rudera

Posted on May 18, 2011 | 4 comments

The wind has blown; the stones lie fallen –
Oh, what rudera, oh, what detritus
Shall in its broken death invite us
And seed our fantasies like pollen?

Though we can read no truth at all in
Ruins, histories excite us:
Oh, what rude era, oh, what detritus
The wind has blown! (The stones lie, fallen.)

But dust in wind will put its call in,
And gasp of death outshout vagitus:
These are the stones of Heraclitus,
Entropy’s rudders, nolens volen’.

The wind has blown the stones. Lie, fallen!
Oh, what air, Rudra! Oh, what detritus.

What, then, is rudera? Well, are rudera, I should say. Ruins. Broken stones, perhaps with vines crawling over them. Rubble. Rudera is the plural of the Latin rudus, meaning “broken stone” or “lump of stone”. The word is probably related to rude, which in origins meant “crude, unwrought, unripe, etc.” long before it meant “socially offensive”.

It’s actually a comparatively fluid word, isn’t it, for something so solid? Well, but are broken stones really so solid? They are evidence of the flow of time – as Heraclitus (of Ephesus, where there are some stirring ruins) said, you can’t step into the same river twice. But, as he also said, the path up and the path down are the same.

What else flows? Wind, of course, as in “Dust in the Wind” (the classic Buddhist-inspired song by Kansas, a band named after a place famous for dust in the wind, but not for rudera, just for a rude era, the dirty thirties). And if you want wind, look to a storm – or to the Vedic (Hindu) god of storms and the forces of nature, Rudra.

Rudera, incidentally, is also the name of a winery in the Stellenbosch region of South Africa, so named for the broken stones in the soil on which their vines grow.

The last line of the third stanza of the rondel is, I admit, cheated; nolens volens is the proper term, meaning “whether willing or not.” I had thought of using tholen, past participle of thole, but decided against it.

Oh, and vagitus means a cry, particularly that of a newborn. Which reminds me that I didn’t fit in a reference to ruach, “breath” and “spirit” – the wind of the body, connectind to the oxygen we need to live but that slowly erodes our cells. We are not made of stone, of course, not exactly: dust, rather. And such stuff as dreams are made on.

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sacroiliitis

Posted on May 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Wow, holy what-is-that! This word looks like it’s slamming on the brakes in order not to hit a wall – or maybe just screaming in pain as it wrenches around a corner. In fact, there are so many vertical lines in the back half of this word, it looks like it’s already slammed up against the wall.

But of course that could also be hair standing on end. Or just an effort to straighten up a bent back – unsuccessful, it seems, as it reverts to s at the end. Whatever it is, it’s not natural to English eyes, because it’s not a natural English combination of i’s. Oh, we have other words with four i’s in sequence, but usually they have consonants between them. Double i’s are the real oddity. Think of English words with other vowels doubled: baa, bee, boo, and, uh, vacuum. But find me one with two i’s in the same syllable!

Well, when you do, it won’t be this one. These i’s may have you crying, but there’s no real love between them, either; between them, they have all three of the common pronunciations of i: [I] as in hit, [i] as in machine, and [aI] as in hi (and then it’s back to [I] again). The act of saying this word is like a funky workout for the tongue, sort of like one of those workout programs you see advertised on American infomercials – the ones that will probably do your joints in.

Joints! This word has two of them in it, holding together three morphemes of two syllables each: sacro, having to do with the sacrum, the bone at the bottom of the spine (and this is from the same Latin root that gives us sacred); ili, having to do with the ilium, the lowest part of the abdomen, and the top bony flanks of the hip; and itis, a Latinate suffix (originally from Greek) that means “swelling”. So you have the ili in the middle like your backbone, and these two wider bits joined to its sides. And when there’s swelling in those joints – the sacroiliac joints (that’s five syllables, by the way, sac-ro-i-li-ac) – it’s sacroiliitis.

Does that sound like a kind of arthritis? Yeah, it’s a symptom of several kinds of arthritic conditions, notably various spondylarthropathies, such as ankylosing spondylitis. It can also be caused by other things, such as a car accident. But I’m kinda wondering if it’s so sore just from carrying all these heavy words around.

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crotchet

Posted on May 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

I think I might have a little note for this one in my quiver.

On the other hand, there are two quavers in this little note – quaver meaning “eighth note” and crotchet meaning “quarter note”. But fancy that, eh? How does a word for such a common snip of music gain such a scratchy, cranky, ratchety, crusty-sounding word?

Well, one might have an image of a crotchety musician, able to play a good hook but hard to work with – perhaps one of those who like to crochet between numbers, then ditch the work in their crotch while making the minimum brief quavering effort with the minims (half notes), semibreves (whole notes), quavers, and crotchets, or perhaps tossing the tune around like a game of lacrosse, but anyway getting through it by hook or by crook.

Well, actually, it’s a hook and a crook that are at the root of all this. Croche, to be specific: an old Northern French word for a hook or a bishop’s crosier (shaped like a shepherd’s crook). Its cognate crosse is the root of lacrosse. Croche itself has forked into a few branches.

There is, first, the one that leads to crotch (yes, yes, always the crotch shots early and often, like a movie). Our English crotch probably borrows as much from crutch as from croche, but one way or the other it appeared meaning a stake or pole with a forked top, used for supporting things. From that it came to refer to the place where a tree or branch divides in two, and from that the analogous location on the human body (so “the crotch of the tree” was not originally an anthropomorphic metaphor – rather the opposite – though of course that’s how it’s read now).

Then there is the diminutive, crochet, a little hook. That should be obvious enough, yes?

But from that came crotchet, which also meant first a small hook or hooked instrument (I’m not inclined to say a crooked instrument, not just because hooked does not mean crooked in the figurative sense, but because Bob Cratchit was as honest as the day is long, and crotchet makes me think of him). From this, it came to have the figurative meaning of a pet conceit, perverse pertinacity, whimsical fancy, or similar insistent digression – typically on a small point – from popular opinion. And it came to refer to a quarter note. Some suggest that the “whimsical conceit” sense had some base in the musical sense; others see in the old shape of a quarter note (more like a lozenge or diamond on a stem rather than the circle or oval you see now) something sufficiently close to a hook (though I do think eighth notes look more hooklike).

It is from the “perverse pertinacity” sense of crotchet, anyway, that we get crotchety. It is not now used to mean “tending to follow flights of fancy” or “waywardly whimsical”; rather, and I’m inclined to think thanks in some measure to the sound of it, we use it to mean “cranky” – the pertinacity is specifically that of negativity, whether the crotchety person be a witch, bitch, curmudgeon, or other frictionable person with an alveopalatal affricate (“ch”, “j”) – the sort of person who makes you say, “Tch!” But it must be duly noted that they won’t give you quarter.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for mentioning this one.

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ogdoad

Posted on May 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word strikes me as a bit of an ugly doo-dad, a knot of voiced stops. I’m not a synesthete, but I see a kind of sick yellow colour with it (your results may vary). I get that from a coagulation of different factors: the gd, which always seem to be glued together or tied with gut strings; the two o’s, which can look kooky or pretty or clean and cold but which always stand for back vowels, more often than not rounded, and so have a sort of dullness to them; the oa, which in some cases can be quite lovely but which seem stunted by the d at the end.

Aside from that, the word makes me think first of the name Ogden, which has a few associations for me: an industrial district of Calgary; Ogden Nash, an amusing poet; David Ogden Stiers, who played Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H. And it makes me think of dog (and dead dog), dad, good ad, d00d…

Of course, all of that might just make you say, “Huh.” On the other hand, the word ogdoad itself might make you say Huh… and Hauhet, Naunet, Nu, Amaunet, Amun, Kauket, and Kuk: the ogdoad of ancient Egypt. They were male-female pairs (the males had the shorter names) of gods representing the concepts of primordial waters; air or invisibility; darkness; and eternity or infinite space. Of course there were four; that’s the number of completeness, and they were gods of creation. Double that and you get the most excellent number eight (also thought lucky in Chinese, but for paronomastic reasons).

And the Gnostics liked this double quaternity, too, speaking of the four emanations by which creation occurred: masculine abyss and feminine silence, grace, thought; from these, masculine mind and feminine truth; from these, masculine word and feminine life; and from these, masculine man and feminine church.

At any rate, it’s eight. You likely know the root for “eight” as octo. Well, for the ordinal, there was a phonological transformation in Ancient Greek, making those stops voiced, and from that came the word for a set of eight – just as myriad is a set of ten thousand. Interestingly, this is not some recent borrowing into English that really ought to be set in italics or quotes; it’s been around since medieval times – in fact, there’s even a sighting of it in Old English.

The ancient Angles were talking about Gnostics and hieroglyphics? Some were, yes, but others made broader use: “The Ogdoad, they said, was the first Cube, and the onely number evenly even under ten” (T. Stanley, 1660). An ogdoad, after all, can be any eight things, as long as you don’t mind that your readers will likely take it as a reference to the Egyptians or the Gnostics. Or, more likely, they will just say, “Huh?”

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sackbut

Posted on May 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

There are some words where you can make a pun that seems obvious to you and people will say, “I never thought of that.” I really don’t think this is one of those words.

You see (in case you didn’t know), sackbut (also seen as sackbutt) is not a word for baggy pants or a sagging bottom (even though sagbutt is an old alternate spelling). No, it names a musical instrument, and by that I don’t mean the kind of wind instrument whereby hangs a tail (as a clown in Othello put it). I don’t even mean a bagpipe. Nope, this is a wind instrument, but it’s an old version of one that is better known today by another name that appears to contain a word akin to butt but doesn’t really.

A few of you may be thinking, “Wind instrument? But in the book of Daniel in the Bible, sackbut refers to a stringed instrument!” Yes, that’s because the Arabic sabb’ka, rendered as σαμβύκη sambuké in the Greek, was mistranslated.

This word does not actually come from Arabic. No, it comes into English from Norman French. It comes from saqueboute, which also was the name of a lance with a hook used for pulling men off horses (think of that next time you’re watching football and a quarterback is peeling down the field when someone sacks his butt – much harder when it’s off your high horse). The saque comes from saquer, “pull”; the boute probably comes from bouter “push”.

So is this instrument named after a big gaff? Not necessarily, even though the English version of its name looks like a big gaffe. There is a sort of reminiscence of that shape in the instrument, but the instrument also has the feature that it is pushed and pulled – the tube is slid in and out. This means that it can play any frequency within its range, not just certain stops, and it can make smooth glissandos.

You probably have figured out what the modern version of this instrument is called: a name that is somewhat smoother sounding due to nasals and a voiced stop – trombone (Italian for “big trumpet”). Now, for a bloke like me, bone and butt go together (this is why my desk chair is so soft). But bones are hard, unlike the sound of a trombone. Well, the sound of the word sackbut is certainly hard, too. It sounds more like something you play on the drums and cymbals, or like a skeleton sitting down on a wooden chair. Nor is the shape of the word any cue to the shape of the instrument, which really recalls a paper clip (paper clips are called trombones in French, after all).

So why not just call the instrument a trombone? A couple of reasons. First, the mediaeval version is a bit different and produces a mellower sound, so if you’re playing on the period version of the instrument, you might as well call it the period name. Second, it’s attention-getting. It may seem like a ridiculous word, but it can really stick in the mind, and it has that quaintness and slight strangeness that can set the tone for archaisms in English, and it’s characteristic of the dry intellectual wit you expect from early-music geeks. And this is why there is a respected ensemble called His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts.

And now it’s time for me to hit the sack, but… well, no buts.

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e

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 1 comment

There’s a very amusing novel by Matt Beaumont called e. It’s not about ecstasy – well, perhaps the ecstasy and agony of communication. It’s set at a British advertising agency, and it’s told entirely through the emails of the various characters (“e me” means “email me”). And of course the accelerated communication leads to events compounding exponentially.

I’d say the letter e strikes the right note for that book, and for all the e things we have now growing exponentially (e-commerce and e-learning in particular), interest in which is compounding and the mass of which is accumulating at light speed, making it hard to maintain the energy to keep it all squared up.

To begin with, e is a letter of being and increase: è in Italian and é in Portuguese mean “is”, and e in Italian means “and” (in Mandarin, it means “hungry”, which can lead to increase, but never mind). Of course “is” is a statement of the existence of one (and in symbolic logic, ∃ x means “there exists an x”). Add “and” and you have “one-and”: that’s a beat and a half in music. The musical note E (in solfège, E = mi… e me, baby) is one and a half times the frequency of A, the basic note – they make an open fifth between them, and an open fifth can be quite powerful and intoxicating. You might be left with an ecstatic, open-mouthed grin like the bottom half of a lower-case e. On the other hand, if you say [e] – the International Phonetic Alphabet character – it sounds like what you would say if you named the note A (in English). How about that, eh? How do we have this apparent equivalence between two different things?

Well, if we want equivalence, there is of course the E that equals mc²: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. You know that when you look to the light of the rising sun, it’s coming from the east – E on your compass. And you know if you have a container with an ℮ on it, it’s a foodstuff from the European Union (the ℮ means the volume is acceptably close to the stated volume by EU standards) – making it a source of food energy. Meanwhile, e is also the symbol for an electron, that energetic little particle that zips around the nucleus – it has properties of both a particle and a wave, and the more you know about its velocity, the less you know about its position… at best you just get close enough.

And e is the mathematical constant that is the base of natural logarithms, the number with the most elegant derivative equation (d/dx ln x = 1/x). Its value can be expressed as a sum of factorial fractions: 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + (etc.). It is not just irrational but transcendental. And it is of considerable value in calculating exponential growth, such as compound interest.

Well. As a Yorkshireman would say, “E, by gum!” (Well, actually, “Ee, by gum!”) American money (speaking of compound interest) may say E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one,” but it’s e’s e (easy) to see that with e it’s really “out of one, many.” And then some!

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shawm

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 1 comment

This word has a sort of soft, shaggy feel to it, like a shag carpet (you can even see the pile of the carpet at the end, with the w and m). It has resonances of names such as Shawn, Shawna, and Shaw, not to mention Shams-e Tabrizi, the man who so inspired the great Sufi poet Rumi, who wrote, among other things,

Listen to the song of the reed,
How it wails with the pain of separation:

….

The sound of the reed comes from fire, not wind—
What use is one’s life without this fire?

It is the fire of love that brings music to the reed.
It is the ferment of love that gives taste to the wine.

(translation by Jonathan Star)

Ah, the reed. It has such a trenchant sound, so unlike the soft marsh of a word like shawm. Latin for “reed” is calamus. The diminutive form calamellus became Old French chalemie as a name for a particular reed instrument, one rather different from the one Rumi had in mind – Rumi’s reed instrument was the ney, an end-blown flute made of a whole reed. The chalemie, ancestor of the modern oboe, had its origins in the same part of the world – well, Iraq, whereas Rumi was from Iran (Persia) – but it made its sound with a split reed (the pain of separation indeed!) embedded in a wood instrument with a flared bell at the end.

The chalemie became known in English as the shalemuse (among other variations on the name), which over time shortened down to shalm and ultimately shawm.

I’m not shamming you! This chamois shawl of a word names a rather trenchant, even stentorian reed instrument. I’m listening to it being played right now – it’s one of the instruments played by the ensemble Corvus Corax, which I have on the CD player. (If you want a short and distinct sense of the sound of the shawm, try www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wW1YRHtU60 or www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsy_jX-jvDQ; for more pictures and information, see www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/renshawm.htm and www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/mshawm.htm.) In this light, the w looks more like two bells or reeds of shawms, and the m like the fingers playing it.

True, not everyone likes this kind of sound – there will be naysayers. But I favour the fire of love, such as I find in women, wine, and shawm! And I have all three: my reed-thin, charming and beautiful wife, my sounds of the shawm on CD, and, in the refrigerator, a bottle of Calamus Gewürztraminer 2008 from the Niagara peninsula.

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discobolus

Posted on May 10, 2011 | 1 comment

Could this, by any chance, be a myriad-mirrored thing that hangs from the ceiling and scatters light in the darkness at dance clubs? Mmm, no. Not even if the thing in question were shaped like a plate (or some kind of bolus) rather than a ball.

It is the same disc, mind you: from Greek diskos, “disc”. In a disco the discs that are being tossed around have music on them. In discobolus, there’s no need to discuss much or dance around the topic: the disc is a discus, a heavy plate-like thing that was originally hurled for the purpose of hurting the enemy but now, in the hands of students everywhere, is at least as good for hurting oneself (or even, if the grip slips at the wrong time, for auto-discombobulation).

But discobolus does not refer to the discus itself; it’s what you call the dude who is tossing the discus. The bolus is a Latinization of bolos, “thrower”, which is related to ballistics and other words with the ball (βαλλ) root that refers to throwing.

The oral gesture of this word has a sort of match to the act of throwing a discus: it starts at the tip of tongue, like the backswing, then bounces back to the /k/ and releases, and sails across the mouth to impact at /b/ and bounce and flip a bit at /l/, finally lying flat at /s/.

I find the sound of this word to have a bit of a wobbliness about it, not unlike the average discus in mid-flight. That’s thanks to the obol in the middle, which rhymes with wobble because in Latin and English renditions of Greek words we tend automatically to put the stress on the antepenult (third-last syllable). This in spite of the fact that in the Greek δισκοβόλος the stress is on the second-last syllable, making it sound even more like disco ball.

Discobolus also has some letter-form iconicity: the d like the arm with the discus in hand, the co like a cartoon drawing of a disk in motion, the b like it first hitting into ground, edge-on, and then it bounces out at o. Or you could come up with other narratives, but in the main it’s gonna be man meets disc, man picks up disc, man hurls disc, disc obeys the laws of physics.

The place you’re most likely to see discobolus is not at the Olympic games or other track-and-field events; they use more standard English terminology. No, you’ll see it in a museum, on the placard for a statue of some buff nude dude all wound up in a twist with a disc ready for hurling. Come to think of it, he probably wouldn’t look out of place in some discothèques…

I wrote this note without remembering I had already done this word once. Well, I don’t have time to write a whole new one now!

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Quaoar

Posted on May 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

What would you say if you saw, dancing a slow dance in your telescope, a new world – or at least a world new to you?

You might say “Cool!” or “Wow!” I’m tempted to say I would have said “Phwooar!” but that’s really a British male expression of appreciation for a woman’s curves. But cool and wow and phwooar are similar to what Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown said:

Quaoar!

OK, that’s probably not the first thing they said, but that’s the name they gave it.

The “it” in question isn’t really a planet, not quite (in fact it’s not much more than a third the diameter of Earth’s moon), so it’s not really a world qua world, but it’s way bigger than an asteroid – it’s about 1250 kilometres in diameter. It’s a KBO: a Kuiper Belt object. The Kuiper Belt is a bunch of big bits orbiting beyond Neptune. The biggest KBO is the former planet known as Pluto, which has about twice the diameter (and thus eight times the volume) of Quaoar. Quaoar has an orbit a bit farther out than Pluto’s (it takes 288 years to circle the sun), but it’s a nice, circular, non-eccentric orbit, unlike Pluto’s. Trujillo and Brown first spotted it in 2002.

OK, but why did they call this ball of (probably) rock and ice out in the cold, dark periphery of the solar system Quaoar?

I mean, really, it looks like the name of some creature from H.P. Lovecraft, say, or a representation of the growling roar of a nasty large quarrelsome bloodthirsty beast. The lips, in saying it, make a “wow-a”, but the tongue launches the whole thing from the back and ends tense in the middle of the mouth, like the creature ready to hurl itself forth.

The big Q is like a planet with a motion line, but it also carries, in English, a certain resonance of exoticness and uncertainty. The word may recall Latin for you, or it may make you think of a quark. The string of vowels in the middle befuddles the eyes. Try typing it without hesitating. You may find it requires practice. It just seems unnatural. Strange. And threatening, perhaps.

And yet in fact the original Quaoar is quite likeable. Quaoar is a deity of the Tongva people, whose ancestral lands are around Caltech (the California Institute of Technology, setting, incidentally, for the TV show The Big Bang Theory), where Trujillo and Brown worked (Brown is still there; Trujillo is now in Hawai’i). But Quaoar is not just any deity. Quaoar is the Tongva creation deity.

Quaoar, you see, came along into the primordial chaos and was sad to see a whole lot of nothing. So he/she/it danced Weywot (the Sky Father) and Chehooit (the Earth Mother) into existence, and then the three of them danced more gods into existence, and each new god joined the dance and danced more into existence…

It makes me think of a church song, “Lord of the Dance” (not Michael Flatley’s touring show), which starts,

I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the moon, the stars and the sun…

If you’d like to know more about this distant world and its quaoardinates, I mean coordinates, see www.chadtrujillo.com/quaoar/ and science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/07oct_newworld/.

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asterism

Posted on May 7, 2011 | 3 comments

What’s the connection between the following lists?

A.
Diamond of Virgo
Summer Triangle
Great Square of Pegasus
Winter Hexagon
Sickle
Teapot
Terebellum
Saucepan
Coathanger
Kemble’s Cascade		 B.
Cassius Ceramix
Goldenslumbus
Dubius Status
Overanxius
Autodidax
Valueaddedtax
Fulliautomatix
Justforkix
Cacofonix
Ptenisnet

Answer: list A is names of asterisms. List B is names from Asterix comics.

Now, it seems to me that asterism would be a perfectly suitable word for a name on the model of the names of Asterix characters – punning variants on forms in -ix for Gauls, -us for Romans, -a for females, -ax for Britons, -ic for Goths, and a few more (Ptenisnet is Egyptian). But the word asterism is already taken, so if you use it for these it’s your ass to risk.

Asterisk is, of course, the word on which Asterix is a pun. Its original meaning is “little star”; its root is the same Greek ast(e)r root that shows up in many words relating to stars. Asterism means “a grouping of stars that is not an officially recognized constellation” (constellation uses the Latin root relating to stars, stella, and in this case it seems the Latins own the private club). Each thing in list A is a grouping of stars into some discernible shape that, however, is not an offical constellation. (For some more on asterisms, including some others to look for, see Observing Asterisms.)

I don’t find anything especially starlike about the word asterism (whereas the k on asterisk looks like half an asterisk). But it nonetheless seems a word of some prettiness and quality, perhaps because it makes me think of asters in the lobby of a Waldorf-Astoria as viewed through a prism. When you say it, you stay to the front half of your mouth; after the initial open [æ], you can say it with your lips almost closed – and then, finally, fully closed. Perhaps as though you were eating Smarties.

But there is a closer link between asterisk and asterism (closer than the distance between k and m, even): there is a not-often-used character, a constellation of asterisks, three in a triangle, also called an asterism: ⁂. If you’ve ever seen one in a book, you may have wondered, “What’s it there for”? Well, it’s not “therefore”, for one thing – that’s three dots in an otherwise identical triangle, ∴. An asterism marks a subsection of a chapter, or calls attention to a particular passage.

Another asterisk shape that’s quite naturally attention-getting is the one you see in certain gems, for instance the Star of Bombay sapphire (I don’t mean the stars you see if you have too much Bombay Sapphire Gin). And that, too, is called an asterism.

I have also found a blog that is called Asterism – a blog on Iraq politics. Its slogan, explained at asterism.blogspot.com/2005/06/after-communism-and-capitalism-there.html, is “After communism and capitalism, there is asterism.” While this is a joke for Unicode geeks (since ⁂ can be found in the Unicode character set), it occurs to me that asterism could mean government by stars (Reagan and Schwarzenegger, anyone?). Or, on the other hand, it could mean government by politicasters – inferior versions of politicians. You see, aster is also a Latin suffix (unrelated) designating an inferior version or imitation: poetaster from poet, criticaster from critic, etc. Either way, in that kind of asterism, there would seem to be a mix-up about who is master.

But what if the star is me? Well, when I was a kid I certainly fancied myself being a hero on the model of Asterix. My friend Christa Bedwin has recently suggested, as a fun diversion, that everyone come up with their own Asterix names. So, perhaps, even if I don’t earn my place in the firmament, I can still be an asterism. Mine, obviously, would be Sesquiotix.

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