tuches

Posted on January 24, 2011 | 1 comment

The matched black leather outfits of Edgar Frick and Marilyn Frack came creaking through the door of Domus Logogustationis. Marilyn paused to flip her feet up in turn and examine the soles of her shoes.

“Step in something?” Daryl asked.

“The neighbours’ pipes burst or backed up or something,” Edgar said.

“And we had to avoid raw sewage,” Marilyn added.

“Well,” Maury said, nodding towards Ross Ewage, “I’m sorry to say you’ve just walked right into him.”

“I was wondering what smelled like ass,” Ross said genially.

“Yes, well,” Edgar said, “it tuches a while to get here.” (Tuches is pronounced rather like “took us”, dear reader.)

“Bummer,” Ross replied.

“So sorry to butt in,” Marilyn said, walking past Ross and bumping him with her behind, which resembled nothing so much as a throw cushion from a leather sofa.

Daryl had begin thumbing away on his iPhone. “Shit,” he observed.

“Thanks,” said Marilyn, “but I stepped in some already.”

Daryl looked up at me, Maury, Ross, and the dynamic duo in turn. “How do you spell tuches?”

“Now there’s a question for the ages,” Maury said.

“It’s just that I can’t find it in the dictionary.”

“Ass,” said Marilyn.

“It’s not my fault!” Daryl protested.

“No, sweet cheeks,” Marilyn said, “that’s what it means.”

“I know what it means,” Daryl said, “I just want to know where it comes from.”

“Many a man has wondered where good ass comes from,” Ross observed.

“Yiddish,” said Maury. “Originally from a Hebrew word for ‘bottom’, tahath.”

“So how do you spell it, anyway?”

“Well,” said Ross, “you can spell it like touch us, minus the o.”

“What good is it,” Marilyn said, “to touch us if we don’t get an o?”

I looked around. “Am I suddenly on Hollywood Squares?”

“Would that make the plural tuchi?” Daryl said.

“It’s not Latin,” said Maury. “Anyway, better with an e before the s. Like touches – again, alas, no o.”

“Well, you can o me one,” said Marilyn.

“That’s an anagram of chutes,” Ross said. “Plural tucheses is an anagram of she’s cute.”

“Some also render the first vowel as an o,” offered Maury. “T-O-K-H-E-S or T-O-C-H-E-S.” He nodded at Marilyn gallantly. “There’s your o.”

“But that’s an o with a chest,” Ross said. “Wrong end.”

Edgar stepped up to his consort. “You can also spell it like tuck us.”

Ross smirked a little. “Or as an anagram of suck it.”

“Ross!” I said. “Can we keep this just the teeniest bit polite? I want to put this on my blog.”

“You want to put my tuches on your blog?” Marilyn purred, settling onto the arm of my armchair with a leather squeak.

“Well,” I said, “that would be one way to end it. But –” I looked at my watch. Marilyn nudged her butt a little closer in response. I continued: “– I think I have enough to round it out now, with just a few finishing touches.”

“Well,” said Marilyn, nudging even a bit closer, “there’s no rush. It’s no crime to get a little behind.”

I stood up and Marilyn – by accident or not – slid abruptly into the chair I had vacated. She sighed and threw up her arms. “Edgar!” she said, patting the small remaining bit of cushion next to her bottom. “Come tuck us in.”

“And with that,” I said, donning my jacket and bracing myself for the cold, “goodnight.”

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ewage

Posted on January 23, 2011 | 2 comments

“So,” Daryl said, resuming the topic of Ross Ewage’s Twitter feed, “why @lewd_tongue? Why not @dirty_mind or @cunning_linguist or something like that?”

“All the good obvious ones were already taken,” Ross said. “Usually by someone who tweeted four times and has been silent for a year or more.”

“It seems to me,” Maury said from deep within his armchair, “that given your mission to pollute the waterways of the web, you could have gone with a persona named something like Cloaca Max.”

“Ah!” Ross tossed his hand up, open-palmed. “Didn’t think of that! Of course, not so many people know what the Cloaca Maxima was.”

“Imagine,” I said, “if you could make a living off an online persona like that: you would earn your e-wages from ewage on the cloaca, Max.”

Ross raised an eyebrow and advanced towards me with index finger waggling. “You’ve been looking up my name.”

“‘Been looking’?” I said. “I only needed to do it once. And anyway, better to look up your name than to look up your anything else.”

“His cloaca?” Daryl chipped in.

“He’s not a monotreme,” Maury said.

“A name like yours takes its toll,” I said.

“It does, in fact,” Ross said, “and not just because ewage is an obsolete word for a toll on a waterway.”

“Oh,” said Daryl, “I thought it was some amount of ‘ew’ – ‘Oh, everything in there is gross, there’s just so much ewage to be encountered.'”

“Do I make fun of your name?” Ross asked Daryl.

“If you haven’t made something vulgar of it yet,” Daryl said, “it’s only because you haven’t thought of a good way to do so.”

Ross smiled slightly. “Point conceded. Expect something soon.”

“I would have thought,” Maury said, “ewage was what one kept in a ewer.”

“As in,” I said, “‘Who’s the vulgarest of them all? Ewer!'”

“Well,” Ross said, “they are cognate. The ew in both is from Latin aqua via French eau. This is also true of the ew in sewer – and the s is for ex.”

“Everything comes back to sex with you sooner or later,” Daryl said.

“Could be worse,” I said. “Could be Edgar and Marilyn.”

Maury looked over at the door. “I believe it is Edgar and Marilyn. Speak of the devils and they appear.”

And indeed the matched black leather outfits of Edgar Frick and Marilyn Frack came creaking through the door. Marilyn paused to flip her feet up in turn and examine the soles of her shoes.

“Step in something?” Daryl asked.

“The neighbours’ pipes burst or backed up or something,” Edgar said.

“And we had to avoid raw sewage,” Marilyn added.

“Well,” Maury said, nodding towards Ross, “I’m sorry to say you’ve just walked right into him.”

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stew

Posted on January 22, 2011 | 1 comment

It was a cold evening outside and a few of us – me, Daryl, Maury, and Jess – were staying warm lounging in the sitting room of Domus Logogustationis, the local headquarters of the Order of Logogustation. Ross Ewage came out of the kitchen holding a hot toddy, holstering his iPhone and chuckling a little to himself.

Daryl pulled out his iPhone and looked at it for a few seconds. He looked up at Ross. “‘I had a stew for dinner’?”

Ross chuckled. “Yeah. Mmmm.” He licked his lips.

“I thought the point of your Twitter feed was to be dirty-minded. I mean, it’s @lewd_tongue. Who cares about your dietary habits?”

Ross looked at Daryl for a moment, probably reckoning how much younger than him Daryl was. He looked at me and Maury. “You got it, right?”

Maury rolled his body slightly in his padded armchair to partially face Daryl. “Stew is short for stewardess. It used to be a common enough term. When female flight attendants were called stewardesses.”

“And they were expected to be tasty dishes,” Ross added.

I sang a little bit of Sinatra, just to add atmosphere. “Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away…”

“I get no kick in a plane,” Maury said, returning to his slouch.

“I thought of adding ‘in a stew,'” Ross said, “but I didn’t want people to think I was upset.”

“Then why would you add it?” Daryl asked.

Maury and I both turned and looked at Daryl. “Stew is also an old word for a brothel,” I said.

“Oh,” Daryl said. Brief pause. “Because there are lots of pieces of meat in the broth-el?” He made a face that was an apparent attempt to look witty.

“In fact,” Maury said, “it comes from an older sense. Stew first meant ‘cauldron’ and ‘heated room’ and, from that, ‘steam bath’; public baths were sometimes used for immoral purposes.”

“Imagine that,” Jess commented dryly.

“From the verbing of that, to mean ‘take a steam bath,'” Maury continued, “came another verb stew, meaning ‘simmer in a pot’. And from that came the noun stew meaning what we eat.”

“From which,” I added, “came the obvious metaphorical usage that Ross was trying to avoid.”

Daryl, of course, had started looking stew up using his iPhone. “I see there’s another stew with a different source meaning ‘stink’, noun or verb. It’s Scots dialect.”

“Yes,” said Maury, “and a fish tank, from the same source that gives us étui.”

“And stew meaning ‘heated room’ has apparent cognates all over the Germanic languages,” Daryl added. “Dutch stoof meaning ‘heated room’ and ‘footwarmer’…”

“That sounds good,” said Jess, looking at her feet.

“…German Stube, ‘room’…”

“As in Bierstube,” Maury said. “I could stand to be in one of those now. But I’d just as soon be sitting, I suppose, and here is fine. It stew cold outside.”

“…and Latin and Greek words for ‘vapour,” Daryl concluded.

“Well,” said Jess, standing up, “all this stewing in our stew is fine, but I feel like going and getting me a stew.”

Ross half-smirked and raised an eyebrow. “What kind?”

Jess, donning her coat, shrugged. “Irish might be nice. …Does Aer Lingus fly into Pearson?” She smirked back at Ross and, without waiting for an answer, headed out into the cold.

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In principio…

Posted on January 21, 2011 | 1 comment

In the beginning was the word. And the word was…

Well, what word comes first? What kind of word comes first? Is there a kind of word that is most important?

In truth, we’re inevitably going to be looking at this question through the goggles of a specific language – in our case, English. But if we only had one kind of word to use, what kind of word would it be?

Well, adjectives and adverbs can be eliminated right away, as they exist to modify nouns and verbs; in many cases an adjective-noun or adverb-verb combination can be replaced by a single noun or verb (sometimes one that is really the adjective or adverb converted, but once it’s verbed or nouned, it’s a verb or a noun!). Likewise, prepositions exist primarily to relate other words to each other, and some languages minimize their use, preferring inflections of the nouns to do the same job.

We might be tempted to look at what kinds of one-word expressions we have. But aside from having a bit of fun with analyzing, say, “Fire!” (noun or verb?), we are forced to admit that one-word expressions are not really the template for larger expressions; they are typically phatic (“Damn!”), performative (“Thanks!”), demanding (“Gimme!”), admonitory (“Fire!”), or hortatory (“Fire!”), but in the main they’re different in kind and not just in size from larger expressions.

So… nouns or verbs? Every sentence needs a subject and a predicate. It is true that many of them in English feature the verb be as a copula and the real predicate is a quality (e.g., It is true) or even another noun (e.g., The predicate is a noun). In some languages such sentences don’t even use a verb form at all; they just put the adjective and the noun next to each other and let nature take its course. But it is likewise true that some languages can form entire sentences with a single verb to which have been attached inflectional and modifying affixes. In fact, it’s even true in English that an entire sentence can be formed with a verb… if it’s an imperative: “Run!” (or, yes, “Fire!”).

In the world’s languages, it is usual – though not universal – for the information about when the action in a sentence is happening to be attached to the verb. It is even often the case that information about who is doing the action is attached to the verb. Think of Italian Capisci? “Do you understand?” Or Latin Peccavi – “I have sinned.” And to me, it seems perfectly apposite for the verb to be the most fundamental kind of word, since life – all existence – is change and motion; fixity is an illusion (certainly at the atomic level, at the very least!).

So, now, in the beginning was the word. Say… what is that in Latin?

In principio erat verbum.

Yes… Latin for “word” is verbum. From which we get verb. That doesn’t prove anything, of course. But I like it: in the beginning was a verb.

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What would result in you sounding better?

Posted on January 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

A fellow editor was wondering aloud (OK, on email) about a sentence with a construction similar to the above (What would result in you sounding better?). She thought perhaps it should be your rather than you: What would result in your sounding better? So… what would? Continue reading →

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psithurism

Posted on January 20, 2011 | 5 comments

Psst! Listen! Sifting, siffling, shifting, sighing, whispering, rushing, brushing… It starts like a sound of corduroys whiffing together, perhaps, or a sigh, a distant waterfall… As it approaches, the shaking becomes visible, thousands of shades shifting, and the echoes of restrained applause or quiet dissonant voices (is there rhythm? nary a bit; you’d sooner find it in Ligeti’s Kyrie)… Then a gradual rise to a roar, a crashing washing, white noise, and all is in motion, leaves, twigs, branches, all the trees, lifted and whirling and flailing in the gust, like thousands and thousands of dancers or papers or birds or dervishes or even the sparkling sun on a lake, shades of green glittering in the breeze, this prism undulating in emerald… and then it passes again, and all calms down to a quieter whisper.

Ah, the psithurism of the trees in the breeze in my native Alberta, rising and falling in the gusts of the spring and fall. Does it sound romantic, idyllic? Try hearing it outside your window in the night, perhaps in an empty house, just you and the darkness and the rushing wind rising and falling, and the trees sighing and shaking and asking your name. I admit I am not much treated to psithurism in my aerie in downtown Toronto, but I also do not so much feel the Windigo coming for me.

Now, psithurism does not have to refer to the sound trees make when they whisper in the breeze, since it comes from Greek πσιθυρισμα psithurisma, “whispering”, but it does have a history in English of focus on trees and leaves – inasmuch as it has a history in English, of course. It arrived only in the 1800s – likely accounting for the fact that, unlike earlier borrowings, it renders the upsilon as u and not y. It’s been taken so directly from Greek, and with so little wearing down by the breezes of common conversational usage, that I really do think one can pronounce the initial p. It’s a word that seems almost just to be passing through the language, stirring it a bit on the way by and then moving on, with no lasting state, just as it rustles the lips and the tip of the tongue without shaking the root: start with mouth closed, open to the tip of the tongue hissing a little air, then a lift, a touch of the teeth, a slight recoil and back to the tip and again the lips close and it is finished.

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hack

Posted on January 19, 2011 | 9 comments

So there was this hack hacker who was hacking away while hacking some bricks – a guy’s gotta earn a living; he also drove a hack – when some guy come up on a hack with a hack-hawk and asked, “Hey, can you hack a hack with that hack?” and pointed to the hacker’s hack. “Don’t you know the hack for that?” said the hacker. “You put the hacks in before it freezes.” He started hacking and hacking away again. The guy on the hack was pretty hacked off. “Too late for that, now, isn’t it? Look, if you can’t hack it, can I borrow your hack?” The hacker stopped hacking and hacking and said, “Go hack yourself.” So the guy set his hack-hawk on him.

So there was this second-rate computer hacker who was coughing nastily while putting some bricks in a drying frame – a guy’s gotta earn a living; he also drove a cab – when some guy came up on a hired horse with a young hawk in training and asked, “Hey, can you cut me a curling foothold with that mattock?” and pointed to the hacker’s mattock. “Don’t you know the shortcut for that?” said the hacker. “You put the footholds in before it freezes.” He started racking the bricks and coughing away again. The guy was pretty annoyed. “Too late for that, now, isn’t it? Look, if you’re not up to doing it, can I borrow your mattock?” The hacker stopped coughing and racking bricks and said, “Go hack yourself.” So the guy set his young hawk in training on him.

Was that a piece of hack writing, or what? I think the word hack was getting pretty hacked – meaning hackneyed – by the end. But it’s just a fact that there’s a lot of hack out there. It’s a short, convenient word, easy enough to say – unless your native tongue doesn’t have the sound /h/, of course, and allowing for considerable variation in the realization of the vowel, depending on accent. It nonetheless has one letter more than it has sounds; in English (unlike in Dutch, Danish, or Swedish), hak would look like bare hack-work, and frankly foreign. And of course hac would just be wrong – well, it’s a Latin word meaning, roughly, “over here”, but that’s entirely separate – partly because it wouldn’t look quite right but in the main (for my tastes) because it would lose that nice look of the h getting hacked into a k.

Almost all of the various senses of hack above come from two sources. One is a Germanic root, which has shown up in cognates in the various Germanic languages (mainly spelled hack, hak, hacke, and hakke), and it has to do with hewing and striking and implements for so doing. The other – relating mainly to the for-hire and transport senses – is as a shortening of hackney, which some trace to the British place name Hackney (“Haca’s Isle” or “Hook Isle”) but others (including the OED) trace to Romance sources such as French haquenée and Italian acchinea, “ambling nag”. There are also a couple of other hacks in there, including the drying rack for bricks and the table on which meat is set out for a young hawk in training (whence hack-hawk), which appear to have different origins, though etymologists can’t quite hack the sources of those.

Hack certainly has lots of echos (especially if you do it in a canyon). Many of them come from other meanings of hack. There are also all the other words that rhyme with it, plus words such as hap and hat, and hick, heck, huck, hock, hook, hike, hake, hark, hork… /h…k/ is a very useful frame for those linguistic bricks, phonemes. And it has an undeniable flavour that colours, to some extent, every usage it has, with its shortness and sharpness, starting with a quick chest pulse and staying stuck at the back of the tongue (well, except for the vowel – hock would be all back, all the time).

I am also, just incidentally, put in mind of Hakka, which is a dialect of Chinese and an associated ethnic group within the Han Chinese. That’s not pronounced like “hacka”, though – the a is as in father. And while you might be led to expect a dialect with a sort of hacking sound and rhythm, Hakka is actually pretty even and smooth overall (I have a couple of friends who speak it).

And I suppose it makes me think of my last name, if I drop the rbe from the middle. But I don’t expect anyone else to make that association!

Thanks to Doug Linzey for suggesting hack.

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concatenate

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word has quite the interesting dry sound, with its voiceless stops (two back, two front) and its four-beat rhythm stressing on the second syllable: perhaps mechanical, like an assembly line, the raw goods coming through conca and being formed by a stamping or bending machine into the final result tenate (the c’s pressed and formed to t’s – or to e’s with the t’s inserted; vowels inserted, removed, or reshaped); perhaps like a chain of tapdancers or stomp-dancers stamping a finale; or perhaps like the sputtering of someone with a mouthful of dry feathers – maybe Sylvester spitting and hacking as Tweety has escaped from his mouth (and left a little something behind as a lesson). He’ll never be the cat that ate the canary, but you can’t keep a cat from its innate disposition, not even with a chain.

Concatenate can’t avoid sounding like a technical word, but at the same time with a little tinge of taste of something out of whack or collapsing, discombobulated, perhaps (or maybe with a cry of “Suffering succotash!”) – a half-heard echo of catastrophe, plus the sense, like one gets with procrastinate, of being a useful long word for something that could of course always be said with a set of shorter words rather than a chain of morphemes.

And what are the morphemes? It’s Latin, of course, and you will know con: yes, “together” again. The ate ending is a verbal suffix, and a very common one in English; we still make new words with it on occasion, all to do with making something of something or changing something from one state to another or simply engaging in an activity of some sort (I leave it to you to meditate on examples to illuminate, such as your mind may prestidigitate when you cogitate). That leaves us with caten, which comes from Latin catena “chain” and can also be seen in the geometric term catenary, which names the graceful curve produced by a chain hanging from both ends.

So what are the shorter words we could use? Well, chain together would be one possibility. If you’re devoted to Anglo-Saxon roots, however, you’ll have to let chain fall; it, too, comes from catena. An alternative would be string together.

Concatenation is a useful thing. We use it a fair bit in English word derivations; it’s common in many languages, and some use it quite liberally (those long German words spring to mind, but agglutinating languages go even farther – meanwhile, isolating languages don’t use it for making new words). But it’s also useful in other areas. Concatenate happens to be one of my favourite commands in Microsoft Excel, for instance, because you can take sets of text in different categories (be they names and addresses or variable components of a URL) and string them together to coherent outputs. It’s saved me a lot of time from time to time.

But a difference between how we tend to think of concatenation and how real chains are actually made is the matter of overlapping. Chains work precisely because they overlap (though I suppose if you used glue to hold the parts together that wouldn’t technically be overlapping), while concatenation in Excel and in many other things is a matter of packing and sticking.

As it happens, concatenate has a bit of an aspect of overlapping: there is the a from catena and ate. And, of course, there are bits you can see in it that aren’t really source parts, just adventitious strings: cat overlapping with ate overlapping with ten (the cat ate ten what? Canaries? Ha – nary a one, not even the one on the catenary. But we do know he ate ’n’ ate. Maybe it was conch. Maybe it was just at a chain restaurant).

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Watch your endings, genii!

Posted on January 18, 2011 | 11 comments

A colleague just quoted from a website on which genie is pluralized as genii.

No, it’s not correct. Genie does derive ultimately from Latin genius (which can be pluralized as genii or as geniuses), but it came to us by way of French, and it’s an English word now, so it’s genies.

But this reminds me of a much larger issue that needs to be addressed: the idea – a rather common one, it seems to me – that there is a Latin plural ending -ii that should be applied to Latin-seeming (and some other foreign-seeming) words. I see it, for instance, when some people write virii instead of viruses.

To be as plain as possible: in Latin, -ii is not a plural ending. Ever. Nor is it one in English (unless this pseudoplural catches on, I guess…). In fact, I can’t think of a language in which it is a plural ending, though there might be one somewhere. Not English, though!

No doubt some of you are saying, “Hey! That’s wrong! What about genii for genius and radii for radius?” Continue reading →

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remunerate

Posted on January 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word confuses quite a lot of people. It’s as though it’s been stirred or something – remunerate? Shouldn’t that be renumerate? As in numeral? Or perhaps related to Latin nummus, “coin”? We’re talking about paying here, after all, settling accounts.

Well, that may be, but we’re not talking about it on the basis of numbers or coins. It’s a question of giving here. The Latin source is munus, “gift” – and the re made it mean, originally, “give back” (there was once also a word munerate, but that one has gone by the wayside). So this word is related to munificent. It’s also related, just incidentally, to municipal, because the same root munus could also refer to “office” and “official duty” – making it also the source of communal and community. The connection between gifts and offices is obligation and being obliging.

So this word might lead a person to think of giving back to the community, for instance. Remunerate can of course refer to any kind of payment (and especially wages), but when we think of the benefits we receive from our community, and the obligations we have to help maintain it and its benefits, we really ought to be so obliging as to think about giving back rather than holding back. (I cannot hold back from observing also that anyone who thinks that their community can maintain or increase services while receiving less remuneration must be innumerate – though, alas, such people also seem almost innumerable.)

This word is, however, in the main a ten-dollar word for “pay” – especially “pay wages”. And its far-more-common noun derivative remuneration is correspondingly a ten-dollar word for “payment” – or the noun “pay”. You give your work, you get money back for it. Do you get fair pay, or just fair words? That depends on your employer, of course. But I am put in mind of a scene from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Costard (a comic servile knave) is set to a task by a rather pompous fellow, who presses some money into his hand and says, “There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honour is rewarding my dependents.” Once the fellow has left, Costard inspects it and says, “Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O! that’s the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings, remuneration. ‘What’s the price of this inkle?’ ‘One penny.’ ‘No, I’ll give you a remuneration:’ why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word.” (A farthing was a quarter of a penny.)

Later in the scene, Costard is set to another task by another, ironically more munificent, fellow, who gives him a shilling and says, “There’s thy guerdon: go.” Costard’s response: “Gardon, O sweet gardon! better than remuneration; a ’leven-pence farthing better. Most sweet gardon! I will do it, sir, in print. Gardon! remuneration!” Ha – marry, quite contrary, no? How does the guerdon go!

The best thing I can think of to help a person remember that it’s remunerate rather than renumerate (and remuneration rather than renumeration) is to think of money (not nummy), although it’s not actually a related word. Or you can think of your municipal community! For me, I am actually put in mind of French remuer, “stir” – also unrelated, but it is fun on occasion to mix it up a bit.

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