wh-

Posted on March 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was watching World Cup downhill skiing from Kvitfjell, Norway, today, and I thought, “Huh, Kvitfjell. That must mean ‘white mountain’.”

Which, of course, it did. Now, it’s not that I speak Norwegian, but I do know that fjell means “mountain” (cognate with the English noun fell, now uncommon) and I had good reason to expect that kvit was “white”.

You see, although “white” in modern German is weiss, just as “what” is wass and “which” is welcher (or welche or welches), and in Dutch the three are wit, wat, and welk, meaning that in both languages it’s just w now (pronounced /v/ or, in Dutch, something close to it), I knew that in Icelandic, the three are hvítur, hvað, and hver, with the hv pronounced [kv] or [kf]. And I see, looking it up, that “white” is hvid in Danish and hvit in standard Norwegian (yes, the kvit spelling is a different dialect), though the h seems most likely to go unpronounced.

We should also notice that in many of our modern English wh words, there are Latin equivalents in qu: quid means “what” and quis means “which”, for instance. (Latin for “white” comes from a different root.) This is most notably so with question words (note that question also starts with qu), which we refer to as wh words in English (and in fact linguists will often call the set the “wh- words” even in other languages, though I’d rather think “qu- words” would have a more widespread verity).

This is because they all come from the same Proto-Indo-European roots, which had a /kw/ onset – that oral gesture that may be like sucking or like kissing, but either way involves both front and back of the mouth, with a sort of tension between the lips pushing outward and the tongue sticking at the back. As the various Indo-European languages developed, the /kw/ was preserved in some, and in others became /sw/ (as in Sanskrit svetah “white”, Old Church Slavonic svetu “light”, and Lithuanian sviesti “shine”), or reduced to /k/ (as in various words for “who”: Sanskrit ka, Lithuenian ka, Irish cé) or even changed to /p/ or /pw/ (Greek poteros and Welsh pwy for “who”), or – as in Germanic languages – altered to /hw/ and in some cases ultimately reduced to /w/. (And in some Scots English dialects, under the influence of Gaelic phonotactics, the /hw/ has sometimes moved to /f/, as in fit “what” – the voicelessness and labial location are preserved, but the rest is changed.)

This leaves us with two questions particularly relevant to English. First, are white and what and which now /w/ onset words, at least in some versions of English? Second, why do we write them with wh when obviously we say either /w/ or /hw/ but never /wh/?

To look at the first question first: here in Canada, as in much of the United States, you will normally hear them with just /w/. But the odds are pretty good that there’s still a citation form (as linguists call them) with a /hw/. Get someone to say “I saw a wight which saw a white witch” and then have someone ask them to repeat it more clearly, and you have a good chance of hearing the /hw/ on the wh words. For that matter, there are times (say, when addressing an impatient woman briefly) when one might say Which? very clearly so as not to be thought to be saying Witch! And some people will find they are more likely to say /hw/ in some contexts – for instance, Rosemary Tanner (who suggested this exploration) finds that white gets the voiceless onset when referring to snow and freshly washed laundry. At the same time, of course, we have lots of fun with the usual homophony, for instance with Which witch is which? So there’s no question of our not being aware that we usually say it just /w/!

There is, by the way, some question of whether it’s really accurate to say it’s /hw/. Say /h/, as in the start of how. Now say /w/ as in win. Now tack the one onto the other: h-win. Does that seem quite like what you say when you say when? Or maybe a bit too separated? Dollars to doughnuts your lips are already rounded when you start the /h/ sound, in fact. So really it’s a voiceless /w/ (the IPA symbol is /ʍ/, an upside-down w), and it might get some voicing at the end.

But it undoubtedly came from a /hw/, which came from a /kw/. And in fact in Old English it was written hw. So hwat happened? Well, it changed during the Middle English period. Somewhere in the 1200s scribes started using wh, possibly under the influence of some Norman French spellings of some words (that’s how we got our sh and ch spellings for what had up to then been written sc and c). We’re not actually altogether sure why the change was made, in fact.

But it didn’t happen all at once; it was dragged out, and uneven. In fact, the list of different spellings of white in the OED is rather long, starting with the old hwit and moving to such as wit and wyt (yes, at one time we left off the h in spelling) as well as to whit and whyte and so on but also to an assortment of others, such as qwyte, quhyt, and qwyght.

The same pattern holds true for our various wh question words, of course. The interesting case is who, wherein the /w/ has been altogether dropped; it started out as hwa in Old English, but once the sound had moved to be /hwu/, the more natural progression was to /hu/, assimilating the two rounded sounds and keeping the voiceless opener for an onset. Interestingly, this also happened to the Old English hwo, which became hu… and then, in Modern English, how. How do you like that? And who would have thought it, eh? What do you know…

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liqueur

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 1 comment

Oh, dear. Am I in my cups again? Only if you’re talking about the u and u. You may drink liquor alone, with only one cup u, but liqueur is clearly meant for a more social – or romantic – occasion. You can see the smiling person e carrying the little glasses to the table. Perhaps it’s like some Bailey’s commercial: should the gentleman spill some on you, he may have to liqueur dress… or liqueur arm… or liqueur, ah, lips perhaps… Mmmm… there ain’t no cure for love, but there is liqueur for love! (In fact, Marie Brizard makes one called Parfait Amour. It is, so I read, made on a curaçao base. So at least there is a curaçao for love.)

Ah, liqueur, enchanteresse, verse l’ivresse et l’oubli dans mon coeur!* Oh, that’s actually not a love song, it’s from the opera Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas. (You can watch Simon Keenlyside sing it if you want.) But Hamlet’s not drinking liqueur. Actually, he’s drinking wine. Liqueur in French is now used to mean pretty much just what it means in English, but it was formerly used more broadly. After all, it’s the French cognate of the English word liquor.

The root is Latin liquor, which means just “liquid” (and liquor is still used in that sense in some domain-specific applications in English, notably in some food processes). We got licur before 1300 from French, and respelled it later to match the Latin, but then we borrowed (and subsequently repronounced) the modern French form again in the 1700s for those special sweet concoctions which are typically brand-specific and sui generis. We may have “dessert wines,” but we have liqueurs rather than “dessert liquors.”

I do believe, when I first saw this word in my childhood, I thought it was another spelling of liquor – or, with that characteristic logic of English speakers, that perhaps it was the correct spelling, since it looked weirder and less logical. But I came to understand that it had a special pronunciation, and that meant there was something special and classy about what it referred to. And I had the clear sense it was a word my mother was more likely to say than my father was.

I taste a certain fondness in liqueur, and perhaps a feeling that its object should be consumed (not simply drunk) in quiet, civilized occasions with some velvet somewhere in sight. It’s not just liquor, which is said like licker and rhymes with quicker; this one has this cute turn of the vowel in the middle, like the sound of the liquid in a glass as you ting it against another, perhaps. (Of course one may say it the French way, or closer to it; I just happen to have learned it with the “le cure” pronunciation, and that’s what I’m still used to hearing.) It seems to make a U-turn in your mouth as you say it – well, what really happens is that your tongue laps forward and retreats like a wave, while your lips round, making a gesture like a faint, longing, incomplete air kiss, awaiting the enchanter or enchantress, or the perfect love.

*Oh, liquor, enchantress, pour drunkenness and forgetfulness in my heart.

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privacist

Posted on March 9, 2011 | 1 comment

There are those among us for whom there is no such thing as bad publicity, for whom the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, who would view any lapse from the public oculus as an unbearable privation. There are those among us who would at least like to have to put up with the burden of fame for a while (and who wouldn’t mind the chance to prove that being rich wouldn’t spoil them, but that’s another matter). And then there are those who would really rather not be so well known, thank you.

This latter type we may also bifurcate as the former: one the one hand those who have never been well known and who do not wish to become well known; on the other those who have been famous (and perhaps still are) and who want to be alone, or anyway could do with a bit less attention.

Into this last camp, it seems, falls – at least to a modest degree – Ken Jennings, who won at Jeopardy! 74 times. In his really quite entertaining question-and-answer session on reddit, he says, “I don’t want to be famous. I keep getting asked who my publicist is. Why would I have a publicist?!? I’m just a guy on a game show. I got mine. I need a privacist.”

Not that Jennings scorns what his fame brings altogether, of course; he has a book and his fame helps him sell it (though he rates someone else’s book on the topic more highly – he really is refreshingly frank). But I’m here to taste words, not to taste the sweet bitterness of fame (well, OK, I wouldn’t mind that, either, but a Campari and soda will hold me for the moment), and the word du jour is, of course, privacist.

As Wilson Fowlie, who drew my attention to Jennings’s reddit session, put it, quoting  me, “Regarding the subject of ‘He used it, you understood it, it’s a word’…” So, yes, privacist is in fact a word. No, you won’t find it in a dictionary, yet. And Jennings may or may not have heard it before he used it. But he’s not the first to use it. It’s a natural enough coinage for the purpose.

Until recently, it didn’t really seem needful to have someone (theoretical or actual) who could help ensure privacy. Publicity, yes, sure, and still today those are needed, but privacy was something one could usually lapse into with no more than a little bit of effort unless one were enormously famous. But now the digital revolution and social media have made our personal information very widely and easily available indeed. Not so long ago, the idea of seeing an apparently public ad, from some company you’re not on close terms with (or any terms at all), that was tailored to you personally might have seemed unsettlingly creepy. Actually, it may still seem unsettlingly creepy, but now it’s not an idea, it’s something that peeks up at you from your web browser all the time. And occasionally calls you on the phone.

And of course some of those who gather your information may want not to sell to you but to pretend to be you. Impersonation is not exactly new, but it has now evolved into a category of crime called identity theft. Privacy is getting to look rather appealing. And so there are privacists. They do exist already. Their role, mind you, is more the protection of personal information than helping people evade unwanted fame, though I’d imagine you could find someone to help with that too.

But, now, why privacist? Is it morphologically well formed? And for that matter, why is it privacy but publicity? Why not privacity or publicy?

To answer the last question first, the roots are not analogous: private is from the Latin past participle privatus, nominalized to privatia, of which the modern analogue is privacy, while public is from the Latin adjective publicus and the ity suffix is from the Latin suffix (i)tas which replaced the us ending. This also leads us to the answer to the question of whether privacist is morphologically well formed: no. Privatist would be the morphologically “proper” formation.

So we should use privatist then, right? No, actually. There’s nothing wrong with neologizing by blending; we do it all the time. If we can have, for instance, chocoholic from chocolate and alcoholic, we can have privacist from private and publicist. Besides, privatist sounds too much like privatest. And, it might be added, those wanting the services of a privacist want not to be private but to have privacy (there is a difference), so it makes sense to form it with the c of privacy.

Anyway, what else could we call them, given that privatist could be mistaken? Privateer is already taken. And in fact it is often from privateers and other profiteers with their omnipresent ears that those who want privacists want privacy. They do not want to be deprived of all the furniture of modern life, but they want someone to assist them in controlling their info outflow. At the very least, they don’t want to give it away. Let the privateers pay a private eye to pry, if it’s worth it to them.

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turpitude

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Well, perhaps the sheen is coming off Charlie. He’s been dumped, Warner Brothers citing a clause that lets them off the hook if he commits “a felony offense involving moral turpitude.”

Ah, turpitude. This is not some mere dotting of the tease and crossing of the eyes (that would be Ben Turpin-tude); this is a high-toned vituperation, one that fairly spits from its three voiceless stops (though, from the charming side, it does sound like a tapdance at the Cotton Club). Turpitude is at the other end of the scale from a friend of mine who, when chastising herself for some oversight, says “Toopid, toopid, toopid!” (onset cluster reduction being an easy index of intellectual insufficiency). But turpitude is not per se undue stupidity, nor is it a sort of torpor. It is a rupture with prudity and piety, an impertinent attitude that may lead to pruritus and penitentiaries. It is a sort of moral turpentine, stripping the thin coating of respectability to show the true colours beneath.

Oh, yes, moral. You almost always see moral before turpitude, even though it’s quite redundant; turpitude comes from Latin turpis, “base” (as in “low”), and if baseness is not a moral character (or lack thereof), what is? Indeed, one may say those of base character, those who lie, are of the character of lye, a base, and are abased by the corrosion as they try to whitewash their dirty deeds. But that leaves us nowhere with turpentine, which is not acid or base, though it is corrosive, as of course (and of coarseness) is turpitude.

One may also, mind you, say that turpitude is wickedness (another moral judgment), and that will put us in mind of other things that are wicked, such as lamp oil and candles – oh, and to wax poetic, the great quatrain of that wonderful wanton poet of turpitude, Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.

Well, one doesn’t always want to make light of turpitude, even if it may involve a spectacular flame-out (and even if turpentine is flammable – oh, by the way, turpentine is not actually related to turpitude; it comes from terebinth, the Greek name for the kind of tree whose sap was originally distilled to make it). No, we must remember that it tends to take the sheen off things – and, if rests on your skin, you may experience excoriation.

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rocococity

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Imagine a cacophony of curves and curls, a kind of rocaille quincaillerie a-go-go, not so much baroque as going for broke… a rather cuckoo occurrence. Imagine a whole city, squirrelly with coquilles and asymmetrical curves, like a pile of wood shavings from a carpenter’s plane growing quickly into vines… look, and oh, see, oh, see, oh, see… an atrocity? Rocococity!

Ah, the ferocity of rocococity. For some people, “oc oc oc” might be the sound of gagging at the sight, but for others the curls (ocococ) will spur excited curiosity. Oh, the rococo – a late development of the baroque, just as rococo may also be playfully built on baroque and rocaille (shellwork, grotto-esque and perhaps grotesque) and coquille (a scallop shell) and no doubt something fun or diminutive about the repetition. The doubled /k/ gives a nice kick, with a wind-up from the /r/ and a slide into home with city.

Originally the term rococo was used dismissively to say the style was old-fashioned, but over time what was old can become, if not new, then at least charming again. There are rococo rooms in palaces, and even entire rococo churches, but your best bet is to look in the theme rooms in museums – try the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Victoria and Albert in London, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I think the Louvre has some too, though one might after all randomly bump into rocococity out and about in Paris.

If rococo rooms may daze your eyes, though, surely rocococity will too. How many c’s and o’s are there? Three of each, but it’s ro-co-co-city really. And though rococo puts the stress in the middle on the second syllable, rocococity puts the stress on the middle in the third syllable, to echo ferocity, precocity, and so on. This may be the only symmetrical thing about rococo and rocococity! The baroque was tidy and mannered, the rococo rather less so… it’s what happens to a decorative art when the gardener goes on vacation and doesn’t come back.

But of course rocococity can spread beyond the decorative arts. It infected painting. But more than that: the property of rocococity may be attributed to things not artificially contrived at all, just curly and wanton and asymmetrical: “electromagnetism behaves in essentially the same simple way on all scales, varying only in its general strength, whereas gravity becomes increasingly rococo as you zoom into microscopic scales – signaling that the theory eventually gives way to a deeper one such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. But ‘eventually’ is so far off that physicists can usually neglect the rocococity.” Gravity? And microscopic rocococity? Yes, indeed, and we are reminded of the infectiousness of rocococity: “The rocococity of gravity should infect the other forces.” And who said that? George Musser, in Scientific American (Forces to Reckon with: Does Gravity Muck Up Electromagnetism?).

So here we may have thought of rocococity as some mere frivolity, and we have failed to consider the gravity of the situation! But is it string theory or loop quantum gravity? Well, what do you see in rocococity… strings or loops?

Thanks to Stan Backs for mentioning rocococity and the Scientific American article.

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jackdaw

Posted on March 6, 2011 | 5 comments

When I was in elementary school, one of the kinds of instructional materials I found most fascinating was something called a Jackdaw. I capitalize it because – though I didn’t know it at the time – it’s a brand name, the name of the publisher, in fact. Jackdaws were – still are, I’m sure, as they’re still in business (www.jackdaw.com) – fascinating collections of facsimiles of primary source materials about the various historical events they covered.

I had no idea at the time why they were called that. When one is six years old (and even much older), one may tend to accept the arbitrary nature of new names, assuming that there must be a good reason and perhaps eventually the reason will be revealed. Perhaps it was because they were in a jacket, like a Duo-Tang, and chock-full?

More likely, of course, is that they were acquisitive and loquacious. Jackdaws, like magpies, are known for stealing all manner of things and hoarding them; they are also know to be, well, not so much loquacious as garrulous – they chatter on and on, and can also be taught to say words.

So if you call a person a jackdaw, that means you think him or her to be kleptomanical, garrulous, a hoarder, or some combination of the preceding. And thus a folder that has collected a variety of items pertinent to a topic might fittingly be called a Jackdaw, overlooking the foolish connotations. It occurs to me that it also wouldn’t be such a bad name for the sentences known as pangrams, which have collected all twenty-six letters of the alphabet (e.g., Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz – my, doesn’t that sound a little, ah, you know). And Cambridge University calls its administrative database Jackdaw. It seems there’s a bit of a collection of jackdaws out there.

There is, mind you, a much larger collection of jack words – a veritable jackpot. Jack – from the name – has long since been a byword for the common fellow, and a name to be applied generically. Who leaves frost on your window? Jack Frost. Whose glowing eyes and crazed grin greet you on Hallowe’en? Jack-o’-lantern. Who can fix your broken Jack-in-the-box? Perhaps a Jack-of-all-trades. “Did the ship go down with all hands?” “Every man Jack.” “But doesn’t that bother you?” “I’m all right, Jack.” And there are several jack animals, including jackrabbit, jackass, jack salmon, Jack Russell terriers (OK, that’s an eponym), and of course jackdaw.

Jack is such a square, sturdy name to my taste, with a bit of a kick or a hack, sounding not unlike the call of the jackdaw. It begins with that first letter of so many first names, J, and ends with the open-beaked, angular k. It may have come from Jacques – although that’s French for James while Jack is a nickname for John – but it may have come from Jankin and Jackin, pet forms of the Dutch Jan.

And why jackdaw? Well, for the same reason as jackass, more or less, I suppose. That is to say, we could always just say daw. That’s the older, simpler name for the bird. It’s a Germanic-derived word – it’s first recorded in English in the 1400s, and almost before you could say “Jack Robinson” there was a jack on it.

And what, by the way, is the bird? A little black thing, Corvus monedula – related to crows and ravens (and why not, if it’s known for crowin’ and ravin’ like it’s stark mad?). It’s very gregarious, mates for life, and has flocks with a strict pecking order.

So the name itself is put together of two bits, this old daw and this generic jack of all sorts of trading. And it’s such a quintessentially English thing. Not just because of its origins, but because English is a jackdaw of a language if ever there was one: swiping bits from all over, learning to mimic new words, and generally not shutting up.

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Apparently ignorance is in vogue at Slate

Posted on March 4, 2011 | 13 comments

Yesterday I had a little asterisked mini-rant about some sloppy thinking in an article on Slate. Well, today I discover that they’ve printed an article from someone who thinks that editors are narcissistic megalomaniacs who deserve no credit or consideration. I won’t name him (I’ll say why below), but I will say he knows Jack Sh…itt about editors and editing. Continue reading →

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Gewürztraminer

Posted on March 4, 2011 | 6 comments

You will surely find it unsurprising that I like tasting wine. It may indeed be more surprising that I haven’t tasted that many wine words in my notes. I have tasted merlot, certainly, and xynomavro, but no white grape varieties yet; I have also tasted retsina and claret; but I really am overdue to taste Gewürztraminer.

Wines, when well made, are full of character and layers, nuances, overtones, and other delights.* Some are more complex, and some are simpler. Words, of course, can have a fair amount in common with wines in that respect. But many wine words don’t present a whole lot up front. It takes getting to know merlot before you really appreciate it, for instance.

On the other hand, just as there are some wines that practically grab you by the neck and press your nose into their bosoms, there are some wine words that have a rather similar effect. By an interesting coincidence, three of the wines that are most up-front happen to have three of the names that are most up-front – and all three are written with the letter z.

The wine that will most aggressively throw you on the bed and cover you with red lipstick is zinfandel, and rest assured that I will one day taste zinfandel. Another very popular and friendly red wine is Shiraz (its more demure version, if just slightly, is called syrah). But the most in-your-face white (true white, not “white zinfandel,” which is a red wine with the skins taken out before fermentation), with what is also the most in-your-face name, is Gewürztraminer. You might say it’s the Measha Brueggergosman of wine words (and perhaps of wines, too).

First of all, it’s a freakin’ long word. Which is actually fitting, given that it’s a German word; German words can be long, and so can German wine names – you’ll get bottles that say things like Riesling Kabinett Erbacher Marcobrunn Domänenweingut Schloss Schönborn Rheingau (I did not make that up).

Of course, like most German sesquipedalia, Gewürztraminer is a compound; it comes from Gewürz, which means “spice” or “perfume”, and Traminer, which means “from Tramin” (Tramin being actually the Tyrolean town of Termeno, in northern Italy). It rather looks like two big pieces joined together with hitches and some kind of electric bond right at the rztr (just hear that jolt!).

And you can see the perfumy nose wafting up from the glass at the ü if you want. You might want to proceed both ways from the centre, in fact, and see that on the one side, past the centre join and its flanking vowels, you have w, and on the other m, which is like the w all emptied and inverted. Or perhaps it’s the whole min that transforms the w, for on the outside of either is an e.

There’s no reason to expect Anglophones to say this word just as though they were speaking German (though they can if they want), but it’s generally thought poor form to say the w as /w/ rather than /v/. The ü, of course, signifies a sound we no longer have in English, so you can either make the ür the same way as you say the end of Bloor (Toronto reference there) or you can slip the bonds of English phonotactics. If you say r the English way, you will thereafter find yourself with a rare double treat, two affricates in tight sequence – because /ts/ is an affricate (a stop that releases to a fricative), and the /t/ before /r/ palatalizes to be like what we say at the beginning and end of church. The German pronunciation – either one, the trilled or the guttural – deprives you of the second affricate, but, ah, frick it. Have another glass.

And then the word ends in irony. Irony? Yes, and not just because it’s a German name for a grape now thought of as quintessentially German but taken from a Italian place name (well, Italy now includes it). It’s that you finally get to the kinder part of the word and it’s “meaner”.

And what is wine itself like? It presents a golden hue to the eye, although its grapes are actually a shade of pink. Your nose and your palate will give you a full serving of such flavours and aromas as lychee and rose petals, and perhaps some peach as well. If you’re picking a wine to drink with pad thai, this is it. If you’re looking for good Gewürz, two of the best regions are Alsace and Ontario. Yes, that’s right, neither is in Germany – oh, Germany makes good Gewürz too, but really, some of the best I’ve ever had is made an hour’s drive from where I live. I have bottles from Calamus and Featherstone sitting less than a metre from the computer where I type this. (They’re not open, though. Ironically, I’m drinking Bordeaux as I write.)

*A person who should know better who wrote an otherwise interesting article for Slate recently (http://www.slate.com/id/2285723/) declared that since mass spectrometers can’t “pick apart differentiating flavors of specific spices or flavors of earth in any wine,” such discerned differences must be imaginary – the critics who talk about “butterscotch” or “boysenberry” must just be imagining it on the basis of expectation. Aside from being frankly rude, condescending, and belittling, this discards a very large amount of suggestive data without taking a proper scientific look at it. Experts in blind tastings without indication of the various price levels of the wines can detect different levels of depth, nuance, and structure with considerable consistency, even as personal factors also of course come into play – wine being an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience being individual. It doesn’t even take much acquaintance with wine to be able to distinguish wines that develop and have nuances from ones that don’t and don’t. If I can taste a red wine and identify, on the basis of flavour nuances this author thinks are imaginary, the different grapes that have gone into it – something I have done successfully, and I’m not even an expert – it stands to reason that her reasoning is a bit wanting. She draws conclusions on the basis of what she thinks reasonable, but without taking a truly scientific approach, which would involve experiments with blind tastings – not exactly even an innovative approach with wines.

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Unpacking the Grey Owl

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 1 comment

A colleague – Adrienne Montgomerie – was recently reading to her child from a story by Grey Owl when she came across this rather large sentence (From the second-last paragraph of “How the Queen and I spent the Winter” as published in the collection Great Canadian Animal Stories,
Whitaker, 1978):

This creature comported itself as a person, of a kind, and she busied herself at tasks that I could, without loss of dignity, have occupied myself at; she made camp, procured and carried in supplies, could lay plans and carry them out and stood robustly and resolutely on her own hind legs, metaphorically and actually, and had an independence of spirit that measured up well with my own, seeming to look on me as a contemporary, accepting me as an equal and no more.

We certainly don’t write like that so much anymore. I must say that I enjoyed reading that sentence, but some people may wonder whether all those commas are necessary and whether the whole thing is even grammatical.

So let’s have some fun and take it apart. Continue reading →

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farthingale

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 1 comment

I know when I first encountered this word: it was in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. I was in early twenties and auditioning around, trying vainly to get some acting work, and one of the stock audition pieces I was using was a comic monologue (well, it was intended to be comic) wherein the clownish character Launce is remonstrating with his dog. The end of the monologue goes thus:

Nay, I remember the
trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam
Silvia: did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I
do? when didst thou see me heave up my leg and make
water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale? didst
thou ever see me do such a trick?

You can guess from that that a farthingale is something a woman wears that sits, or extends, below the knee; beyond that, it’s not obvious.

Certainly the form of the word itself is no great help. It looks like a name for a cheap bird (do I mean a cheep bird? well, it may cheep, but a farthing, being a quarter of a penny – farthing is related to fourth – was not much money even then). Or it could be a kind of craft beer, farthing ale – incidentally, farthingale is often misspelled (and misanalyzed) as farthing ale. But it has nothing to do with farthings or with ales, and the g is pronounced, so the last syllable is gale.

Not that it has anything to do with gales either, and I wouldn’t recommend wearing a farthingale in a gale, lest it become a sail or a yard sale (or an assailant). As to the opening fart, of course that’s not etymologically related – I won’t say a farthingale is a far thing from one (though that’s how the syllables divide), but, etymologically, hereby hangs quite a tale. (Whereby hangs a tail? Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know of… Oh, wrong play.)

It is understandable if you think farthingale is related to martingale, or to nightingale, but in fact all three have deviated from their disparate origins towards a common pattern. Nightingale is the oldest of the three by centuries; it comes from night plus an old verb gale “sing” with an extra in stuck in probably for euphony. Martingale – which merits a word tasting note all its own, but not today – is from a French word for a resident of the southeastern French town of Martigues. (What is a martingale? Several things… as I said, it merits a note of its own.) It arrived in English in the 1500s.

Oh, and farthingale? It comes by way of French verdugalle from Spanish verdugado, which comes from verdugo, “stick”. So, yes, it’s a thing made of sticks, sort of. In fact, it’s one of those hoop arrangements that women used to wear to make their skirts stick way the heck out (more recently called hoop skirts – a farthingale is in particular a conical one). Talk about bearing fardels! They were usually made of whalebones sewn into a fabric matrix, which gives me the opportunity to note how the vocal gesture of saying farthingale is similar to the action of a sewing machine (say it several times, picturing your tongue as the needle and the fabric being at your lips). Not that they had sewing machines when farthingales were popular.

Chairs designed to accommodate them were called farthingale chairs, which you will find bothersomely often referred to as farthing ale chairs or farthing-ale chairs, which, as I’ve said, is both etymological and pronunciational reanalysis – folk etymology, as it’s often called.

But how do you get from verdugalle to farthingale? Seems like it would take jumping through some hoops, eh? Well, in fact, it’s more folk etymology (so there). But it didn’t seem to happen in one jump; the earliest English form of the word the OED has (from 1552) is verdynggale, which is a closer borrowing but with a prenasalization of the /g/. After that it was easy enough for it to be reanalyzed as farthingale, like nightingale but with a farthing (influence from martingale is possible, as that word was becoming current at the same time, but of course nightingale was even then the better-established word by far). Now, isn’t that a trick?

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