chai

Posted on April 24, 2011 | 3 comments

We had just settled in at the Metaphor Café (“Service with a Simile”) – Daryl, Margot, Jess, and I – and were giving our orders to Jess, who had offered to go up and get our beverages.

“I’ll have a chai tea latte,” Daryl said.

Margot glanced at Daryl with a look of distaste. She put on a saccharin smile and turned to Jess. “I’ll have a coffee café au lait with milk.”

Jess arched her eyebrow just a little and paused for a moment. “…Regular with caffeine, or decaf without caffeine?”

“Why, regular with caffeine, of course.”

I couldn’t be bothered to play along. “Decaf latte, please, high-fat milk.”

“Surely,” Margot said, “you mean a decaf coffee caffè latte with milk without caffeine.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Daryl said.

“You started it,” said Margot.

Daryl threw up his hands. “OK, yes, I know, chai means ‘tea’.”

“Specifically spiced tea with milk,” Margot said. “You might as well have asked for salsa sauce, or entered a PIN number into an ATM machine.”

“The pleonasm police are out,” Daryl said. “I shall be denied entry into high so-chai-tea.”

“Actually,” I said, as Jess sidled away to go place the orders, “chai is just Hindi for ‘tea’. Tea with spices is masala chai in India. And that’s normally made with milk, yes. So it’s like salsa, which is just Spanish for ‘sauce’ – in English, the word is used with a more specific meaning that’s further specified in the original language.”

“But that’s the way they’ve always had tea in India, isn’t it?” Margot said. “From time immemorial?”

“Well, from before you were born, anyway,” I said. “But tea was grown almost exclusively in China until the end of the 1800s, when the British began cultivating it on a large scale in India in order not to be dependent on China. And the Indians themselves didn’t really drink it until the British-owned Indian Tea Association encouraged industries to provide tea breaks, in the early 1900s. That’s when the chai wallahs with their tea carts started circulating. But the masala chai was a local invention that stretched out the tea leaves and added some spice. Literally and figuratively.”

“Chai is very similar to the Mandarin word for ‘tea’,” Daryl said, “cha.” (He said it properly, with a rising tone.) “Clearly cognate. So how did we get tea? The word, I mean.” He held up a finger and pulled out his iPad to look it up.

“From Malay,” I said.

“But tea cures your malaise,” Daryl quipped as he typed and scrolled.

I got up and did a few fluid moves. “So does chai tea. I mean tai chi.”

“Is that what that was,” Margot said. “I thought it was the cha-cha-cha.”

“Oh,” said Daryl, showing his iPad screen, “/te/ is also from the Amoy dialect of Chinese. Probable source of the Malay word.”

“Sure,” I said. “And the phonological relation is clear. Stop and affricate, both voiceless, same location – tip of the tongue – and the vowels easily transformed one to another, /a/ to /aI/ and /e/ and, in English, /e/ to /i/ – just getting more and more steeped. Every language that I’m aware of that has a word for ‘tea’ bases the word on one of those three streams: cha, chai, te. But the relation isn’t obvious to most non-linguists.”

“It still doesn’t excuse the redundancy,” Margot said.

“Redundancy is often a good idea for clarity,” I said. “I too find chai tea a little grating, but I understand why they do it – they need to specify that it’s tea, for those who don’t know, and at the same time the word chai has a specificity and that nice bit of the exotic that spiced wouldn’t.”

“And the latte for the milk,” Daryl said.

Jess arrived with the beverages. “Wallah!” she said, setting down Daryl’s chai.

“That’s voilà,” said Margot.

“No,” said Daryl, “that’s the chai wallah.”

Thanks (and l’chai-m!) to Kathe Lieber for asking for a bit of chai, cha, tea.

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bobotie

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 9 comments

I might as well start off by saying that bobotie is the national dish of South Africa. Yes, they do like a lot of braai (barbecue) too, but various people and organizations have at various times declared flatly that bobotie is the national dish of South Africa, and it seems that there’s not too much argument about this.

So, of course, the first question is, How is bobotie pronounced? Interestingly enough, you can find some quite enormously unhelpful advice and description on some wesbites. On one bulletin board, a fellow told another poster it was like “Bo-boo-t” and then explained “it’s a long ‘o’ sound” and advised finding a South African girlfriend. Several websites say it’s “ba-boo-eh-tee”; others say “buh-booty”; Wikipedia gives a pronunciation guide that will come out like “baw boaty” if, say, a Canadian says it.

All this confusion has to do with accents and with the phoneme of the stressed vowel – it’s really /o:/, a long /o/ sound, but that’s realized as higher than the English [o] and with a bit of a release at the end. (A phoneme is a sound that we think of as a single distinct sound, even if it has a complex realization and varies according to context.) In other words, unless you’re saying it with a South African accent you’re not going to say it quite right, but if you try to say it like the South African way within your own non-South-African accent it’s going to sound wrong because that sound in your own dialect will signify different phonemes.

It’s like if I were to say “Nollins” in a Canadian way in an attempt to reproduce how people from New Orleans say New Orleans: it may sound to me like they’re leaving out the /r/, but they’re not – it just assimilates into the preceding vowel – and so if I say it as “Nollins” rather than “Norlins” I’m producing the wrong set of phonemes.

But anyway, the second question is, where is this word from originally? We can look at it and see the ie on the end, and that’s actually not uncommon for Afrikaans. Words that in English end in -tion will likely end in -sie in Afrikaans, for instance, and words that we have with -y may have equivalents with -ie. But, then, what about this bobo? Is it a word from some African language – perhaps Setswana, in which bo is a prefix for a place, as in Botswana? Or is it a name of some animal, like dik-dik? Or does it come from some European language? Is it related to Afrikaans boet, “friend”?

Actually, it comes from Malay. Yup, like blatjang, this word is a modification of a Malay word, taken from the Cape Malay, people brought to the Cape of Good Hope area from Indonesia and Malaysia as slaves by the Dutch centuries ago. The original dish, it is thought, is a dish of shredded meat and coconut flesh served in banana leaves, called botok. The plural is bobotok – yes, the reduplication is a pluralization. And, as you see, the tok became South Africanized as tie.

But bobotie is also not botok. Nor, for that matter, is it Botox (though I’m told it does a body good), nor booty, nor a boo-boo, nor even bubble and squeak. It’s a sort of meat pie. Well, what it is is minced or ground meat (which kind varies), spiced with curry and typically mixed with onion and some raisins and/or fruit, and baked in a pie dish, with a mixture of milk and egg poured over it towards the end of the baking. And typically eaten with blatjang (q.v.).

So it’s a dish from Malaysia adapted by Dutch and English settlers in Africa, with a name likewise borrowed and adapted. It’s a mixture of borrowed and adapted spices and local ingredients. It’s an import but has been there for centuries now, taking on a distinct local-yet-imported flavour. Sounds very South African to me.

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blatjang

Posted on April 22, 2011 | 8 comments

This is a word I’ve liked since I first saw it in a cookbook. (I can’t remember which cookbook, but it was probably the More with Less Cookbook, published by the Mennonite Central Committee and my source for a variety of recipes – e.g., nasi goreng – not found in my mother’s other books.)

I’ve given away that it’s something to do with food, so that will prejudice your tasting of the word already (though of course the signification is an important part of the full flavour – it’s just that you don’t want it to overpower the phonetic and gestural aspects before you savour them independently). But this word has such a force to it, an almost comic-book punch: it really seems like a marching band, doesn’t it, with the trumpet going “blat” and the cymbals going “jang”? Definitely zippy on the tongue and catchy for the eyes.

And with that tj in the middle, there’s a fairly good likelihood (especially given where I first saw the word) that it’s from a language that has had a Dutch influence, at least in the spelling. I have long assumed it to be an Indonesian word. The ng at the end certainly has a Malay feel to it – Malay being the language from which have sprung, as independent languages but erstwhile dialects, Indonesian and Filipino.

I was right about the Malay/Indonesian source and Dutch influence, but not exactly. You see, blatjang is a word you’re going to encounter in South Africa, not in Malaysia or Indonesia. You might in those countries hear a similar word: belachan, also spelled belacan, which is a Malay name for a shrimp paste. Sambal belacan can also name a chili paste. But blatjang is not that. It’s an Afrikaans rendition of the word, pronounced more like “blood young” or “bluh chung”, and what it’s a name for is usually called chutney in English. (Chutney comes from Hindi, by the way.)

Indeed, I can hardly think of this word without thinking blatjang (chutney), because that’s how it was listed in the cookbook and that’s how it tends to show up in English references to it. But, to be fair, it’s a specific kind of chutney: a very fruity one, described in some places as like chutney mixed with jam. Apricots are a common ingredient. Of course, so are chili peppers.

So this word, and this sauce, come from the Cape Malay community first (which started as Javanese and other Indonesians and Malays who had been brought to South Africa as slaves by the Dutch). But now blatjang is a staple of South African cuisine. As one South African expat nostalgic for the cuisine of his homeland put it (at expat.ru/forum/showthread.php?p=805876), “Nou praat jy die waarheid, boet! Blatjang met bobotie…..gevolg met melktert en Van Der Hum. Mmmmm……smaaklik.” Which means “Now you’re talking, dude! [or: Now you’re telling the truth, buddy!] Blatjang with bobotie… followed by milk tart and Van Der Hum. Mmm… delicious!”

Oh, bobotie, milk tart, Van Der Hum? One’s a meat dish (spiced minced meat with an egg topping), one’s a dessert, and one’s a liqueur. And at least bobotie, if not the others, deserves a word tasting too. If you want recipes, chef Google will oblige copiously. Of course, if you just like tasting the words, you now have a nice and zippy one. But may I suggest trying some blatjang too? Then you’ll surely think of that flavour as well whenever you see this word.

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snite

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Well, you may not like this, but I’m feeling a little snotty today. I don’t mean I have a bad attitude – it’s just that my snoot does. It’s in a snit, just to spite me; I’d like to smite it, but I just snite it.

Snite? ’sright! What means snite? Well, consider that what you fight is fought, and what you wright is wrought; you abide in an abode, and what you get is got. And, similarly, what you snite is snot. (Oh, don’t wince; snot didn’t use to be a low-toned word. It was in common unexceptional usage a few centuries ago, and it’s been around for a very long time.)

I’m not making this up! The nose knows. Snite means “wipe the nose”, and has for a millennium – though it doesn’t get used much anymore. Pity: it’s much more concise than wipe your nose, and it fits so nicely with the rest of the snooty sn set: snout, snot, snoot (all cognate) plus sneeze, sniffle, snuffle, snide, sneer, snub… It’s not that all sn-onset words have to do with noses; there are ones like snip and sned and snicker, and also outliers like snow (and you’re more likely to be sniting when the snow is out lying). But there’s a lot of nose in those sn onsets, with that sniffy /s/ sound to start and the nasal /n/ to follow (and in this case, to finish the tip-of-the-tongue set with a stop, /t/).

Snite also has a couple of other meanings. It can mean “blow the nose” (especially if you do it with just the thumb and finger, a practice which I remember the narrator so disdained in Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel). It can also mean “snuff a candle”, a sense that seems to have grown from the nose sense.

Incidentally, what’s left when you snuff a candle could (in past times and perhaps still in some northern English dialect) also be called snot. No, I don’t mean the wax drippings, though I can see why you might make that connection (boogers from bougies?). It’s the burnt, snuffed wick.

Which is what my nose feels like about now. Well, it’s nite, and maybe if I snooze I’ll feel all snappy and snazzy in the morning. If not… there’s a more-than-slight chance I’ll be looking for the smite button.

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confetti

Posted on April 19, 2011 | 1 comment

Confetti! The very word bespeaks not just the flurry of fluttery little paper particles but the fete that it flatters. Can’t you see the glitterati (perhaps a return tour of Scritti Politti, or Little Richard singing “Tutti Frutti”) in an open-top Bugatti (or a vaporetto in Venice), tossing dolcetti and other confections (but no confit – that would be discomfiting), then trotting into a palazzo as the paparazzi pop a smattering of titillating photographs?

Just two questions: How did we get in the habit of tossing paper bits (perhaps fresh from the base of your hole-puncher or the bin of your shredder) for celebration at weddings and similar parties? And why do we call these shreddies “confections”?

“Confections”? Why, yes. Well, more exactly, sugared almonds, which is what confetti means in Italian. Surely you’ve had them at some fete sometime, especially if Italians were involved (I most recently had them at just such a do for a relation’s first communion). Perhaps visions of them danced in your head at some point in your childhood – after all, such sugared fruits, nuts, or seeds were also, even a century ago, called sugar-plums. But another name for them is comfits.

Which is, as you see, close to confetti. Fair enough; they come from the Latin conficere, “make ready”, from con “with” and facere “make”. So does that mean that a baby from which candy is taken is literally discomfited? Well, discomfit is cognate with comfit, but the split in meaning goes a bit farther back – it’s just an opposite to “make ready”.

And that is also the root of confit, as in that tough preserved duck you can get in fancy restaurants – it’s been immersed in something just as the comfits have. Now, I’m sure if someone were throwing confit at you you would want it confiscated (though confiscate is not cognate with confit), but would you be happy if they were pelting you with candied almonds?

I mean, sweets are very nice, and there’s a long history of throwing them at people to show approbation and good wishes. This was especially so during carnival time in Venice. (Beads make do similarly in some contexts now.) But they can cost money, and they can also hurt.

It seems that the money consideration comes foremost, for early substitutes for the bon-bons thrown during carnival time in Venice included some made of plaster, which can also hurt and leave marks. Paper, of course, was cheaper still, and more innocuous, so it ultimately prevailed. And it also made a nice substitute for rice, which, along with other grains, was traditionally thrown at weddings to symbolize showers of blessings from above. (By the way, birds will not explode if they eat dry rice. Rice needs to be cooked to swell, and it can’t swell beyond the volume of the liquid it’s immersed in, which is what it absorbs to swell.) So it spread from carnival to other sorts of carnality.

Which leads me to mention that confetti is an anagram of to infect. Make of that what you will (as little as possible, I hope). I should also say, though, that it is an anaphone (rearrangement of sounds, not letters) of phonetic – or close enough (a slight difference in one vowel). And in Italian, the spelling of confetti is phonetic… in English, however, we shred it just a little.

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balk

Posted on April 18, 2011 | 1 comment

When you see this word – which may not happen often – what do you do about the l in it? You might be inclined to say it, but you ought not to (as with walk and caulk – oh, balk can also be spelled baulk). That l is a ridge that was left between the furrows in the field of this word, but is now to be driven over, disregarded; though it may seem to be a structural beam, or a dividing line, do not recoil at it. Simply disregard it. What I’m saying is: the l in balk may seem a balk, but do not balk at it or let it balk you; simply balk it.

Balk, you see, is an old Germanic word that meant first “dividing ridge” or “bar”; an old meaning is “a ridge left between ploughed furrows.” But it can also refer to a structural beam or similar bar. Or, by extension, the area behind a line on a billiard table.

The noun balk also has meanings that relate to the verb balk, which derives figuratively from the noun balk. To balk can be to stop short or shy away from (not related to the noise chickens make, though it does sound like baaalk balk balk), or to avoid or refuse or let slip, or to ignore, or (in baseball) to make a certain kind of error – or, on the other hand, to put an obstacle in the way or to frustrate. So a balk can be a refusal, just as balking at something is refusing to do it (cue Hall and Oates: “I can’t go for that!”).

That, anyway, is the bulk of the available senses. (Bulk is not related to balk, by the way.) As you can see, this term is not balk and white – I mean black and white. Or perhaps it is, both at the same time… Word taster Allan Jackson, in suggesting this word, has mused on whether it is a contranym (a word that can mean opposite things). I think there’s a case to be made for that: is hesitation a contrary to outright refusal? Perhaps (inactive versus active), or perhaps not (both non-doing); but hindering someone and being hindered are at least obverses of each other. (There is also the matter of Fairuza Balk, whom most lads would not balk at looking at, but that’s a digression.)

You can even see the different senses of the word in its letter forms, if you want: the obstacle b versus the rebound k (consider the upright bar to the the base – or just see the rebound ‹ off the ball‹)… Or is it just the bursting of a bubble, b > k?

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rampage

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 1 comment

One gets the impression that violent outbursts are rampant. Every time someone goes on a rampage, the news media ramp up their coverage and ram page after page of gory details into our faces. And we know what’s coming when we see the word rampage – in fact, we’ve usually been informed by a preceding adjective: shooting, murderous, deadly, killing, bloody…

The word rampage itself carries a certain flavour that helps give the sense that something big is going on. To start with, it has two syllables but neither is unstressed – the first has more stress, but the second has a “long” vowel. So it’s like a one-two punch. It has this in common with outrage – this and the age too. Add to that the ramped-up amperage of rage and a certain savour of rant. Not to mention the fist-forcefulness of ram.

And it’s something you go on, too – think about some of the other things a person might go on besides a rampage: a tear, a bender, a spree… also a vacation and a walk, of course, but the point is that it denotes a departure from the normal course of things, with a subsequent return but not without consequences.

Is rampage related to rampant and ramp? Yes, in fact. They all trace back to a verb, ramp (Middle French ramper), meaning (among other things) “rear up on the hind legs”. In heraldry, if you see a lion or other critter rearing up (I think first of the logo of the Royal Bank of Canada), it is said to be rampant. It’s from this sense that we get our modern adjective rampant: from rearing up and climbing and so on, and rushing about and raging and such like (other meanings of ramp), we get “widespread and attacking”.

And it’s also from that verb that we get the noun ramp, as in that thing you drive up in the parking garage. That’s right – from the animal inclined upwards we get the thing inclined upwards. And again, from the verb – not the noun – we get rampage. Just add the age suffix that indicates some material manifestation of a thing: an outage due to insufficient wattage, for instance.

But normally that suffix is unstressed. Some cases (e.g., garage in North America) say it as in French (from which it comes), but usually it’s a reduced, unstressed vowel, followed of course by that voiced alveopalatal affricate. It’s only in rampage and outrage that it gets a full accented pronunciation. But, now, tell me: would this word be so forcefully effective if that second syllable were unstressed, as in that word better suited to what is left behind after – wreckage – or that possible spark of the initial spree – umbrage at postage (or, alas, misused language)?

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spruce

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 5 comments

The other day, I bumped into Maury in a clothing store in the mall. I almost didn’t recognize him; he was wearing black pants and a black shirt and a leather vest.

“Good grief, man,” I said, “have you been spending too much time with Frick and Frack?”

Maury swept his eyes over his own figure and said, “I know not what it shall signify…”

A tall, lean, stylish woman appeared from behind a clothing rack. “I am sprucing him up!” she declared, with what sounded like a German accent.

“James,” Maury said, “this is Lorelei.”

I shook her hand and tried, out of consideration for Maury, not to appear too obviously attracted to her. “How do you do.”

“I may be Lorelei, but I am not from the Rhine,” the goddess declared, smiling. “In fact, I was raised in East Berlin, and my mother was a child refugee from Königsberg. So I am Prussian.”

“Hence the spruce jerkin,” Maury explained, indicating his vest.

“You have said that already and I do not quite understand,” Lorelei said.

“The word spruce actually comes from French Prusse, for ‘Prussia,'” Maury said, “and a few different things imported from Prussia in medieval times came to be called spruce. Spruce fir, for one –”

“Oh, I do not wear fur,” said Lorelei.

“No,” said Maury, “F-I-R, the tree. Fichte. We call it spruce.”

“Oh!” Lorelei looked informed. “This is what I have decorated my apartment with! Only it is from Norway. Do continue!”

“Anyway, fine leather from Prussia was spruce leather, and in particular a jerkin – a sleeveless jacket – made from it was a spruce jerkin. And spruce jerkins were considered very smart looking indeed. Around the time of Shakespeare, spruce came to be an adjective meaning ‘stylish, trim, neat, dapper, smart.’ From which we get the verb spruce, with or without up.”

“So indeed I am sprucing you up!” Lorelei declared. “Only you are already smart. Now I am making you neat and stylish and dapper.” She scanned his not-really-thin figure. “Trim will come.” She smiled again. “Now, I have found you a tie. Come!” She gestured and began to walk away.

As Maury began to move away, I said, “Do you like your new look?”

He leaned close and said confidentially, “I feel like a jerk in it.” Then he straightened up. “But it’s all for a good cause.”

“Or a good effect,” I said, as he trotted off after Lorelei, who shouted back, “Oh, nice to meet you, James.”

The next day, I saw him at the Domus Logogustationis. He looked a bit the worse for the wear. “I must say, you look a little blue,” I said.

“In more ways than one,” he replied. “We went to a gallery party and they were serving International Klein Blue cocktails, which are made with Prussian blue. It retains its colour as it passes through – you may be seeing a bit of it in my skin hue, perhaps.”

“I don’t think that accounts for your overall mien,” I said. “I’m not sure any blue on you might not be a bruise.”

“I think it is,” he said, touching his upper back and wincing. “Well, after the party, she showed me her place.”

“Was it good?” I asked. “Norwegian wood?”

“It was really spruce,” he said. “She’s quite the conversationalist. Did you know Königsberg is a link between Leonhard Euler and the Eagles?”

I paused for a moment. The lightbulb went on. “‘Seven Bridges Road,'” I said.

“Not the only topological problem of the evening,” he said. “We talked until two.”

“She seems quite engaging,” I said. “And then?”

“And then she said, ‘It’s time for bed.'” He sighed. “She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh. I told her I didn’t, and crawled off to sleep in the bath.”

“Hence the bruise,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She turned out to be teasing me. She dragged me back and introduced me to her birch.”

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resveratrol

Posted on April 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Now, look at this word closely, or as closely as your aging eyes will permit. Are all the letters in the right order? Does nothing seem as though it has been displaced?

In fact, it is spelled correctly, but how much more your eye probably wants it to be reversatrol than resveratrol – after all, though it may roll off the tongue (with the lips) in a feasible way, resver doesn’t fit in what we expect in English, while reverse is an English word. And resveratrol is said to reverse aging, you know! In fact, it’s touted as an all-purpose agent of rot reversal. We are led to believe that it helps prevent cancer, reduces inflammation, and lowers blood sugar. No doubt even the lover raters will be kind to you if you are fortified with resveratrol!

It really does have the sound of some mid-20th-century wonder drug or engine cleaner or polishing agent, especially with that -ol ending. And indeed it’s the same -ol ending, originally for oil products (from Latin oleum) but more recently also used with alcohols. The rest of it is from res for resinous and veratr for Veratrum, the genus name of the plant in which it was first discovered.

These Veratrum plants, perennial mountain herbs, often with pretty little flowers, are quite poisonous – your heart will stop quickly if you ingest them. This may sound very unpromising, but extracts of the plant have been used, at very low and carefully managed strength, to help high blood pressure and arrhythmia.

But that’s not the best way to get resveratrol; it is found in other plants. And I should add that its main value appears to be as a result of its presence in Vitis vinifera. The product of Vitis vinifera has been condemned by some as poison, but it is quite widely consumed. And enjoyed. In fact, the greatest benefit in resveratrol as far as I can see is guilt removal. If you can tell yourself that every glass of wine you have is helping you live longer, and so not feel bad about drinking, then resveratrol is doing its job. Never mind that you’d need to consume an awful lot of wine to get its documented positive effects (a lot). It’s sort of like the phenols in maple syrup – come on, just have the stuff because it’s so good. And maybe then the word resveratrol will look normal, too.

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helminth

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word has some lovely qualities, with its opening and closing voiceless fricatives and its liquid and nasals in between – all soft and lovely. Its associations add to that feel for me: the /hεlm/ makes me think of actress Katherine Helmond (famous from the TV shows Soap, Coach, Who’s the Boss, and Everybody Loves Raymond), of Helen of Troy, of Hellman’s mayonnaise and perhaps of the playwright Lillian Hellman (who has a lovely name but was perhaps not such a soft and pleasant person as all that). True, it also makes one think of helm, helmet, and Helmand (a province in Afghanistan), but at least those are all nice-sounding words. And the second half of the word, /mɪnθ/, has nice associations as well: echoes of mint, a rhyme with plinth (which may not be soft but at least has classical connotations) and (in English pronunciation) absinthe…

The shape of the word is also notable. I don’t know whether you find it lovely or not, but it is a good collection of humped parts (n, m) and tall parts (l and, a bit shorter, i and t, and, with hump attached, h), like a colonnade with towers, perhaps.

Al together, it makes a word you’re not likely familiar with. It sounds as though it might name something from the Bible, though actually it’s taken from Greek, ἕλμινς helmins, combining form ἑλμινθο- elmintho-, naming pretty much what it names now.

And what it names now is surprisingly common, though much more so in less developed parts of the world. But, say, can’t we just ignore the sense on this one? The meanings of words are generally fairly arbitrarily attached to the forms of the words, though of course there can be interplay, and sometimes I feel like the meaning is really just some other thing that has attached itself to the form. Something that you’d really rather not have to think about.

And believe me, helminths are fairly high on the list of things I don’t like thinking about, let alone seeing pictures of.

Um.

They’re parasitic worms. There. Now I’ve said it. And don’t you wish I hadn’t?

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