Eccles

Posted on August 21, 2011 | 6 comments

The first time I saw this name it was in a mention of the Goon Show – probably in one of Spike Milligan’s books, but perhaps some other place; I believe it was in a bit of script, probably something like the following bit (from www.thegoonshow.net/quotes.asp):

Bluebottle: Why are you not wearing any trousers?
Eccles: Well, it’s lunchtime.
Bluebottle: Oh! What did you have for lunch?
Eccles: My trousers.

I read it as though it were short for ecclesiastical or Ecclesiastes: /ikliz/. It certainly seemed odd to me: who was this ecclesiastical character and why were they abbreviating his name?

I did subsequently learn that it actually rhymes with heckles and freckles and is not an abbreviation. I also got a good taste of the character when, during rehearsal for Stoppard’s After Magritte, we listened to a Goon Show episode or two; Eccles happened to be similar in various ways to the character I was playing (a rather stupid cop called Holmes – not the only big stupid character I ever played; I seemed to have a knack for them, somehow). I remember this bit (which I have copied from www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?
title=s06e09_the_international_christmas_pudding):

MINNIE
Helppp, Eccles!

HENRY:
Help, Eccles, help!

FX:
Loud banging.

ECCLES:
(off) You two down there! Stop that naughty noise! I’m trying to get some sleep, I’m a brain-worker!

HENRY:
I’m sorry Eccles. Not so loud, Min, quietly.

MINNIE and HENRY:
(quietly) Help, Eccles, help.

But it’s not just the feckless Eccles and his reckless pickles that tickle my ears and my tongue. There are also Eccles cakes, which are yummy round flaky pastries filled with currants (so much tastier than trousers). It’s true that I can’t see, let alone eat, an Eccles cake without thinking of Eccles from the Goon Show and his rather stupid, daft voice (hear an example at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSSGiA4f5cs). But it doesn’t override the enjoyment (and anyway, they’re both flaky). In fact, I also can’t see the name Eccles now without thinking of Eccles cakes.

Well and good, Eccles has those echoes, but where does the name come from anyway? The cakes are named after their place of origin, a town near Manchester. That may not be the famous Eccles (as the character Eccles often says, “I’m the famous Eccles!”), but it’s evidently the original Eccles (there are ickle Eccles all over the place – little cc‘s, as it were). And where does it get its name?

It’s not entirely sure, but the indications are that it comes from Celtic egles “church”, which comes from Latin ecclesia (which in turn comes from Greek). Which is of course the source of ecclesiastical and Ecclesiastes – the latter being a book of the Bible, often abbreviated Eccles, known for its quotable stoic world-weariness:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (ix:11)

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (xi:1)

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (xii:12)

Well, doesn’t that take the cake. Or, if it doesn’t, Eccles will:

Interviewer: Get out, you idiot!
Eccles: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! But you ain’t even heard me speak yet!
Interviewer: We’ll write to you.
Eccles: Well, that’s no good, I can’t read.

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cataplectic

Posted on August 19, 2011 | 2 comments

Some years ago, I was thinking about tongue-twisters and the features that could make them particularly tricky. I decided that a bunch of voiceless stops moving around in the mouth and switching back and forth, interspersed with some /l/s, could make a pretty tricky one. But why settle for hard to say? Add an extra level by making it hard to understand – the mental disorientation could only add to the difficulty, yes? So here’s what I came up with:

Pat, a pickled cataplectic klepto, takes Platonic plate tectonics.

Admittedly, the words are generally well known, even if their juxtaposition is odd: what the heck is Platonic plate tectonics? (Indeed, when I made the tongue twister, I was assuming that it didn’t actually exist. But in fact there was a paper titled “Platonic plate tectonics: On the regularity of the distribution of triple points on the earth’s surface” published in 1981 by A.J. Arnold and A.F. Siegel, using models based on Platonic solids to examine regularities in plate movement.) And pickled in its figurative sense of “drunk” is normally used as a predicate: “You’re pickled”; “Jane is a bit tipsy, but Jill is completely pickled.” It’s odd to see it in the modifier position.

But cataplectic is the one word that might not be familiar to many readers. Some will recognize that it must be cata+plect-ic and thus has a root in common with apoplectic, which would also mean that the related noun is cataplexy. All of this is in fact true. And the cata is the same one as in catacomb, catapult, catastrophe, catalogue, and catabasis – but no relation to caterpillar. It means “down”, and it’s from Greek κατά kata. The plexy and plectic come from πλήσσειν pléssein “strike”. Is there a connection to complex, simplex, and multiplex? Nope – that plex relates to Latin plectere, “intertwine, weave, braid”.

So… “strike down”. That doesn’t really help all that much, does it? You can guess (again by analogy with apoplexy) that cataplexy is a medical condition, and you’ll be right. But what? It had better be something impressive. Cataplectic sounds like a house of cards – of credit cards and ID cards and other plastic cards – collapsing, perhaps because the cat batted it. It carries a variety of resonances leading in different directions: electric catapult plectrum complexion clap apocalyptic… And it’s a long word, 11 letters standing for 11 phonemes in four syllables, the sort of thing that can make some people go all weak at the knees.

Which would be just the right effect. When someone goes all weak at the knees, that’s cataplexy. So is any other sudden transient loss of muscle tone, typically caused by strong emotion. If you find this word jaw-dropping, that, too, may be cataplexy. There are many other muscles that can be affected – indeed, the whole body can be affected. The awareness is not; you can watch yourself drop like a sack of potatoes. If you happen to be wearing plastic body armour at the time, you, too, may make the sound “Cataplectic!”

I don’t mean to make fun of it, really, though. It’s not exactly pleasant. And while it’s comparatively rare as a diagnosable condition, it affects most narcoleptics and it can also affect people who are in withdrawal from some antidepressants (it is typically treated with antidepressants too).

And, yes, in theory it could affect a klepto who is taking platonic plate tectonics. Even, or perhaps especially, if he (or she) is pickled.

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apostrophe

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 5 comments

Apparently it is Apostrophe Day. Who knew? Aside from half of Twitter, I mean. Well, obviously, that means one thing to me: Healey Willan.

Oh, is there something missing there? I mean his luminous choral piece, written originally for the Toronto Mendlessohn Choir (with whom I have – more recently – sung it), “An Apostrophe to the Heavenly Hosts.” (Listen to a performance of it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RCNyXDsEFE.)

No, he doesnt mean that hes going to write it “Heavenly Host’s” – its not a greengrocers apostrophe (indeed, the entire text of the piece does not contain a single apostrophe of the punctuation kind!). Its that other kind of apostrophe: a rhetorical device wherein one turns away from the flow of what one is saying to make a direct address to some person(s) present or absent. (Good grief, I thought they knew this. What is this world coming to?)

So, in the middle of whatever service or occasion the piece is sung in, the choir declares, “Invoking the thrice threefold company of the Heavenly Hosts, sing we:” and then it addresses a whole bunch of them by group and by name. And of course after that everyone turns back to the regularly scheduled ritual and on we go. So its just a little extra something stuffed in: a brief turning away. Thats Greek ἀπό apo “away” and στροϕή strophé “turning”.

But lets turn away from that to what Apostrophe Day is really about: those little jots that bedevil many Anglophones world wide. It seems more people get them wrong than get them right. This is because their “proper” uses in English are no longer confined to the necessary or even the consistent. An apostrophe, the mark, originally existed just to mark an apostrophe in the now-disused sense of “elision” – dropping something out rather than adding something in. We do use it a lot that way still, in contractions. But we also use it in places that are not and never have been contractions.

The big point of confusion is plurals versus possessives. It just happens that in Modern English we use an s ending for both (as well as for third-person singular conjugations), but we use an apostrophe only for possessives, not including possessive pronouns. It was not always so. In Old English, the forms differed quite a bit. Often there would be vowel changes rather than a suffix to signify possessive, plural, or both for a word; sometimes the suffix would have an n rather than an s; in words that had an s on both, the singular possessive ended in es, the plural in as, and the plural possessive in a, typically. But English inflections collapsed together and simplified quite a bit over time. And at a certain point some people incorrectly decided that the s in the possessive was short for his and so added an apostrophe to indicate the deletion of hi from his.

But speakers of Modern English certainly dont think of it that way. More to the point, we dont speak it that way. When we speak, in fact, we dont say apostrophes at all. Theyre silent! Where theres any possible ambiguity (as there seldom is), context nearly always clarifies it. So, lacking a natural, consistent, intuitive, inevitable basis for the apostrophe, people get confused.

Could we just do away with the apostrophe? I often remark provocatively that Id like to do just that. After all, George Bernard Shaw showed how easily they may be dispensed with without affecting clarity, just as Im doing here. But of course I know that thats actually a non-starter – it would never really happen. And, in truth, there are places in writing where an apostrophe adds clarity (partly because writing doesnt have the added cues intonation gives, and partly because we often phrase things differently in writing).

Still, Id rather lose the apostrophe altogether than put up with those apostles of the apostrophe, out on their Mission: Apostrophe with their pens correcting grocery signs and monument plaques, stroking away where they should be turned away. I think its quite apposite how apostrophe splutters like impossible and preposterous (though, amusingly, Oxford points out that the derivation of the word for the punctuation mark, coming by way of French, ought to have only three syllables, but “has been ignorantly confused with” the other apostrophe). It sure is a much longer word than the little mark would suggest. Might we make it more poetic and a bit briefer if we turned away some of the crowd and set it as ’postr’phe or ’postroph’?

Oh, yes, theres that other value of the apostrophe – because poetry often uses elisions to make the metre (Ive always looked on that as cheating, but there it is), nonce apostrophes have become a mark of poetic gravitas. My friend and colleague Carolyn Bishop suggested a special punctuation mark for this purpose a few years ago, and I wrote a poem on it, which will be in my book of salacious verse on English usage, Songs of Love and Grammar:

The gravitastrophe

Had I it in my pow’r
e’en for a wond’rous hour
to let words solemn hark’d
in print be plainly mark’d,
the mark I’d use would be
the gravitastrophe!

Momentous situations
oft call for syncopations;
howe’er, a plain contraction
is plebeian detraction.
To keep solemnity,
use gravitastrophe!

Take ink plash’d from a fount
on ’Lympus’ heavn’ly mount;
’scribe it with quill-pen gain’d
from phoenix wing detain’d;
’gainst alabaster be
writ gravitastrophe!

Like cherub’s down, the curl
shall clockwise-turn’d unfurl
’til, widdershins returning
(profan’d convention spurning),
with circlet tipp’d shall be
the gravitastrophe!

This stroke shall through the ages
be ’grav’d on scepter’d pages
so humbl’d reader knows
that whilom mundane prose
is rebirth’d poesy
with gravitastrophe!

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It is not I, it’s me

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s an old joke: St. Peter hears a knock at the Pearly Gates. He says, “Who goes there?” A voice replies, “It is I.” St. Peter says, “Go away! We don’t need any more English teachers.”

For who other than a hard-core grammatical prescriptivist would say “It is I?” And would even the driest English teacher (not that that many are that dry anymore), arriving with others (I was about to type “friends,” but it’s hard to think that such a person could have any left), say “It is we”? Or, on the other side, answering the door, say “It is they”? I have seen “It is he,” it’s true, but…

But no one in normal English speaks that way. Not even the well-respected, highly educated people. So we’re all wrong, then? What’s with this, anyway?

This “rule” is obviously not organic to English, since it seems so awkward to pretty much every native English speaker (except the ones who have had “It is I” drummed into them and so accept it – a linguistic perversion that can be accomplished with any irregular usage if you can get people to think it’s more formal, polite, and correct, since English is capricious that way; see An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)). The idea behind it is that the is there is a copula: it equates two things. A=B. Identity means identity, so both must be the subjects: “I am he.” (If you recognize that as the first three words of “I Am the Walrus,” remember that the next four are “as you are me.” It’s not a grammar lesson from The Beatles.)

There are some problems with this reasoning. First of all, when you draw up the rules for a language, it helps if they actually describe what the language actually does, as opposed to enforcing practices that are quite different from what established usage is. If you get an idea about language and make a theory and it turns out not to be an accurate description, you shouldn’t bend the subject, you should change the theory. Otherwise you have linguistic phlogiston, a mumpsimus. And something unfortunately all too common.

Second, language is not math. Or, more precisely (since one may construct a mathematical language), English is not math. Why this isn’t incredibly obvious I don’t even know. Try performing a mathematical operation on a sentence. Give me the square root of “To be or not to be.” Language is waaaaay less tidy than math, but it’s a lot of fun. You don’t get to derive new equations and results, but linguists are discovering a lot of really fascinating weirdness. Grammatical prescriptivists, on the other hand, if they applied their thinking to the realm of math, would insist on only using certain equations in certain ways and would argue that some solutions are unacceptable because they involved, for instance, irrational numbers. They would be like the lawmakers who legislated the value of pi to be exactly 3.

And incidentally, even in math, if you establish that in this instance of an equation a=3 and b=3, you don’t necessarily change all b to a. But anyway, syntax is sequence and form; identity is semantics. Two different areas of grammar.

Third, English is not Latin. Many of prescriptivists’ ideas, such as this one, are derived from and/or supported by appeals to Latin grammar. You might as well use a barbecue to bake a cake, or dress patterns to make shoes. Each language has its own set of rules, its own parameters, its own ways of handling this and that. French is descended from Latin but you could never say “C’est je” in French, so why would we insist that English use “It is I” just because Latin, which English is not based on, does similarly?

The real ace in all of this is that “It is I” is supposedly equating “It” and “I”. OK, what’s the “It” here? If I say “I am he,” then there’s a “he” we were talking about who turns out to be me. But where’s this “it”? There’s no object I’m claiming is me. The it is actually empty. The only reason it’s there is because in English we require every finite verb to have something in the subject position. Not every language does. In Chinese you can say you shu, “have book”, to mean “There’s a book”; you can say shi wo, “is I/me”, to mean “It’s me” (or “It is I” if you’re one of those people). But we have to put in these empty its and theres in English for it to be a complete sentence. (We may say, casually, Got it, but even casually we don’t say Is me instead of It’s me.)

So it’s is really an existential predicate. But it’s bootless to argue that since there’s only one real thing there (me), it must be the subject. The point is precisely that it’s not the subject because that’s not how English syntax works. A thing can’t be both subject and predicate. We can’t say I am to mean It’s me, because it means something else, so we have an existential verb and an empty subject, and make me the predicate.

Which leads us to another fact of English syntax: the case filter. Put simply, English nouns and pronouns are by default in the objective (accusative). For each finite (conjugated) verb, there has to be one subject, which means one noun phrase in the subject (nominative) case, and that noun phrase is the one that is specifying the verb – it’s in the “subject” position. We don’t do this with non-finite verbs: I want him to go, I want to see him going. Those hims are the subjects of an infinitive and a participle, but they’re still objective. But if the verb is finite, one noun phrase and one only is treated as its subject: I desire that he go. The one you want is him. (Note that there can be inversions: What fools are we! Sam I am!)

And that is a real rule of English. One that we all use all the time without having someone tell us, one that guides our comprehension and usage. Not phlogiston. There is no cake batter dripping from the grill. So if someone at your door says “It is I,” you’re fully enfranchised to say “Go to hell!” (You probably don’t want them at your party anyway.)

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key, crucial, pivotal

Posted on August 17, 2011 | 3 comments

Dear word sommelier: Today @BloombergStyle tweeted, “Key is vague as a modifier. Adjectives such as crucial and pivotal are more precise.” My question is just, “What?”

A valid question. Why is key supposed to be vague? What would make crucial and pivotal more precise? Have I missed something somehow all these years of being a professional word person? Or am I encountering yet another hoary prejudice of which I have heretofore managed to remain innocent? Or what?

Certainly key seems more popular right now as a modifier, especially in business writing (and we know how many language sticklers have a hate-on for business English – not without some justification, assuredly). It’s a nice, short word, and it carries an image of a key that opens a door – perhaps a golden key, something of value, something shiny. You readily read of a key role, a key question, key players, key issues, key elements, key factors, and so on (I’m getting these frequent collocations from the Corpus of Contemporary American English). The keystone is the most important stone, and when you “set the tone” for something you “set the key.” Plus it’s a short word, two sounds and three letters, an explosion of air from the tongue tight at the palate.

So it’s easy to see why key would be popular, and overuse can dilute effect; we also see it a lot in more workaday terms like keyword. But that doesn’t make the word itself imprecise; it just means that it is sometimes used imprecisely. One may as readily use crucial and pivotal imprecisely. Perhaps @BloombergStyle dislikes it in part because it’s in origin a noun, not a “proper” adjective. I’m also tempted to wonder whether its plain Anglo-Saxon source counts against it.

Crucial certainly seems more dramatic, and if greater drama is what you want then it will be more precise (but if it’s not then it won’t be). The mouth screws up tight and puckers out as you say it, the tongue crushing air against the palate, and you can almost express excruciation just with the sound and vocal gesture. Its sense comes from Latin crucem “cross” with the idea of being at a crossroads, a decision point: something that’s crucial is deciding. Nowadays we would probably view it more as meaning “absolutely necessary” – something you can’t do without, as opposed to being merely important. We may speak of a crucial role, a crucial question, a crucial part, a crucial point, a crucial moment, a crucial factor – notice more singulars than for key: this indicates that crucial signifies greater importance. Key things may be multiple; crucial ones are more likely to be singular.

Pivotal has a clearer image because its original reference is still plain in the word: pivot, a word we got from French and French got from we’re not entirely sure where. This is a tidier word, starting and ending with stops, and with a possibly ambisyllabic /v/ right in the middle – which, in written form, even looks like it could be a pivot. Something that is pivotal is clearly something on which everything turns: a pivotal role (seriously, role is the most common collocation for each of these words in the COCA), a pivotal moment, a pivotal point, a pivotal player, a pivotal figure. Again, singular: pivots always come one at a time.

So key may seem vaguer to @BloombergStyle, but that may just be because it indicates something important but not as important. But that’s not the same thing as vague. It’s not at all precise to say something was hot when it was just warm, for instance.

I wanted more feedback on this, so I asked some of my colleagues in the Editors’ Association of Canada for their off-the-top-of-the-head evaluation of the differences between these three words, leaving the dictionary on the shelf. Here are some of their responses:

crucial: very very important all by itself.
key:  the most important of a bunch of important ones.
pivotal: similar to key, except the less important concepts surround it; “key” they seem more like they’re in a hierarchy.
—Rosemary Tanner

key = it matters; this is important but not necessarily as much as the following
crucial  = it matters especially, it is critical to (for example) something happening or not happening
pivotal = crucial/critical but using the image of the pivot point, it is the factor/concept/assertion/etc. that could cause a change in direction, taking this path over that path, etc.
—Laura Edlund

“Key” and “crucial” are the most synonymous – both meaning “essential” – but “pivotal” of course also implies a moment of change or a feature that changes the way the entire context can be understood.
—Aaron Dalton

Key: important, but could be one of many. A key concept, another key concept… A key piece of evidence is important, but you wouldn’t lose the case by mucking it up.
Crucial: stronger than key and bordering on unique. An entire case may rest on a crucial piece of evidence.
Pivotal: something that changes the game/situation/direction.
—Paul Cipywnyk

key – one of the most important items
crucial – not to be overlooked, above all others
pivotal – having a bearing on outcome, associated with desired results
—Carolyn Wilker

We see some general trends here, especially as regards the hierarchy of importance and the imagery of pivotal, but on the other hand there’s not complete agreement either. And these are highly literate people who work with words all the time. So consider the effect the choice will have on the average reader (who will most certainly not be looking at a dictionary either): probably a fairly impressionistic one, determined in part by prosodic and phonaesthetic factors and strongly by current patterns of use. (As I’ve said many times, words are known by the company they keep.) I’m not arguing against maintaining certain distinctions of sense, but always be aware of what your readers will be aware of.

And, now, is key less precise? Or is it just more often used imprecisely? It does seem a little milder in tone, but that’s a different matter. I’d say @BloombergStyle is a little off-key here, myself.

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cepstrum, quefrency, rahmonic

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 5 comments

“By applying a low-pass lifter to the cepstrum in Figure 2 to extract the low quefrency components below the first rahmonic peak, the slowly varying curve (in red, upper graph) results.”

I read that to my wife and her eyes turned into a pair of shirred eggs. She was, for a time, speechless – a condition that, incidentally, the process described in the quotation would have been helpless in the face of.

Make no mistake: what Al Oppenheim and Ron Schafer are describing in their article (From frequency to quefrency: a history of the cepstrum, Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE (September 2004), 21 (5), 95–106) is freakin’ hard for most people to wrap their minds around. But while it might seem as dry as dust to you, that passage actually evinces a fundamental fact of true nerds: a sense of humour and playfulness.

There are four words in there that you need to look at: lifter, cepstrum, quefrency, and rahmonic. They are terms that apply to this specific mathematical process. The process itself is a little quirky, and applies to things that themselves require a bit of explanation to have real meaning – a bit more than I have space for here. But here’s a very short run-down – if your eyes start to glaze, skip to the paragraph that starts “So anyways.”

Sounds such as human speech are actually very complex, made up of a lot of different harmonic resonances on top of a basic sound frequency. It’s these resonances that allow people to discern the difference between different speech sounds: the position of your tongue in your mouth (among other things) changes the shape of resonating chambers and makes certain bunches of harmonics, called formants, stronger – you might say the formants are the informants of what speech sound you’re hearing.

When linguists – acoustic phoneticians in particular – and engineers and physicists analyze sound waves, they use a wonderful mathematical function called a Fourier transform to identify the different resonance frequencies in the sound waves, what is called the spectrum, a perfectly appropriate term since the spectrum of light is also the different frequencies. (Think about if someone were tapping 9 beats a second and someone else 12 beats a second and someone else 36 beats a second. If you graphed the sound waves, you would have something looking like :,..;..,:.,.:,..;..,:.,.:,.. and on and on. A Fourier transform would just show a graph plotting frequencies with one mark at 9 per second, one at 12 per second, and one at 36 per second.)

Well, if you treat the Fourier transform graph as though it were a graph of sound waves and perform a Fourier transform on it (it’s just slightly twickier than that, but that’s the general concept), you are performing a curious but useful inversion. You can identify how close together the harmonics are, and how close together the formants are; it tells you how frequent the strong frequencies are on the graph, so to speak. Believe me when I say this is useful, and not just in speech analysis: it makes cleaning up the sound on old recordings a lot easier, for instance – you can filter out unwanted resonances from the original sound-capture device.

So anyways, when you do this process, you get something that looks like a spectrum but is really a spectrum looked at the other way around, and you get what looks like frequency but is really frequency looked at the other way, and harmonics that aren’t actually harmonics, and you can apply filtering processes on the data that aren’t filters like the normal data filters are. You’re treating frequency as though it were time and time as though it were frequency.

So what do you do? You come up with new words for what you’re talking about. And if you’re a nerd, you may take this opportunity to be a little playful. (Businessmen would use wanton sesquipedalianisms and initialisms to try to sound impressive. Nerds don’t feel a need to try to sound impressive because they actually know what they’re talking about.)

That playfulness actually tells us some interesting things about language, too: not the way we perceive sounds (which is what the data that all this analyzes help us to understand), but the way we think of and group sounds and how we perceive the structure of words. You see, the guys who came up with this – Bogert, Healy, and Tukey, three engineers back in the early 1960s – wanted to signify the inversion by inverting the words. But you will notice they only inverted parts of the words, in order to maintain comprehension I suppose – in the process producing pseudomorphemes (I’ll explain, hold on) – and they did it in some particular ways:

spectrum –> cepstrum
frequency –> quefrency
filter –> lifter
harmonic –> rahmonic

In all of the words, they only inverted the first part of the word, thereby treating the front end of the word as the significant part and the remainder as a sort of tail (a common enough things for people to do – go to SoHo and ask JLo), and also treating them as separate bits of the word, like tweet plus ed in tweeted – meaning-bearing building-blocks called morphemes. Except that trum, ency, ter, and monic actually are not morphemes; they have no meanings of their own – they’re just phonological divisions.

And the way they inverted the first half is notable: in three of the four, they just reversed the letters in the first syllable, which in all cases also reversed the sounds (you should know from this that the original pronunciation of cepstrum is with a /k/ at the start). It was always the syllable, not any other division: not rtcepsum or nomrahic, which would be morphologically appropriate but phonologically and orthographically problematic. As usual, the sound patterns of the words guide how they’re treated – when you turn it around, it’s the sound you’re turning around (this is standard in most playful things we do with words, and it’s how we treat helicopter as heli plus copter rather than the original helico plus pter, and why we say a whole nother thing, and also why people asked to say my backwards will probably say “I’m” – reversing the phonemes – rather than like “yam” – reversing the actual sounds).

In the other word, that wasn’t possible – /rf/ and /wk/ aren’t acceptable syllable onsets. So the syllable onsets, /fr/ and /kw/, were simply swapped to make quefrency. The vowel sounds were not swapped: it’s just not comfortable in English to say /’kwε frin si/. But when you look at that word on paper, do you want to pronounce it with a “long e” on the first syllable? To me, thanks to other words starting with que, it looks first like the que is said like the one in question, making both vowels /ε/ and conforming the word to expected sound patterns rather than to the original sounds.

But at least quefrency looks like a swapping-up of frequency. When I first saw cepstrum, I didn’t see spectrum in it at all (obviously I wasn’t swirling and sniffing it at that point). It looked more like it was just some other Latin word I hadn’t seen, joining the long list of neuter nouns like rostrum and plectrum. And rahmonic, aside from making me think of Rahm Emanuel (and maybe rah-rah-rah), had a taste of rampike and mnemonic but took a moment to show its harmonic resonance. (Lifter happens to be an English word in its own right, and thereby carries unbidden resonances. Ironically.)

However, the resemblance of cepstrum to spectrum is not lost on those who are expecting to see spectrum. And the hazards of such wordplay showed up in an early publication by Oppenheim and Schafer on the topic – and make for a cautionary tale for editors and authors alike. I’ll quote directly from the same article I started with:

throughout the various stages of proofreading of this book, we constantly had to maintain vigilance to be certain that this “strange” term cepstrum wasn’t inadvertently “corrected” to what seemed to be more appropriate. . . . We breathed a sigh of relief when the last page proofs were returned to the publisher. When the first printing of the book appeared, it was clear that a particularly diligent proofreader at the publisher had caught the “error” at the last instant and cepstrum had been reversed to spectrum throughout.

Well, not entirely reversed – but run through a transformation aimed at making the strange look normal again. Ah, but too late – and sometimes you want to see things strangely.

Thanks to Colleen Kavanagh (@CanuckWordNerd) for drawing my attention to this whole sandbox of words.

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zein

Posted on August 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Have you seen this word before? You might think you’d remember if you had, but I think you more likely haven’t. Yet it’s a short word (unlike, say, zeaxanthin), and at the same time eye-catching, thanks to the z at the front – and it’s very angular indeed if you write it in all caps: ZEIN. If the EI were, as they almost appear to be, a single character looking like an 8 from an LED readout, ZEIN would read the same vertically when rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

Ah, the plasticity of the written word. It’s a nifty little thing, too, this word, and the odds are very high that you’ve actually encountered what it names. And yet the odds are also quite good you won’t even get the pronunciation right at first try.

Also, was kann es sein? Well, if you think it’s pronounced like German, try again. It’s two syllables: like “zee in” – as an American might say, “There’s a zee in this word.” But what else is in it? Hmm. There’s a bit of maize in it… you know, zea maize, a.k.a. Zea mays, a.k.a. corn? More exactly, zein is in maize. It is to corn what gluten is to wheat.

Well, whoop-de-doo. Isn’t that amaizeing. Actually, though, it’s more interesting than you might think, because it is a very useful protein. Pure zein is (to quote Wikipedia, which is borrowing from who knows what) “clear, odorless, tasteless, hard, water-insoluble, and edible.” That gives it quite a lot of uses in a variety of areas of manufacturing. All those bio-plastic cups, for instance. But also coatings on pills, candies, paper cups, bottle caps, buttons, fabrics, and more. You’ve almost certainly handled it, and you’ve almost certainly swallowed it, too (in the many corn products out there, of course, but also on candies and pills, where it may be referred to as “confectioner’s glaze” or “vegetable protein”).

And yet zein remains an exotic, little-known word. Well, unless you’re a reader of AK Comics, an Egyptian-based superhero comic, in which Zein is the name of a superhero philosophy professor who is the last of the ancient line of pharaohs. Wot, they named him after corn protein? Naw, not really, though zein is something of a superhero shape-changer product. Zein just happens also to be an Arabic name (pronounced differently). The corn protein, for its part, gets its name from Latin zea (from Greek ζειά zeia), meaning “spelt” (the grain) originally but more recently applied to corn (i.e., maize), and the same derivative suffix in that’s in protein and a variety of other biochemical names.

And so we have maize, originally from Taino (a New World language), and zein, originally from Greek, and they both utilize e, i, and z. Man! Whaddya think of that! Such plasticity written language has… These bits that get used all over. It’s a maize zein!

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ajar

Posted on August 14, 2011 | 3 comments

You know this one, for sure: “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar!”

OK, try this one: “When is ajar not ajar? When it’s not a door!”

Perhaps that requires some explanation, lest I leave you with mouths agape. I was playing poker with some friends last night – real ones, not fictional characters – and one of them, Michelle, observed that you can only use ajar on a door, not anything else. Alex, who seldom misses a turn to burnish his cynical and gruff image, in response produced the sentence “Your mouth is ajar.”

And indeed one may on rare occasion see references to mouth(s) ajar – also window(s) ajar. It’s worth noting that mouths ajar would not be the same as mouths agape, as ajar means “slightly open”.

But what, anyway, has a door’s partial openness to do with jars? Were doors once held open with – or for – mason jars (from Arabic jarrah, earthen vessel)? Indeed not, nor has it anything to do with the door having been jarred, i.e., bumped (a word that comes from onomatopoeia for a harsh sound – physical jarring is actually derivative from sonic jarring), though for a time many people thought so. Rather, this jar comes originally from the Germanic word char.

But that’s not the char that has to do with burning, nor the one that has to do with tea, though both involve chores that a charwoman might do. This char, you see, is related to chore – it’s the char in charwoman, and it referred originally to a turn or a returning; the surviving sense is of an occasional turn of work – a little chore. So a door is ajar because doors swing open and return, and one that is not completely returned is still on the turn: a (a variant of on) jar.

This is a word that requires no more effort than closing a door that’s been left ajar (so close it already!). The act of saying ajar, one might say, leaves the mouth ajar – opened but not returned to shut – and the tongue, too: it touches at the tip on the j and then hangs near the palate but not touching it with the retroflex /r/.

It’s a nice, tidy, even pretty little word – the j in the middle is a little unusual, especially in a word so short; it adds a stylish little swing below and dot above, so much nicer than achar, I’d say. It’s raja backwards, and it makes me think of the Steely Dan album Aja, which has (among others) the song “Peg”: “Peg,” Donald Fagen sings, “it will come back to you.” I guess that peg is what the door closes against. The door swings open, and then shut – every time it goes one way, it will go back, Jack, and do it again (OK, that’s a different song). But of course you can always leave it partially open and let the charwoman close it.

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reticent, reluctant

Posted on August 13, 2011 | 4 comments

Dear word sommelier: When should I use reticent and when reluctant?

I’m a little, um, hesitant to wade into one like this, because this gets to be one of those pedantics-versus-the-universe points. Not that there’s a whole lot of debate over reluctant, mind you – though there is a little specification of sense that some may stipulate. But reticent is one of those words that some people will use as a net to catch you with if you so much as offer a penny for their thoughts – or even if you don’t.

There is, of course, a difference in the feel of the words that will always have some effect, whether you’re a semantic stickler or not. They are similar-looking words, re____nt; one has tice where the other has lucta, both with a t and a c, so the difference in look is mainly i and e versus lu and a. The feel of the sound is more different. The rhythm, for starts, is a dactyl in reticent and an amphibrach in reluctant; ironically, the vowel in re is (or may be) “long” in the word where it’s unstressed but not in the word where it’s stressed. More to the heart of the matter, reticent stays on the tip of the tongue, a little more tentative and delicate with the /tɪs/; in reluctant the mouth is locked up with a clucking coarticulation after the lick: /lʌkt/.

There’s also the relative frequency of the words. Reticent is a much less commonly used word than reluctant. That makes it a pricier word – used when people want to sound more erudite, impressive, what have you. It’s also a newer word by a couple of centuries; it first showed up in the early 1800s, while reluctant has been around since the early 1600s.

Both come from Latin, naturally: the re at the beginning is the same, meaning “back” or similar things, and the [a/e]nt is a present participle ending. The root difference is in the occupant of the space for re____nt. In reluctant, it’s luctari, “fight”. Originally, to be reluctant was to actively resist something; there’s a verb, reluct, which doesn’t get used now, at least in part because now we view reluctance as more of a passive resistance or even simple hesitation. It might be as little as not truly believing you’ve lucked into something – for instance, if you’re reluctant to believe that the person calling telling you you’ve won a cruise vacation is on the up and up. I’d like to think the effect of the tongue backing away in the luc adds to that sense, but of course I have no data for that.

In reticent, on the other hand, the root is tacere “be silent” (compare French Tais-toi! “Shut up!”/”Be quiet!”). The original use, and the one still preferred by those who make it their business to prefer such things, is closer to “taciturn” than to “hesitant” or “resistant”: it means “disinclined to express personal thoughts and feelings; the opposite of loquacious”. It stands alone: “Herb was reticent.” (That’s a quote from MAD magazine. Yes it is.) But you may often see reticent used to mean, well, “reluctant” – the same sense of “reluctant” as we use today, often taking an infinitive complement: “The State registrar was just as reticent to give us information.”

That last quote, by the way, comes from 1875. This usage, which undeniably uses it to mean what there’s already another word to mean, but with the added air of elevation, erudition, or plain misplaced prissiness, has been around much too long and is much too well established to eradicate. That doesn’t mean you have to use it, of course; you’re perfectly within your rights to reserve reticent for what you wish pedants would be. But if you are not reluctant to use it as a shiny substitute for “reluctant”, just be aware that there may be a semantic retiarius ready to cast a net of condemnation without so much as one red cent in payment for their liberally expressed conservatism.

Thanks to Stan Backs for suggesting reticent. A retiarius, by the way, is a gladiator who uses a net.

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phocomele

Posted on August 11, 2011 | 5 comments

I recently read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a sci-fi novel written in 1968 and set in 2010. In his version of the – well, of last year, from my perspective – the world has about 9 billion people (enough for all to stand on Zanzibar if everyone had a space one foot by two feet – not something that happens in the novel; just a bit of trivia that is the only mention of Zanzibar in the book). This overpopulation is resulting in severe overcrowding, such that every so often a person will simply snap and run amok, slaughtering those around. (Given our experience of a world fast closing on 7 billion, Brunner seems to have overestimated the demographic pressures and their effects.)

Anyway, a result of this overcrowding is that much of the world, and especially the developed world, has taken on strict eugenic legislation. People must be tested for genetic defects they might pass on, and if they have a gene for anything such as hemophilia or colour-blindness – let alone worse – they are not allowed to have children. Along with this prevailing ethos is a shift in the terms of abuse – bleeder is among the most common, replacing bastard and similar – and an overall focus on a melange of possible genetic defects. Among these is phocomelia; Brunner’s book is the first place I am aware of having heard of this condition by this name.

Brunner never explains what phocomelia is, but he tosses it in – and the noun for a person afflicted with it, phocomele, which he spells phocomel, and the adjective phocomelic – here and there to exemplify some particularly dreadful congenital condition. Now, I read novels on the subway and bus, well away from a dictionary (I do not have an iPhone), and once I get where I’m going there are other things on my mind and I tend to forget to look up any word I don’t know (a phenomenon I encounter once in a while). So it was only just now that I looked it up and found out what it meant.

I have to admit that phocomele was not morphologically transparent to me – I am not actually fluent in Classical Greek, and this word’s parts are not so often used in English word formation. I knew it was from Greek, due to the ph spelling. It did seem odd: like a respelling of focus or focal, though I was sure it wasn’t. It’s reminiscent of Phocis, a place name mentioned in The Libation Bearers, a drama by Aeschylus that I performed in once. It’s also reminiscent of Jacmel, a town in Haiti that my mother once lived in long ago. The word seems an awkward joining of two parts that aren’t quite meant to join together: a hard, cold, round phoco and warmer, more voiced, more front, nasal-and-liquid mele.

By the context, I made the assumption that it must be a mental disability. After all, in the real 2010, when people focus on congenital disabilities and talk about one as though being particularly unfortunate, there’s a fairly strong chance in our culture it’s in some way cognitive. But in 1968, there was a different kind of congenital disorder that was still much on everyone’s minds. You may recognize the word thalidomide: a drug for morning sickness that came out in the early 1960s. It was found to have an association with phocomelia.

Phocomele comes, as it turns out, from ϕώκη phoké “seal” (compare French phoque) and μέλος melos “limb”. It refers to a condition where the long bones of one or more limbs are shortened or nonexistent, so the hands and/or feet are joined closely to the trunk of the body. I have been aware of the existence of this condition since I was a child, but I do not recall ever having seen this name for it. People affected with it were and are (in my experience) called thalidomide babies. Frankly, phocomele seems a rather unkind word, not just for meaning “seal limb” but for equating the person with the condition. In Brunner’s dystopia, the person is inseparable from the disorder; it has a deterministic effect on them. Today we lean towards seeing such things as incidental to the person: something that has happened to them, rather than something they are.

Brunner’s book is not without hope, but it has a strongly bitter tinge. He gets some things close to right, and other things rather less so. His faith in science is hardly untarnished. But given that he was writing in the era that had just been reminded of the dark side of scientific advancements, is it any wonder? What we have learned better between then and now is, perhaps, that while humanity and its sciences can be very destructive, there is also corresponding growth in enlightenment and redemption.

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