adnexa

Posted on January 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

OK, yes, this word caught my attention when it crossed my eyes in no small part because of the x. (I’ve since uncrossed my eyes. Also undotted my tease.) You can just picture the effect of an unexpected word on the ordinary sleepy eye: sleepy eye e sees word, blinks for a moment x, then opens wide a. If it’s a really good word, the hairs on your head and neck might even stand up d. Safe to say, though, that your fingernail on your fingertip n won’t extend to be a claw, unless you’re a cat.

Adnexa seems like it could be a name for a girl, doesn’t it? Or perhaps for a consulting company or advertising broker. Or a model of car. At the very least it seems to me to have an air of almost studied sexiness, the sort that comes with wavy hair, long eyelashes, painted nails…

On the other hand (the one without the painted nails, I guess), the sound of it, I must admit, also makes me think of sinus congestion. It’s the /dn/, for sure, but amplified by the sticky-throat and harder-swallow sound of /ks/ at the x. That sense is a sort of awkward appendix to the rest of the word.

Hm, well, perhaps appendix isn’t the right word, quite. In literature, an appendix is something extrinsic but useful, but in the body an appendix is simply vestigial and without apparent function. And anything that bears on the taste of a word has a function – or should I say an effect. Even the off tastes come in subtly.

So what is the word for those parts of the body that are peripheral to an organ but also have functions? Like the eyelids on an eye – and the eyebrows, tear ducts, et cetera? The hair growing on your skin, and even the muscles that horripilate (make it stand on end)? Fingernails too? Oh, I know. It’s from Latin ad “to” plus nectere “tie, bind”. Is it annex? No, though annex also comes from that. Nope, the word I want is… oh, yes, you guessed it… (I guess I am dotting my tease after all…) It’s adnexa, noun, plural.

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fatigue

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 2 comments

I’m listening to Jan Kaczmarek’s soundtrack for Washington Square, the movie directed by Agnieszka Holland in 1997. It’s really a nice piece of work, and one I do not tire of (except for the short children’s song “The Tale of the String”). In particular, there is one song in it, sung by Catherine and Morris as they play the piano, that is quite lovely. The words are in Italian; they are actually a poem by the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, “Tu chiami una vita.” (I feel quite certain that the song is not in Henry James’s book, although I have not read it. The book was published in 1880; Quasimodo was born in 1908.) The opening words are “Fatica d’amore.”

Ah, now, what is fatica d’amore? I’m sure you know that amore is “love”. Fatica, for its part, happens to be related to English fatigue. (It it also pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.) So is fatica d’amore “fatigue of love”? It could mean that; it could also mean “hard work of love” – you could say “labour of love,” though more in the sense of “love’s labours.”

But how is it that the word could mean both the labour and its result? Well, at least the senses are connected. The Latin source, as it happens, is a verb, fatigare, which means (according to the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary) “weary, tire, fatigue; harass; importune; overcome” (and of course we have an English verb fatigue, which you now know was not formed by verbing the noun). Verbs that denote the causing of an effect can be nouned into the effect or the cause. Or, sometimes, both, by choice.

In English, we mostly don’t use fatigue to refer to things that cause fatigue, though in the past it was an available sense. The modern exception is in military usage, where non-soldierly grunt work, often assigned for punishment, is called fatigue (and the kind of clothing one wears to perform such work is called fatigues). Otherwise, it refers to a weariness that comes from sustained exertion.

Indeed, it almost seems a word made to be said when fatigued. It starts with the puff of /f/, and then a reduced vowel in an unstressed syllable; after that is the /t/, which may be crisp but comes with a puff of air after it that, in a fatigued condition, may become an escaping sigh. The main vowel is that /i/ that we hear in please, gee, yeesh – the tongue still able to tense, but the incipient exhaustion and perhaps exasperation is forcing its way through. And then it ends with that back-of-the-mouth stop /g/, as in words of tossing up one’s hands as with ag! or just trying and failing to swallow. Put all together, it moves from the front to the back in a sort of fading away, evanescing.

The written shape has a certain something that way too, if you wish. The f is already bent over; the t is shorter; the i is more reduced again; and after that nothing stands up, and in fact it sinks in a slump into g. The last two letters aren’t even pronounced. (That’s because we got the word from French, but I will not tire you with a history of French pronunciation and orthography.)

Of course something may be a labour of love without being laboursome or fatiguing – these word tastings are an example for me. But I have a hunch that Salvatore Quasimodo, in his poem, meant something deeper. The poem speaks of sadness and of naming a life that within, deep, has names of heavens and gardens (and Kaczmarek’s music repeats a lovely sequence on “di cieli e giardini”). But then it adds, “E fosse mia carne che il dono di male trasforma”: “And it would be my flesh that the gift of evil transformed.”

Evil? Well, or misfortune, harm, pain, ache… just like French mal. Heavens, gardens (to labour in?), flesh transformed by a gift of hurt… indeed, the fatigue of love. And, not incidentally, quite apposite to Washington Square.

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Two spaces and authority

Posted on January 14, 2011 | 7 comments

Something I have to tell people about every so often, and would probably have gotten around to doing a blog post on, is that the rule so many people learned about putting two spaces after a period was a rule invented for typewriters and never appropriate for proportional type, such as we use now on computers. However, Farhad Manjoo of Slate has just given such a nice explication/rant on the topic (even if a little too harsh at times) that all I really need to do here is link to it. Which I have just done.

But if you’ll look at the comments, you’ll see not everyone agrees with him. And their reasons for disagreeing with him are for the most part not based on rational argumentation focusing on the points he’s made. They’re generally in the line of “You’re wrong because you’re wrong,” “Lots of people do it so you’re wrong,” “Who cares?” and “That’s not what we were taught, so you’re wrong.”

The first two kinds of response – “You’re wrong because you’re wrong” and “Lots of people do it so you’re wrong” – are easily waved off. Circularity is obvious and juvenile, and popularity is not always a proper basis for correctness. (In typography, the design aims for maximum readability and minimum unbidden distraction, and double spacing defeats that when the type was designed to have proper kerning after a period. So it’s not like language usage, which in the long run is decided by mass opinion.)

The third, which is exemplified by the comment “You know what’s even more outdated than using double spaces at the end of a sentence? Typographers,” is the argument from and for ignorance. The truth, of course, is that typographers are not outdated; perhaps that commenter thinks that God or magic makes everything look pretty and readable on the page, and that all letter forms are sent straight down from heaven. But if there were no typographers, he and others would discover the true meaning of text looking like shit.

It’s the final category of comment, though, that touches on a point that comes up quite often when language professionals talk with their clients and other people who might think they know what they’re talking about but don’t really. An exemplary comment is “Hey jackass. Us two spacers didn’t invent this practice. It was taught to us somewhere, more than likely in a typing class. So despite your assurances, I assure you that it is correct.”

Oh! It was taught to you somewhere! Ohhhh. I see. So it must be right then! Because teachers are always right. And yet there are other commenters in the same thread who say they were taught not to use two spaces. So they were taught somewhere that double-spacing was wrong! So that makes them both right! But they can’t both be right! Oh noooooooes! Mai hed hurtz.

So I’ll say it, just to be clear: Just because you were taught it doesn’t mean it’s right.

And here’s an even more important fact: School teachers are not subject matter experts. They teach what is in the curriculum, which has been determined by school boards and politicians, and most of the time it’s right, and of course in order to teach it they need to know enough about it to teach it. Certainly most of what they will teach you is true (whether you remember it correctly is another matter). But they are not always right about everything.

And some of the things you are taught in school are not entirely right, either. Usually this is because you aren’t quite at a level to understand the matter exactly correctly; you will find this in university, too – linguistics students are constantly being told that what they learned in a previous-level course was actually a bit oversimplified. Sometimes the school curriculum hasn’t caught up with reality. In some places, due to politics, the curricula are impervious to established reality on some important points. But also, students are sometimes taught things that aren’t in the curriculum but that the teacher just happens to believe. This is how many mistaken beliefs about grammar have been spread. (See When an “error” isn’t about those.)

But let’s just get this right down clear and straight: you probably know that your high school biology teacher knows less about the human body than a surgeon does. You may know that your high school physics teacher knows less about physics than one of the physics professors at MIT, Cal Tech, or Stanford, and less about engineering than a professional engineer who builds bridges for a living. So why do so many people believe that what their high school English teacher taught them about grammar and writing is the highest, most expert level of fact, handed down as though from God? Here, I’ll put it in bold so people can see it when skimming: Your high school English teacher was not an English language expert. He or she probably acted like one. But if you really want to understand English grammar and how it works and why it is the way it is, you’re going to need to get much farther than the rather basic understandings you came out of high school with.

Now, those who read this blog regularly will know I take a pragmatic approach, and generally dislike inflexible thou-shalt-not rules. So what’s with me saying thou shalt not use two spaces after a period? Well, it’s like this: you can use two spaces if you want to, but it’s probably not going to look as good. The type was not designed for it. If you submit it for publication, the designer will convert double spaces to single spaces pretty much immediately, and in fact will probably run that replacement without even looking to see if there are any to replace. So you’re making either a little extra work or not really any extra work at all for the designer, but you are wasting your energy with every unneeded space. Hey, it’s your energy…

But if you double-space, at least don’t insist that single-spacing after periods is wrong. It’s not. It’s actually preferable in proportional type. And it doesn’t matter that you learned it in school. The fact that you learned it in school doesn’t mean it’s right. You have a brain, right? I’m sure you’ve questioned other things you were taught. Well, question this too! Find out!

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vertigo

Posted on January 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

You’re up, high up, high in the vertical, eyes diverted, extraverted – outside at the railing – and then you look over the verge, and o, view forever; you are riveted, shivering at vividness of the overt elevation, but, no, git over, your ungoverned gogglings have given way to a riven, gyrating vigilance, and with a vagitus you divagate dizzily to an ogive or trave, a rivage above the gorge, and are revisited by gravity.

Hello, hello… you’re in a place called vertigo. It’s everything you wish you didn’t know… (U2, eh?) But question: what part is the vertigo? You have found yourself in vertiginous heights. Were you overcome with a fear of falling? You may or may not have been, but that wasn’t the vertigo; that’s acrophobia. Oh, millions of people are no doubt under the impression, abetted by the Hitchcock film Vertigo, that vertigo has something to do with heights. But it ain’t necessarily so.

What I mean is that heights can cause vertigo in some people, but so can many other things. I daresay more people probably get it from excessive alcohol consumption. The vert, you see, is etymologically the same vert as in vertical, but the root refers to turning. Turn up and it’s vertical. Turn back and you revert; turn aside and you divert. And if you feel like you’re turning – your head spins right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round – when you’re not actually moving, that’s vertigo. (And I don’t know about you, but when I get it, I go vert – that’s green, son, green.)

Vert is really a sort of angular root – think of vertex, for instance (whereas vertigo is more like a vortex) – but in the end you can see it go round. And in your mouth you can feel it go round, your lips rounding. Not only that, you can feel it go around your mouth, starting with the teeth and lips /v/, coming next to touch at the tip of the tongue /t/, then bouncing off the back /g/ back up to the front /o/. Say it over and over, vertigovertigovertigovertigo, and you can feel it whirl around in your mouth like a carnival ride, until, perhaps, at last you end up with fatigue. It ain’t easy bein’ dizzy.

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omnibus

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 2 comments

Where to start with this word? I’m not sure I’ll be able to cover everything…

Well, I can’t remember what my first encounter with it was – whether it was in reference to a transit vehicle or in the phrase sol lucet omnibus. I know I learned the Latin phrase (for some reason) when my age was still in the single digits, and I knew it meant “the sun shines everywhere,” though I didn’t actually grasp the figurative value of it, and of course I said it in like English.

I naturally knew the word bus for the vehicle before I knew the word omnibus (which I might have first seen in a Richard Scarry book), and so I inferred not unreasonably that an omnibus might be some special kind of bus – perhaps one of those red double-decker ones I saw in Scarry’s cartoons. It does have a sound of some greater quality. Once I had learned that it was really just the same vehicle, I concluded that it was a fancier, more British way of saying the thing, like motorcar or automobile. And indeed it does have a higher, more archaic (even quaint) tone, and I would say sounds more British to North American ears.

How did this word come about, anyway? Was the omni grandiosely tacked on to the humble bus? Well, no, of course it went the other way: just as automobile became auto (now itself a rather dated-sounding word), omnibus became bus. Actually, a closer analogue would be trimming helicopter to copter. You see, the roots in automobile are indeed auto and mobile, while the roots in helicopter are helico and pter – and as to omnibus, it’s actually the noun root omn(i) with the inflectional ending ibus (as in pax in hominibus, “peace among people”). It means “for all” – it’s the dative plural of omnis.

And what that means is that it’s not a masculine singular, and so it doesn’t pluralize to omnibi. This puts it in the same set as mumpsimus (which comes from an inflected verb), vade mecum (in which mecum is a compound meaning “with me”, so it doesn’t pluralize as meca), and arguably octopus (which is a Latinization of a Greek word wherein the source of pus is pous, meaning “foot”). Although, as Ross Ewage lately tweeted, “If the plural of omnibus were omni-bi, they would take everyone,” it’s not and they don’t. Well, not in the sense he undoubtedly meant, anyway.

They do, of course, take all comers when they’re part of a transit system. And, tangentially, if you ride a bus often, you will likely see people reading from an omnibus every so often. By which I mean the book they are reading is an omnibus edition – not an edition made for reading on the bus, but a volume of collected works by an author. (This is a more British term, generally.) For instance, on my shelf I have The First Rumpole Omnibus, by John Mortimer, which is the first anthology of tales of Rumpole of the Bailey.

I think it quite possible that Mortimer (or whoever named the book) also liked the added legal overtone of omnibus. You see, another common use of omnibus is in omnibus bill, which is not the name of a bus driver or anthology editor but rather a bill submitted to legislative approval that is a collection of unrelated pieces (what Kurt Vonnegut, among others, has termed a blivet: ten pounds of shit in a five-pound sack).

By the way, omnibus has been shortened to bus in another application independently of its use with transit vehicles: a main connector in computer circuitry, originally an omnibus bar, became bus bar, and is now often just called a bus.

Ah, well, this magic bus. More to the point, this magic omnibus. Wherever it goes, it makes people think of busing (which I am careful not to spell bussing), be it in legislature, computers, books, or random bits of Latin such as mottos (Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno – Switzerland; Justitia omnibus – Washington DC; Omnia omnibus ubique – Harrods). It can thus be used for good or ill effect in dog Latin, such as this classic, meant to be understood in light of the English it sounds like:

Caesar adsum jam forte
Brutus et erat
Caesar sic in omnibus
Brutus sic in at

Sol sure don’t lucet on that omnibus (but Caesar did). Oh well, sick transit gloria…

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Are you editor material?

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 20 comments

Editing is not a glamour career. If you want to be famous, it’s not what you can do to get there (though you can be an editor and be famous for something else; I know of examples). Nor is it a career that will make you rich. (In fact, freelance editing is hard to survive at if you’re not married to someone with a good salary. In-house editing jobs can, but don’t always, pay better, but they’re not so easy to find.) Nonetheless, there are many people who want to be editors, including some who offer their editing services to friends or colleagues, sometimes without being asked. So what are the characteristics of a person who could become a good editor?

Well, first of all, if you have a burning desire to fix other people’s prose, if the very sight of a minor grammatical error puts you into a rage, if anytime you see something written you know you could have written it better, if you are often heard to counsel your friends (without being asked) on how to improve their grammar or expressions, if you perhaps carry a marker with which to correct signs in grocery stores, DO NOT BECOME AN EDITOR. At least not until you’ve grown up and changed your personality.

If, on the other hand, you love language and think it’s fun, and you love communication and understand that what’s most important in communication is bringing minds together, and that the results dictate the means, you could become an editor.

If you always have to have things your way, STAY OUT OF EDITING. If making other people happy makes you happy, you may be editor material.

If you are often heard to say things like “That doesn’t matter” and “Why should I care about that?” and “I don’t know about that; it’s not important to me” and “Why do you know all these dumb, useless things,” you will never make any sort of decent editor. On the other hand, if other people often say things like that to you, you very well may! Certainly, if you are more likely to say “I wonder” and “Let’s find out” and “Let me look that up,” and if reading reference works and looking random things up out of sheer interest is something you have always done for fun, you have the right disposition to become an editor.

If you see something that you don’t recognize and don’t know the function of, and you conclude it’s useless, stay out of editing. If you see something that you don’t recognize and don’t know the function of, and it provokes in you an excited desire to find out what it is and what it does, you’re editor material.

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hippopotamus

Posted on January 11, 2011 | 2 comments

The full length of this word rather splutters and pops, doesn’t it? Perhaps like your outboard motor coughing violently as you frantically try to restart it after it has stalled out perilously close to a hippopotamus. Its four-horsepower engine is ceding to the four horsemen of the hippocalypse. You are mere seconds away from having your head bitten off – quite literally (and perhaps littorally, though rather more likely riparially, but not reparably). You can try praying to St. Augustine, but he’s not the patron saint of hippos; he just was from Hippo.

Ah, now, hippo, that’s a word that sounds a bit more apposite for these beasts, doesn’t it? Heavy, round, big in the hips – and everywhere else. It’s a short word, a mere four phonemes, something even Frankenstein’s monster could manage to grunt out of his gullet. But hippos are not thought of as hideous; they seem so big, round, and goofy. Many Canadians will remember a cell phone commercial that made use of the song “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” sung by ten-year-old Gayla Peevey (well, she was ten in 1953, when she sang it), with an endearing hippo waddling around.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine. Hippos are the most murderous animals in all of Africa. They’re huge, they can outrun you, and they are, as an article from Science Digest (November 1974, by George W. Frame and Lory Herbison Frame) puts it, wantonly malicious beasts. Oh, and they like to fling their poo around. Actually. At other hippos and whoever else is in the vicinity. (I’m sure it’s mere coincidence that within hippopotamus you can find letters for several words for excrement.)

There are some redeeming factors, though. Not for actual hippos – to heck with them – but for the word, to start with. It actually comes from Greek hippos “horse” and potamos “river”, Latinized slightly. Yet again we must conclude that early Greek explorers, such as there may have been, were terribly nearsighted. I mean, why not river cow? Then the beast would have been a bopotamus. But thanks to this unpleasant jungle ogre, when we see the Greek word for “horse” now elsewhere (for instance in hippodrome), we think of… yes… the unpleasant jungle ogre. Though we probably think of it as big, fat, and cute.

And then there is T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus,” which it would be copyright infringement to reprint here in full, I think, but which I can tell you contrasts the earthly, sluggish, frail hippopotamus with the glorious True Church, and, in an ending that carries the same moral as some well-known parables, sees the hippopotamus take wing and sing with a harp of gold –

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Well. The hippo may yet be redeemed. It needn’t worry about its image among consumers, meantime; idealized and fictitious hippos can be plenty cute (just like Mickey Mouse isn’t a vermin you want to kill with a spring-loaded trap). Witness, for instance, Hroshi, the sweet hippo created by Elaine Phillips (who suggested today’s word and provided research on the unpleasantness of real hippos). Hroshi is an endearing stuffed sort who has corresponded with an equally endearing, equally stuffed unicorn (see www.harbeck.ca/cww/cww_071128.html – and ebooks.ebookmall.com/ebook/332634-ebook.htm and search.barnesandnoble.com/Hippo-and-the-Unicorn/Lindsie-Haxton/e/9780595436705 for the book).

As to the word hippopotamus, it doesn’t really need redemption; it’s a perfectly fine, fun word, that starts off with a hi, and proceeds into a little game of lacrosse (or is it merely bubble wands?) before finishing off with tamus. It has a nice five-syllable cadence that peaks in the middle. And it’s just itching to be used in a tongue-twister.  Hmmm…

How do you stop an optimistic hippopotamus on the Appomattox? With a copper pot, but take apposite pity: a hippopotamus in captivity is not apt to be optimistic.

How’s that? More of a warm-up than a tongue twister, but ah, it’s a start…

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fervent

Posted on January 10, 2011 | 1 comment

There is a time-honoured unholy trinity of topic areas that one is supposed to be very careful of raising in conversation (and that are banned in some establishments): religion, politics, and sports. In all three, discussion can quickly reach a fever pitch, and those involved can build up quite a head of steam, primed for venting. Indeed, these are the realms of fervent beliefs.

Ah, fervent. My earliest recollection of this word is from a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon wherein a man was described as having prayed fervently (OK, yes, fervently, not fervent, but that’s an easy derivation); the illustration was a man with head bowed, lips slightly parted, a look of concentration on his face. I got the sense that fervent was something involving intense murmuring rather than wild shouting, something earnest and motivated from the heart but as quietly hot as, well, a fever. The word felt warm to me like my chest felt when I had a fever; the /v/ vibrates, and the /r/ is close, quietly urging; the nasal /n/ adds to that air.

This is not to say that that is how everyone sees it. But when I look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, what things do I find most commonly described as fervent? Hope, prayer, belief, wish. The word by far most often seen with fervent actually comes before it: most. As in my most fervent hope and even the most fervent believers – and, yes, many of the most fervent supporters and had always been the most fervent defenders, so fervent can be associated with action as well as with an internal state. But the table tilts towards the internal. The most common types of fervent people are supporters, believers, and admirers.

And where do we get fervent from? Latin fervere, “boil, glow”. It also has a sister word in English meaning about the same, fervid – which, however, takes on a more active aspect, maybe (or maybe not) because of its taste of fevered, vivid, rabid, avid, and so on. We might reckon that fervid is more of the boil and fervent more of the glow. But probably most people who use either word are unaware of the exact Latin meaning of the etymon.

Either way, though, fervent (and fervid too) is a word that has a certain tone of gentility to it, or at least of erudition. That is not to say it is not encountered in the rough-and-tumble of debate on hot topics; in fact, I rather suspect (and see a trend in the search results I’ve seen, but cannot verify persuasively within a sensible amount of time this evening) that it is most often encountered in such contexts (probably less so with sports than with the other two). But even when it is used with a tone that is fevered or urgent, indeed even when used for venting, it bespeaks in its user – rightly or wrongly – a degree of intelligent analysis (something I wish most fervently for more of in such debates).

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thurifer

Posted on January 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

There are some words that are more frank in sense than others. This one, to most eyes, is not exactly a thoroughfare from form to meaning. It’s likely that you’ve never seen the word before, even if you’ve seen its referent (which you may or may not have).

Looking at it, what does it bring to mind? Perhaps it smacks of Lucifer, which is certainly a name that comes with an unpleasant smoky glow. Some might wonder if it relates to Urim and Thummim (what’s that? um, something from the Bible; high priests wore them…). Not exactly. Others might suspect it is some kind of musical instrument, like a theorbo. It is not, though a thurifer may know how to swing.

If you’re a word geek like me, you’ll fix immediately on the ifer. Yes, that’s the same as in Lucifer, which means “light bearer” (remember that Lucifer was chief of the angles angels before his fall); it’s also the same as in crucifer, which means “cross bearer”, and aquifer, which is from “water bearer” (yes, so is aquarius). In short, fer bears the sense “bearer” (and the i is connecting tissue). So, given that, I further wonder what that thur there is. So I look it up and find it’s thus.

Thus? No, not thus, thus. Don’t get incensed; it’s not “therefore”; incense is what it’s there for. You see, Latin for “incense” (in particular frankincense) is thus – which is also an English word, even if almost no one knows it is: the th voiceless, as in thin; the us is either like us or rhyming with goose. The shift from the /s/ to a /r/ in thus > thurifer – which happened by way of /z/ – is due to a phonological transformation called rhotacism: the fricative trips lightly to become a liquid when it’s between vowels (it verily purrs, though rhotacism is not eroticism). We North American English speakers do something similar with /t/ and /d/ in similar environments.

So is a thurifer a thing that carries incense? Hm. Well, a thurifer might be incensed at being called a thing. Actually, the referent of thurifer is the person. (In Medieval Latin they used the longer thuriferarius… probably until the scribes complained. I mean, really, holy smokes.) The incense burner that a thurifer carries (and likely swings on a chain) is in fact a thurible. Another name for a thurifer is thus thuribuler, though that’s rather terribler, I think. The thing is that thurible, like – for instance – chasuble, has that little niblet or dribble of /bl/ at the end, and while that might seem more technical or detail oriented in flavour, it lacks the smoothness of thurifer, with its soft brushing fricatives issuing forth like smoke. True, it also lacks the smack of Lucifer, but with richer flavours come inevitably some dark and contrasting tones. It was ever thus.

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pants

Posted on January 8, 2011 | 1 comment

I was back tutoring young Marcus Brattle again after the Christmas break, planted in the dining room in his house. As usual, he was trying to distract from studying. His sally this time was “Get anything nice for Christmas?”

“Some nice pants,” I said, and stood up to show him.

He recoiled. “Spare me!”

Ah, yes. Young Marcus and his family moved to Canada from England only a couple of years ago. “I mean what you’d call trousers,” I said. “Not what we’d call underpants.”

Marcus let out a little noise of relief. “Funny word, pants,” he said.

I sat back down. “Because you use it to refer to an undergarment when in fact it was originally an outer garment, pantaloons, named after a character from Commedia dell’Arte who wore them?”

“No,” he said. “Like I’d know that.”

“You do now,” I said. “It is funny, though, as many people have remarked, that not only pants but trousers, slacks, shorts, skivvies, gotchies, et cetera, including derivative words such as shorts, undies, panties, and briefs, are all plural, while shirt, jacket, and so on are singular.”

“I would have thought you’d know why that is,” Marcus said.

“I do know,” I said. “The two legs used to be made and donned as separate parts, just like stockings and hose.”

“Hose is singular,” Marcus observed.

“Go figure,” I said. “Actually, oddly, it’s a mass object.” (“I object to some odd masses I see in pantyhose,” Marcus offered while I continued talking.) “Anyway,” I said, “the plural has by long tradition become attached to anything worn below the waist that has separate legs or at least separate leg holes. Even new products will tend to take that on.”

“Not a thong,” Marcus pointed out.

“Well, thong is actually originally a strap, so in the case of the undergarment it’s referring to the butt floss, which is one thing.” (“Classy,” Marcus interjected at “butt floss.”) “When I was a kid, I used to wear thongs to the beach –”

“Naw! Augh!” Marcus waved his hands as if battling cluster flies. “Stop!”

“– by which we meant sandals with strapping that connected to the sole between the first two toes. The strapping being the thong and, in that case too, transferring the name to the whole object.”

“Well,” said Marcus, “there’s many a man who pants at the sight of a thong. On the right person!”

“The verb pant does happen to be cognate with the noun fantasy,” I noted drily.

“Funny word, pants,” Marcus said (again).

“Because of the plurality and all that.”

“No, because in England it’s an insult. ‘That’s just pants, that is!'”

“But you wouldn’t say ‘That’s just knickers’ or ‘That’s just trousers,'” I said.

“No,” Marcus said. “Except for your trousers, maybe.”

I stood up to display them. “You don’t like them?”

“They’re pants,” he said.

“Obviously,” I said. “Welcome to Canada.”

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting today’s theme.

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