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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Such cases as these

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague had been discussing the difference between such as X and such X as with some friends, and asked for further insight from the rest of us. I gladly weighed in:

The first thing to note is that it’s actually a choice between X such as Y and such X as Y. But those two constructions are not the same thing, though they can mean similar things. Continue reading →

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moss

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 2 comments

I do have a likin’ for this word. It’s so soft and moist and comfortable, the lips coming together like stacked pillows on the /m/ and then the /s/ at the end refreshes with the coolness of the other side of the pillow. The shape of the word is even and compact, like a little piece of what it refers to. And of course my taste for this word is strongly influenced by what it refers to, that simple plant that forms a sort of green fur coat on rocks and dirt and trees and so forth. I love lush green places, and nothing is as lush and green as moss, especially when you have masses of moist moss, perhaps in the mist in the morning…

Another reason to think of moss as pretty is of course Kate Moss. Actually, she’s a friend of mine. No, not the famous Kate Moss, though she’s pretty too. This Kate Moss is the wife of another friend of mine, a fellow I’ve known for years and met in choir.

And choir is the reason I was thinking of this word tonight. You see, in musical scores you will sometimes see più mosso or meno mosso. I’d like to think that it means “more moss” and “less moss”, but there’s nothing soft, moist, furry, dense, or heavy about what mosso means in music. In fact, it refers not to the moss but to the rolling stone that gathers none; mosso is the past participle of muovere “move” and, in music, means “animated”, “rhythmic”, etc. So più mosso is quite the opposite of peat moss, but meno mosso might mean a bit more moss on the rock (or the classical, as the case more likely is). (The word moss is not related to mosso; it’s an old Germanic word.)

About that proverb, by the way. Today when we say “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” we probably think (aside from the inevitable popular music references from rolling stone) that it means that you won’t get old and mouldy and tied down with unnecessary commitments if you keep in motion – that it’s good to be like a rolling stone. But it was not always thus. “A rolling stone gathers no moss” originally meant that if you never settle down, you never accumulate friends, wealth, etc. Think back even to Bob Dylan: his song is about a person who is “without a home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone” – the subject of the song is not in a happy state; he’s scrounging for his next meal.

So moss was seen as a good thing. And I think it still is a good thing. It’s not just a soft, likable, lush green thing that grows all over whatever; among the 12,000 species of moss out there are many of the sphagnum sort (ah, sphagnum – there’s another word worth a taste, a word of deep mists or perhaps sounding like a depth charge), which are associated with some rather good things. Sphagnum moss is what peat is made of, and peat makes a decent fuel for fire – especially if the fire is smoking the malt for Scotch. It’s also what keeps those various prehistoric bog men preserved so we can see them in museums. Sphagnum moss, you see, is absorbent and has antibacterial properties, which means it’s also usable as a dressing for wounds. And, incidentally, as a substitute for diapers.

No, seriously. Various North American aboriginal peoples have carried infants in moss bags – the bag is made of leather, and the moss inside it does quite nicely for absorbing baby’s mess, and it’s easily changed (as long as you have more moss available). I don’t know how common this still is, but I know about this because for many years my parents worked for and lived among the Nakoda (Stoney) Indians, and they (my parents) carried their infant second son – me – in a moss bag. It’s not that I remember now what it was like in that bag, but I’m sure I’ve liked moss longer than I’ve liked almost anything.

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kinnikinnick

Posted on April 12, 2011 | 2 comments

If you like the look of this word, consider that an alternative spelling is the perfectly palindromic kinnikinnik. It’s quite a fun-looking thing, isn’t it? It has a certain kinetic kick – sonically and visually reminiscent of a rough start on an engine, perhaps (with each k a little bang, preceded and followed by sparks i and, in between, turns of the pistons nn). Or perhaps more like a hedge… Or, well, look at it and see what else you see in it. It’s a fairly nice abstract pattern, for all that, like a border in art deco wallpaper, perhaps.

Its sound has a nice pattern, too, and a simpler one at that: a simple bounce between a stop at the back and a nasal at the tip of the tongue, as though tracing a w-style zigzag. The sound of it reminds me first of all of a song – a number one hit of the post-Kennedy days by the Belgian nun who went as Sœur Sourire (The Singing Nun, real name Jeanine Deckers), “Dominique,” with its “Dominique -nique -nique” chorus. It rather sounds as though she’s singing “Domini kinnikinnick…”

And what would domini kinnikinnick be? Well, there are two related things kinnikinnick can refer to. It can refer to bearberry, which coincidentally has a similar repetition in sound (compare /kini + kini +k/ with /bEr + bEr + i/). Bearberry is a common berry that has had a wide variety of medicinal uses – a sort of panacea, perhaps not quite as anodyne as “Dominique” was (a cheery song needed after Kennedy was assassinated – couldn’t hurt that the “Dominique -nique -nique” sounded vaguely reminiscent of “Kennedy”, either), but good for bladder problems and similar strains. It’s thanks to this berry that I know this word from my childhood – it grows in southern Alberta and we used to see it often enough when out hiking.

So in relation to that berry, domini kinnikinnick would be the Lord’s bearberry (I wonder if that’s like blessed thistle). But I should say that the berry is not the original referent of kinnikinnick. And, actually, the original form of the word is more like killikinnik. It’s from an Algonquian word meaning “mixture”. Mixture of what? Well, berries, for one thing, but often tobacco for another. Tobacco? Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Literally, in fact. It was a mixture that would be smoked in pipe ceremonies and used for smudging. The smoke would carry the prayers to God. Which makes domini kinnikinnick seem quite coherent all of a sudden, doesn’t it? (Nod and smile.)

Which reminds me of that song. You see, the eponymous Dominique was a real person – Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, a travelling preacher and ascetic (though one more inclined to rosaries than to bearberries). The refrain is:

Dominique -nique -nique s’en allait tout simplement,
Routier, pauvre et chantant.
En tous chemins, en tous lieux,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu

This translates to

Dominique -nique -nique went about simply,
A poor singing traveller.
On every road, in every place,
he talks only of the Good Lord,
he talks only of the Good Lord.

Sœur Sourire is, by the way, the only Belgian to make a number one hit on the US Billboard charts. “Dominique” was her only big hit, though she continued to sing and record. She gave her profits to her order, and then ran into trouble in England due to owing a lot in taxes on her income, and not having any receipts to show her donations. This played a part in her unfortunate and despairing demise. Asceticism is better, it seems, if you keep receipts.

As a last tangent, I am put in mind of two other great Belgian singers: Plastic Bertrand, who sang (actually, it was sung by his producer, oops) “Ça plane pour moi,” a barely coherent song about a life that is about as opposite to Dominic’s as anyone could imagine, and Jacques Brel, who sang “Ne me quitte pas” – a great song about leaving – and “Le moribond,” a song by a man on the point of death who wants his friends to laugh and dance, not cry. The latter was ruined entirely by an American version, “Seasons in the Sun,” which made it a soppy, whiny self-pity fest… nothing but smoke, and not the kind that carries prayers.

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cnicnode

Posted on April 11, 2011 | 1 comment

Some words look like they were invented just to poke at your eye, perhaps to make some point. This one has that kind of angle – I mean, in English, cn is just not a natural onset. We might accept kn, pronounced /n/, but cn makes me think of that uncomfortable sticky state your soft palate gets in when you’re fighting a cold. And in case you miss it the first time, it’s there a second time in this word – and while you can make the c silent the first time, it’s across a syllable boundary the second, so you have a real /kn/ (without that /k/ it would all stay on the tip of your tongue – inasmuch as this word is likely to be on the tip of your tongue).

But what is this word? What does it mean? Where does it come from? Well, forgive me for not getting right to the point, but I want to say first that it has nothing to do with cinch or with nicky nicky nine doors or with kinnikinnick, which is another name (a rather likeable one) for bearberry. It does have something to do with blessed thistle and safflower, but only because Cnicus is (or rather was, before it was reclassified) the genus of the blessed thistle and is the Latin for “safflower” (taken from a Greek word for a thistle – it’s because it came to us through Latin that it’s cn rather than kn; Latin doesn’t use k, whereas in the original Greek the /k/ was represented by kappa, κ, which is normally transliterated to English as k, reasonably enough).

The node in cnicnode, by the way, is from Latin nodus, “knot” or “node”. So we have something that seems like a thistle node. But actually the word was invented by the noted 19th-century British Mathematician Arthur Cayley. (A nice name, Cayley, no? Makes me think of inverted cones, sort of, with those two y‘s, and perhaps part of the base of a cone with the C.) And what is it? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a point where tangents form a cone of the second order – more to the point, it’s the sharp end of a cone. I know not whether it is coincidence that cnicnode anagrams to conic end.

This word doesn’t really look pointy, does it? To my eyes it’s more reminiscent of a chain. It even looks sort of glued together from opposing bits. You see the cn stuck together (perhaps with cyanoacrylate) and wonder if it’s in code, or is perhaps some nonce word. Or at least if someone left out the o and the space in conic node. Well, whatever it is, once you know it’s math you know it’s something you’ll have to sharpen your pencil for.

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bleep

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 1 comment

OK, what’s the difference between beep and bleep?

Seriously, what’s the beeping difference?

Oh, wait, should that be “what’s the bleeping difference”?

Well, I’m sure you can tell me. Beep refers to what car horns and electronic sensors do. Bleep refers to what electronic censors do.

Not that it’s exclusively so. The word bleep wasn’t invented to refer to the censorship tone. Indeed, it wasn’t used to refer specifically to the beep of censorship on broadcasts until around 1970, but it came into use in the 1950s (two decades after beep showed up) to refer to electronic tones.

Presumably high electronic tones, naturally. The /i/ vowel signifies that. A medium tone would be a “bloop” and a lower tone a “blaap”, or something like that. But you also would expect the tone to have a little inflection of some sort at the beginning – not quite a tweedle, but an alternation of pitch, tone quality, or both. Otherwise, why the /l/? It might as well be beep.

Or, for that matter, oooo. That’s what my brother and I said in our young years when imitating censored speech from television. “Give me that oooo thing or I’ll oooo your oooo, you oooo.” (No need for easy coherence.) Because, really, the bleep of censorship is a simple tone, typically 1000 hertz (in musical terms, an annoyingly flat soprano C), generally a sine wave or something similarly plain, lacking in high and low harmonics.

But never mind. The question is not what everyone can hear; it’s what everyone knows. And everyone knows that when you censor a word, it’s bleep. In fact, you can see it often enough in printed text, when it’s emulating spoken (broadcast) text. “Get your bleeping car out of my bleeping driveway or I’ll cut your bleep off.”

“Cut your bleep off?” Now, what word could coherently go there that’s vulgar enough to merit a bleep? Well, of course, there’s a wide variance in judgment about what is bleepworthy. I remember hearing a mention on TV of the movie The Best Little bleep in Texas. Yes, that’s right, whorehouse merited a bleep on that TV station.

Really, it gets to where you can heighten the effect of vulgarity by bleeping something. Not knowing the word, people will fill in the blank with something more outré than was actually there. Censors really should look before they bleep!

But most of the time, you know well enough what word goes there. “Bleep off, you bleeping motherbleeper! I’ve had enough of putting up with your bullbleep!” It’s rather like the euphemisms we use: “Frack off, you fricking mofo! I’ve had enough of putting up with your BS!” Everybody knows what words are being replaced; they’re often barely masked anyway. And, for that matter, it’s permissible to refer to the same things using other words. We can talk about “sex” and “defecation” and so on, probably not over dinner but certainly on TV. So why bother at all?

One thing that’s fairly obvious is that when the vulgar words are being used, they’re often not being used denotatively at all. If I say “Get your bleeping dog off my lawn,” it’s quite unlikely that I mean that the dog is actually bleeping right there on my lawn. Rather, what we have are words for things that were at one time taboo for discussion in any form in polite company (one might at most advert to them in the most glancing, indirect way imaginable) and acquired a certain taboo force in the utterance as a result. The act of speaking of these things was a transgression.

And so if one wished to express anger or frustration or something else that called for an expression of rupture with politeness, an expression of transgression of social norms as a way of responding to a situation that has in some way transgressed one’s own standards, one could use them without semantic value – as expletives (expletive = “filler”) – simply for their speech act force.

By speech act I mean what you’re doing when you say something. When you utter a taboo expression, you are breaking a taboo; you are transgressing a social norm. Your act is “I transgress!” and thus “I disregard polite norms! I wish to be offensive!” Interestingly, they can have the effect of offending more strongly than expressions that, while not vulgar, are denotatively much more hurtful. If someone on TV says “You’re a stupid, worthless person who never should have been born,” that won’t get bleeped; if you replace “stupid, worthless person who never should have been born” with a reference to the rectal sphincter, it probably will get bleeped. In other words, it’s a matter of pure conventional function, just as much as a word like hello communicates acknowledgement of another person’s presence and please communicates that you don’t have the right to demand something of the other person.

And these vulgarities have retained that speech act force in large measure even after the loss of denotative taboo, though the force is gradually weakening. Indeed, what word is now the most offensive word you can say? Many people would say it’s a word that communicates racial hatred – a word that refers to a member of another race but that communicates contempt in so doing, and draws on a history of contempt, repression, and slavery. Yes, the n-word is supplanting the f-word for the worst thing you can say (perhaps excepting if you’re a member of the race referred to, and even then with limitations). After all, if you say the f-word, you’re a crude vulgarian but not an uncommon one, but if you say the n-word, you’re a bigot, a racist. Which is certainly much worse. It actually hurts people.

And does the n-word get bleeped? I think increasingly it does. I don’t watch enough TV to say for sure, but I know that it’s getting censored in print, not just in quotations in news stories but, famously, in an edition of Huckleberry Finn (wherein the word was not originally used as deliberate transgression in the same was as it is today, but the rationale is that these words have powerful effects on readers’ reflexes), and lately in a book by Joseph Conrad now available under the title The N-Word of the Narcissus.

No, really. It’s true! Don’t say WTF! (Or should that be WTbleep?)

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“I can do that!”

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 4 comments

This is the text of a presentation I gave at The Writers’ Community of Durham Region’s monthly breakfast on April 9, 2011.

Have you ever seen A Chorus Line? I mean the Broadway musical or the movie that was made from it.

Now, there’s a show for a triple threat. You know, someone who can act, dance, and sing. There’s one great tapdance number in it – you might know it: “I’m watching sis go pit-a-pat, Said, ‘I can do that, I can do that.’”

That’s actually a pretty good guide to becoming a triple threat. In publishing. You know, writing, editing, design. By design I mean layout – desktop publishing. “I can do that” is also a good guide to getting to earn a living doing these things. And there’s a corollary: a good way not to get as far is to say, “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.” Continue reading →

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benignant

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 1 comment

Well, we all know the words malignant and indignant, and that reminiscent word ignorant. There’s something about that /Ign/ that seems to come with brutish, negatively toned words, especially with an /ənt/ at the end of the word – if not prognathous or gnashing the teeth, still jamming up the mouth at back and front, releasing in a way that might remind you of having a cold /gn/, then coming to a clunking stop on the tip of the tongue /nt/.

On the other hand, there’s this word benign, with its smooth /aIn/ ending, even if it is spelled with ign. It fairly glides over that g, like skating overtop of a logo on an ice rink. It rhymes with divine (and a lot of more neutrally toned things). It might even make you think of Benigno Aquino, assassinated opponent of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and husband of Corazón Aquino, who brought democracy back to the Philippines.

Benign is usually an antonym to malignant. If you have a tumour, and it’s malignant, that’s ugly – it means cancer. But if it’s benign, that means all is fine, or anyway that it’s not cancer.

But benign and malignant aren’t quite a matched pair. They’re like a fork and knife from different sets. They come from Latin roots, benignus “kindly” and malignus “of evil intent”. They were both brought over to English in the 1300s, as benign and malign. And then, 200 years later, a new version of malign arrived, malignant, based on the related Latin form malignans, which is formed from a present participle (rather like maligning). So now we had two evil and one good. And the second evil one was taking much of the business the first evil one had.

So another 200 years later (in the 1700s, if you’re not keeping track), a parallel word was invented, benignant. Where malign bespoke character and malignant perhaps a bit more action, benignant likewise spoke more to action than just to disposition. A person who is benignant shows kindness, especially to social inferiors. So there can be a kind of condescension to it as well – the bigness it displays may bring with it a bit of indignity. I suspect this is partly due to its echoes of malignant and perhaps indignant and ignorant.

Jim Taylor, who suggested this word, noted it in a quote from Mark Twain’s autobiography: “Roosevelt closed my mouth years ago with a deeply valued, gratefully received, unasked favor; & with all my bitter detestation of him I have never been able to say a venomous thing about him in print since – that benignant deed always steps in the way…” Ah, yes, the pregnant benignancy, the indignity of receiving magnanimity, smouldering like lignite ignited. Another good deed that is not unpunishing.

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wax

Posted on April 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

We were seated at a table – Jess Long, Edgar Frick, Marilyn Frack, and I – at the Order of Logogustation’s monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event. For atmosphere, the lights were dim and the tables were lit with candles.

“This candle’s waning,” observed Edgar.

Marilyn reached over and tilted it a bit. “I think it’s waxing.”

“Like your legs?”

Marilyn set the candle back down. “Are you saying my legs are getting fat?”

“No, no,” Edgar protested. “I mean like you wax your legs.”

“I’ll wax your bum,” Marilyn said, reaching over and giving his leather-clad posterior a whack.

“An interesting and still open question,” Jess said, to divert the conversation, “the matter of whether the verb wax meaning ‘grow’ is at the root of the noun wax. Is it that it is what bees grow, or does that come from another root, meaning ‘weave’?”

“Beats me,” said Marilyn. “I’ve generally minded my own beeswax.”

“Your own bikini wax,” Edgar said.

“Your own Johnson wax,” Marilyn shot back.

“I think,” I interjected, “uh, we’re waxing a bit vulgar here.”

“Why, Johnson wax is floor wax, dear boy,” Edgar said.

“And probably ceiling wax, too,” Marilyn added.

“Fit for ships, and shoes, and cabbages, and kings?” Jess said, with a little smirk.

“You’re getting Carrolled away,” I said.

“I was just trying another angle,” Jess replied.

“Well, wax is a rather angular word,” I said. “In all caps, it’s almost entirely diagonals.”

“Perhaps fitting,” Jess said, “given the way it involves front-and-back coarticulations: the /w/ with the lips rounded and the back of the tongue raised, and then the /ks/ releasing at the back while the tip of the tongue holds in place.”

“More phonemes than graphemes,” I observed.

Marilyn didn’t like the dry turn the conversation was taking. “Front-and-back coarticulations… that sounds like fun,” she purred to Edgar.

“Well, these two sods are about as lively as a wax museum,” Edgar said.

“I think so,” Marilyn said, “I’m talking hot wax, and these drips are writing a wax paper. They don’t know beans about the real wax.”

I said, “Well, I didn’t come here to have a strip peeled off me.”

“Oh,” said Jess, “that’s a whole other ball of wax.” She started whistling “Brazil.”

“Now, that’s waxing lyrical,” Edgar said.

“Or lyrical waxing,” Marilyn added.

“Wax on, you two,” I said.

“Oh,” said Marilyn, “we burn the candle at both ends. I needn’t tell you what Edgar does with a smoldering wick.”

“Wax off,” Jess replied drily, and high-fived me.

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pram

Posted on April 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

Picture yourself out for a stroll when you perceive a posse of perambulators, strollers trolling past the lamps on the boardwalk – or perhaps rolling down the ramp from a tram or some boat. The matrons pushing them have perms, and have perhaps lately sampled some SPAM parmigiana; the pram passengers are pampered and Pamper-ed and probably talcum powdered. And then something happens rather beyond the usual pram parameters: the permed moms begin to ram prams one against another: “Pram! Pram!” is the sound as the metal rattles when the prams jam. Now, what could be the pragmatic of such a perturbation of perambulation, this heavy metal thunder forcing the newborn to be wild?

And where would this be happening? Well, England, probably; that’s where they have prams – in North America we’re more likely to call them baby buggies, baby carriages, or – less semantically isomorphically – strollers. You might see prams parading in Hyde Park, near Albert Hall, where they perform the Proms and Brahms. The word is a demotic English truncation, a bit like telly for television or – more American and more recent still – blog for web log. What is pram short for? Perambulator. Does that sound like some discombobulator, some rather Victorian machine?

Well, the perambulator is a Victorian machine, really; its name comes from when such impressive-sounding locutions were in fashion: in 1853, Burton’s Registered Infant Perambulator was the latest thing for taking infants out for air. Perambulation, as you may know, is “walking around” – from a Latin root formed from per, meaning “throughout”, and ambulare, meaning “walk” (whence also ambulance, a thing that no longer walks). There is also a device used by surveyors – a wheel one walks about with to measure distances – called a perambulator.

Of course, baby carriages had been in existence for several decades by the time perambulator was applied to them. But the term caught on. And then got trimmed down in that way we do (I’m put in mind of vacay, for instance). The first citation for pram in the OED is from 1884. Unless, that is, you count the entirely unrelated word pram referring to a kind of flat-bottomed boat, which comes from Dutch praam.

And how do you like saying it? It seems so pretty and prim, but that’s probably association. The shape of the word bears no particular resemblance to its object, but they seldom do; you could, I suppose, see the blouse of the mother in p and her hand on the pram handle in m. The mouth, saying pram, makes a transit from lips closed to lips closed, like mum, but it can be open for as long as you wish. If it weren’t for the /r/, it could be one of baby’s first words. But if you hear /pam/ from baby, you’ll probably take it as a request for mummy, or perhaps for some SPAM.

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