murmuration

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 12 comments

Have you heard a murmuration – perhaps the murmuration of a herd? Is there rationality in murmuring? Lovers may murmur to each other, but when many may murmur the murmuration is not only a heard phenomenon but a herd phenomenon. One responds to the next responding to the next…

It can be a rum thing. Something coherent can be split apart and partially turned, as an m turned into an r and an n and then the n turned to a u and switched around; or unconnected things, u r, come to be construed as joined m. No single clear voice speaks up so all can hear; nothing calls back to ration, so it remains the unseeing hearing herd of the murmur nation. Who is in the herd? U r, among others. And the sound all around is not really “rhubarb, rhubarb” as some would render it; if you have a large number of friends over, get them all to murmur murmuration at the same time and see whether it doesn’t sound just right. And perhaps a bit creepy.

But, then, is it a herd, really? A herd is made of animals. We might discern it better among birds. And among words for birds. Consider: we do well enough with school for a group of any of many different kinds of fish, and with herd for several kinds of animals, but there are among us those who are unsatisfied with standard flock as applied to birds. Oh, there is fun in fancy: it is enjoyable to speak of a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, a watch of nightingales, a parliament of rooks, and (this would have changed the complexion of ’80s music) a wreck of seagulls. But the problem comes when someone murmurs that you are wrong if you use flock. These fanciful words, in truth, have (with just a few exceptions) always been just that: fancies. Toys. They ought not to be made into bludgeons.

It is true that among humans, the herd determines the use of the word, but individuals have influence, and sometimes they have quite a lot of influence. A medieval nun appears to have invented many of these words for bird herds, which are first seen – the whole flock of them – in The Book of St. Albans (1486). Thus these words were set, but mostly they are barely used, except among the murmuring set.

And when they are used, new flights of fancies, or just fancies in flight, may attach themselves to them. Consider the starling. The collective for starlings (other than flock, of course) is very rarely used: murmuration. (Yes, the word originally means “act of murmuring” or “continuous murmuring” – and also (though no longer) “spreading of rumours”. And murmur has apparent onomatopoeic origins in its Latin source.) But it happens that starlings can do something rather startling, a fascinating demonstration of complex dynamics: in places such as Otmoor, near Oxford, where large numbers of them come together at day’s end, there is a huge, fluid swooping, quite amazing to see, as thousands and thousands of birds make mass shapes that swirl like a sideways lava lamp sped up several times. They do this because each one is reacting to the ones near it, and they all have some particular pragmatics to follow relating to their role in the group hierarchy and their desire – and relative right – to go where they are safer. There is no one bird saying, “Hey, you guys, the old males come here, and the females go around there, and the younger males go over there.”

You can see this phenomenon in quite a few videos; my favourite is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE. Another is at www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/murmuration-starlets_n_1072687.html (note that the URL erroneously has starlets – but it’s the correct URL). But the Huffington Post writer at the latter has taken the exotic act and assigned it the exotic word: “A murmuration, which this is, consists of thousands of tiny starlings (birds) collectively flying and swirling about.” So now it seems, to this writer – and to his readers – murmuration is not simply the word for a flock of starlings but is the word for this remarkable flocking behaviour.

We may say “Fair enough”: there’s already a perfectly good word for a flock of starling – flock – and there hasn’t to this point been a word specifically for this thing that large numbers of starlings do that happens to amaze a lot of people. But whether we like the semantic shift or not, it’s happening; given that the article on the Huffington Post has been “Liked” by over 36,000 people (as of this writing) and shared, tweeted, and emailed by almost 20,000, I think we can assume that each one of those people will take from the article – and pass on again by word of mouth – the word mumuration as referring specifically to this act (and may come to use it not as a murmuration of starlings but as starlings engaged in murmuration).

One bird turns, and the rest follow; one writer murmurs murmuration to this person and that, and they all follow. Of course, since it’s in a published article, it is in a way as though one bird had given direct instruction to the many, but since most people who read it likely found out about it through friends rather than simply turning every day to HuffPost to see what lexical updates to assimilate, effectively the article is the word that is murmured, not the voice murmuring it.

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Io

Posted on November 5, 2011 | 6 comments

This word is not lo, as in “Lo, behold a cow-horned maiden.” It’s a capital I and a small o. In English, the spelling and pronunciation of this name sound the same: I-o, like “I owe,” as in “I owe one of my greatest stage memories to Io,” and perhaps sort of like “hi-ho,” as in “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s on the stage I go.”

Actually, though, it comes from Greek, and its pronunciation there is like “ee-o” – not exactly like “yo,” as in “Yo, check out the cow-horned maiden,” which would be oy backwards, as in “Oy, this gadfly is making my life hell” – although in classical Greek, the word io was also a lamentation meaning “oy” or “alas”. When faced with Io in a classical context, one is hard pressed to decide which way to say it, and might in vacillation say “ee-ay-ee-ay-o”, as in “Old Inachus had a farm, e-i-e-i-o, and on that farm he had a cow, e-i-e-i-o.”

At the same time, Io presents distinctly digital associations – likely what my mainframer brother would see in it first. It’s not just that I/O stands for input/output, it’s that IO looks like a 1 and a 0, the binary digits, a.k.a. bits (and also the international symbols for “on” and “off”, since 1 is something and 0 is nothing). In binary, 10 is equal to 2 in decimal (the joke goes that there are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t).

So is Io number 2? No – in terms of size, it’s number 4. By which I mean that the moon of Jupiter called Io is the fourth-largest moon in our solar system, behind Titan (which orbits Saturn) and Ganymede and Callisto (which orbit Jupiter), and just ahead of Earth’s Moon and of its fellow moon of Jupiter, Europa. But, oh, though Io, Europa, and our Moon are of similar size, they’re like fire and ice and cold stone. Actually, they’re not just like them: Io is very volcanically active, while Europa is covered in ice and our Moon is dry and inert.

Io and Europa, like Ganymede and Callisto, got their names – the moons, I mean – because their namesakes were all lovers of Zeus, the god also known as Jupiter. Well, perhaps I should say they were all seduced by Zeus. Actually, with Io, it’s not even quite that. Zeus saw this maiden and came to her and night and whispered to her, and though she resisted, her father (Inachus) finally turfed her out, fearing trouble, and Zeus came down and had his way with her. Zeus’s wife, Hera, came snooping, so Zeus turned Io into a cow to conceal her. But Hera knew what was up and asked for Io as a gift. Then she tied her to a tree and set a guard on her. But Zeus got her loose, and then Hera send a gadly after her… Anyway, Io wandered around quite a bit, and in her travels she stopped by Prometheus, who was bound to a rock. Many years later, one of Io’s descendants (yes, she had a baby by Zeus, after she got turned back into a human) – Heracles (a.k.a. Hercules) – would free Prometheus. (Meanwhile, on the moon Io, there’s a volcano called Prometheus. The moon Io has no horns but it sure has a complexion problem.)

Now, mind you, the Greek myths have various variations depending on the source. They don’t provide completely fixed, reliable, and consistent narratives; they practically invite new inputs and outputs. And a classical work such as Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, when performed in Canada in the modern era – an age where 1 and 0 are much better known than Io – will unavoidably have modern perspectives and modern inputs and outputs. Or postmodern – why pretend there’s a reliable metanarrative to adhere to? Mix and match and see what you can get. Flip from English to classical Greek in the middle of the play, for instance.

That’s just what Philip McCoy did when he directed Prometheus Bound at the University of Calgary in 1987. And I got the best bit: to the sound of Philip Glass’s funeral march from Akhnaten, I entered – in full classical Greek costume, including sandals, robe, and complete head mask – and recited, in a classical Greek dramatic style – keening, emotional, undilute, all-or-nothing – the monologue of Io, in classical Greek. It was a moment – indeed, a good two minutes – handed on a silver platter, from τίς γῆ; τί γένος; Tis gé? Ti genos? (“What land? What people?”) through ἰὼ ἰὼ πόποι, ποῖ μ᾽ ἄγουσι τηλέπλαγκτοι πλάναι; Io io popoi, poi m’agousi téleplanktoi planai (“Ah, ah, alas, where are you taking me, my far-wandering wanderings?”) to the final cry, κλύεις φθέγμα τᾶς βούκερω παρθένου; Klueis phthegma tas boukero parthenou? (“Do you hear the cry of the cow-horned maid?”)

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Europe

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 9 comments

At the time I’m writing this, the EU is saying to Greece, “You’re up!” As in “You’re up to bat,” “Your number’s up,” and, well, “Europe… are you in or what?”

Anand Shukla, who suggested tasting Europe (I’ve tasted Europe, and I’m quite fond of it, but I have not before tasted the word Europe), says “Europe, contrary to my expectations, has nothing to do with either eu or rope.” And that is a pity, since eu in Greek-derived words such as euphony and euthanasia means “good” or “pleasant” and with rope we could talk about “blessed be the ties that bind” with regard to the European Union. And, on the other hand, rope makes me think of ropa, which in Spanish means “clothes”, and since eu sounds like new we might be reminded of the king’s (or emperor’s) new clothes, which is about what some people think of the euro.

Speaking of the euro, events in Greece are becoming not only dramatic but potentially drachmatic (the drachma being the unit of currency that Greece forsook for the euro and is now, at least in some quarters, for seeking to return to). But some people think that the Greeks are being rather selfish (I’m reminded of eu, Portuguese for “I”), and taking all sorts of money from the rest of Europe without so much as saying thanks (in Greek, ευχαριστώ eucharisto – note that in modern Greek that’s pronounced like “efharisto”). One wonders whether that sound “europe” that you hear is just the sound of a colossal burp after digesting all that German dough.

But, then, what exactly is that sound we hear when we say Europe? It just happens that that first syllable varies somewhat between the various European languages: /ju/, /εu/, /ɔɪ/, /ø/, /εv/… Some rounded, some not; some diphthongs, some monophthongs; lips out, lips in, lips wide, lips narrow… And of course the rope is ropa in most countries too. But the pronunciation of the /r/ is another point of variance: retroflex, uvular, trill?

And somehow we expect all these different people, who don’t even pronounce the name of their common geographical unit the same, to get together and agree on all sorts of important things? Well, it’s not impossible. Or is it?

But where does this word come from, anyway? As befits any truly epic name, no one is entirely sure. It may come from Europa, who, according to Greek myth, was a Phoenician princess – descended from Io (the cow-horned maid) – who (like Io) was seduced by Zeus (a common occurrence in Greek myth), who came to her in the form of a bull. Mmm, yup, she took the bull. And the bull took her. (“Sometimes, señor, you ride the bull, and sometimes the bull rides you.”)

She also (again like Io) gave her name to a moon of Jupiter, by the way – the moon that is covered with ice, very smooth ice, which suggests that there is water beneath it. Which suggests that there may be life there. Not just in the mind of Arthur C. Clarke (read 2010 – it wasn’t historical fiction when it was written), but in a not altogether unreasonable estimation.

And where does Europa’s name come from? Uncertain. Many origins have been proposed. A longstanding account, now in doubt, is that it comes from words meaning “broad eyes” or “broad face”. (Pity it wasn’t “bright eyes” – then I would have had a Bonnie Tyler tangent.) Or perhaps “open-minded”. On the other hand, it may have been from Akkadian for “go down, set [as in the sun]”.

But of course, for most people, Europe has flavours that have nothing to do with mythic damsels or moons of Jupiter (don’t forget, incidentally, that Jupiter was just what the Romans called Zeus… so the two seduced maidens, Io and Europa, are eternally mooning over their seducer). If someone mentions Europe to me, I immediately think of my favourite place to travel to, a place with a cultural depth that I simply can’t get in Canada (well, maybe in Quebec, to some extent), a place that is home to the cultural mythos that I have inherited, a place I idolized and fantasized about before first visiting at age 16, a place my honeymoon and most of my other best trips have been to. Yes, yes, I know, for people who live there it’s just as ordinary as Canada is for me. The grass is greener etc. But all aesthetics are personal.

Which also means that Europe can have very different meanings for other people. I know that many Americans think of it as some kind of socialist hell (I will resist further comment, and let me tell you, that’s a real effort on my part). Some Britons see it as a set that does not at all include them; others disagree. Your own personal images, expectations, and experiences will certainly shape the flavour of this word for you. Common, important words like this have a markedly different history for every person.

Nor does it help that Europe names a continent that is really somewhat arbitrarily (at least recently, as in since the continents drifted to their current locations) a continent. If you think of Europe as the head and Asia as the body, you have to confess that there is no neck. At. All. Somehow Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan are Asian, while just over the mountains Russia and Chechnya and Ossetia are European… but Russia runs across the Ural mountains (and a non-salient line that stretches from them to the Caspian Sea) into Asia. It’s the largest country on both continents, without having to jump across water. (Turkey is also on both continents, but in its case they are separated by the Bosporus, which comes from Greek for “cow’s ford”, supposedly named – oh, here it comes again – for Io having crossed there.)

One thing is certain, still: whether Greece wants to be part of Europe or not, whether the sun is setting on the euro and the EU or not, Europe (and of course Europa) is from Greek.

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Why? Because it’s a complete sentence.

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 9 comments

A colleague was wondering whether, in something such as the title of this post, the b in because should be lower-cased, since Because it’s a complete sentence isn’t a complete sentence.

Of course, lower-casing the b wouldn’t result in the formation of a more complete sentence, and it would make a difference in how it could be read – a lower-cased follow-on after a question tends to imply that what follows is an explanation or addendum to the question, whereas a capital tends to indicate a response. But the important point I want to make today is that Because it’s a complete sentence actually is a complete sentence.

A complete sentence has a subject (sometimes implied) and a predicate. In this sentence, it is the subject and is a complete sentence is the predicate. Nor is there in reality a rule that a sentence can’t begin with a conjunction; that’s actually just a superstition invented a couple of centuries ago by people who didn’t understand what they were talking about (notably one Robert Lowth, who vandalized English teaching quite badly in 1762 with a book of inane invented superstitions that caught on). It was no problem for Shakespeare or the translators of the King James Bible, among other true standard-setters.

But the sense of the sentence is incomplete, one may protest! It requires something to have come before! Um, so? We have no issue with beginning sentences with other discourse markers that relate them to previous sentences (However, it’s a complete sentence – no one calls that incomplete, but you couldn’t start an essay with it; it requires a preceding sentence), and we have no issue with such things as pronouns that refer to entities in other sentences (most of the times we use he, she, or it we are referring to an entity established in a different sentence, so the sentence is not self-sufficient). The fact that a sentence in isolation is semantically incomplete does not make it syntactically invalid.

(It occurs to me that a church can be quite a good place to let opening conjunctions pass unremarked, even at the very start of a passage. A famous hymn begins “And can it be that I should gain an interest in my saviour’s blood?” A common Christmas reading from the Bible starts “And in that country there were shepherds.”)

Meanwhile, no one seems to have qualms about Why? even though it is clearly less complete than the sentence that followed.

It’s true that certain registers (tones, contexts, levels of use) tend to exclude the use of conjunctions at the start of sentences; this is because someone made up that “rule” and the people who established those registers tended to adhere to it. But registers also shift over time in what they allow, and even formal writing is gradually coming back to match ordinary English – and the English of Shakespeare and other greats – in this respect.

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mainframe

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 6 comments

Well, this is a nice, simple, straightforward word, made of two simple, easily serviceable bits that have been in English as long as there has been an English: main and frame. The overt sense is “principal supporting structure” or “basic framework”. It was used first in application to heavy equipment – of course, it’s not the frame that does the glamorous part of the work, but nothing at all could happen without it.

But in 1964, two important things happened to mainframe: it gained a new meaning, and a future mainframe alpha-geek – my brother, Reg Harbeck – was born. The mainframe is now known as a kind of computer, a very big kind (these days, about 7 feet tall, 6 feet wide, and 4 feet deep – that used to be small for a computer, but it’s enormous compared to my Mac Mini. My brother, on the other hand, is about 6 feet tall and about a foot and a half wide and deep). I learned in high school that mainframes were big, old, dusty, clunky machines, hoary things that were the computer equivalent of dinosaurs. I also learned a number of other things that turned out to be false, but few so egregiously so – and yet pervasively believed – as that.

Let me quote from The Devil’s IT Dictionary:

mainframe
n. 1. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year’s run twice as fast as last year’s. n. 2. A large PC peripheral

Let me put it this way: everyone you know uses a mainframe. Including you. Unless you don’t have an ATM card, a credit card, insurance, a bank account, a pension plan… or pay taxes. Getting out cash? That’s you, personally, operating a mainframe interface. What, you thought they used PCs to do that?

My brother has been so kind as to write a pocket encyclopedia entry for me on the topic (he writes quite a lot on mainframes, so this was an easy whip-off for him):

On April 7, 1964, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe. At the time, there were a number of other kinds of mainframe in use or in development. Mainframe, of course, refers to the “frames” of magnetic core memory which predated modern transistor memory. The cabinet containing these frames of memory led to the term main frame computer.

Over the past 47 years, that IBM mainframe computer has grown to become the one that powers the global economy, while the other types of “mainframe” eventually fell by the wayside after losing successive battles with IBM’s mainframe and then PCs. The IBM mainframe never blue screens or gets viruses or trojan horses. And IPLs (“initial program loads” – the mainframe version of a reboot) may be years apart. In fact, it’s common for mainframe downtime to average in the order of 5 minutes a year, i.e., 99.999% uptime.

Additionally, a given mainframe may be running hundreds – or thousands – of applications concurrently, at 99+% busy with no degradation in performance. That contrasts sharply with all other platforms still in common use, which tend to run no more than one data-intensive application per machine (office-type user-oriented applications are not intensive in comparison), and slow down to a crawl when they get over 30% busy (but average closer to 5% busy).

Interestingly, there are only about 10,000 mainframes in use in the world today, by the largest 4,000 organizations on earth – and there have never been more. The mainframe hasn’t gone away. Instead, it has worked so well that all the other computers can focus their processing power on user-oriented activity such as presentation, allowing those mainframes to take care of the massive data processing that keeps the world economy functioning, with any exceptions to that function arising from political and business, not technical, considerations.

Today’s leading-edge mainframe, IBM’s zEnterprise, is the highest-performing ever, and even has the ability to have other Unix, Linux and Windows computers “bolted on” to it as zBX Blade Centers to run all the critical applications in an entire enterprise, regardless of which platform they were written for. That way, those applications that were written for non-mainframe platforms can still benefit from the massive, secure, high-performing, reliable back-end processing of the mainframe while doing their additional work with that data and processing in a closely coupled and secure configuration.

Yes, Virgina, there is a mainframe, and it keeps the world economy running, and even plays nicely with every other platform out there, almost invisibly keeping the largest organizations on earth running their critical data processing smoothly and reliably.

But mainframes still don’t get no respect. And mainframers are typically somewhat older than the average computer person. This is in no small part because computer programmers tend to learn their craft at institutions that don’t have mainframes, so they’re used to smaller machines and thus tend to lean towards them in their careers and to push their employers towards them. This in spite of the fact that such computers are very inefficient because they were designed for very constrained applications and environments, and building a large application on such a basis is like trying to build a large castle with only ten square metres of land and a lot of cantilevers.

Or, to put it another way yet, consider this quote from The Economist in 1984: “Mainframes, which are used by big businesses for their centralised data processing, are slower than supercomputers (though still very fast).” Reg’s response? “That’s like saying a Bugatti is slower than a drag racer.” Supercomputers do one thing very well. Mainframes do tens of thousands of things very well, and they’ve always been designed to do so.

But they’re like those basic words we have from Old English, the ones that make up the core of our vocabulary. They seem unspectacular, and they don’t get a lot of respect or notice, but they perform a huge number of functions and perform them very efficiently. PC may seem sharp and crisp, and may rhyme internally, but it’s also small – those /i/ vowels are high, and it’s a tiny little initialism. Mainframe is longer, and doesn’t quite rhyme (but very nearly), but it’s warm and friendly and stable, with its easy nasals, and it has a powerful mid-front vowel. Fittingly, it’s not so outgoing (How do you know you’re talking to an extraverted mainframe sysadmin? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you), but  it does the job.

Mainframes are often called big iron. This puts me in mind of the title of a book by Anthony Burgess: Any Old Iron. The book is about the sword Excalibur, which was embedded in a stone until King Arthur pulled it out. The layman may look at such a thing and think, “Woo-hoo, a big rock with a fancy handle. Next?” But when you put them in action, mainframes cut through many a problem quite efficiently.

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hemistich

Posted on November 1, 2011 | 3 comments

Many a mortal || makes rhymes
But pompous poets || prefer apposition
Of available alliterations || alternating evenly
Central caesura || seizing suddenly
Hacking halfways || every hemistich

Thus runs the pattern of Old English alliterative verse, best known from Beowulf, but most entertainingly exemplified in Hrodulf Readnosa Hrandeor. I’ve indicated the pause in the middle – the caesura – with || for clarity (spaces appear with varying consistency). Many other kinds of verse also have a division in half with a break in the middle. One could argue that there is some of it in Robert Service, even (“There are strange things done || in the midnight sun”), but it is certainly a feature of classical poetry and of Anglican chanted psalms.

The pomposity meter really goes through the gothic arches with some renditions of those psalms. I’ve sung with a choirmaster who would have one line run right into the next, but have a two-second pause in the middle of the line. Think of a section like this (with : representing the pause, a convention in the Book of Common Prayer):

O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand : and there is none to help me.
Many oxen are come about me : fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.
They gape upon me with their mouths : as it were a ramping and a roaring lion.

Now imagine it sung like this:

O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand

and there is none to help me.Many oxen are come about me

fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.They gape upon me with their mouths

as it were a ramping and a roaring lion…

You want pompous, pretentious, and formally self-conscious? You got it.

But, ah, this is not about caesuras so exaggerated they seem like seizures. No, today’s word is about the halves that are meant to be stitched together, with the caesura as a hem, not riven like garments in mourning (and sewn to the next person’s garments).

But is it that you stitch them together, or just that you stick them together? True, stick doesn’t seem all that mystic, but think about the exoticism you get whenever you see a ch unexpectedly pronounced /k/. (I say unexpectedly because in choir and school you hardly think twice about it.) And in hemistich, which comes from Greek, the ch comes from the Greek letter chi χ, which as a rule ends up in English sounding as /k/.

The Greek word in this case is στίχος stichos, “line, row, verse”; ἡμι hemi means “half” as always. So then we may ask a couple more questions. First, as Stan Backs, who suggested this word, says, “A hemistich in time saves four and a half?” (He knew that the pronunciation was more sticky, though.) But then there is also the issue of what a sesquistich might be…

Well, macaronic, for one thing, since sesqui is Latin and stich comes from Greek. But we may consider that if a line is a foot in the meter, a line and a half is a meter and a half but also a foot and a half – sesquipedalian. But since a foot and a half is half a metre (roughly), we have made a loop between hemistich and sesquistich; loop after loop makes stitches, and hemistich sesquistich may be a mystic sadistic. Or perhaps a hamitic sasquatch… or a red-nosed reindeer. I mean readnosa hrandeor.

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umpteen

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 4 comments

In today’s Pardon My Planet comic, we see some pre-teen in a bedsheet dunning a dumpy pumpkin-possessing adult for a dump of candy; his line, in response to the adult’s pre-emptive guessing: “Why does everyone keep saying that! For the umpteenth time, I’m a mattress!”

OK, what’s wrong with this picture? To my eyes, it’s a pre-teen using umpteenth. It’s not that no one at all uses it anymore, but such a barely presumptuous exaggeration seems small potatoes indeed for today’s youth, used to living in a world of something like 7 billion people, where national budgetary gambits are measured in the trillions of dollars. We know we are in a universe with about 70 sextillion stars in observable range, and even the little easily loseable chip in my camera can hold more than 8 billion bytes of information – each byte being 8 bits, at that. Geez, when the word umpteen was coined, 8 bits was a dollar, and 8 billion dollars was an unbelievable amount of money, rather than about a ninth of the wealth of just one very rich person.

It’s not that large numbers were not used in prior times; 2500 years ago the classical Greeks often referred to the myriad and the Chinese to wan, both ten thousand; the Indians have long had a lakh, which is a hundred thousand, a crore, which is ten million, and even larger numbers. But consider that in The Maltese Falcon (1941) Joel Cairo offers Sam Spade $5000, and Spade says (sincerely) “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.” In living memory a dime could get you a cup of coffee.

In England a century ago, which is when and where umpteen came into use, you could get into a fair bit of money before you needed to speak of a dozen of anything – after 11 pence was a shilling; although there were 20 shillings to a pound, you had crowns and assorted other intermediate amounts that kept you from often referring to more than a dozen shillings; as to a dozen pounds, that was a fair bit of cash – the equivalent of around a thousand dollars in today’s Canadian or American purchasing power.

Not to belabour the comparison, but to add illumination, consider that in the early 20th century Morse code was still being used commonly for communications – the original binary system, dot-dash, or, as those who used it sometimes called it, iddy-umpty (imitative of the dot and dash in signalling). Now we have phones and other media (including this one) that work by binary communication, but it’s ones and zeros, and they go several million times faster per one or zero. Even my sports watch manages a 2.4 gigahertz signal. That’s not umpteen iddies and umpties per second, that’s a zillion. A gazillion. A squillion. Not a googol, though, not yet.

But umpteen does seem kinda dumpy and dumb next to gigahertz, doesn’t it? It’s just lame. It lacks a certain umph. Heck, it’s a Morse code number. In fact, the ump in umpteen is from umpty – it’s a fill-in-the-blank-teen: if you don’t know exactly how many teen, so you want an umbrella teen term, and you don’t want to be silly and say eleventeen, you can present it as —teen, which is umpty-teen, or just umpteen.

Those of you who still use umpteen may take umbrage at this characterization, to be sure. No need to call an umpire to see if I’m making an ass with my umption: I use it sometimes too. But a pre-teen, still quasi-umbilical? Um, probably not.

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swizzle

Posted on October 30, 2011 | 5 comments

What is it that makes a word like swizzle stick in your mind – and in the vocabulary? What ingredients make it such a tropical cocktail of tastes and associations? Is there an umbrella term for such words? Is English stir-crazy, that it likes to stir crazy words of this kind into the liquor of our tongue?

It’s an electric word to look at, with all those angles: wizzl all lines and sharp points, and the only curves at the ends s e – and the s a softened view of a z, or the z’s a hardened and distorted view of the s, as though reflected in ice cubes. Out of it all one letter projects, l, like that little stick in your cocktail… the swizzle stick, of course (I add the explanation for the non-drinkers).

This word mixes the juice of a swi onset – as in swish, swing, swirl, swivel, words with a certain sway or swoop, that fluid motion – with the spirit of an izzle ending that can suggest busy activity: drizzle, fizzle, frizzle, sizzle, twizzle; there are also the tones of dazzle, puzzle, frazzle, nozzle, and especially guzzle and sozzle. Some come via a Latin-derived iller ending in French; some with the frequentative le suffix in English; some through onomatopoeia; and some evidently by imitation of other words. “What shall I toss in here? Oh, yeah, let’s try a shot of that!” This word is of that last sort and has been with us for a tidy two centuries.

So what is swizzle? Is a swizzle stick a stick you swizzle with? No, it’s a stick you stick in your swizzle. Swizzle is that with which you wet your whistle – it’s booze, especially a mixed drink. If you’d stick a swizzle stick in it, it qualifies, though it may have been a bit more specific at first: Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Dictionary, as opposed to a random dictionary in my house) says “a tall drink, originating in Barbados, composed of full-flavored West Indian rum, lime juice, crushed ice, and sugar: typically served with a swizzle stick.”

In other words, like a caipirinha but with dark rum. The sort of muddled tipple you’d like to guzzle when it’s sweltering out and you’re sweating and sizzling. Skip the little umbrella, and who cares about the frizzle frazzle on the swizzle stick: just sit in your swivel chair and tip this booze into your muzzle until you’re sozzled and dozing and all will be swell.

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ytterbium

Posted on October 30, 2011 | 1 comment

With a word such as this one, we seem to be at the outer limits of English orthography. It is indeed a rare bird. What is the y here? Consonant or vowel?

The answer, of course, as always, is neither: y is not a consonant or a vowel, it is a letter. Letters are not sounds; letters represent sounds, but – especially in English – they don’t always do so consistently. In some languages, y always represents a consonant; in others, it always represents a vowel; in English, it may represent either, and there are several vowels it can represent. It’s a real gold mine of phonemes… or if not gold, then something, anyway.

But we still tend to see it as a possible consonant, especially in unfamiliar words, and doubly so at the beginning of a word, where it nearly always represents a consonant. To see it followed by not just a t but a tt – ! It makes you want to trim some off. Hmmm… instead of ytterbium, how about terbium? or maybe erbium?

Aw, but where’s the fun in that? The word’s utter strangeness catches the eye. And as snarled and snagged as it may see, there’s something inside it that says I’m buttery. You want to read it backwards; you want to mix it up; you want to find rum, Betty, mutter, tribe, and even an incomplete muliebrity.

And what does it name? The ium ending should make it elementary… or anyway elemental. It’s an element, number 70 on the periodic table. It’s one of the rare earth elements, useful in combination with others to do quite a lot of tidy things. It’s also found mixed in with other rare earth elements, as rare earth elements tend to be. You will find it with, among others, terbium, erbium, and yttrium. Do these seem suspiciously similar? They were all originally identified in a mine in Ytterby, along with a few others (holmium, thulium, and gadolinium, named after Stockholm, Thule – a mythical name for Sweden – and Johan Gadolin, the person who originally identified them).

Ytterby! Where the heck is that? Look at those oarlocks, the Y and y – is this someplace you take a boat to get to? It had better be someplace nice, with a name like that! Well, but of course if you’re Swedish the name doesn’t seem so odd. In Swedish, by means “village” and ytter means “outer” (and is, yes, also cognate with utter), making its English equivalent something like Outerton. And those y’s in Swedish represent a high front rounded vowel, like in German fünf and French lune. And, by the way, in Swedish they say both /t/s – so not like in utter but like in coattail. But since that is quite outside the limits of English phonotactics, we say it with the beginning like “it” and the vowel after the b like the vowel in be.

Anyway, Ytterby is on an island (Resarö) near Stockholm, Sweden. It has – or had – a quarry, which existed for mining feldspar for use in porcelain. But a part-time chemist noticed an odd black rock in the quarry and sent it to full-time chemists for analysis. And it turned out that it contained a bunch of elements not previously identified – elements that actually took the best part of a century for various people to finally isolate and identify. Because sometimes something that looks kind of odd turns out to have a variety of interesting things in it.

One thing I like in particular, incidentally, is that yttrium (not ytterbium, but yttrium) is commonly found in the earth called yttria, which contains sesquioxide of yttrium: Y2O3.

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Math… amazing

Posted on October 29, 2011 | 5 comments

Every so often someone will forward me one of these “amazing!” math tricks, and I will of course feel compelled to explain just how outrageously simple the math in them actually is. The latest one going around is even simpler and more obvious than most, and yet people still seem impressed by it:

Take the last two digits of the year you were born, add your age this year, and it will add up to 111. Amazing!

I have to say, I’m kind of amazed that it’s not gobsmackingly obvious to absolutely everyone who can add and subtract two digits. But so many people will do anything to avoid arithmetic, so it seems to have that “magic wand” quality pretty readily.

So OK. Say someone were to send you an email that said “The year you were born plus your age this year equals 2011 – but only this year! Amazing, huh?” Wouldn’t you find that obvious? Now, 2000–1900=100, and you were born in the 1900s (we assume no one under 12 years old got the email), and it’s 2011 now…

Put it another way: if you subtract 1900 from everything, as though 1900 were the year 0, this year would be the year 111; and if you start with the last two digits of your birth year, you’re subtracting 1900, so…

There are some really cool number tricks out there. But you don’t too often see them being passed around in emails, because different people have different definitions of “cool”.

At the very least, they could try tricks that use more than just disguised simple addition and subtraction. For instance, there are fun facts such as that your age (or any two-digit number) plus the reverse of your age (e.g., 49+94) will always be divisible by 11 (in fact, it will be 11 times the sum of the digits in your age); your age minus the reverse of your age, or the reverse of your age minus your age (e.g., 94–49) will always be divisible by 9; your age minus the sum of its digits (e.g., 49–13) will also always be divisible by 9… And the digits of any number divisible by 9 will always add up to a number divisible by 9, which means if you have any two-digit number divisible by 9 and add its digits, you will get 9 or (in the case of 99) a number the digits of which add to 9.

All of this is explainable with simple algebra on the basis that a two-digit number cen be represented as ten times a one-digit number plus another one-digit number, e.g., 49=(4×10)+9.

So for any number 10x+y (e.g., 40+9, where x=4 and y=9), the reverse will be 10y+x (e.g., 90+4), meaning if you add 10x+y (the original number) to it you get 11x+11y (e.g., 40+9+90+4=44+99), and if you subtract the reverse you get 9x–9y (e.g., (40+9)–(90+4)=40+9–90–4), and if you subtract the sum of the digits (x+y, e.g., 4+9) you get 9x (because 10x+y–(x+y)=9x, e.g., 40+9–(4+9)=36). And of course 10x+y+10y+x=11x+11y=(x+y)×11.

So assuming a person of a normal adult age, you can say

1. Take your age (e.g., 49).
2. Add the digits together (e.g., 4+9=13).
3. Subtract that from your age (e.g., 49–13=36).
4. Add the numbers of the resulting number together (e.g., 3+6).
5. The answer is 9.

Of course, you want to gussy this up with something fancy. Add in some other calculations to distract. Instead of step 5, maybe say

5. Multiply by the last two digits of the year.
6. The answer is 99. This always works!! But it will only work this year!!! And not again for a hundred years!!!! OMG it’s amazing tell all your friends!!!!11

or, if you think they can handle the math (!), say

5. Now add your age to the reverse of your age (e.g., 49+94).
6. Divide the result by the sum of the numbers in your age (the number in step 2).
7. Multiply this by the number from step 4.
8. The result is the answer to the question “Who’s the greatest hockey player of all time?”!!! OMG Gretzky rules!!! Number 99 forever!!!!

Even this is pretty straightforward for people who like to think about numbers. But there aren’t that many of us. Anyone who graduated from high school is officially able to figure this sort of thing out easily. But as long as people think math is hard and mystifying…

I suppose you could argue that the general “Numbers! Oh noooooes!” attitude people tend to have in our culture allows them actually to have fun with simple things like this, but it deprives them of the much greater fun they can have with more complex number problems, and it makes them easy marks for misleading advertising, misleading politicians, and so on. And generally vulnerable to making dumb mistakes. There’s a classic Dilbert cartoon (two of them, in fact) illustrating this – see http://search.dilbert.com/comic/40%25%20Sick.

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