cursive

Posted on July 25, 2011 | 1 comment

My wife, Aina, said to me this morning, “You look skinnier.”

I said, “But I don’t weigh any less.”

“That’s the curse of running,” she replied.

Of course I heard her correctly, and knew she meant that I was gaining muscle while losing fat. But I can’t ever resist also hearing incorrectly, just for fun: in this case, “That’s the cursive running.” So I said, “Interestingly, cursive comes from a Latin root meaning ‘running’.”

She laughed. “See?”

Indeed, running is fluid and all joined together, just like writing that is all joined together: a sequence of curves and lines. But one may stop or stumble in running, and rather more so may one stop and stumble in writing. I sometimes lose my place – because my m’s and n’s tend to have points rather than humps, a word like community makes me stop and count how many points I’ve written. And if I had to write unununium often it would certainly have me cursing! Even civility can give me trouble (the word, I mean, not the practice) – if my aim were to join all the letters together, I would surely curse iv. But at least I can write cursively, which seems to be a dying art: it’s just not the type of communication preferred by those native to keyboards – a pity; they lose some style with their digits.

But what has running to do with cursing anyway? Aside from what you might say when you are cut off by a car, or nearly run down by a cyclist, or obstructed by oblivious walkers, or almost tripped by a dog on a long lead, I mean. What in the fluid lines of a runner and the fluid lines of handwriting has anything to do with malediction?

Nothing at all but the sound and shape of the word, it would seem. The Latin source of cursive is cursivus, “running”, from currere, “run” (as in current, for instance), while the English word curse (the antonym of blessing) is a lexical orphan: like dog (but unlike cur), it has no known cognates in other languages. Well, of course, we can only trace what we have in print – the curse of relying on the written word.

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scandalize

Posted on July 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

As you scan the lines of a gossip rag for whatever your enquiring mind wants to know, and some scandal crosses your eyes, some shame or infamy, are you actually seeking to be scandalized? Do you take Schadenfreude in Schande, do you want to be offended?

Certainly some people do like to take offense, and to find it where it can be found. I remember an intermittent character on the sitcom Barney Miller who was ever looking for the shady side – his name was Scanlon, and I have always thought they picked that name because of the echoes of scam and scandal.

Is there any sort of negative phonaesthetic kick to that /skæ/ onset? Aside from scandal and its derivatives and scam, we see it in in scab, scad, skag, scamp, scan, scant, skank, and scat. Most of those have some negative tinge, though scad does not and scamp often does not. And scan? Generally not, though it does put me in mind of Hamlet’s

that would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge!

When I first read it, I thought he was using scann’d to mean something negative (rather like rotten or vicious), but actually he’s running through the scansion of the situation – and finding that it doesn’t meter out: the “to heaven” hangs over onto another line. What, a line in Shakespeare that doesn’t make the meter? Scandalous!

One need not seek in such obscure places for scandal in plays, of course; it makes some very good theatre generally. Indeed, a famous play of a sesquicentury or so after Shakespeare is The School for Scandal by Sheridan, and in the times in between – especially during the Restoration – there were many plays that trafficked the stage almost exclusively with the comings and goings of scandalous behaviour. Nor has the appetite let up; from Desperate Housewives to the nightly news, we like to be scandalized.

And how would you define scandalize? Does it mean “offend”? Certainly you can find that equivalency in the Bible, for instance, as Bill Whitla pointed out to me (and others) today: in Matthew 13:57, where one usually reads that Jesus’s townsfolk were offended by what he was teaching, the Greek source uses a conjugation of the verb σκανδαλίζειν skandalizein, which might suggest that they were really scandalized – that’s much juicier than just being offended, isn’t it? Can you be scandalized without whispering amongst yourselves, for instance?

But we should bear in mind that that Greek origin is a word for a snare or a trap, used metaphorically to refer to a stumbling block or offense. Scandal appeared in English first in reference to irreligious behaviour bringing discredit. Now it refers to shocking people by some violation of propriety or morality. But propriety has broadened in its scope. And the liking some people have for breaches of propriety is rather indecent – it’s scandalous how much they seek to be scandalized! (Ooo!)

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verdant

Posted on July 24, 2011 | 1 comment

I love this word not for its shape or its sound but for what it signifies. I grew up, you see, in a place that was overall rather dry and most of the time was shades of brown and grey; only in the summer would it become green, and I certainly enjoyed the view from a hill of the river valley filled with trees, as though someone had poured a pitcher of pesto into it, but even then it was nothing like the intense green that one sees in more humid climates. And this word carries intensity with it: although its dictionary definition is simply “green” or “green with vegetation”, one cannot miss out on the intensity of the green – depth of colour, or pervasiveness, or both.

This is in part because something that’s covered with vegetation probably does have an intense and pervasive green. But consider the sound of verdant – what does it sound like that will be flavouring it? What other words have a similar sound? Verve, fervent, fervid, vermin, fever, fertile, vertical, perverted, verdigris, verge, vervet, ferment, nervy, perhaps for heaven’s sake… I find that in general a labiodental fricative followed by syllabic /r/ has a vibration against restraint, an insistent yearning, though of course it’s more present in some words than in others.

And what words does verdant travel with or near? Very often, it shows up in the phrase verdant green, which manifests either a mistrust of the hearer’s understanding of verdant or a belief that verdant refers to the vegetal nature rather than the colour per se (in fact, it comes via French from a Latin root for “green”), or perhaps a tendency (as in ruby red too) to form colour adjectives as specifiers on a primary colour name. Or simply a taste for redundancy.

But there are various things that are described as verdant, and not always as verdant green: hills, forest(s), fields, trees, landscape, valley, lawns, foliage… Keats wrote of a verdant hill, Robert Burns of verdant woods, Milton of verdant grass, verdant leaf, a verdant wall, verdant isles, and even verdant gold, Wordsworth of verdant herb and a verdant lawn and a verdant path and verdant hills – they really get their word’s worth out of it.

I especially like Edward Smyth Jones’s “A Song of Thanks,” in which he gives thanks “For the verdant robe of the gray old earth” (among dozens of other lovely things). I must say that whenever I see verdancy – the verdant sea of trees in the Don Valley, perhaps, or the emerald crescent of Toronto Island – I too am truly thankful: that it is there and that I am too.

And thanks to my mom, not just for putting me here to see verdancy but for asking me to taste verdant.

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roundabout

Posted on July 22, 2011 | 2 comments

Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout,
A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray,
And though she feels as if she’s in a play,
She is anyway.

Well, you know that song, anyway: “Penny Lane,” by the Beatles, about a junction in the Mossley Hill area of Liverpool, a sort of circus – not just because there was so much going on there (many bus lines met there), but because the roads that met there met in a ring.

And then there’s this:

Onc’t they was a little boy would n’t say his pray’rs –
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up stairs,
His mammy heerd him holler, an’ his daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he was n’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout!
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

That’s from “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley – it’s the poem that inspired the comic (about that little redhead girl with the empty rings for eyes) that inspired the musical from which was made the movie.

But in the end, need one meet all the busy-making and frights of the world head-on? William Cowper presented a differing view in “The Jackdaw”:

He sees that this great roundabout
The world, with all its motley rout,
Church, army, physic, law,
Its customs and its businesses,
Is no concern at all of his,
And says – what says he? – Caw.

That jackdaw (who has probably collected a bit of each of those parts of the world) cuts to the heart of the matter, but the matter is circling around him, and so the heart of it goes around it by going straight when it goes around.

Should I get to the point? Well, every circle has its origin, but it doesn’t touch that origin, while yet it doesn’t depart from it. The point may remain unspoken (and without spokes), and yet it is perfectly circumscribed. And sometimes in life that is what will make things go more smoothly – sometimes the express route is via the unexpressed.

Take a touchy topic: touchy of course means don’t touch it, so you have to play a ring-around-the-rosie. Or take several roads and bring them together: if you have them intersecting at a common point, it will be a vertex of vexation, with stopping and starting and collisions, but if you have everyone go around, the traffic can go smoothly.

Not that it necessarily will. There’s a very funny scene in National Lampoon’s European Vacation where Chevy Chase et al. are stuck going around one and can’t exit. In Edmonton (Alberta), there used to be a lot of them, and they gradually got rid of nearly all of them – people just couldn’t drive them safely. Same deal on the highway near Banff. And yet they’re very popular in England.

What are very popular? Oh, for heaven’s sake, what I’ve been talking about. Even the name for them has a certain iconicity of verbal gesture: beginning with a rolling /r/, the tongue loops open and the mouth widens and then closes round in front and high in back, then the tongue touches at the tip and then it bounces to the lips, and then – why, then it goes back, Jack, and does it again: that big round vowel gesture again and back to the tip of the tongue, going around about the mouth. And each circular gesture is written with the aid of a ring as well, o and o.

It’s that word made of two Germanic words that in England often names a meeting of the ways without their actually meeting (Canadians call them traffic circles), and in other senses is everywhere often followed with way.

Sometimes the only way through is not to go through at all – go about, go around. Sometimes it would tease to cross; sometimes you don’t dot the eyes. The usefulness of round things is, after all, often in what is not there. And sometimes the point is not what is in the middle at all, but what you find behind it.

Thanks to Saro Nova for mentioning this topic.

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avarice, greed, cupidity

Posted on July 21, 2011 | 7 comments

Dear word sommelier: I’m unsure whether what I want to describe is best called avarice, greed, or cupidity. Which should I use for what where and when?

Oh, heck, why have just one if you can have all three?

If you’re wondering about the semantic difference between the three, you’re not the only one. This question was discussed today on the Editors’ Association of Canada email list, and there were differing opinions about whether one or another was more or less money-specific. And while a dictionary might tell you some little difference like that – or actually more likely won’t be so obliging – what really matters is how the people who actually read or hear it, who are unlikely to be running every word through a dictionary, will perceive it. And we know that there are different views on that. In other words, never mind the label or the guidebook, let’s taste it and talk about food matching.

Words, after all, are known by the company they keep. And they also gain flavour by other words and sound patterns that they bring to mind. So let’s swirl and sniff and sip and spit (or swallow) each one of these.

Greed is now the most common of the three by a fair measure, though if Google ngrams are to be believed it was not always thus (remember, though, that the Google ngrams search books, not popular usage in general). Its popularity gives it a certain commonness but also gives it more accretions. There are the pop culture references – “Greed is good,” as Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, and Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged also glorified greed; meanwhile, Han Solo blasted a slimeball named Greedo in a cantina on Tattooine – and it tends to show up with words such as corporate, human, personal, pure, sheer, and simple.

It has a taste of green, as in envy, and creed, as in a fixed statement of belief. And it has that growling, gripping /gr/ onset. Generally it is the most purely negatively toned of the three, Gekko and Rand notwithstanding. Interestingly, while greed tends to focus on financial and material acquisition, greedy, its related adjective, can also be used comfortably to refer to such things as eating. Just by the way, greed actually comes from greedy, not the other way around; greedy is itself a derivative form of a Germanic root for “hunger” or “greed”, however.

Avarice is less popular than it used to be – the word, I mean, not the thing, which is quite durable. It is found in more elevated texts – it is more erudite in tone, and seems a more expensive word. It’s like greed as practiced by “the right sort” of people – greed with a bowtie. It’s also one of the seven deadly sins. It comes from Latin avaritia, from avarus “greedy”, and it’s been used in English at least since Chaucer.

The feel of it may vary a bit from person to person – it makes me think of avaler, French for “swallow”; also avalanche, avenue, rara avis, avid, average, maybe aviatrix, and perhaps advice… Its adjective, avaricious, on the other hand, carries an air of vicious. Avarice seems comparatively open and airy in sound; certainly the mouth is much more open than for greed.

Cupidity, in the here and now, is one of those words that people probably feel a little twinge of pride in knowing, because it’s sufficiently uncommon. It’s a bit like avarice with a PhD. It keeps pricier company – words such as pudor and rapacity may be seen in the same sentence. Or maybe I’m only thinking of education because someone pointed out to me once, as we were walking by it, the cupid that is on top of the spire of The Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, and I said it was a monument to cupidity (Harvard’s endowment is $26 billion. Yes, $26 billion). And, yes, that chubby little cherub shares a root with this word: Latin cupidus, “eagerly desirous”. It’s a little newer to our tongue, having arrived in the 1500s.

The taste of cupidity is conditioned by various odd echoes: stupidity, cube, cubic zirconium, cubit… It is a word with a cup that runneth over (and still wants to be refilled). And it may well have a tinge of sexual desire, not just from Cupid but from concupiscence (which might be practiced in combination with a cupidous concubine). But it is the crispest of the three words, chunky, blocky, or at least tapping; its four syllables have four stops, each with a vowel, while avarice has three syllables with fricatives and a liquid (and vowels before consonants), and greed has two stops, a liquid, and only one vowel.

So which to use? Consider the rhythm and the sounds of the sentence around; consider also the tone – how lofty or plain? How harsh or mitigated?

But certainly keep all three in your bank to use. Look, you can never have too many words at your disposal. And spending them is actually your best investment.

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groundhog

Posted on July 18, 2011 | 4 comments

Maury and I and Maury’s friend Gwen (Jennifer) were besporting ourselves at the pool at Maury’s uncle Red’s country place. More specifically, Gwen was swimming laps (in spite of being two martinis to the better), I was swimming a bit and standing a bit, and Maury was sitting in a deck chair, fully clad, on his third martini.

“You should come in!” Gwen shouted at Maury. “It’s fun! Exercise does a body good!”

“I am of the conviction,” Maury said, “that one’s heart has only so many beats in a lifetime. Raising one’s heart rate therefore shorten’s one’s life.”

“I think I’ve pointed out the error in that reasoning before,” I said. “For instance, because I exercise, my resting heart rate is about 20 beats per minute slower than it used to be when I didn’t exercise. While I’m exercising, it averages about 80 beats per minute faster than my resting heart rate used to be, or 100 beats faster than my resting rate. But I only exercise six hours a week. So one twenty-eighth of my time is spent exercising each week. That means my average heart rate is… let’s see, a difference of 100 averaged out over 28, just about three and a half… my average heart rate is about sixteen and a half beats per minute slower than it would be if I didn’t exercise. Sixteen and a half times how many minutes are there in a lifetime?”

“Alright, I get the point,” Maury said. “I nonetheless find this option more refreshing. And I’m less likely to drown.”

“Except your sorrows.”

“May they be few.”

Just then, Maury’s uncle Red strode out. “Lady and gentlemen, I would like to point out that the sky is darkening and there will soon be lightning.”

I pulled myself up out of the pool. Gwen protested: “But that’s why I’m in the pool! I’m lightening myself up!” Funny how the skinny ones always complain about their weight.

“You could end up blackened,” Red said, “like catfish. C’mon in, food’s a-fixing.”

We retreated obligingly. I headed to my room to change. As I opened the door I heard a sudden scuffling noise, and I noticed the corner of the carpet turned up. But a first scan of the room showed no animate forms.

Hm.

I knelt down and looked lower. I found what I sought beneath the bedside table: a critter that looked like a gopher, but click-dragged to rather larger size. A groundhog. It was cowering and looking at me nervously.

I shouted into the hall. “Red! There’s a groundhog in my room!”

Red came around the corner. “Oh fer… gracious mercy… He was in here yesterday. It’s like Groundhog Day.” Maury and Gwen appeared behind him.

“Well, we aren’t all that far from Wiarton,” I observed.

Gwen peeked down. “And he does look a bit like Bill Murray. I wonder what he’s after in here.”

“Some marmot-lade, perhaps?” Maury said. (Groundhogs are a kind of marmot.)

“Maybe it’s looking for some wood to chuck,” I said. (Woodchuck is another name for a groundhog.)

“Well,” Red said, “he can chuck all the wood that a woodchuck chucks… outside. And hog the ground there too. Hand me that broom. And open that door.” He gestured to the door to the outside that my room – actually a converted covered porch – featured. I went over and opened it. Maury handed Red the broom, and then grabbed a golf putter that was leaning against the wall.

Red looked at Maury. “What are you doing with that? We’re trying to chase the poor thing out, not beat it to putty. I have all the ground hog I need in the kitchen. Oh, no vegans here, right? Because I’m making something I saw on Epic Meal Time.”

“I’m just trying to help encourage it to go to ground,” Maury said.

“Well, let’s line up and make a path to the door for it. Coooome on, little guy… get the hell outa here.” A little encouragement and some sweeping under the bed eventually resulted in our little friend making a break for it through the open door, which we swiftly closed.

“I wonder where it will go,” Gwen said.

“Oh, it has plenty of room out there,” Red said. “This used to be a farm. I’ve sold off most of the turf, but I still hogged enough of the ground for myself. Just as long as it stays away from my car.”

“Have you seen Red’s car?” Maury said. “It’s in the barn. It’s a brilliant red Barchetta.”

“Bugatti,” Red corrected him. “It’s a real rush to drive.”

“You don’t need to worry about him stealing your car,” Gwen said. “He’s not Mr. Toad.”

I, meanwhile, was standing there sounding out the various names of the beastie. “Grrroundhoooggg… round and rumbling… Wood! chuck! short and sharp… Marrrmota monax… murmuring up to a crack, like lightning in reverse…”

The heavens obliged at that moment with a crack of a lightning bolt not so far away and the following rolling rumble.

“Poor thing,” Gwen said, looking out towards the groundhog’s path of retreat. “What if the lightning zaps him?”

“It’s OK,” Maury said. “He’s a natural ground.”

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Jennifer, juniper

Posted on July 17, 2011 | 1 comment

Maury’s uncle Red has a country place, and Maury wangled an invitation for a set of his friends to come up and spend the weekend. He intimated to me that he was bringing a new interest named Jennifer.

It was rather hot out when I arrived, so I quickly dropped my bags and changed into swim gear. I passed through the kitchen to grab a bevvy, but Maury said that he had some he was just fixing up that he would bring out shortly. So I made a beeline to the pool.

I was just setting down my towel when a fetching lady emerged through some ornamental heather near the pool’s edge. “Hello,” I said. “I’m James.”

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Gwen. In fact, I’m gwen into the pool.”

I paused. “Oh, you must be Maury’s friend. I thought your name was Jennifer. …Oh, wait.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Gwen as in short for Jennifer.”

“Because Jennifer is really a Cornish version of the name Guinevere,” I said. “Yes, I’ve seen Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma.”

“Yup,” she said. She quoted from the play: “‘My name is Jennifer.’ ‘A strange name.’ ‘Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.’ Well, thanks in part to Shaw, it’s not so strange anymore. Jennifer is now about as plane as Jane, so I went with the English version and then shortened it to Welsh roots.” This was true: Guienevere is from Welsh gwen “white, fair, blessed, holy” and hwyfar “smooth, soft”.

“You could have gone with Gaynor,” I said. Gaynor is a variant of Guinevere.

“Ew. Didn’t want to. ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor would be playing through my life. Anyway, it’s getting common in England, and over here sounds a bit too much like Gaylord.”

At this juncture Maury arrived with a pitcher of martinis and some glasses. “Ah,” said Gwen, “you’ve brought my namesake.”

“Juniper and Jennifer aren’t really related,” Maury said.

“Oh, jenever know,” Gwen said, playing on Dutch for “gin”. “Yes, yes, I know it’s from Latin.”

“And from juniper,” I volunteered, “come genever and genièvre and ultimately gin.”

“Maury mentioned that,” Gwen said. “But I do like the similarity of sounds. Jennifer and juniper differ only in one vowel and one consonant, and those consonants are closely related.”

“For all that,” I said, “Jennifer has a bit more of a rustle as of heather, and juniper has a little more of a nip to it.”

“Meanwhile, Guinevere starts with a g and all those variants on juniper begin with the letter g,” Gwen said. “But Maury, dahling, can you give me mine with a twist? Since I’m by the pool.”

Maury obliged and handed Gwen a decent-sized martini with a twist of lemon peel. She held it up in toast: “Gin gin!” Then she downed the whole glass and danced a quick little twist. But her foot caught on my towel and she spun into the pool with a bit of a flip and a bit more of a splash.

“Well,” Maury observed as she resurfaced spluttering, “that was a double Gaynor.”

“She did say she was Gwen in,” I remarked.

“Ha,” said she. “I will survive.” She held up the martini glass that she was somehow still holding. “Arrr. Pirate Jenny wants a refill.”

I looked at Maury as if to say, “You’ve found a winner.” He just lifted an eyebrow and the jug and refilled her glass.

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bung

Posted on July 14, 2011 | 3 comments

Lynne Murphy, @lynneguist, separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/, mentioned today on Twitter a word that I (like her) have come to see as particularly British in flavour: bung.

It’s not that I encountered it first in a British context; actually, I knew it first as the name of the alcoholic court jester in The Wizard of Id, the cartoon strip by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart (see johnhartstudios.com/wizardofid/characters/index.php?page=bung). It was some time after that that I learned that it was another word for a cork.

But cork is a tight, stopped-up-sounding word, starting and ending with /k/. It’s what you stick in a bottle – you can hear the sound as you push it back into a bottle that (like you) is half drunk (“cork, cork, cork”), or later as you pull it back out (“corrrrk”). Bung is resonant. It’s something you would stick in a barrel, whacking it in with a rubber mallet so the entire vessel makes a “bung!” sound.

Not that that’s where cork comes from, nor – in the case of the stopper – bung. That kind of bung seems to be related to Middle Dutch bonge, meaning the same thing, which may have come ultimately from Latin puncta “hole” (though there are some holes in the etymological trail too). There is also a sense of bung as “dead” (or “bankrupt”) that comes from an Australian Aboriginal language. But some uses of bung do seem to originate in sound symbolism – specifically the senses meaning “throw violently, put forcibly” and “right in the middle of things” – and it’s quite reasonable, I’d say, to think that there is real influence of the sound on all senses (certainly in English usage), just as the “stopper” sense surely has some effect on the non-stopper uses.

At any rate, in Britain the word gets around; they will often say (as Lynne Murphy points out) “My nose is all bunged up” rather than “My nose is all stuffed up,” and they may say, as the Macmillan Dictionary says, “Bung the ball to me, Jack” or “Bring me another beer and just bung it on the bill” – in those senses it’s not merely a real or metaphorical projectile motion that is signified, but specifically a fairly careless one (as may go with the bluntness and dullness of sound of the word – not as focal as bang, let alone bing, nor even as bright as bong). They also use it to refer to bribery and other under-the-table financial payments, as for example secret financial incentives to facilitate a deal in British football  (thanks to Lynne for the examples as well).

One may imagine that if you throw a cork (metaphorically) into the middle of a shady transaction in a small house, thereby stopping the action and basically killing it, you could say that you bung a bung bung into the middle of a bung in a bungalow, bunging it up so it’s bung. But that sounds like a bungled jungle of bungs…

I do hope that Lynne Murphy does not find this effort merely echoic of hers. But I thought it a good way to direct you all to her blog and Twitter feed, which are worthy of notice. And it’s a good excuse to move farther afield than just my usual Torontonian perspective.

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under the sea

Posted on July 13, 2011 | 1 comment

Dear Word Sommelier: I was just watching The Little Mermaid and I was struck by the song “Under the Sea.” The sea is the water, right? All the creatures are in the water; only the sea bed is under it. So shouldn’t it be “in the sea”? Or is this one of those idiomatic things? If I wanted to write about the beauty of sea life, should I write about the colours in the sea or the colours under the sea?

Oh, prepositions are bedeviling. Which preposition goes with what is one of the least predictable things about any language. But I’m not going to wave this off with “It’s idiomatic” (which might be read as “It’s idiotic, Ma”). In this case you have two usable options, depending on your choice of schema for the sea: as container or voluminous body, or as surface with or without depth: without, like a boardwalk (“under the boardwalk, down by the sea”), or with, like a blanket of snow.

Under the sea uses the “surface” schema; it means below the surface of the sea, and – giving the sense that it’s a surface with depth – usually towards the bottom; the fact that it’s actually in the seawater doesn’t change the “under” relationship to the surface and to all the water on top of whatever is under the sea. Jules Verne’s book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is something that often hovers in the mind when one speaks of being under the sea, as does the Beatles’ “I’d like to be under the sea, in an octopus’s garden in the shade.” Another phrase that makes use of the same schema is beneath the sea – or, perhaps more commonly, as in “Octopus’s Garden,” beneath the waves (do remember that waves are more than just a pure surface phenomenon in reality). We must remember, too, the very common word and image underwater (and its counterpart underground).

In the sea, on the other hand, uses the “container” or “voluminous body” schema (that’s two different schemata, not two names for the same one). It presents an image of being in the water, surrounded by it or as part of it or using it as a medium. It can even involve being partly out of the sea (e.g., swimming, which you do not do “on the sea”).

There’s also the question of vantage point. If you’re looking at the colours in the sea, you’re most likely looking at them from outside, perhaps on a boat looking down into it. To see all the colours under the sea, you’d more likely have an undersea perspective yourself – if not in a submarine or scuba diving, then at least snorkeling or in a glass-bottom boat. Also, colours in the sea could imply or at least include the colours of the water itself, which colours under the sea would less likely do – though it might imply the colour of the light coming down through the water.

There’s also the phonaesthetic angle, which is a little fuzzier: under has that depth of sound, that hollow central vowel with the resonant nasal-stop /nd/ and the echo syllabic /r/, just like thunder (and also, of course, blunder, chunder, plunder, and wonder). Anyone who has had their head under water and heard hard things bonking together in the water (even if it’s just your shampoo bottle falling into the tub) will have some sense of that hollow sound. In, on the other hand, has a high front vowel into a simple nasal. It’s short, direct, less resonant, less capable of evocativeness. One might say it’s a jackknife dive to under’s cannonball, but it’s not really amenable to even that much flourish.

In a song like “Under the Sea,” of course, the rhythm is an important part of it. But for other uses, you may also want to consider the sound and the rhythm along with the image. Oh, and less-common usages tend to have a certain dearness compared to more-common ones… and under the sea is and (indications are) has always been somewhat less common than in the sea.

Just as a parting shot, ask yourself whether you would use under the ocean. I suspect most people would find it less idiomatic. Sea, an English word as long as there has been an English, has more native idioms and a greater literary accretion. Ocean is a loan from Greek (via Latin and French, arriving in English in the 13th century) and, like many such, is a little more technical and precise, and a little less flexible.

Thanks to Gael Spivak and several other editorial colleagues for input and inspiration.

Questions for the word sommelier are always welcome!

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baksheesh

Posted on July 12, 2011 | 3 comments

You may most likely hear this word in some expression of exasperation: “The whole economy there is lubricated by baksheesh! Everywhere you go around there, to get anything done, you have to slip them a buck behind the back! Sheesh! You’d think baksheesh was the sound of the printing press producing all those extra banknotes!”

Well, yes, there are some places where it’s a good tip to know that one is expected to give a good tip, as it were. But remember that, just as tip is not actually an acronym for “to improve performance” (no, it’s not; it’s not an acronym at all), baksheesh doesn’t come with performance guarantees, either… aside from a reasonable guarantee of lack of obstruction. You could think of it as the sound of a latch clicking (bak) and a sliding door opening (sheesh).

But it can also be a payment of alms – in India and Pakistan, the beggars cry “Baksheesh, baba!” – and a thanks or a veneration, for giving the opportunity to gain merit by giving alms or for the simple act of performing one’s little job (as a waiter, doorman, parking attendant, or what have you). It can be outright bribery of an official, too, of course, but it can also be subtler – a donation to a police charity, earning a bumper sticker that might make the boys in blue more favourably disposed, for instance. Generally it’s money, but I suppose other things given could count (perhaps baklava or hashish?).

Just as the act has various forms and valences, so too the word has a few different forms. The pronunciation is always the same – with that mechanical clack and slide like a machine that requires lubrication – but it has been spelled in English as baksheesh, bakhshish, bakshish, bakshis, buckshish, backsheesh (a spelling I saw just today in the cartoon Alex, www.alexcartoon.com/cartoons/5749_12072011.gif), and even (a couple of centuries ago) buxees. And the word has other spellings in other languages – bakchich, Backschisch, and spellings in the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. It doesn’t mean quite the same thing everywhere, either: in Balkan languages, it generally just means “tip” the same way we mean “tip” in Canada, and in Greek it can mean simply “gift”.

“Gift” is probably the best word for it anyway. Not just because you really can’t expect much in return (as opposed to the rather negative things you may expect in its absence in some contexts), but because it comes from Persian for “gift, present”, from a verb meaning “give”.

Just incidentally, there’s a Punjabi name Bakshi that comes from the Persian for “paymaster”. But that’s not the source of the family name of famed animation director Ralph Bakshi; his is a Krymchak (Turkic Crimean) Jewish name derived from the Turkish word for “garden”. Well, every garden needs a little seed money to keep it animated, too… but to be of the Bakshis or even just Bakshi-ish has nonetheless nothing to do with baksheesh.

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