philtrum

Posted on October 29, 2011 | 5 comments

If you’ve read my note on aglet, you know already that this is a word for something that needs a name but doesn’t have it, but actually does. It’s something you see every day and might just occasionally wonder what to call. Don’t you just love those? Ha. As in they get up your nose.

Looking at this word, you can see classical origins – or perhaps pseudo-classical, in the mode of the Victorian/Edwardian era fads for inventions and fancies such as phlogiston and names such as Phineas. That ph bespeaks a Greek origin, probably brought down to us by way of Latin. And, come to think of it, that whole phil looks phamiliar – excuse me, familiar. Perhaps related to the Greek philos “love”, as in philosophy “love of wisdom”, Philadelphia “place of brotherly love”, and Philip “person with a lip shaped like the letter phi (φ)” – sorry, no, it’s from Philippos “horse lover”.

On the other hand, it also makes me think of plectrum, which is a fancy word for pick as in guitar pick – that triangular thing you use to provoke strings to vibrate. If music be the food, of love, pick on! And if it’s really groovy, take your pick.

Take your pick and do what? Or take your pick of what? How about taking your pick of people with upper lips with grooves in them? Well, that’s kind of everybody, isn’t it… though some people’s grooves are more pronounced than others. I tend to think of Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0TYun-Nq1Q for a version of the “Head Over Heels” video with lyrics describing the action – a digression but really funny), though his isn’t really abnormally pronounced; I did know a few other guitar pickers around that time who looked as though they had vertical equal signs under their noses. It always seemed kind of self-important to me, which is in some sense the opposite of groovy.

Anyway, yes, where I’m going with this is that the groove in your upper lip – anyone’s upper lip (except some with fetal alcohol syndrome) – coming down from the nose is called the philtrum. Some legends say it’s where an angel touches a baby’s lip before birth. But others relate it to Aphrodite (you will see the ph balance going up here, and that’s not baseless). Philtrum is a Latin word meaning not only “groove in the upper lip” but also “love potion” – taken from the Greek philtron, which has the same two meanings. The “love potion” meaning is now normally spelled philtre – although, frankly, love potions are more likely to bear the legend unfiltered these days. And then you can nose them, wafting the scent up past your philtrum. And feel groovy (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQxG0Z72qM for that musical reference – though neither Simon nor Garfunkel has a pronounced philtrum).

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aglet

Posted on October 26, 2011 | 9 comments

This is a name for one of those things that need names but don’t have them – except that they do, but the average user is agnostic of them. Our daily life is certainly laced with such things; some people will call them thingies, others will make up cute nonce words (often called sniglets, a term and concept created by Rich Hall of Not Necessarily the News), while agelasts will simply describe them or say “Ag, let it go.” The capper, of course, is when we find out that there was a word for them all along.

I first saw today’s word in The Book of Lists, by Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace, in a list called “16 names of things you never knew had names.” As I look again at the list now, after a couple of decades, I find that I might as well be seeing some of the words for the first time, while others are like old friends now. (I’m also surprised to see that the list does not include philtrum. Now, where did I first see that one?) And the top of the list is, yes, aglet: “The plain or ornamental covering on the end of a shoelace.” (Am I sorry for stringing you on for so long? No.)

It’s a strange little animal, this word, no? It tastes of piglet and eaglet (but not in the way an eaglet would taste a piglet). You know it’s something little thanks to the let ending, but what thing is it a little version of? It is in some ways a stringy word, its brevity nothwithstanding; it has a hint of ligate tied into a knot; the g has a look of a bow, and the l of a straight string. It’s a short word for a typically not-too-long thing, but, then, how long is a piece of string?

As long as it has to be, is the usual answer. And this word, too, has settled to a useful length – well, not quite settled: it’s also spelled aiglet. But it’s had half a millennium of erosion since we stole it into English. It used to be much longer, back when it was a French word, but why leave the speaker tongue-tied? You may find it (and its taste) ugly or elegant, but at least it’s efficient at less than half the original length. OK, I’m not stringing you along, just giving you a little needling – or rather a little needle: this word is knotted up from aiguillette, “little needle”, tracing back to Latin acus “needle” and cognate with acute. As in “That’s acute pair of shoes you have.”

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well-being

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 1 comment

Ah, just home from an evening at the spa. After being rubbed like an old lamp, I emerged into a cloud of steam like a genie and splashed around in the water like a naiad, and now I feel sprightly. My spirits are raised – not as in a séance, but as in bienséance, bienêtre. Well-being.

That’s the word in spas, displayed proudly in the logo of this one: well-being. I see it a lot, not just in spas but anywhere good health is being marketed or enjoined. I see it as an open compound (well being), a closed-up one (wellbeing), and a hyphenated one (well-being). Well, being a transparent compound of basic Anglo-Saxon parts as it is, its variety of forms is unsurprising. It’s almost as though it’s being re-coined every time.

Anyway, spirits come in a variety of forms. Spirits? Mmhmm. I can’t see this word without thinking of a sprite, a naiad, one of those wet spirits that dwell in wells. No, I don’t mean well drinks, i.e., the cheap wet spirits they pour at the bar. For the well-being you don’t leave your coins in a pool of stale gin; you toss them in the water and make a wish. If you’re lucky, you may get a message; if you’re at a spa, you may get a massage.

But, of course, since my vocation is equivocation, you may take it as given that all that is well is not “well”, and vice versa. We all want to be the well that is whole, but we mostly don’t want to be the well that is hole. Wellness is the wellspring of being, and water is the stuff of life, but we want to be true to ourselves, not trous to ourselves. And yet we can’t help being our own wells: not just the source of water but the hole we fall into. To quote a poem I wrote years ago:

Well it is like
water one moment your
head is above one
below sometimes you fly
high above the surface
sometimes you sink below
into the depths where
air and light are
barely more than memory
but always you return
when you stop flapping
you fall when you
stop swimming you float
(where did I get
this stone I’m holding)
Well I am in
the water and the
water is in me
I will not drown
or fall but sometimes
oh often I struggle

But remember that the only way we have water in the well is because it came down from above before. It’s always a cycle. You are your own well-being, and the water is in you as you are in it, but it all comes from somewhere else. To quote another poem:

I am in love with
the possibility, I can only
become by not being, I
choose to lose, I am
my own hole in which
all is lost so I
may find it, it may
spring forth like water I
have never tasted. But always
I must forget so that
I may see fresh, I
must believe I am not
well, I am not hole,
I am only the seeker
longing to find the way
to the spring, wandering through
the desert with the map
forgotten in my back pocket.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you get it it’s only because you didn’t have it – or thought you didn’t have it – before. Is that well-being? It may not seem to be the spirit of the spa, but I throw money into the spa and, after rubbing and steam and splashing, the genie emerges – and it’s me again.

Note: trous is French for “holes”.

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How come it can’t be used?

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 12 comments

I’m reading a text on minimalist syntax right now, borrowed from the library. One of the previous readers has been of the self-appointed editor type – a sort of person generally looked on by real editors about the same as vigilantes are looked on by real law enforcement officers. For instance, everywhere the author has put combined together or merging together, this person has struck out the together with black pen. (Strictly speaking, things A and B could each be combined with other things and not together, although it’s true that combined when used of two things normally implied “together” unless stated otherwise.)

On page 65, there’s an extra bit of ink: the phrase how come it can’t be used to answer A’s question has had cross-outs, writing in and an arrow to change it to why can’t it be used to answer A’s question.

Sigh. Yes, the how come phrasing is more words. Yes, it’s less formal. But it’s not incorrect. And clearly the author wanted that less formal phrasing – more casual and also less pointed. Does it suit the tone of the book? Indeed it does, as it happens. Strange as it may seem to some, adding words can (depending on the words) have the effect of relaxing prose and making it more friendly.

But the vigilante seems to be someone who just has a couple of bees in his (or her) bonnet. Obviously he/she/it is not especially thoughtful or careful. After all, the next sentence gets by unaltered: The answer which we shall give to this question here is that… A person dedicated to concision could cross out most of that to make The answer is that… but that would be less precise even as it’s more concise. It could be The answer in this instance is that… but that would change the tone. Either would be consistent with the other changes the vigilante has made, but neither relates to a specific prescriptivist hobby-horse, so it gets a pass.

It may be that trimming the sentence would be an improvement. That’s a judgement call. But it’s not the sort of judgement evinced by our vigilante, who is simply making sporadic attacks of black ink to swat bees in the bonnet.

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evening

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 3 comments

If the day has been odd, you need an evening out. Indeed, the evening evens out not just your moods and the odds the day has stacked against you; it evens out the light – gradually to nil – and the colours, too: as Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues wrote,

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

You decompress and the colours desaturate. But the light levels are not so even – if you are near light sources, the light is reliable and directional, but highly contrasty. This is why I like photography in the evening: as Robert Browning wrote,

Was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day.

The long /i/ that opens evening gives ease, but the /v/ vibrates still… and then it soothes as it fades back in the mouth from the /I/ to a final nasal, the tongue rolling out like a wave relaxing away from the shore (perhaps on Echo Beach). An evening may have verve; it may even bring a frisson (think of a sepulchral tone greeting you with “Good evening”). It is when you go to the theatre or the club. But it is not the bright yang of the day; all finally subsides into the yin, the valley spirit (v), the dark half. The bright masculine angel of the day falls (as in William Rimmer’s famous painting “Evening: Fall of Day,” well known in a modified form from the labels of Led Zeppelin records – see www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2008/07/19/william-rimmers-evening-swan-song/), Apollo recedes, to be replaced by the evening star – Venus. And Adam gives way to Eve.

The eyes grow heavy-lidded e and e, the only salience is the candle i, and at the end it descends further g to night… The evening stretches from dinner to bed, when mother night overtakes us and we are level.

Laurie Miller, in suggesting this word to me, wrote, “The ‘evening’ has a lovely sound. Does it reproduce the effect on a landscape of the daylight’s dying? Colours do even out, and differences in texture and elevation go away. Is that awareness, of diminishing differences as night comes, common in other languages?” Well… the first question is whether that is even where it comes from.

Of course, the homonymy with even as in “level, flat” has an undeniable effect in English. But it is in fact a coincidence. Evening comes from a word even that we still see in uses such as eventide as well as in shortened eve form; it comes from Old English æfen, cognate with Dutch avond and German Abend. Even as in “divisible by two” and “level, flat” (and “equally”, even) comes from efen, cognate with Dutch even and German eben.

In other languages, the form may be quite different from one for “level” or “flat”  (and some do not distinguish evening from night at all). French has soir, and Italian sera, but Spanish and Portuguese have tarde, focusing on lateness; Mandarin has wan (or more fully wanshang), which is also used in reference to lateness; Latin has vesper; Hebrew has erev (which makes me think of the song “Erev shel shoshanim,” “Evening of Roses”); Irish has tráthnóna (said sort of like “tra no na”), while Breton has abardaez; Slavic languages tend to have a “v-ch-r” pattern, as in Polish wieczór and Russian вечер vecher (which makes me think of the song “Podmoskovnie vechera,” commonly but not quite accurately called “Moscow Nights” in English); Finnish has ilta and Indonesian has malam… These generally have nothing in particular in common with evenness, but all have flavour sets of their own in their own languages.

But in English the two have come to have parallel forms, and so we may multiply the meanings. Think of two lines = and in them find equality, levelness, divisibility by two (and indeed the Chinese numeral for “two”), but also the horizon and clouds at sunset, and the table of food, and the body or bodies in bed. Two is the only even prime number; all others are odd. We may think of odd numbers and prime numbers as like the day – oppositional, singular, yang – and even numbers as like the night – receptive, cooperative, soft, yin, recessive in addition but dominant in multiplication – and we may see that there is one place that the two meet, the romancing of the numbers at the conjunction of the prime and the even: evening. The phrase at even and at prime means “at all times of the day,” but we know that evening is when it all comes together.

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What would you need in order to know if this is right?

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked about a sentence such as “What additional information would you need in order to determine if XYZ will actually happen?” Should the will also be would?

The answer is that it depends. Is the possibility of XYZ happening also contingent or hypothetical? If it’s something that may or may not happen regardless of whether you make a determination in advance, then “will” is preferable:

If you were a weatherman, what information would you need in order to determine whether it will be cloudy tomorrow?

On the other hand, if XYZ’s occurrence is hypothetical, then “would” is correct:

If you were obsessed with a star, what information would you need to determine if he/she would accept your proposal of marriage?

It’s possible to have a hypothetical with bearing on a real event, so we can’t insist on concord between the conditionals without looking at the sense.

Incidentally, some people will insist that you should always shorten in order to to plain to. In fact, while there are places where the shortening can be accomplished to good effect, there are others where bare to would be ambiguous:

These are the dishes I need in order to cook. [Without these casseroles and plates, I can’t cook.]

These are the dishes I need to cook. [I need to cook these dishes.]

And how about if versus whether?  While whether is more formal and has no possible ambiguity, if is very well established in such usage, and has been used by far better authors than the ones who will tut-tut you for using it. Again, consider tone and clarity.

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crepuscular

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 8 comments

I went on a road trip with two friends today. As we were driving across the Burlington Bay Skyway, we observed the quasi-stygian landscape (Burtynskyesque) of the steel mills. But it’s really quite a tame sight now compared to what it once was; one has the sense of the steel industry gradually fading into twilight years. I recalled my first encounter with Hamilton, as a child, when a family friend, driving me and my brother from the airport in Toronto to my dad’s childhood stomping grounds in Buffalo, had us put on masks to protect our lungs from the air there; when we stopped for gas, the air had a definite orange cast.

My friend Alex’s response? “It made spectacular sunsets.” True enough: clear air makes for fairly plain sunsets – the more crap you have in the air, the more spectacular the sunsets tend to be (as long as you can see them), layered like crepe paper, sometimes with almost muscular striations (though, in the wrong smog, creeping and pustular). Your eyes tell you to breathe deep the gathering gloom (to quote from the Moody Blues); your lungs beg you not to.

But I mislead: crepuscular does not relate to sunsets, not directly. Rather, it relates to what follows them, something that comes in ample quantity in boreal latitudes and is brutally fleeting in the tropics: twilight.

Oh, great, now I’m going to get people coming to this page because they were searching for stuff on vampires. Ugh. I haven’t read the Twilight series, so I have no direct comments on its merits, but in general I’m not strongly inclined to read about creeps and corpuscles. It sounds craptacular to me. I’m not here for tweens (other than exceptionally literate ones); I’m here today to talk about the between times – between night and not night. When darkness covers us, it is not the vampire’s cape, not the shades we are dragged into by a creeper, but rather the dull crepe of the creper, which is Latin for “dark”. Make a diminutive of that and you have crepusculum, the lesser darkness: what we experience as the suddenly frantic half-dark.

The Romans tended to use the term more for dawn than for dusk, it seems, but dusk is more in our experience now. True, many of us in northern countries wake in the pre-dawn twilight for much of the year, but few people are not up and about and looking out during the dimming hours. It’s a time when we probably finish work and settle into our home-oriented routines, perhaps to settle in for a favourite sitcom, or go out for leisure and pleasure. The word twilight has a certain dreamy quality to it, an echo of night and a persistence of light. But the word crepuscular, an adjective for twilight, is more likely to send a shiver down the back, as though some unexpected furry thing were brushing against you, or perhaps a chupacabra were licking its chops in your carport.

True, this word hides sup and even super backwards, but in its crisp crackle and hiss (reminiscent of the sound from an old gramophone record set to play by a fireplace in a cabin in the grasslands a century back) we find no plenitude of positive associations as it passes over our tongues and by our eyes in a forward direction. Some people will like the taste of this word, but there are others who find it – as Elaine Phillips, in requesting this tasting, put it – sinister.

Still, even the not-pretty can have aesthetic value. The hazy air of Hamilton’s harbour presented a prepossessing picture. And from there we rode on, not into the sunset or twilight but just to Buffalo, where one of us owed the other two of us lunch (for losing a bet), at the Cheesecake Factory – we may not be Twilight fans, but we do watch The Big Bang Theory.

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Macon

Posted on October 23, 2011 | 5 comments

Mmmm… bacon. Salt, fat, protein… what’s not to like? But the question one inevitably runs into is, What kind of wine do you drink with it?

Aside from champagne, I mean. How about a nice chardonnay? I don’t mean one of those hello-sailor Australian or Californian oak-stick-in-your-face hyper-buttery chards – talk about gilding the lily. No, try something a little crisper to cut through the fat, maybe a little toasty, just a little edge of fried food in the nose. I won’t pussy-foot around this: you want a Pouilly-Fuissé, or some other chardonnay from the same region. I’m drinking one such right now: Louis Jadot Mâcon-Villages. The region is the Mâconnais, names after the city of Mâcon, in the Burgundy (Bourgogne) area of France.

You see? The name is perfect: Mmm + bacon = Macon. Of course it would be even more perfect (in word form if not flavour) for macon, which is bacon made from sheep (mutton + bacon), but who eats that outside of Scotland (or even inside of it, for the most part)?

Admittedly, you don’t want to build your culinary house on a masonry of graphemes (letters). It just happens that the wine in question does work nicely with the bacon. I’m sure, on the other hand, that far more bacon than Mâconnais is consumed in Macon. That’s Macon, Georgia, of course: note the a in place of â.

Does Macon, Georgia, have anything in common with Macon, France? Is it in fact named after it? Well, sorta and sorta. Both have hills on one side, so that’s something in common; in Georgia they have streams rushing down them that gave useful fuel to textile mills. In France they have grapes growing all over them. Those hills gave Mâcon it name; it comes from Ligurian mat “mountain” with the suffix asco, and that became Matisco in Latin, which became Mascon in French, and all those s’s that became silent over time got turned into circumflexes – that little peak on top of the a in Mâcon.

Macon, Georgia, was named after Nathaniel Macon, the sixth speaker of the US House of Representatives, a staunch opponent of the constitution and of a strong federal government, a man famous for voting “no” to practically everything (one may speculate bootlessly about sour grapes). His grandfather was Colonel Gideon Macon, an early settler who came from the Loire area of France. Which is where Mâcon is.

Of course Mâcon is pronounced the French way and Macon the English way, meaning the latter rhymes with bacon and the former does not. (Bacon, by the way, comes from a Germanic root cognate with back.) Another pair of words with the same sound pattern, different from this one only by having /s/ instead of /k/, is French maçon and its English translation mason, the English coming from an earlier or variant form of the French, which ultimately comes from a Germanic root probably cognate with make.

There is one other taste I get from Macon: in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, there’s this line: “No I was never in the Macon country! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!” So… where is the Cackon country? Nowhere, actually. It’s a play on Macon, with a (frankly not obvious enough) reference to caca.

Does that seem like a stretch? Well, the thing is, Beckett, though an Irishman, wrote Godot in French first and then translated it to English himself. And in French the line is different: “Mais non, je n’ai jamais été dans le Vaucluse! J’ai coulé toute ma chaude-pisse d’existence ici, je te dis! Ici! Dans la Merdecluse!” You see, it’s not Mâcon, it’s Vaucluse – an area farther south in France. And the counterpart to Cackon is Merdecluse, which replaces vau with merde, the French word for “shit”.

Beckett also used puke in English where in the French he has chaude-pisse. It would be far too disgusting to relate that to chardonnay and bacon in some way, but I can’t help but be reminded by it of Pisse-Dru, which is a red wine made in Beaujolais, which is immediately south of Mâcon. I probably wouldn’t drink it with bacon. Maybe with a Big Mac, though.

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hatch

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 4 comments

“Well, that was a weekend down the booby hatch.” Marilyn Frack looked uncharacteristically like a tired wet hen. Her head was leaning against the heel of her hand, her elbow (in the usual black leather jacket) planted on the table, her whole body slumped in distinct disgruntlement. She lifted her head – and her other hand – long enough to toss a half glass of meritage down the hatch.

“We went sailing,” her other half, Edgar Frick, explained. I thought I heard an apologetic note in his voice.

Marilyn glanced up through her top lashes, which were leaking mascara. “And who hatched that plot, in mid-October?”

Edgar splayed his hand, palm up. “You saw the forecast.” He dashed back some of his glass of Hacker-Pschorr.

“What a hatchet job,” Marilyn said. “Sunny, my itchy cha-chas. The sky was cross-hatched with clouds in the morning, and by lunch we had to batten down the hatches.”

“Yes, well, things did get a little sketchy in the afternoon.”

“Sketchy?!” Marilyn raised her head, her eyes a bit wider. “I thought I was in the coney hatch!” I resisted the usually insurmountable impulse to ask whether she knew that this term for a madhouse came from the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in London, and whether she was a fan of the Canadian rock band Coney Hatch.

“The girls got especially excitable,” Edgar said, a touch ruefully.

Marilyn looked at me. “A clutch of chicks, barely hatched. That’s why he wanted to go on this wretched trip.”

“You seemed rather fond of the crewmen,” Edgar said.

“Chet and Chico? I spent all my time with Chuck. Up-chuck.”

“It was wretched,” Edgar allowed. “And I ratched my back in the parking lot. I was clutching the catch on a hatchback…”

Marilyn smirked. “I thought it was from catching your britches in a hatchway.”

“Well,” I said, hoping to switch the topic. “This is quite an affricate festival we’re having here. And all these Anglo-Saxon words…”

Marilyn looked at me and half-smiled. “Don’t lose your touch, hot-shot. Oh, I have some Anglo-Saxon words to hatch and dispatch at my match…” She glanced over at Edgar, who was doing his best to look like a sorry puppy. “But…” she said with a shrug, “ah, frick it.”

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affricate

Posted on October 19, 2011 | 5 comments

Ah, frick it. It’s about time I got around to doing this word. It just has a certain something: it sits in your mouth hissing and spitting like a fricassee on the griddle, and the sound it refers to is slightly sternutatory: a stop released not suddenly but in a short, sharp spray – or hissing puff of air, anyway. Well, hissing if it’s voiceless; with the voiced ones, that little vibe after the stop can seem to give it an added strength. Or you tell me: which letter sounds stronger to you, d or j? No doubt context plays a role. But affricates, consonantal equivalents of diphthongs, have a complexity most others lack.

What are the affricates? In English, we have only two: /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, what we spell ch and j. But several others are available, and you’ve probably said more than one of them at one time or another in some loan word or piece of another language. It’s probably just a matter of time before /ts/ is accepted as an English sound; its voiced counterpart, /dz/, may or may not follow. Some of you may use /pf/ in loans from German; /bv/ is one you might make inadvertently in an especially sodden “bread”, but not as a distinct sound in its own right. And then there are the ones on the palate – press the middle of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and imitate a sneeze, and you might recognize a sound from the start of an emphatic “cute”, but again, it’s not a distinct sound in its own right – you could say a normal [k] there instead and be making the same word. As to the affricates made with /k/ and /g/ at the start… well, those have a good reason for being rare. And then there’s the lateral one heard at the start of Lhasa when it’s pronounced in the original… I’ll spare you the detailed description.

Some of you may be thinking, “Wait, we have hats and adze and upfront and subvert… what about those?” But an affricate is the conjunction of the stop and fricative done as a single sound, recognized and treated as a single sound, patterning as a single sound. We start words with /tʃ/ and /dʒ/: Chuck and Jim, for instance. We don’t do that with other potential affricates. German has Pfeiffer and Zeitgeist; Japanese has tsunami; we tend in English, when we borrow such words, to reduce or change the sounds. The English examples you can think of are all two sounds treated like two sounds. You can see the difference when you look at one of our affricates against its two-phoneme counterpart: compare ratchet with rat shit.

Others of you may be thinking, “What about /ks/ and /ps/ and sounds like those?” They don’t count; they’re not homorganic: the stop and the fricative don’t use the same part of the apparatus. To make an affricate you start with a stop and then add some friction – a fricative – in the same place. And, yes, the fric in affricate and fricative is the same as in friction: from Latin for “rub”.

The word affricate has stops and a rub – the twin ff like chaff in the breeze standing for the fricative /f/, and of course c and t the stops /k/ and /t/ – but it has no affricate. It does have a sound of African (indeed, affricate is how you would say African if it were Afrikit). Is that ironic? People more readily think of prenasalized stops – such as /nd/ and /mb/ – and clicks when they think of African languages, but that’s just because those are exotic to European ears. Of course affricates can be found in African languages – varying from language to language, naturally; remember that Africa has about two thousand languages in four entirely distinct language families (Niger-Congo [e.g., Swahili, Zulu], Afroasiatic [e.g., Arabic, Hausa], Nilo-Saharan [e.g., Dinka, Masai], and Khoisan [e.g., !Kung, Khoekhoe]; five if you count the Indo-European ones – English, French, etc., as well as the Greek that Cleopatra spoke).

Not all languages have affricates, to be sure, and those that do may not have many. But where you have them, they add a nice extra something that you can just chew on. So to speak.

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