sequelæ

Posted on March 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

In my word tasting note on malamanteau, I wrote, “that gives the benefit of a year’s perspective and the chance to see the sequelae.”

I imagine that might have caused a reader or two to squeal queasily, “Sequelae? Equals what, eh?” Well, the word does betray a certain acquaintance on my part with medical materials, as that’s where you’re most likely to see it.

But, now, can you guess, more or less, what I meant there, and what this word probably means if I speak of “a disease and its sequelae”?

What word does this word look most like? Sequel, of course. And that’s no non-sequitur; it follows the pattern because it follows. Sequelæ (note my extra-fancy use of the æ digraph) is just the plural of sequela, which is a word borrowed unaltered from Latin, while sequel is the same word passed through French and then anglicized. Not that they mean exactly the same thing now. Both have to do with following – sequela comes from sequi “follow” – but sequela was borrowed straight from Latin because it comes from a context in which Latin terminology persists: medicine.

So a sequela is a medical condition that results from a previous medical condition. And, from that, more generally, it’s a consequence. (Oo – note that word: consequence. What do you see in it? A sequ at the heart: con + sequence, and sequence also traces back to sequi.) So I could have said consequences rather than sequelae. But consequences is a common word, and it’s used enough to have acquired a certain stern-parent tone to it (plus the association with truth or consequences). Sequelæ is an uncommon word in most contexts, and so it has that polished gleam of a sharp new surgical instrument, one that you may not know the exact function of but that sure looks like it could do something and not make a mess of it. To the less-familiar reader, it has a more neutral tone; to the more-familiar reader, it gives a rather dry-wit comparison to diseases.

As an added bonus, it has that flash of a pensive moue that comes when saying a qu. It also has a certain uncertainty of pronunciation. I tend to want to say it as though it were ecclesiastical Latin, with the last two vowels as [e] (as in “lay”, roughly). But the great old British tradition of Latin pronunciation has flavoured the more official version of this word, so that those two vowels are both [i] (as in “machine”), making it like “squealy” with a catch between the first two consonants, or like “sick wheelie” (a stunt that may have its own sequelae).

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E.g., this kind of thing, etc.

Posted on March 28, 2011 | 2 comments

A point of uncertainty for many: when you have something listing examples, do you use etc. with e.g.? For example,

requirements for baking a cake (e.g., eggs, flour, sugar, etc.)

The answer:  use one or the other (or neither – see below), but not both. Each of them indicates you’re seeing a subset: e.g. translates (roughly) to “for example”, and etc. translates to “and more” or “and others”.

Faced with a sentence that uses both, I generally drop the etc., although in some contexts I’ll drop the e.g. And in some contexts I’ll use for example or for instance in place of e.g., or and more or and so on in place of etc. (I will not, of course, have for instance, flour, eggs, sugar, and so on, for the same reason as given above: you only need one – otherwise you’re saying and so on is an instance or example.)

When deciding which to drop, note that etc. may seem more hand-waving dismissive (as may and so on) and e.g. more high-toned or business-y; also, e.g. declares from the outset that the list is not exhaustive, whereas etc. waits until the end to show that there’s more, so there’s a difference in the flow of the argument.

Another thing to pay attention to is whether the list is definite or possible members of a set. Generally, you will find that etc. tends more to imply that the things listed are all definite members of a fixed set, whereas e.g. is more able to allow possible members of a set. Compare:

Choose some music you like (e.g., Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven).

Choose some music you like (Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven, etc.).

The second is more likely to imply that you like all three of the artists listed, whereas the first tends more to allow that they’re just examples of music you might like.

And if we look back at the cakes, we can try both:

requirements for baking a cake (e.g., eggs, flour, sugar)

requirements for baking a cake (eggs, flour, sugar, etc.)

The first allows that you might bake a cake without one or more of the items listed, whereas the second tends to imply that they’re all requisites.

Oh, and what about i.e.? That’s from Latin for “that is”, and it means you’re presenting not an example – not a subset – but an amplification or restatement. Let’s look at our examples:

Choose some music you like (i.e., Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven).

requirements for baking a cake (i.e., eggs, flour, sugar)

In the first case, it’s saying that those three are the music you like and the music you’re going to choose, and none other in addition. This is possible but unlikely. In the second case, it’s saying that you need nothing other than eggs, flour, and sugar to bake a cake. Heh… you try that and tell me how it comes out.

If you want to be less prissy, i.e. can be replaced by in other words. Also, there’s nothing in the logic of a sentence to keep you from using i.e. with etc., but it’s sloppy writing – better just to use e.g. and no etc. Oh, and often you can drop it altogether:

He named the three hottest women in film in his opinion (Cate Blanchett, Rosamund Pike, and Lucy Liu).

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chatterati

Posted on March 27, 2011 | 1 comment

This word has nothing to do with Chattanooga (except for inasmuch as it probably has some chatterati in it, as would any town big enough to have a TV station) or anyone named Chatterton or Chatterjee (allowing that someone of either name may be a member of the chatterati). No, it’s a blend made through forcing an Anglo-Saxon verb (chatter) onto a Latin-derived pseudomorpheme (-erati, the ending of literati). It’s like a fish tied to a fowl – or perhaps like some cross-breed between the one and the other.

Well, we know chatter. Originally it’s what magpies do – and other fast-vocalizing birds too, at first including those that are now said to twitter. Now we more often talk of people chattering – as the OED puts it so nicely, “Of human beings: To talk rapidly, incessantly, and with more sound than sense.” And there’s more than enough of that when politics is the news of the day. There’s a whole chattering class, as they are often called, prattling in their rat-a-tat fashion, a bit like woodpeckers except that it’s their heads that are the wood and they’re pecking at each other. They strive to read the entrails that will foretell the future, but really they’re just eating each other’s chitterlings.

As to literati, it means in origin “the literate people”, but now that literacy is nearly universal, it means “the highly literate people”. It has a taste of an elite – a sort of illuminati, but not secret and not necessarily pulling the reins of power. So it’s a nice base for adding, for instance, glitter to make glitterati, “the glittering stars of fashionable society” (often pursused by paparazzi) – or, more recent, chatter to make chatterati, “the chattering class”. These words have a hardness of feel, possibly brittle but also possible as untriturable as a diamond. At the very least, the words suggest the clicking of teeth as jaws rattle on.

The chattering class, in their modishness and striving to be au courant, seem naturally to foster lexical syncretism. Another word for the same set is the commentariat – a term that, like chatterati, first showed up in the 1990s; it’s a merger of commentary with proletariat (it also smacks of secretariat).

But now political commentary is not just the preserve of television talking heads, audibly rattling out their sound and fury in a human teletype patter. Blogs are an important source of political information and opinion (inasmuch as there is such a thing as an important source of political opinion – politics and its commentary suffer from a surfeit of opinion and a deficiency of fact), so now we also have the bloggerati. Which is an especially amusing word morphologically, as it involves two mid-morpheme clippings – the -erati one, but also the blog one, since blog is short for weblog, a compound of web and log. On the other hand, its voiced stops give it a kind of bluntness and dullness that make it a less appealing word.

But the real problem with blogs (I’m being sarcastic, by the way, when I say “problem”) is that they allow expression of thought, fact, and insight in depth (they don’t enforce it, but it’s possible). Ack! Who wants that? Isn’t it much better to get it in short, quick bursts, limited to 140 characters? OK, yes, some of those 140 characters can be a link to a lengthy article. But the premise is really that one can say something useful, something valuable, in 140 characters (or fewer) – short bursts of chattering, of twittering: discourse gone to the birds. Naturally, those who chatter on Twitter – in particular on popular current topics – are lately called the twitterati.

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tergiversation

Posted on March 26, 2011 | 1 comment

When an election looms, the talking heads go into overtime. Forget concision; these moving mouths will not give terse conversation, returning instead many a turgid verse, a sort of – if not terrorization – torporization, through saturating reverberations of treatises verging on the vertiginous. All the sound and fury… signifying nothing. And then, of course, there are the politicians.

You thought I was talking about politicians? When was the last time you got to hear anything they said at length? The news media insist on clipping anything a politician has to say down to a mere sentence fragment, reserving for themselves (and their pet chatterati) the right to pontificate and speculate at inordinate length. And in their inevitably inane analyses, one of the prime crimes decried is tergiversation.

Is that hypocritical? In a way, though not necessarily for the reason that one might imagine. Tergiversation is not – however it may sound – a question of going on at great length. Rather, it can mean “turning one’s back on a cause one had espoused” – changing your position on something – or “being evasive or deliberately ambiguous”. It comes from Latin tergum “back” and vertere “turn”. (And in the second sense, the use of tergiversation can be an example of tergiversation if you feel confident your audience won’t know what it means.)

So when a politician speaks and knows he (or she) will be quoted in brief snippets, the politician is not in a position of being able to say anything substantial, may not be in a position of being able to say something clear, and in fact in many cases is not even in a position of being able to say something true, since a bare statement on something in which the necessary background is not supplied can be lacking information that can’t be assumed and without which the statement simply can’t be understood correctly. (The late Richard Feynman does a great job in explaining this at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM.) But watch out if a politician tries to avoid giving a misleadingly simplistic statement! The moment they try to avoid being unnecessarily simplistic, they get jumped on for not being clear. Imagine if someone said to you “Express to me the foundational principles of general relativity in one syllable” or “How can you make the economy work better by raising taxes – yes or no?”

So in that sense the news media are creating the very ambiguity and misleadingness they decry: a politician has a choice between saying something misleadingly simplistic or saying something that seems vague and evasive. But meanwhile, the chatterati will criticize a politician for taking this or that position – but will also impugn a politician who changes his position on something! So tergiversation of that sort is in its absence enjoined, but in its presence decried.

But, oh, no, the chatterati are generally not guilty of tergiversation themselves per se. They do, however, participate in the inanition of political discourse (which means they are emptying it and starving it of nutrition), especially in their strongly tactics-oriented discourse (as though it were another sports league).

But enough excoriation. How do you like the taste of this word? It stays rather nicely near the tip of the tongue, straying only at r (and only if you say it rather than eliding it in the typically British manner). It has that common nominalizing ending, ation, giving it just a slightly more intellectual tinge. Its stress pattern is out of phase with its morphemes, a 3+2 beat. And its letters present many anagram opportunities. I like tergi > tiger + versat > starve + ion. We can also make (among others) griever station, Sir Vegetation, o a virgin street, and nor give it a rest.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting tergiversation (back in July 2009).

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malamanteau

Posted on March 25, 2011 | 2 comments

Nearly a year ago, Roberto De Vido sent me a link to an article from the Boston Globe about a new word – a rather fun and useful new word – and the bit of a kerfuffle it had created. It’s taken me a while to get to this suggestion – I have older ones still waiting too – but that gives the benefit of a year’s perspective and the chance to see the sequelae.

It all started with this comic from the great geek strip xkcd: xkcd.com/739/ . The strip (for those not disposed to click through) shows a Wikipedia page for the word malamanteau. The definition is “A malamanteau is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism.” The caption is “Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?”

But the word wasn’t in Wikipedia. Yet. (Actually, Wiktionary would be the more appropriate place for an entry on a word.) The word was not being used for the very first time in the strip, but nearly. So, naturally, as the Boston Globe article recounted, the word was quickly added to Urban Dictionary and Wordnik – and, of course, to Wikipedia. And just as quickly removed from Wikipedia. Though not without generating a lot of debate between Wikipedia editors, mainly about whether it was a real word and whether it was notable.

Now, notable – there’s a word Wikipedia really likes. One thing you need to be aware of with regard to Wikipedia editors is that they are not like editors of, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary. They did not get the job due to expertise. Actually, it’s not a job at all; it’s a volunteer position. And anyone can join in the fray. But the ones who tend to prevail are the ones who put the most time and energy into it. Unfortunately, this means that it attracts a disproportionate portion of crankish no-lifers who want to be important and to set the rules in their own little corner of the universe. And the “information wants to be free” ethos that is the supposed founding spirit of Wikipedia is strongly subject to the itchy delete fingers of high-school-not-yet-grads and chronic career jumping beans, who, rather than letting information be free, will spike an article if, in their Napoleonic estimation, it’s not “notable”.

This is not, of course, to say that all Wikipedia editors and contributors are dweebs with an exaggerated sense of the ambit of their own knowledge. And indeed, Wikipedia is a very useful source of information, though one forgets at one’s peril that it cannot be assumed to be as reliable as expert-reviewed material. The point at hand here, though, is if you look for malamanteau in Wikipedia now, you will only find a reference to it in the article on xkcd – as “a stunt word.” You won’t find it at all on Wiktionary, which will instead direct you to malamante, which (perhaps fittingly) is Esperanto for “hatingly” or “hatefully”.

No fear if you want to find it elsewhere, though. It gets about 14,000 hits on Google. It’s still in Urban Dictionary, Wordnik, and assorted other sites that are not subject to the same ethos as Wikipedia. The question, though, is whether Wikipedia is right. Is it – like, for instance, floccinaucinihilipilification – a stunt word, one that is never really used in earnest for its denotative value? May one thereby floccinaucinihilipilificate it?

Well, before xkcd used it, it had already been used (not much, though) as a blend of malapropism and portmanteau. And it’s still useful – it’s by far the tidiest way to refer to words such as misunderstimate, refudiate, insinuendo, bewilderness, flustrated, ambiviolent, and misconscrewed (it up). So it has clear value as a word. It fills a gap neatly. It’s a nice malamute to add to the dog team on the linguistic sled of meaning. It’s reasonably mellifluous – nasals and a liquid, and an alternation between the lips and the tip of the tongue.

And it has a very good chance of sticking in the language due to the notoriety given it not just by the comic but, perhaps more importantly, by the insta-smite response it got on Wikipedia. In effect, by the very act of declaring the word not notable, those who did so helped to make it notable. In their flustrated attempts to refudiate it, they misunderstimated it; they misconscrewed it up and now they’re just in the bewilderness. And without even the mot juste.

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wetin

Posted on March 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

twit_a #wetinconcern spring with snow

twit_b @twit_a you got wet in the snow? or you’re wet because you’re concerned about the weather?

twit_a @twit_b no its a fun meme cresting now. click hashtag.

twit_b @twit_a i always thought hash tag was something you played when stoned. what’s the game with #wetinconcerned

twit_a @twit_b not concerned concern. take 2 things that don’t go together. it’s like what does x want with y

twit_a #wetinconcern x with y

twit_b @twit_a this does not make immediate sense. wet inconcern? = doesn’t matter?

twit_a @twit_b wetin concern. 2Face Idibia.

twit_a @twit_b see http://www.tribune.com.ng/sun/index.php/glitz/1724-wetin-concern-anybody-whether-i-marry-or-i-no-marry

[pause]

twit_b @twit_a ok, i see, it’s like “what does it concern”. wait, looking up…

twit_b @twit_a nigerian pidgin. wetin = what is. see http://www.ngex.com/personalities/babawilly/dictionary/pidginw.htm

twit_b @twit_a so wetin concern = what business

twit_a @twit_b right, wetin concern Kim Kardashian with tastefulness

twit_b @twit_a wetin concern you with Kim Kardashian? wetin yua eye find go dia?

twit_b @twit_a seems like a fun game been around a while. see http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-3764.0.html – they’re playing it in 2005

twit_a @twit_b whats nigerian pidgin

twit_b @twit_a pidgin = a lingua franca for communicating functionally between two or more speech communities without a common language

twit_b @twit_a typically lower-status language provides the grammatical model (stripped down) and higher-status language provides the vocabulary (altered)

twit_b @twit_a just asked my african ling prof Bruce Connell, he says several Niger-Congo languages provide grammar substrate for Nigerian Pidgin

twit_a @twit_b ur goin all capital on me #wetinconcern me with academic fancy-pants

twit_b @twit_a istg twitter is like high school or junior high but at ten times speed

twit_b @twit_a it’s not even that wetinconcern is cresting today, it’s that it’s cresting this hour. it’s like watching two-year-olds with toys.

twit_b @twit_a i can’t get all wet in concern about it. i’d rather have a westin concern.

twit_b @twit_a wetin is just another bit of twine mixed up in the big ball of loose threads.

twit_a @twit_b yeah but look, it introduced u to nigerian pidgin

twit_b @twit_a #pointconceded

twit_a #wetinconcern ftw!

twit_c @twit_a #wetinconcern ftw wit what?

ftw = for the win
ofgs = oh for god’s sake
wetin yua eye find go dia = you should not be looking there/mind your own business (see http://www.ngex.com/personalities/babawilly/dictionary/pidginw.htm)

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zilch

Posted on March 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Some words sprout slang synonyms because they’re naughty enough to advert to indirectly or in code; others sprout them just because they’re unpleasant. Say, for instance, an exceptionally undesirable result on a test, or a profound lack of financial return on an investment or effort. You may want to express your disappointment in a glancing way, one that has a certain style, a certain vehemence even, but that attenuates the sting just slightly by not naming the thing exactly.

So you stand there, looking at your test paper or your financial statements or your empty hand, saying “Shoot. Fuddle-duddle. Son of a bungee jumper. Goshdarn it all to heck.” And someone walks up and says, “What did you get?” Are you going to say “Nothing” or “Zero”? Or are you more inclined to use a word that has a similar onset but is otherwise like punching the air – “Nada, niente, zip, zilch”?

Funny thing, isn’t it, how N and Z are really the same basic form at 90-degree rotation, but their feel and effect differ so much, thanks to their sound (the /n/ so soft and nasal, the /z/ buzzing, though both are done with the tongue in the same place), their relative frequency (n being the fifth most frequent letter in English, z being the least frequent – the [z] sound is more often represented with s because it used to be just an allophone of /s/), and perhaps the shape of their half-uncials (n rounded, z just as sharp as the capital).

But nada and niente are actual words for “nothing” in other languages, whereas zip and zilch are slang terms just in English. Their use for “zero” certainly can be reasonably suspected to be related to the /z/ onset. The dismissing flick of zip for “zero” (specifically on a test) showed up around 1900, about a quarter century after the word first arrived as onomatopoeia for a light, sharp sound of a fast-moving object and about a quarter of a century before it was applied to a clothing fastener. It may give you the feeling of an exam paper being flicked into the trash.

Zilch, on the other hand, will more likely give you the feeling of the paper being ditched into the dirt, or perhaps of the test taker himself being jettisoned into a gulch (where he is squelched by mulch). It doesn’t stop abruptly like zip; it curls into the impact and then slides a bit. (Or is that the sound of a paper being crumpled up?) It’s sort of like zero plus nil plus scratch, though that’s not likely where it came from.

So where did it come from? Well, it showed up in the 1960s, and a clear origin hasn’t been traced. It’s suggested that it comes from a character in a 1930s humour magazine called Ballyhoo, and there may be a connection to Joe Zilsch, a 1920s nickname for an average student – or a nonentity or loser. (Zilsch and Zilch are real family names; Oxford says they’re German/Slavic, while some other sources specify Yiddish.) But there’s a gap of a couple of decades between Ballyhoo and the “nothing” sense – not impossible, since someone might have spotted it in an old magazine and pressed it back into service (or might we say filched it). But as far as conclusive evidence goes, we have, well, zilch.

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twerp

Posted on March 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

This doesn’t really sound like a word for something heavy, does it? It might be the sound of a strange bird – a strange little bird – or perhaps a quick pluck on an odd stringed instrument, or some kind of a drip, maybe.

Yes, well. A strange bird, no doubt. A drip, oh yes. And little: the most common word to show up with twerp is certainly little. Other adjectives tend also to emphasize lightweightness – if not physically, then mentally or socially – and certainly lower status. And annoyingness, but usually the kind of annoyingness one envisions simply flicking off, like a burr off one’s sleeve, or shaking off like a self-important doglet on a leash. The annoyingness of the pesky little brother (I’m put in mind of National Lampoon’s January 1984 cover). An impertinence. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A despicable or objectionable person; an insignificant person, a nobody; a nincompoop.” Like a twit, but twit refers more specifically to intellectual lightweightness.

I think it’s reasonable to say a fair amount of the tone and flavour of the word comes from phonaesthetic influences. It really is a small, quickly chirping word, and one that causes the mouth to make a motion reminiscent of a dripping tap (say it, then again, then again). The etymology is opaque; although it has been asserted that it is from an Oxonian named T.W. Earp, last and most charming of the “decadents” and bane of the rugger set, this is not confirmed, and the Dictionary of American Slang gives a first reference as 1874, while T.W. Earp was at Oxford around 1911. And Earp, for his part, was president of the Oxford Union debating society, and a noted wit, so anyway not likely truly meriting the designation as we mean it today.

Between its appearance and now, a couple of fanciful stories have been confected, purporting to describe the exact sort of person a twerp is. One I heard (or read) when I was young was that a twerp was someone who bit fart bubbles in a bathtub. Kurt Vonnegut had another definition: “When I was in high school in Indianapolis 65 years ago, a Twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. (And a Snarf was a guy who sniffed the seats of girls’ bicycles.)” (http://www.vonnegutweb.com/archives/arc_nice.html – he then goes on to apply it in a very non-literal sense to people who have failed to read certain works he considers essential.)

Well, and then there’s the question of exactly how we do mean it today. Aside from its “impertinent twit” sense, it’s also used to mean “someone who uses Twitter” – although there is still disagreement as to whether it applies to all users or certain types and whether it’s derogatory or neutral-toned. But ’twere pity to see a useful insult be bleached away…

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prayer

Posted on March 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

“How come the word ‘prayer’ has no ascenders at all?” asks Jim Taylor.

I am immediately put in mind of Claudius’s lines from Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” But of course the written form of prayer reaches only to the roots and not to the branches regardless of the sincerity of intention. Not that here is necessarily the right place to debate the up-is-Heaven-down-is-Hell schematization. I do remember that my mother at least used to have a plaque or poster that read “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” a quote from Henry David Thoreau. And Laurie Anderson starts and ends her song “Language Is a Virus” with the aphorism (which I have always liked) “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now only much much better.”

Well, in any event, the form of this word is adventitious – regardless of how sincere the prayer of the pray-er, no matter whether, deep in the heart, there is a “why” (a y), no matter whether the prayer contains a ray of hope, and no matter whether the oral gesture of it involves the tongue in a full wave of prostration (“pray-er”) or merely a slight distancing and return (our usual “prer”), it all just happened to be so, the result of accumulated linguistic acts and facts that occurred without reference to this particular word. As with so many things, the karma runs over the dogma.

But, say, now, why is it that the noun for what you make when you pray is prayer? Shouldn’t prayer be the one who prays? Well, in fact, there is also a word prayer – often written pray-er for clarity – that means “one who prays”, but our usual word prayer does not involve the usual er agentive suffix. No, it has simply been polished down by the flowing river of time, over the centuries and by way of French, from post-classical Latin precaria.

Does that word look a little familiar? Prithee consider this situation: You are a king, and you have gained the kingship by offing your brother. Now your nephew knows you did it, and so your position is precarious: you are become prey, and must next prey on him. You will not do so without uttering precations and imprecations, however – though you may find your precations are imprecise and so will proceed unappreciated, and your imprecations simply impotent. So now, pray tell: what words are related?

Prey, that closest, best pun, is not. It’s from a different root altogether (Latin praeda). But precarious and precation – and imprecation – are. We can understand the connection with imprecation – although it’s often used now in phrases such as uttering imprecations to mean “swearing”, that is a bit imprecise. Precaria meant “entreaty, petition, request” (and the general “request” sense has persisted in pray tell and other frozen archaisms), and certainly deities were often the ones being asked. Precation is just prayer. With imprecation, one is asking for evil to come down on another, so “To hell with you!” counts, but “You stupid jerk!” does not.

But, now, what could prayer possibly have to do with a position of poise on the point of a pinnacle? We know, don’t we, that a precarious position is one where one might fall at any time, and that precariously tends to go with balanced? In fact, the original sense of the word would not even have included situations where one is at the whim of forces not susceptible to reason or persuasion. It meant that one was in one’s state at the whim or pleasure of another – that one was a suppliant, entreating the other. To be a tenant at will was to be precarious.

But senses shift, and the sense of uncertainty has been retained while the sense of volitional caprice on the part of another has largely been lost. Still, though, however inhuman the forces, many will appeal to a superhuman other when in a precarious position. And we may feel sure the prayer will be sincere – or at least the desperation will be – whether the word flies up or reaches down, and whether the thoughts should reach out or go within, flail like branches (as they often do) or dig deep for water and strength.

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perigee

Posted on March 20, 2011 | 1 comment

We were driving back from a day of skiing – my wife, my friend Trish, and I – and I looked over and saw the moon rising over the fields and low hills. It was reddish and large, and it rose perceptibly – in a matter of a few minutes it had cleared the horizon. It glowed, pregnant, like a big e: not an o, a blank face, but an e, first because it was bisected by the horizon, but afterward just because its face is not, after all, blank. And of course the moon always looks larger at the horizon, but tonight it had an even better reason for looking like a fat, tawny perogie: it was at its perigee.

Yes, the moon, the moon, the moon, the full full moon, is at a low point in its orbit – a point closer to the earth than usual. You see, our selenic satellite pursues an elliptical path in its peregrination: a Bosc pear, an egg. Imagine the earth at the back of your mouth, and the moon sometimes at your lips /p/ but sometimes at the tip of your tongue. Tonight it swings lower, lowering, closer: it appears fourteen percent wider and thirty percent brighter than average.

And as we looked at it, it was such a ruddy colour, paling only gradually as it rose: a blood moon, bloodthirsty like the one in Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, or a warm one? Is it serious and noble – has it a peerage and prestige – or is it a parody? It’s not a blue moon, to leave you standing alone. And it is not cold and green; it is ripe at its perigee, appearing as a low-hanging fruit. It may be the focus of many a pagan liturgy; it could perhaps spawn a Persian peri in her imperfect pursuit of paradise. And so many songs have been written of it, perhaps to purge the urge, perhaps in pure ecstasy… And yet still it circles, now closer, now farther, planet of our planet for eternity (more or less).

Note that we are not saying it is at its nadir. Although nadir is commonly used to refer to a low point, it is celestially the point that is diametrically opposite the zenith – and hence under your feet. No, the opposite of perigee is apogee, and in both cases the gee is from Greek γῆ gé or γαῖα gaia, “earth”. The peri means “close” in this context – in others it often means “around”; we may say that the moon at its perigee is hanging around the earth. Yes, swing low at the sweet perigee, as I am being carried home.

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