to say the Silicon Valley rather than just Silicon Valley because, after all, we say the Ottawa Valley.

But the Ottawa Valley is the Ottawa Valley because it’s the valley of the Ottawa River. I grew up in the Bow Valley, so called because it was the valley of the Bow River. There is no Death River and no Silicon River; the names Death Valley and Silicon Valley are not descriptive formations based on some geographic feature. A valley doesn’t need to have a river to get a “the,” but the “the” generally indicates a central geographic feature contained by the valley, and that geographic feature is the focal detail, not the valley – the valley is presented as a surrounding attribute.

On the other hand, places named after some feature or associated quality or thing such that the place, not the associated thing, is central (and the associated thing is an attribute) normally don’t take “the” – Moraine Lake, Rainbow Falls, Happy Valley, Cougar Mountain, etc. So if it’s a valley first, it’s likely to be X Valley, whereas if it’s a river or whatever first and the valley is an attribute of it – if it’s the valley of the X – then it may be the X Valley.

But the main reason that Silicon Valley doesn’t take a the is just because it doesn’t. Never mind arguing from reasoning; place names are varied enough that exceptions can typically be found for any rule. Place names adhere to what is actually officially and commonly used for the place name, and it is not officially or commonly standard to say or write the Silicon Valley. It’s like saying the New York or the Vancouver Island.

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guggul

Posted on December 4, 2011 | 5 comments

When you Google, you can find if not a googol then more than a gaggle of words that make you goggle and giggle. Your mind will boggle as, agog, you ogle the ugly but allegedly legible scribblings. It might as well be so much googoo and gaga – do they take you for gullible? Are you being guggled (deceived)?

Some people say the same about Ayurveda, mind you, in which guggul figures significantly. What is guggul? It’s a shrub that grows in Gujarat and Rajasthan; it produces a resin from which is extracted guggulipid (I kid you not), which is said to be beneficial for treating high cholesterol, inhibiting tumour growth, reducing osteoarthritis symptoms, and, in combination with other ingredients, healing hemorrhoids, urinary tract infections, and acne, and helping people lose weight. It’s had clinical trials for treatment of cholesterol, but the results were not so great, so its future as a treatment for that is questionable.

So is its future in general. As it happens, the plant is endangered due to overuse. It’s also used as incense (which smells like myrrh), especially for driving away evil spirits (“Go, ghoulies”) and removing the evil eye. (No news on its effect on nazguls.) Such magic for us muggles! This all gets to sound a bit like Gulliver’s Laputa, doesn’t it? Or, no, not Laputa – Glubbdubdrib. Which reminds me (especially its convocation of b’s and d’s like big-bellied men making conversation) of the name the incense had around the Mediterranean in ancient times: bdellium.

There seems to be one stop too many in bdellium, doesn’t there? Well, it does at least counterbalance these back-of-the-tongue /g/s with the tip and the lips. Not that guggul is entirely at the back of the mouth: the u’s keep it there with the g’s, but in the end it leaps up with the l, which just happens to be a frequent travelling companion of g, a kind of Laurel to its Hardy. The /gl/ onset is a well-established phonaestheme, often heard in words for things wet, bright, or both (gleaming, glistening, gluey, glop); this /g–l/ finish, which has the stop and liquid in separate syllables, has less of a clear pattern, but as you juggle and gurgle it in your mouth, you will find it seems often to show up in words for small, rapid motions (jiggle, wiggle, juggle), and to have a sense of swallowing. (Indeed, guggle the noun refers to the epiglottis or the windpipe, and guggle the verb more commonly refers to a sound like that of liquid pouring from a small-necked bottle.)

The tongue often follows common paths, and – in any given language especially – shuns others. But it can nonetheless put together unexpected bits. It makes me wonder: is language more like Boggle or Lego? Do you mainly follow the bits as you can connect them, or do you pick them from the bucket and stick them together willy-nilly? This issue comes up for phonemes (the set of available distinctive sounds for a language), morphemes (the meaning-bearing bits words are made of, e.g., make+ing=making), lexemes (words, basically), phrases, and of course the semantic components too: how constrained are we when we string them together?

Linguistics is not some kind of jiggery-pokery, though some people (who prefer not to be plagued with facts) might say it is. But there must be limits to what we can say about language with language; that follows from the incompleteness theorems set forth by Kurt Gödel. The nature of the system sets, you might say, a girdle on it.

I know not what this has to say about the science of medicine, and what western medicine can know versus what Ayurveda maintains. I make no claims about the health benefits of guggul, let alone about its apotropaic qualities. But while its set of letters , just slightly unexpected in English, might attract the eyes, its path in the mouth is well worn. I’m sure you said it many times as a baby.

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crapulous

Posted on December 4, 2011 | 4 comments

Naughty things – those that bring pleasure but may have very undesirable consequences – tend to have a lot of words for them. A person adhering to the “Eskimos have 50 words for snow” idea* that people have more words for things that are more important and central to their lives might well conclude that drunkenness and sex are two of the most important things to Anglophones. Proceeding in the other direction, they might come to conclude that Eskimos (better to call them Inuit) see snow as a naughty pleasure.

There are far more English words for “drunk” than I could possibly mention in today’s note; I could actually do nothing but words and phrases for “drunk” for a whole year. They come with many different tastes and tones and implications. We all have our favourites, of course, and will use different ones for different contexts.

Recently, a colleague in the Editors’ Association of Canada was looking for one that had just the right elevation of tone – dignified but not snooty. Among the ones I thought might be appropriate were tipsy, three sheets to the wind, under the influence, flying, feeling no pain, blotto, pie-eyed, sozzled, squiffy, tanked, boiled as an owl, drunk as a lord, and, of course, in one’s cups. Interestingly, there are a lot of Anglo-Saxon words in that list and almost no Latin-derived ones. And one very plainly Latin-derived one is not on it: crapulous.

Crapulous comes originally from Greek κραιπάλη kraipalé, which referred to the symptoms of a hangover. Latin took that word and made it crapula, which is not the name of a low-quality vampire; it means “excessive drinking” or “inebriation, intoxication”. From it we get a set of English words, including crapulous, which commonly refers to drunkenness but is also usable to refer to the undesirable effects of drunkenness.

You can see why, in spite of its classical roots, crapulous does not carry a dignified tone. The overtones are obvious in English; a person may be forgiven for thinking that crapulous is like craptacular, and crapulence (the related noun) a crappy opulence like fugxury. I first saw crapulous (slightly altered) as a name of a drunken Roman in Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield – Titus Crapulus – but did not instantly make the connection between crapulous and drunkenness; I think I connected it first with rhinophyma (that bulbous red nose often, and not always accurately, associated with alcoholism).

This word seems to have various bits dissolved together: along with crap we have a mixed-up soul and an incomplete louse, a hidden cup and two cups u u (plus one seen from above o); anagrammed, it forms the response uttered by a pair of linguists caught pressed flat together, predicating directly: “Us, copular?” (Those linguistics parties. I’m told they do get up to some antics before they pay the sin tax.)

The form of this word seems to highlight a particular aspect – or vector – of the alcohol experience. We all know that being right ripped, home-style hammered, ploughshared, plastered, shellacked, et cetera, can make a person feel crappy thereafter. Craptacular, in fact. So it’s not so unreasonable that crapulous looks like a blend of fabulous and crap: it’s what you get after drinking a lot of fabulous crap – first you feel fabulous, and then you feel like crap. It’s easy when crapulous to think you’re fabulous but to look ridiculous and eventually end up in the crapper, destined to creep out of bed in the morning, joints crepitating and mind captious, wincing at the crackling of a wrapper, skin prickling at the touch of crepe paper. Alcohol may seem like a solution – well, alcoholic beverages are solutions, of ethanol and esters and whatnot in water – but in the end, you will see what it can precipitate.

*The idea that the Inuit have 50 words for snow is not really accurate, and anyway since Inuktitut is an agglutinating language – it sticks a lot of parts together to make very long words where English might use a whole sentence – counting words in it is a mug’s game. On top of that, we have a lot of words for snow and its various types in English. So there.

Thanks to Stan Backs for suggesting crapulous.

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