lurch

Posted on October 18, 2011 | 5 comments

When I was a kid, if I wanted to imitate the noise of something (e.g., a car) lurching to a sudden halt, the sound I would make was typically “Rrrrch!” (I suppose you could also spell it “Errrch!” but only if you remember that the nucleus of the syllable is a syllabic /r/, no variety of an e vowel.) The /r/, especially if high pitched, seems to carry a bit of the sound of rubber on road, and the closing affricate /tʃ/ is a classic catch sound, that of something that stops but not quite on a point. There’s a definite taste of screech. One way or another, this is one word that makes me glad I speak with a Canadian accent rather than, say, a British (or a Brooklyn) one. That syllabic retroflex, as infra dig as it may seem, has a certain tension.

Bearing all that in mind, lurch seems a generally sonically appropriate word. Of course things (and people) may lurch into motion, or side to side, rather than to a stop; the point is simply abrupt movement – originally a sudden leaning to one side. The headlong movement seems to work well with the /r/ and the abruptness with the /tʃ/. The one bit that may make you wonder is the /l/: is that not too soft, too liquid? For a truly abrupt motion, perch might perchance seem a better word, but that is instead a word for a place to sit, or the act of sitting on it. Well, maybe the /l/ is the lap of the sea, or maybe it’s the unnoticed lead-up to the big lean.

But what other words have this sound? And does it suit them? To find the answer, you may search, research, and ensearch from your perch, be it on birch or in a church, or just virch, but what you find will besmirch any theory of a phoneastheme here: the various words really have nothing in common other than the sound. I’m inclined to think that phonaesthemes – such as /sn/ having to do with nasal things – tend to show up in the onset, not the rime, of a word. Alas, /rtʃ/ leaves us in the lurch.

And in fact even lurch leaves us in the lurch. You see, the sense “sudden leaning to one side” dates only from the 1700s (and the verb “lean suddenly” to the 1800s), and its apparent progenitor is lee-larches, possibly from lee-latch. Meanwhile, two centuries earlier there was a game called lurch – not a sport, but a table game like backgammon, and it got its name from a Germanic word meaning “left” or “wrong”; if you lost badly, you were lurched (sort of like being snookered). The lurch, from that, is a position in a game where one loses very badly: either completely blanked or, for instance, with less than 30 at the end of a game of cribbage.

Yes, that’s where we get left in the lurch from: being stuck without help in a losing position (it does not necessarily imply that the person who leaves you in the lurch is your opponent – it could be someone who was supposed to be on your side). Nothing to do with jerks, except for the kind who leave you in the lurch. The phrase originated with a gaming sense now long forgotten; it’s just been lurching around since.

Oh, yes, there’s also a verb sense of lurch that means (and is probably related to) lurk. Well, there was one – it’s obsolete now too. It seems that the sense we know best has taken over. I’m tempted to speculate that it’s prevailing thanks to its phonaesthetic appeal. Of course, I have no solid data for that.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

nevertheless, nonetheless, notwithstanding

Posted on October 17, 2011 | 2 comments

Jess held up Arlene’s jacket, which had been missing. (See whereabouts.)

“Oh!” said Arlene. “Whereabouts was it?”

“Hanging off a cupboard in the kitchen,” Jess said, “but wherefore I know not.”

“Wherefore… Is that short for what it was there for?” Arlene said playfully. “How did it get there? Nevertheless, I am glad you found it.”

“Oh!” I said, a lightbulb going on in my head. “When you arrived a bit early we conscripted you immediately into helping bring food and beverage out. We took you into the kitchen and you left your jacket there.”

“Oh yes,” Arlene said, “notwithstanding I was the newbie…”

“Especially because you were the newbie,” I said. “And how do you get involved? Not with standing around waiting!”

“Well, carrying trays of food, I felt like a waiter nonetheless,” Arlene said. “Although, as I know from working for a caterer, they also wait who stand and serve.”

Jess was shaking her head in amusement and mild amazement. “Where did you find her, James?”

“Not without standing around,” I said. “Manning the table at frosh week can be a bit dodgy, but nevertheless there’s always the more.”

“And nonetheless there’s one the more, at least this time,” Arlene said. “Those are nice long words that don’t say a whole lot, aren’t they? Nevertheless, nonetheless, nothwithstanding… insofar as they say anything at all, it’s just ‘but’ or ‘athough’.”

“I believe medieval English law clerks got paid by the letter,” I said.

“Well, not by the word,” Jess said. “Otherwise why concatenate so?”

“Are these words really that old?” Arlene said.

“Older, even,” I said. “Especially earlier versions of them such as netheless and natheless, which come from Old English, before the years were in triple digits. The phrases got used adverbially so much that they got treated as single words. We don’t use natheless anymore because we don’t use na anymore, but none and the now-archaic use of never the and never a to mean ‘not’ have taken over.”

“We use natheless nevermore!” Arlene said.

“I think she’s raven,” Jess quipped.

“Just as we use neverthemore nevermore,” I said, “but it was a word in use at one time, to mean ‘definitely not’.”

“And nevermore means ‘no longer’, as does not anymore,” Arlene said, thinking it through, “so they refer to something that stopped. The converse would be something that hasn’t stopped… Still.”

“Yes,” Jess said, “if something hasn’t stopped still, it still hasn’t stopped. I love how we use still for something that keeps moving. And is therefore not still.”

“Well, what would it still be there for?” I said.

“What are these words still there for, if we have shorter ones that serve?” Arlene said. “Nevertheless they are, their length notwithstanding.”

“Ah, multiple morphemes are the morphine of pompous parlance,” I said. “If we wish to be more formal and authoritative, we often drag in confections of multiple Latin and French bits, but these ones are made of Anglo-Saxon bits: never, the, less; not plus withstanding, which is with on standing, which is stand plus ing.”

“Notwithstanding that notwithstanding is probably based on Latin non obstante,” Jess said. “Still, we could say it at even greater length: ‘It is no less the case that it is so’ rather than ‘Nevertheless, it is so,’ or ‘All of the preceding does not present an obstacle’ rather than ‘All of the preceding notwithstanding.’ But you’re right, the longer words are like verbal truncheons, and the longer ones hit harder. However,” she said, dropping into a chair, “if we’re going to keep on this tack, it will not be without sitting down.”

“Notwithstanding that it sounds like fun,” I said, “my system and my spouse will not withstand a lack of sleep. Enough morphemes, more morpheus for me.”

“And now I have my wherewithal,” Arlene said, putting on her jacket, “something to wear with all the words in my head and the winds outside…”

“I hope it will be withstanding the winds,” Jess said. “It’s a bit breezy out there.”

“And in here,” Arlene said, and smiled. “I’ll see you later.” And with that she breezed out.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs and Elin Cameron for suggesting today’s words.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

whereabouts

Posted on October 16, 2011 | 8 comments

The Order of Logogustation’s monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event was drawing to a close. One of our newest members, Arlene (you may recall her from my note on beg the question and ad hominem), was looking at the chairs around the room.

“Inventorying our assets?” I said.

“It’s more about something to wear,” she said. “My jacket. Its exact present whereabouts are unknown.”

“Magnificent,” I said. “You’ve managed to include three of the top collocations for whereabouts: unknown, present, and exact.”

“True,” she said. “People seldom say that whereabouts are known.”

“In fact,” I said, “if you Google ‘whereabouts are known’ you get the suggestion ‘whereabouts are unknown’. Interestingly, if you Google ‘whereabouts is known’ you get no suggestion and far fewer hits – about fifteen percent as many. The same is/are proportion holds for unknown, but with about ten times as many hits.”

“Well, why would anyone say whereabouts is?” Very brief pause. “I suspect I’m about to find out.”

I was smiling. “It’s not a plural.”

“Of course not,” she said, looking heavenward. “Why should I assume something is a plural just because it looks like one?”

“The s is a survival of the genitive from when it was used to form adverbs – besides, anyways, towards, and so on.”

She looked at me through the tops of her glasses. “Survival of the genitive. Sounds like linguistic Darwinism.”

“Except in language some words and phrases persist long after their environment has changed to one unsuited to them.”

“Well, I’m unsuited for the environment outside,” she said. “If I don’t find something to wear about now, I will lack the wherewithal to get home comfortably, no ifs, ands, or buts.” She continued moving through the chairs. I could see her begin to roll the word around in her mouth silently as she did so: where-a-bout-s. Then she stopped and turned again to me. “So I could actually say ‘Whereabouts is my jacket’?”

“Exactly,” I said. “That was its first use: as a long way of saying ‘where’ or a short way of saying ‘in what area’. Sort of like whatever versus what.”

“Which means,” she said, “I could also say ‘My jacket’s where is unknown.'”

“True, although since we generally no longer devoice the wh, there is risk of confusion.”

“Well, there we are,” she said. “I am confused about the exact present where of my wear.”

“Yes, the whereabouts of what you will wear about outside is unknown.”

Jess came up to us. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re disagreeing with my syntax?”

“Your semantics,” she said. “Its whereabouts may be unknown to you, but they are not – sorry, it is not – to me.” She held up a jacket.

“Oh!” said Arlene. “Whereabouts was it?”

“Hanging off a cupboard in the kitchen,” Jess said, “but wherefore I know not.”

8 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

muumuu

Posted on October 15, 2011 | 5 comments

So… what do you think is better for a woman to wear in a hot climate? Cut-offs or a long, loose dress? Daisy Dukes or a Mother Hubbard? Well, when the missionaries hit the Polynesian islands in the 19th century, they found that the women wore less than the missionaries felt was modest. So they had them wear long, loose dresses with long sleeves and high necklines – what have come to be called Mother Hubbard dresses. The women of Hawai‘i felt that these dresses would be more comfortable with a little less fabric, and so they cut them – no flounces at the bottom, no lace collar at the top, and short sleeves; the dresses hang loosely from the shoulders. They called them “cut off” – a word which in Hawai‘ian is not cut off but reduplicated, as many Polynesian words are: mu‘umu‘u.

Now, to be sure, a muumuu is not a sort of dress to make the average man say “mmmm” or “oooo” or get a catch in his throat. It’s more the sort of thing for his mama. Many women don’t fancy it so much either – it’s the kind of thing of which my wife would say “It makes me look like a moo-moo” (i.e., bovine – although in reality no matter what she wears she looks divine).

But it sure is comfortable and relaxed. And, typically, very colourful. It’s tropical loungewear for people who really don’t want to have to worry about, well, much of anything. Kick back. Have a Chi Chi (that’s nothing chi-chi; it’s a piña colada made with vodka). It’s fitting enough that the pronunciation has eased off, too: no glottal stops (as we use in English uh-oh, and as in Hawai‘i they say between the final two i’s of the state name); what was four syllables has become two, and in English the glottal stop marks – not apostrophes but opening single quotes – have been dropped. You can discern a variety of shapes in the resulting muumuu: the uu’s may be upside-down m’s; they may be loose shapes of the body hanging in the dress’s drapery; the alternation between m and uu might bring to mind the swaying of a hula dance.

And the sound of the word? The soft murmur of the breeze in the palm trees, perhaps? The wash of the waves, beneath which swim the mahimahi, the humuhumunukunukuapua‘a, and the lauwiliwilinukunuku‘oi‘oi? Or, well, the cattle that are herded by ranchers on the island of Hawai‘i, perhaps – they were introduced by Captain George Vancouver in 1793 and there’s a pretty big industry there now.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

hussy

Posted on October 13, 2011 | 5 comments

OK, what word comes before this one? Yes, I know, immediately you think Olivia, but in fact the actress who starred in Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet is Olivia Hussey with an e. I suppose the Montagues might have thought Juliet Capulet was a shameless hussy, though…

Oh, yes, shameless. That’s the big winner in the collocation contest. Number two is brazen. We know what a hussy is: that husband-stealer who wears deep red lipstick, the sort of woman who gives every decent housewife a hissy fit and sends her off in a huff, even as the husbands think “Huzzah!” And I won’t mention the resemblance of this word to another one that starts with a p but curiously doesn’t rhyme with this one… I won’t mention it not because I’m still on a paralipsis kick but because it would probably trip off every stupid spam and smut filter out there.

Still, I wonder if this word might be undergoing a bit of a rehabilitation. I say this because on a store window today I saw a display for Merle Norman’s Hussy Collection, a set of cosmetics (lipstick, lip gloss, lip liner, nail polish) in a truly lurid red, just the sort of thing you imagine the hourglass-shaped maneaters in film noir and hardboiled ’40s films wearing (imagine because, after all, the films were in black and white). Very Jessica Rabbit: “Get out of here. Give me some money too.” (You can see the curve and sway of her hips and bust in the ss.) Makeup for women who aren’t bad but want to be drawn that way, maybe to fly off with their mad men on Pan Am…

Well, if hussy gains a more positive tone, it’s only fair; it’s had something of a downturn in the past half-millennium. After all, it started out as a contracted form of huswyf or huswif – a word we now spell as housewife. At first hussy named a frugal domestic engineer. The prejudices of the times (not altogether gone from our own) led from that to a sense of a rural, uneducated woman. And from that to a rude one. A nasty one. A nasssssty one. Mmmm… a minx. Oh yess. A hussy. Maybe with a husky voice, and flounces all fluffy… ready to ride off on a horsey with some rural Romeo.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

paralipsis

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 9 comments

I don’t have to tell you that this word has two of most of its letters – p, a, i, s – plus a pair of liquids; some might suggest that this indicates doublespeak or a forked tongue, but I will not. And it hardly needs pointing out that this word resembles parallel and parallax, which I just yesterday tasted; it goes without saying that they have the Greek para “alongside” root in common. The lipsis comes from leipein “leave”, so the roots combine to make “leave alongside”, which is what this word means.

But it doesn’t mean it literally; it means it rhetorically, a sort of feigned rhetorical paralysis (or acted cataplexy). Imagine the stream of discourse as like a conveyor belt of ideas. Now imagine that every so often in the incessant stream someone takes an idea and pulls it off and sets it aside. I don’t need to ask which you’re more likely to turn your attention to, the stream of ideas or the one that was pulled off and set aside. It’s sort of like saying “Don’t think about elephants.”

I used to have a professor who would occasionally introduce slightly mischievous suggestions into his discourse by saying “I was about to say” – as in “She looked rather like, erm, I was about to say rather like a tart.” But of course he didn’t say it, did he, aside from, you know, saying it. That’s the good-humoured way of using paralipsis. It would be distasteful to mention here the less pleasant mode of use it gets in politics, drawing attention to a character attack by saying you won’t mention it – anyway, Andy Hollandbeck does just fine covering that side of it at logophilius.blogspot.com, wherein he calls it by the name praeteritio.

Yes, paralipsis has a number of names; aside from praeteritio, it can also be called preterition, cataphrasis, antiphrasis, and parasiopesis. But I like paralipsis. I like it, for one thing, because it makes me think of a parellipsphere. What’s that? It is (or was – it was made in the ’70s and ’80s) a theatrical light that combines the best parts of three different kinds of reflectors – parabolic, ellipsoidal, and spherical – to cast a strong, clear, focused beam. They make good spotlights (not follow spots, though; fixed). And paralipsis draws attention just as surely and as strongly as a parellipsphere.

One thing I don’t need to draw attention to is this word’s strong taste of pair of lips. Oh, there’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip, and I’m a-Freud some of them are not pure lapsus. I was going to close with the admonition that you always have to watch what the pair of lips is actually saying, but I think you know that, so I’ll leave it aside.

9 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , ,

Fun with find & replace: trailing punctuation

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 2 comments

A colleague found herself faced with a formatting problem: the book she was working on required trailing punctuation (commas, periods) to match the formatting of the word they trailed (bold, italic). This can be hard to spot, and tedious to do by hand. She was working in MS Word. Was there a way to do it in find-and-replace using wild cards?

The answer is yes, and it involves one of my favourite F&R subterfuges, the dummy character.

It’s a bit of a nuisance that Word can specify formatting only over a whole search term, not part of one. But dummy characters help get around that:

1. Replace all bold whole words with the same word plus a special character used nowhere else in the document (a per-thousand sign or a pilcrow or a double dagger or whatever, but it has to be used nowhere else).

The find field will look like this: (<*>)
It will have “Use Wildcards” and “Font: Bold” specified for it.
The < and > mean start and end of word; the * means any number of characters; the ( and ) define it as a single term.

The replace field will be like this if your special character is ξ:  \1ξ
(Replace ξ with whatever character you use.)
The \1 refers to the first (and in this case only) defined term from the Find field.

2. Search all instances of that character followed by a comma or a period (or whatever trailing punctuation you want to change – but only one at a time) and change them to bold.

This is just changing ξ. (or whatever special character and whatever trailing punctuation) to bold, no wild cards needed (make sure to remove the format specification on the Find field). In fact, don’t use wild cards; . is a special character in wild cards (you’d need to make it \.).

3. Delete all instances of the special character.

In other words, find ξ (or whatever your character is) and replace it with nothing – completely empty cell, not even a space. Make sure to remove all formatting specifications.

4. Do the same but with italic rather than bold formatting.

The bolding and italicization should be done as separate steps. Reduces possible confusions, and also handles bold italics neatly.

This can also be used for preceding punctuation, e.g., opening quotes. The variation is trivial and is left as an exercise to the reader. 🙂

2 Comments

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

parallax

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 1 comment

I mentioned two days ago that I recall first encountering sidereal in Isaac Asimov’s The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar. Another word I’m fairly sure I saw there first was parallax.

When you first see this word, you very likely assume that it has something to do with parallel. Indeed, the form accidentally gives a good clue: both words have the parallel lines ll in the middle (and, by the way, it’s just coincidence that I’m posting this on 2011.10.11), but whereas in parallel there’s a third l running in parallel with the other two, in parallax you end up with two lines x not in parallel but meeting at a certain point. So is parallax a laxity in parallelism?

The two words are not derived quite so simply. Lax is not an ancient Greek word (it comes from Latin laxus), unlike our two parallel words here. Both begin with para, meaning “beside, alongside, etc.”; both have second halves that come from allos “other”. But in parallel it’s allelos “one another”, while in parallax it’s allassein “change”. So one is “beside one another”, while the other is “alternation”.

What has this to do with stars? Well, stars aren’t all the same distance away. How do we know how far away a star is? By parallax. I’ll explain.

Let me give an example. Your eyes are two different viewpoints. Hold your finger halfway between them and the computer screen. Close one eye and look at your finger in front of the screen, or at the screen behind your finger. Now open that eye and close the other and look again. Or, more simply, just focus on the screen and notice how you see two fingers, or focus on the finger and notice how you see two screens. That’s parallax: the difference between the relative positions of two objects that are at different distances (finger, screen) when you see them from different viewpoints (left eye, right eye).

You can use basic geometry to work out the distance of the screen if you know the distance of your finger, or vice-versa, as long as you know the distance between your eyes. You just use the principle of similar triangles. In fact, that principle saved me a bit of money a few years ago. I had – still have – a 1950s-era folding medium-format camera (a Zeiss-Ikon Ikonta), which has no rangefinder and certainly no through-the-lens focusing – you turn the focus dial to the distance desired, but it’s up to you how you know what that distance is. I could have bought a rangefinder for it. Instead I measured the space between my pupils, measured the distance from my eyes to the thumb and forefinger of my outstretched arm, and made marks accordingly on the back of a business card.

(Here’s how that works. Picture a capital A, where the bases of the legs are my eyes, the legs are the lines of sight from them, the point is where the lines of sight meet on the object focused on, and the crossbar is the distance on the business card between where the lines of sight cross it – the parallax. The principle of similar triangles says that if the card, held in my outstretched hand, is halfway to the object – the height of the top part of the A is the same as of the bottom part – the distance on the card will be half the distance between my pupils; if the top part of the A is two-thirds of the total height of the A, the distance on the card will be two-thirds the distance between my pupils; and so on. So I have a bunch of pen marks on the card, and I simply note where the edge, as seen from one eye, overlaps the pencil marks, as seen from the other, when I’m focusing on the object I want to photograph.)

Parallax can be very useful in photography when you’re using a rangefinder camera such as a Leica – it imitates the parallax of the eyes, using a double finder and mirrors to produce the double image and so that the images line up when you’re focused on the right distance. Parallax for the win. But parallax can also be a nuisance if you’re using a viewfinder camera or a twin-lens reflex, if you happen to be focusing on something close enough that the parallax between what you see (through the viewfinder or upper lens) and what the film will see (through the object lens) is significant. (Yes, yes, I know, very few people use such cameras anymore. But there are indeed digital rangefinder cameras, such as the Leica M9, which I would own if I could afford it.)

And, to get to the original point, parallax can also be very useful in knowing the distance of object much farther away, such as stars. You can know the distance to a star by measuring its parallax against some other star the distance of which is known (and which can be assumed not to be moving enough to make a difference). The earth moves around the sun, and so the difference in viewing positions at different times of year produces the same kind of effect as the distance between your eyes, though you can’t see from more than one position at the same time – you have to keep track.

On a more human scale, parallax is also, of course, very useful in avoiding injury and death. Depth perception relies on parallax (and the brain’s interpretation of it). You do not want to be lax in a time of peril: if a tiger or snake – or a swinging ax – is moving towards you, or if you are moving towards a tree, you want to have a good sense of exactly how far you are from danger. You don’t want what you took to be a brobdingnagian peril far away to turn out to be a lilliputian peril much, much closer; at the very least, parallax can save you a pair o’ slacks (impending peril can be a powerful laxative).

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

gobbler

Posted on October 10, 2011 | 8 comments

It’s Thanksgiving in Canada, and Columbus Day in the US. Canadian Thanksgiving is a sort of cross between Columbus Day and American Thanksgiving: it’s a long weekend in early October, rather than an awkward Thursday in November; the busiest travel day of the year in Canada is not the day before, though people do travel a lot for Thanskgiving, since it’s a holiday for joining with family; the busiest shopping day of the year in Canada is not the day after. Really, for us in the Great White North, it’s a nice long weekend, more meaningful than Columbus Day but less so than Easter. And, yes, the theme is dominated by gobblers.

When I was at grad school in the Boston area, I found it quite irritating that the holiday was called “Turkey day” at least ten times as often as it was called “Thanksgiving” – sort of like how Canadians keep calling Victoria Day “May two-four.” But even if you choose to eschew the turkey to chew something else, turkeys dominate Thanksgiving the way pumpkins dominate Hallowe’en.

Gobbling has long been associated with turkeys. The sound they make has been described as “gobble” since at least 1680, and within a half century after that (and probably sooner) the bird was being called a gobbler. It’s pure onomatopoeia, and it’s sort of iconic visually, too, with the g with its hanging snood or wattle and the bbl like the tailfeathers. But it’s also ironic, just like calling this entirely American bird a turkey is ironic. The turkey is a symbol of conspicuous consumption precisely because it is conspicuously consumed. The gobbler does not gobble; it, and whatever else is served with it, is gobbled by the collective gobs of those assembled. And yes, by the way, the verb gobble meaning “eat” is likely related to gob meaning “mouth” – or to gob meaning “blob, as of food”. It likely also has a connection to the motion and sound of eating greedily. If the le ending seems familiar, you may recognize it from crackle, crumple, wriggle, giggle, babble, gabble, mumble… all those repetitive little motions… sounds like a family gathering, doesn’t it?

Ah, the good things of the world. We do take them for granted, don’t we? In some ways, Thanksgiving can be a celebration of wanton rapacity and vulgar hedonism. Oh, I’m not a vegetarian, and I like a good feast, too, but I feel that often we aren’t thankful enough for just how lucky we are – or appreciative of how much of that “luck” comes from being on the winning side of a zero-sum game. Consider the extent to which we are gobblers of much more than turkeys.

The conjunction with Columbus Day is a nice reminder that the Americas are as they are now because an assortment of rapacious invaders came in and gobbled it all up. The harvest celebrations that turned into Thanksgiving – brought over from similar celebrations in Europe – certainly were inspired by gratefulness, but mainly gratefulness to God for having given them all this bounty, not so much gratefulness to the people who were already here. The archetypal “first Thanksgiving” image has the Pilgrims sharing bounty with the people who were already there (Wampanoags, as it happens), who had shown them how not to starve. Now you tell me what those people who were already there got in return in the long run.

But I’m not trying to make you feel guilty for what our ancestors did. They did it; we had no choice about being born into the results. We should just appreciate what we have and acknowledge how we come to have it (and do something to help redress the ongoing imbalances created). We should remember, too, that the low prices that allow us to buy so much are aided by people elsewhere in the world being paid awfully poorly for making the stuff. We should be careful not to heedlessly gobble more.

Which is what we seem to do so often. The table groans with goodies; we load up, then lapse into a food coma in front of the TV, and if we’re in the US, the next day we may well go on an buying binge to boggle the gobbling minds (in Canada Thanksgiving is too early for Christmas shopping, and the next day is a work day; we roll on instead to the goblins of Hallowe’en – our buying binge will come, though). We want all the things popular culture tells us we should want – whatever the fashions are now. It’s the state religion: consumerism.

I remember what the good life looked like when I was a kid. Who wouldn’t want a room covered in shag carpet, perhaps a round plush bed – or, better, a waterbed – in the bedroom, and all those nice stone and wood accents that dominated the popular architecture – the turn-key solutions for taste of the time? Today we look on such things with disdain and distaste as the decorative equivalent of gobbledegook, just as in future years we will sneer at what we think is so great now. But it’s what we thought we wanted, and we gobbled it up.

Look now at the epitome of that style: the (now gone) Gobbler motel, bar, and restaurant in Wisconsin, preserved for your visual consumption by the brilliant James Lileks: www.lileks.com/institute/motel/index.html. You must look at it. This word tasting is not complete without a full perusal of this fantastic turkey of a concept motel and restaurant. Snicker now, but when I look at it I experience nostalgia. I remember liking all that. I even remember seeing houses done in much the same decor. We wanted it because it was what we wanted. We gobbled it up.

The Gobbler is now gone, though we gobblers are still here. But we should watch lest again the gobblers become the gobbled. Gobbler makes me think of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s play about a young woman who had grown up having much, and had expensive tastes and overreaching fantasies; those tastes and fantasies owned her and drove her life, and when she would not accept that she couldn’t have it all, those tastes put her in a position of being owned by another. Which she could not live with.

So the gavel falls on the obligations: do not have the head of a gobbler. And now I will gobble no more of your time today with my blogging gabbing.

8 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

sidereal

Posted on October 9, 2011 | 3 comments

When I was a boy genius, I naturally thought it befitting for me to take an interest in science and especially astronomy. It was, as were nearly all my interests, dilettantish and bookish; I did not spend hours at a telescope. But I did spend hours daydreaming. Space is fit fodder for fantasy: humans had walked on the moon; other planets were in reach; could the stars be much farther? As H.G. Wells wrote at the end of The War of the Worlds, “Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space.”

I also spent hours reading and watching movies. I watched the Star Wars movies and others avidly, of course. And I acquired and read (or at least read about two-thirds of, before my attention was seized by something else) Isaac Asimov’s The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar. I think it was that book in which I think I first encountered the word sidereal.

I was reminded of sidereal yesterday when making one of my several annual excursions to Collingwood: launching myself (and my wife and her mother) for a day or two on the side to one of the more distant points that are in stationary orbit of the Centre of the Universe, as Torontonians jokingly call their town. The scenic country route we prefer rolls up hill and down under enormous skies (and at times in the later hours the moon hangs low at the horizon). And every so often you cross an intersection with a sideroad: there is a post with a sign reading County Sideroad 10, for instance, or what have you. They are the fixed marks, the meridians crossing the countryside; when you go and return, they are still there, avenues to other places.

It was, as you may have imagined, the word sideroad that made me think of sidereal. Ah, sidereal, a word that can make you think you are veering off into a side reality, a digression, a divergence from the constitutive quotidian, perhaps a launch into orbit and back or perhaps a right turn and off into a different perspective altogether. What if we measured our days not by the sun that is before us but by the distant stars that call to us in their faint celestial choir?

Why, that would be sidereal time, of course. A day as measured from when a given star crosses the meridian to when it again crosses the meridian is a sidereal day. Given that if the star is at its zenith at midnight – thus directly opposite the sun – on, say, the spring equinox, it will be at its zenith at noon – directly behind the sun – a half year later on the fall equinox, we can see that a sidereal day loses half a solar day in half a year. A sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes long. And this also means you fit in an extra sidereal day every solar year. It’s like having an extra day on the side that no one else gets.

Sidereal isn’t formed from side and real, though, and it isn’t pronounced like side real. It’s a bit more like “sigh deer eel”: /saɪ ‘di ri əl/. It’s from Latin sidereus, from sidus “star, constellation”. So when I see sideroad, I amuse myself by thinking /saɪ ‘di ro æd/ and imagining it’s some sidereal excursion or measure – or right turn to the stars.

But of course my wanderings are entirely planetary (fittingly, planet comes from Greek for “wanderer”). I spend some time with family in that distant detached world two hours north, and then come back to my centre of gravity, my rental vehicle more of a space shuttle than an interstellar ark.

Our interstellar explorations have receded farther into the future since my childhood, too. We content ourselves with fantasies. My dreams of being in the stars, like my later dreams of being a star, seem like messages from beyond that turn out to have been destined for someone else. And I recall that the sentence I quote from Wells above is followed by “But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.”

But before I throw up my hands and sigh “Deary!” I’ll remember that there are many excursions one may make within ready reach. New things are being discovered every day about the world we live in, and even about the words we live with. Every book is a new world, and every word a new star. And each blog post that goes by marks a sidereal sideroad, a chance to turn the head and look away from the main road of discourse down a lane that leads to a different set of horizons.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,