tumbrel

Posted on May 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

Barbara Kay, writing in the National Post, commented, “Ignatieff has zero emotional appeal to Quebecers and anyway, you could hear the rumble of the tumbrils for the Liberal Party a mile away.”

Ah, the rumble of the tumbrils – also spelled tumbrels (the spelling I’m more used to and will go with here). Some people may not be familiar with the reference. The context suggests that she was saying their days were numbered, the writing was on the wall (and yes, that’s what she was saying, and more, but I’ll get to that in a moment). But let me head that off: how like you this word, without a thought for the moment of what it refers to?

It goes nicely with rumble, yes, and also number, and obviously tumbler (as in a lock or a drink) and probably temblor, and perhaps tendril and prehaps trouble, and lumber too. And just maybe umbrella. And the word fairly rumbles. The /t/ gives it a crisp start, but then it has that dull central vowel, prenasalized by the following /m/. And then that /mbr/ rolling into the final /l/: first resonant and building /m/, then with a bend or bounce or break at the /b/, then releasing and rolling with the forward liquid /r/, and, after a swallowed vowel, the hollow /l/ like the echo of a landslide. Yes, that’s what this word sounds like to me: an avalanche, albeit a small one perhaps.

Well, it’s not that. But it is something that rolls and rumbles. And it may roll and rumble quite innocently to an innocent purpose. But that’s not what it’s known for. Guilt by association prevails. Just as words are known by the company they keep, so, too, are their objects. And what company does – or did – a tumbrel keep? Well, eat some cake and have a sit; it may put you on edge – or put an edge on you.

Some clarity may come from this quote from my colleague Paul Cipywnyk, from a discussion on truth versus the mob in ephemeral digital data: “Is that a social-media tumbrel carrying my bits to the guillotine?”

Do you have a mental picture of a tumbrel now? It’s a two-wheeled, flat-bottomed wooden cart that is made to be tipped to the back so its load may be easily dumped. It just happens to be what was used during the French Revolution to carry the condemned to the guillotine.

And is tumbrel related to tumble? In fact, it is, and both are related to French tomber “fall” (which came to French from a Germanic root, not a Latin one).

I am tempted at this juncture to compose a sentence about a person in trouble riding a lumbering, rumbling tumbrel while holding an umbrella (to keep the head dry), knowing his or her number is up, but taking no umbrage when a temblor interrupts the drumbeat… but I think I’ll cut it short and let things fall where they may.

Thanks to Barb Adamski for making me aware of the National Post quotation. Paul Cipywnyk’s bon mot was the impetus for this tasting.

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ictus

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was in rehearsal last night. We were preparing for an upcoming concert, Mozart’s C-minor Mass. Noel Edison, our conductor, happened to use a word which he’s used many times before, but this time it occurred to me that it’s worth a tasting.

Ictus.

It’s a good choral word, fairly made for spitting out with that forceful enunciation some choral singers use (largely to make up for some others who don’t enunciate enough). The /kt/ is practically a coenunciation. The /t/ certainly comes out with a good puff of air and perhaps spit. But, now, here’s a question: how do you hear the /k/? After all, it’s not released – the release is the /t/.

As with many things in music – and in fact in speech – you hear it as much from what’s not there as from what’s there. You can hear the change in resonance in the mouth as the tongue starts to go from the vowel to the stop – it is, after all, possible to hear the difference between tick-tock and tit-tock and tip-tock – but only to a point. The voice cuts out before the tongue really touches. That’s how you know it’s a voiceless stop – it’s /k/ and not /g/. The vowel before it cuts off sooner, and is also a bit shorter. (Vowels cut back in later after a voiceless stop is released, too, but this /k/ doesn’t release.)

That happens to be very similar to how we sing many notes in the piece (and in others). Staccato, of course, calls for that, but in many cases where a syllable ends with a stop, we will drop out the sound for a moment before articulating the stop. This gives contour and heightens the contrast. (It’s sort of like dotting the i, too.)

On the other hand, some phrases are meant to be sung more smoothly together, with less reading. There are long stretches of sixteenth-note runs that we need to phrase together so that we give an overall shape rather than a collection of notes, for instance. Less is more. And we need to make sure not to rush the ictus.

Oh, yes. Ictus. It’s a downbeat kind of word.

I don’t mean it’s somehow unhappy. It’s quite compatible with even a manic rictus. And while choristers who sing the same stuff over and over again may have some small risk of gaining a jaundiced view, it has nothing to do with icterus, icteric, and icterism, all words for “jaundice”. No, those yellow words come from Greek, whereas ictus comes from Latin. Rather, ictus refers to rhythmic stress – or, when Noel’s talking about it, the point at which his finger (or pencil) begins its downstroke from zenith to nadir.

And well enough we should use a Latin word here, since the piece, like most liturgical music, is written in Latin. So you would find talk of an ichthus fishy here, for instance, in spite of the obvious Christian context. And while the pointing finger is ictic, it is not in this case deictic – not only because it’s not pointing at anything (which is what it means to be deictic), but because deictic is another Greek-derived word, referring to showing rather than, as ictic, to striking. So one of these things belongs, and the other doesn’t. (Which I say just to excuse mentioning that iktas means “things” or “belongings” – but it comes from not Greek but Chinook.)

And just as the ictus can be a tricky thing in a complex piece of music such as a Mozart mass, so can the string (but not the morpheme) ictus be a sneaky thing – showing up in benedictus, for instance, and (in the Requiem Mass) maledictus and addictus, among other places. They’re all past tenses of verbs with roots ending in ic, which is not such an odd thing in Latin.

But perhaps that’s Greek to you. Well, that would be ironic, wouldn’t it, given what I’ve said about Greek versus Latin? Just about as ironic in that regard as what we sing on our first downbeat of the whole piece – of any mass. The first word, the first phrase, the first whole movement of a Latin mass, the opening ictus, as you may know, is in Greek – the Kyrie.

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Abbottabad

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

You know where Abbottabad is, right? The small city northeast of Islamabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden had his compound – incognito for half a decade – and where he was ultimately tracked down and killed.

As soon as I saw Abbottabad in print (as opposed to hearing it being tripped over by newsreaders), my spidey-sense started to tingle. Well, OK, more like my lingua-sense – this is etymology, not entomology (or arachnology).

Oh, yes, it’s a pretty word, isn’t it? With its double letters, all of its consonants ascending (like the peaks around Abbottabad), its three a’s, three b’s, two t’s, one o, one d forming an interesting pattern… It’s vaguely reminiscent of a popular tongue-twister or any of a few different vocal warm-ups for actors.

But it’s not the prettiness of the word that caught my attention the most. What did grab me led me to this poem:

I remember the day when I first came here
And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air

The trees and ground covered with snow
Gave us indeed a brilliant show

To me the place seemed like a dream
And far ran a lonesome stream

The wind hissed as if welcoming us
The pine swayed creating a lot of fuss

And the tiny cuckoo sang it away
A song very melodious and gay

I adored the place from the first sight
And was happy that my coming here was right

And eight good years here passed very soon
And we leave you perhaps on a sunny noon

Oh Abbottabad we are leaving you now
To your natural beauty do I bow

Perhaps your winds sound will never reach my ear
My gift for you is a few sad tears

I bid you farewell with a heavy heart
Never from my mind will your memories thwart

How do you like it?

Not very good, is it?  I mean, it describes what by all accounts is a rather nice place, almost like a Banff of Pakistan. But it’s doggerel (and who ever heard of a welcoming hiss?). It reads as though it was written by, um, some dilettantish army officer, say.

Indubitably. Major James Abbott, to be precise.

He was a British Army major. He founded the town in 1853. (Curious as to what he looked like? You may like this painting.)

I figured that the town was named after a British guy named Abbott. You see, abad means “dwelling place” or “town” or, I suppose, “abode”, or such like (as opposed to bad in place names like Marienbad, which is German for “bath”). And given the history of the region and the surprisingly British form of the first part… well, I guessed right. (Yabba-dabba-doo! Not bad, eh, bud?)

Now, going by the constituents, the stress should be on the first syllable, which would make it singable to the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. In fact, in Urdu, the second syllable has disappeared altogether. However, if you look in Wikipedia, you find a pronunciation guide that puts the stress of the English name on the second syllable, making it sound like part of a sentence: “I picked up some groceries, but by mistake Abbottabad apple.”

Well, pity, if so. I like it better with the stress on the beginning. Then, for instance, I could say “Abbottabad, Abbottabad, Abbottabad, that’s all, folks!”

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pessimal

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was commenting today, apropos a certain situation that had occurred, that there may not have been a possible optimal result, and that what was left was debating whether we had managed the least pessimal result.

Ah, one doesn’t want to be pessimistic, but, in the absence of efficacious pessomancy (divination by means of pebbles), one has to perform a calculus, not necessarily to the last decimal, but at least to avoid decimation… What will prevent pessundation (destruction) to the extent possible? And do you simply get depressed, or do you get on a pess (church kneeler, also hassock) and petition? Il faut peser les choses… (one must weigh matters…)

And as you watch each mile pass, wondering whether you will leap or miss, you may feel like a sap if you smile, for how could it be as simple as all that? But somehow you must impel your ass and hope not to make the same slip as you have before… If only you didn’t feel so mixed up…

I think pessimal is an underused word. It’s the nice opposite to optimal, after all, and pessimum to optimum, just as pessimist is to optimist. But somehow the optics of optimal are worth opting for, while pessimal just gets a pass – or at best is used piecemeal. Pity, since we spend so much time in our lives trying to find the lesser of two (or more) evils.

The word even looks fairly right. You can see the ss like the cartoon symbols of foul smell from some fetid mess. (And they give that nice hissing sound that allows one to express disapproval quite effectively even in the saying of the word.) Its p is like a thumbs-down, too. I can’t account for the i and the l, though – they’re like flowers growing through the pavement.

And what is its source? Latin, of course. Pessimus means “worst” and is related to peior “worse”, which gives us another word, pejorate “make worse” – the opposite of ameliorate.

But let us always remember that things can always be better, and that’s a good thing. To quote as I often do from Laurie Anderson’s “Language Is a Virus,” “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much much better.” To start with, even when things are pessimal, your email may go pss… and deliver you a delicious word.

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apocolocyntosis

Posted on May 2, 2011 | 2 comments

This is a heck of a word… ¿un poco loco, no? Such a concatenation could be a lexical cynosure or could be a bit of cynicism. Does it belong in a classical apostrophe – or is it more of a verbal colonic or collyrium? Is it language heightened to its apotheosis, or is it more ridiculous than sublime? Does this word even have any collocations, or is it an appendix on the language (or perhaps a colophon)? It is colourful, but while it may suggest cyan, it seems a bit more on the purple side, really…

Actually, though, it’s orange. That’s the colour of pumpkins.

I’ll explain. This word really has one noted collocation, a title… in Latin: Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii. The English translation is typically The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius.

The Romans, you see, had developed a habit of declaring deceased emperors to have become gods. Transformation into a god is apotheosis, a Latin word that’s really a Greek word taken into Latin basically unaltered.

But some of the emperors were not such great guys. Anyone who has watched or read any of I, Claudius by Robert Graves – or any of quite a few other works on Rome of the time – knows that, for instance, Caligula (who, to be fair, was not deified) was just about the most insane person you could even imagine running a country. Well, his successor (and uncle) – Claudius – wasn’t such a splendid guy, either, especially not if you asked the Roman stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca. And even if you didn’t ask him, he said so. In the Apocolocyntosis.

Seneca certainly didn’t like the undermining of divinity by according it to such venal people as Claudius. So he wrote a satire on the apotheosis of Claudius. In it, Claudius goes to Olympus to make his case for deification. But his many crimes are noted, and he is escorted to Hades. On the way down, he passes a funeral procession for him filled with lowlifes mourning the end of the perpetual Saturnalia under him. In Hades, he is met by the various friends he had had murdered, and his punishment is determined: to spend eternity trying to throw dice in a box with no bottom. (He liked to roll the dice, it seems. Well, alea jacta est… Oh, wrong emperor.) But then Caligula shows up, declares that Claudius used to be his slave, and hands him over to become a law clerk in the underworld.

This word, thus, is a parody of apotheosis – in fact, it’s a Greek construction represented in Latin, just like apotheosis. It wasn’t Seneca who came up with the word, though – it was a later author, Dio Cassius, who gave the work that title. I’m sure Cinderella came much later than Dio Cassius, but I do like the image of a carriage meant to carry Claudius to Olympus turning into a pumpkin.

We may know, as the Romans did, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum – say nothing but good of the dead. But sometimes the praise is not altogether merited. To say the least. And sometimes we must observe that some purported sublimity is not just subliminally ridiculous. A word such as apocolocyntosis is a nice way of saying, “Well… aren’t we special.”

Seneca was just the right person to write such a satire. The general trend of thought you get from his writings is that the world was perfect until people screwed it up, and civilization is entropy. We should also note that he was banished to Corsica by Claudius. On the other hand, he made a point in the Apocolocyntosis of sucking up to the next emperor. (Well, at first, anyway. A decade later he was accused of plotting to assassinate him and was directed to commit suicide, which he did.) Oh, you may have heard of the next emperor, too: Nero.

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bellwether

Posted on May 1, 2011 | 1 comment

Words in different languages that resemble each other but mean different things are often called “false friends.” But what about words in English that may seem to be made up of words different from the ones they actually are made up of? Should we call them “fair-weather friends”?

Well, the term for misconstruals of words – reanalyses, as linguists call them – on the basis of plausible-sounding but inaccurate derivation is eggcorns, named after just such a misconstrual of acorn. And today’s word, bellwether, is subject to just such a misconstrual, as you can see, for instance, at news.nationalpost.com/2011/04/26/road-map-to-a-potential-ndp-breakthrough/ : bellweather.

We know what a bellwether is, right? Something like a canary in a coal mine – a thing that tells you which way the wind is blowing? Like a bell that rings to tell you the weather?

Such a train of reasoning may seem sensible but can leave people a bit sheepish. You see, if you have it as weather as in wind, you’ve blown it. Nor is it whether, as in to be or not to be. No, this is more to baa or not to baa. Wether is an old Anglo-Saxon word for a castrated ram. The leading one in a flock gets a bell on its neck so the shepherd knows which way the sheep are going (you may not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but you may need a wether, man, to know which way the sheep go).

So bellwether meant first “lead sheep”, and from that more broadly a leader or person at the forefront; on the basis of that – and perhaps the idea of the weather bell – it has gotten the meaning “leading indicator of trends”. A bellwether is not quite someone who says “Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on” (actually, that’s Bill Withers), but it’s also not a belle-weather friend. But when we the people (or perhaps sheeple) follow the bell (or follow where there be parallel lines), we are likely following a bellwether.

This word is uncommon for its llw combination, incidentally. The /lw/ sound is not normal in English (though ordinary enough in French, for instance), but it escapes here because it’s across syllable boundaries. Anyway, we tend to reduce the /l/ at syllable’s end so that it’s just like a /w/ but without the rounding, so all you need for /w/ is to round your lips – sort of like folding the two l’s into two v’s and gluing them together to make w. So the /l/ largely assimilates to the /w/ here.

And assimilation is just the sort of sheeplike behaviour that makes bellwethers so effective: follow the path of least resistance. I’m reminded of a joke. An old rancher has suffered a stroke and the doctor is testing his faculties. The doctor says, “Say you have a pen with 100 sheep in it and one gets out. How many sheep do you have?”

“None,” says the old rancher.

“Well… no,” says the doctor, “that’s not quite right. If you had 100, and you’ve lost one, how does that make none?”

“Look, young fella,” says the old farmer, “you may know brains but you don’t know sheep. If one of those damn things goes, they all go.”

And we just know which one gets out first, now, don’t we? Begins to ring a bell, doesn’t it?

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maraschino

Posted on April 29, 2011 | 12 comments

OK, what word does this word most often go with?

Well, that was easy. Cherry or cherries. What else?

Now tell me how you pronounce it.

That will be easy for most people too: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say it any other way than “merra-shee-no”.

Anyone other than myself, that is.

You see, I can’t escape being aware that this word is not a German word. And sch may spell “sh” in German words, and words derived from German, but rarely elsewhere. If the word is from Greek or Dutch, for instance, the original is [sx], where [x] is the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for the consonant you hear in “ach!” If, however, the word is from Italian, sch is [sk]. The h is just written to keep the c from being read as palatalized before an e or an i.

Anyone who’s ever gotten their knickers in a twist over mispronounced bruschetta knows this one. And in the case of maraschino, the root is marasca – which is a kind of small black Dalmatian cherry – and there is the derivative suffix on it, which starts with an i, so that h is added so that the c won’t soften. Ironically, if it were written marascino (no h), it would be pronounced in Italian just as nearly every Anglophone says it now. But… it’s not. (What’s worse, if it were written that way, many Anglophones would say it “maras-chee-no”, a grating hypercorrection.)

So is it snobby of me to say “mara-skee-no”? More likely obsessive or compulsive, or anal-retentive, or what have you. But if you look in English dictionaries, you will see my pronunciation listed – sometimes as the first option, with the now-more-common one as the second. So I feel comforted that I am not being blockheaded. Which is not to say that I think the way that most people say it is wrong. But I would like to point out that that more common way is the newer way, first officialized in a dictionary a mere half century ago, and spreading from the US to England (and of course elsewhere).

Some of you may have said, halfway through my etymology, “Whoa. Small black cherry?” Well… here’s yet more I must break to you. Maraschino cherries, those red things you buy, are actually light-colour sweet cherries of the Royal Ann, Rainier, or Gold varieties, soaked in sugar water and coloured with food colouring.

So why the heck are they called maraschino? Because the original soaked cherries were soaking in maraschino.

Getting dizzy? Yes, there’s another thing to explain. Maraschino is not a name for the cherries. It’s the name of a liqueur flavoured with marasca cherries. Luxardo is a popular brand of it. It’s sweet with a slightly bitter flavour… because marasca cherries are a little bitter. Marasca may be derived from amaro, “bitter”.

So, to recap: little black Dalmatian cherries are used to flavour an Italian-named liqueur in which other cherries are sometimes soaked, and, in emulation of that, other cherries soaked in sugar water and coloured bright red are described with the name of the liqueur that is named after the cherries that these bright red cherries differ from about as much as two cherries can differ from each other. And, just to put the cherry on top, the Italian name is now commonly pronounced as if it were German.

Just a little thought, though: what difference in effect does the different pronunciation of the word have? With the “sh” it makes me think of garish mustachios, and it’s soft like a marsh too – a soft, sweet word. With the “sk” it has a kick, a skip, a zip like skis or a skee ball; it’s risky like keno in a casino and it’s sexy like mascara. It’s like… well, the adult version of the word. Put in that [k] and it kind of… loses its cherry, as it were. Even as it regains its original cherry.

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Gasherbrum

Posted on April 27, 2011 | 2 comments

Imagine yourself climbing one of the highest mountains in the world, a steep jag of rock in a corner of the Karakoram, pinched between Pakistan and China. You are hanging on a rope, swinging against a rock face, a mile above the glacier below but not so far from the glacier to your side. A chunk breaks off the glacier hanging just over there… it resounds: “Gasherbrum!” You swing on the rope, thrash for room, bump on the rock and gash your bum.

Heck, why settle for one of the highest mountains in the world? Take seven of them. Or anyway seven peaks in one massif. That’s the Gasherbrum. One might be forgiven for thinking it’s Gascherbrunn, which would seem properly Germanically alpine, but these peaks are nowhere near Switzerland or Austria. And their name is from Balti, a language that is a form of Ladakhi, which is in turn a dialect of Tibetan.

Its Balti source is the words rgasha “beautiful” and brum “mountain”. I do think brum is more suited to naming a very large thing made of rock than it is to naming a hand-holdable thing made of wood and straw, as its English homophone does. But rgasha for “beautiful”? And note that, unlike in Standard Tibetan, that opening /r/ is actually pronounced. (Tibetan is loaded with onset consonant clusters – stops preceded by such as /r/ or /d/ or both – that are still written as such but have simplified in pronunciation to the last consonant in the bunch.)

But why can’t rgasha be beautiful if an 8000-foot-high striated crag of rock, rock, rock, and rock, covered with snow and ice, can be beautiful? I do admit that such things as are made of rock and ice seem to me to be more suited to voiceless stops – make that /rg/ voiceless and it would seem quite perfect for the terrible beauty of a lethal peak – but the word doesn’t exist for the mountain, after all. Well, the three highest peaks could have retained the names given them by Thomas George Montgomerie in 1856: K3, K4, and K5 (K is for Karakoram). But why not call mountains what the locals call them, if they call them something?

Ironically, the other thing Gasherbrum makes me think of is Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, a ghoulish abecedarius of small deaths, none of which involve mountains or glaciers. There have, of course, been quite a few deaths on the Gasherbrum peaks and on their neighbour K2, none of which were small or cartoonish or involved household implements and substances. But the lure of high hard things can be irresistible – and they are to be climbed and conquered for the same reason their names are to be tasted and those onset consonants are to be said: because they’re there.

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yield

Posted on April 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Give me a sign!” I cried.

And then I looked up and saw it before me, glowing, golden, upon a metal standard like a great Y as in YES. And I knew what my answer was. For the sign meant “yield”, and to me that meant, more than anything else, one thing.

Cookies.

Not because I was yielding to temptation; for me, when it comes to cookies, the desire is pure and unconflicted and is followed immediately, so it doesn’t qualify as temptation at all.* No, there was no guilt, nor was I feeling I had to lay down my arms or render them forth like the yellow Sir Rodney. There was just the gilt of the golden sign and the golden cookies, and the resonance of nearly every cookie recipe in the English-speaking world: “Yield: 2 dozen” or “Yield: 40” or…

Look, recipes are one of the top two places you’ll see yield in print (or on the web) – the other being financial documents and articles. But, now, how does one word cover the ambit from yeast to gold to arms and asphalt? What could cause one sense to give way to another, what could render these results?

Gold, of course. And payment for services rendered, or anyway payment rendered in service.

The Proto-Indo-European root at the base of all this, you see, ghol-/ghel-, gives us, among other things, our modern gold (and gilt), as well as our modern yellow, but also – by way of the Old English noun gield and verb gieldan – our modern yield. (The tongue used to stop on the roof of the mouth, [g], but its resistance was weakened over time and now it yields with a [j] “y”.) The sense of yield was first “render a sum of money” (or, simply, “pay”). It is from this that we get the sense of “produce a crop”, and from that we get other senses of production, as in recipes. From giving forth we also get the sense of relinquishing, as in arms to the enemy. Yield was a standard translation of Latin reddere and French rendre, and so it gained commonality and breadth of use. And from that we got the rather bleached sense of ceding right of way.

So, you see, it really does make sense, even if coincidentally, that the middle light in a traffic light is yellow (though some people insist on calling it “amber”). And while it is true that most “yield” signs in the world are white and red, there are yellow ones to be seen.

And many are the golden cookies brought forth in tribute by the world’s ovens. If you are seeking a sign, look to the gold on the standard; follow the Y and say yes to the yield… and you will be healed.

* “Sin” also has nothing to do with cookies or chocolate in my world, advertising be damned. There’s nothing wrong with eating two or three, and I find I can stop after that, since I know I can have another any time I want. Guilt schmilt. I exercise.

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shill

Posted on April 25, 2011 | 3 comments

If you’re shilly-shallying on a sale, and you’re not sure whether to shell out your shillings, it sure will help tilt your opinion if you hear another satisfied customer, won’t it? Takes the chill off, helps you warm to the purchase. So, needless to say, there’s some motivation for a seller to get someone to pretend to be a satisfied customer (and perhaps to “sh!” any ill reports). Support begets support, confidence begets confidence. And so we get the shill. (And after you cross the palm with silver and find you’ve been double-crossed, you’ll be feeling cross, and the parallel lines you thought you were on with the shill – ll – turn to perpendicularity: t. Thus does shill become… well, you get the picture.)

There are other names for such fakers, such pied pipers, sheepdogs in the wolves’ pay: fake advocacy organizations and masses of fake Twitter and Facebook supporters (who may also post comments on news stories, dozens of them actually all from the same person) are often called astroturf (because fake grassroots); they may also, on the individual level, be called sock puppets (as with someone creating a fake third-party identity to voice support for themself or respond to criticism of them). These kinds of things are altogether too common on websites that allow review of and comment on commercial entities.

There are also slightly less dodgy (and more legal) versions of shills, such as claques, people who are in an audience to start applause and laughter where the performers desire it. Audience members who might otherwise have remained reserved will join with the crowd, and will remember having clapped and laughed, too.

Shill has an interesting taste, I find, that doesn’t necessarily relate to its object. It has the brittle overtones from shell, but also a sound as of a sword unsheathing; the ill ending pulls in shivers from kill and thrill and chill and perhaps spill, and it has a little look of horripilation to go with it. For some reason I also associate it with flaps or slices of flesh or meat, such as wattles and cock’s combs and cold cuts. I don’t know why. But it has a weaker effect in common words such as bill and pill and will.

The word itself is operating under something of a mask. It has no relationship to shillings or shells; it is thought to be a shortened form of shillaber, which referred to one of those people who would, for instance, pose as a stranger to play a cheating gambling game and win so that others would think it winnable. And where does shillaber come from? It happens that there is a family name Shillaber, but not one of the etymological sources I’ve looked at considers the two connected. There are many websites out there that say that it is a Yiddish word, but I have yet to find one that says what the reported Yiddish word shillaber means; moreover, a surprisingly large number of those sites use the exact same phrasing: “It may be an abbreviation of the Yiddish shillaber.”

It would seem that the plurality of information sources on the web is largely a house of mirrors. But we knew that, didn’t we? (See “Nothing to chauffeur a classiomatic” for a great example of this information house of mirrors.) Still, I feel confident that one of my readers – all of whom are, to my knowledge, real people – may have a Yiddish resource ready to hand to supply the needed detail, if it exists. (I know I should have one. I don’t.)

Thanks to my mom for requesting shill – more than a year ago…

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