shiva

Posted on November 8, 2010 | 9 comments

Near the beginning of a short story I wrote some years ago, I had the line, “I sit shiva on the steps. I sit, Shiva on the steps. I am in mourning for what I have destroyed.”

It might seem like a rather inauspicious beginning for a story. But in fact there is something rather auspicious about shiva.

Mourning, of course, is an occasion of loss, and shiva as in sit shiva is a prescribed period of seven days of mourning for any of the seven first-degree relatives in the Jewish tradition. And death and destruction are always thought of as losses – and Shiva, the Hindu god, is well known as Shiva the Destroyer.

But why would people worship a god of destruction? Ah, and here lies the path to wisdom. You cannot have creation without destruction. Every creation involves change; every change also involves something no longer being the way it was – which involves loss. In truth, nothing can dance the dance of creation unless there are separate dancers and separate places to dance. If in the beginning the world is formless and void, an even unity, the first thing that must happen is that it must be divided, cut into pieces with a shiv, as it were. And then you see what arrangements and creations can be had from the kaleidoscope of life (ah, kaleidoscope – from Greek roots for “beautiful form vision”, but note that kalé, feminine form for “beautiful”, is very similar to Sanskrit Kali, name of the Hindu goddess of eternal energy… and death).

And when creation dances in the kaleidoscope, at each turn there are new visions, and at each turn the previous vision meets the Shiva end: it is vanished. And so it will be. You have to learn to let go. You may mourn – and you are blessed if you mourn, for you will be comforted – but once you have mourned, you must accept the new state of things. And the dance goes on. (The dance… lord of the dance? Why, yes. I’m sure you’ve seen the image of a Hindu god in a dancing pose, on one foot, with four arms. That is Shiva Nataraj, Lord of the Dance. So much more than Michael Flatley.)

And so, you see, the god of destruction is also the god of change. And the god of renunciation. And the god of purity. And the auspicious god. Quite literally, in fact: Shiva is Sanskrit for “the auspicious one”.

OK, Shiva is auspicious, but how about shiva? Well, shiva is simply Hebrew for “seven” (you will also see it as shivah, or sheva or shevah contingent on gender). And seven, as we know, is a “lucky” number. It is also the number of days of creation. Well, creation took six – on the seventh, God rested.

One may, with some creativity, discern shapes relating to creation and destruction in the letters of this word. The v is like a knife edge, or a division; the i is like a candle flame. The s is like a snake… or a river. The h is perhaps like the low chair a mourner must sit on during shiva. But of course you can create what you will out of forms you are given. How about the sounds? The word starts with the classical sound of hushing. Why hush? Is it about to begin? Or is it the sound of a door or window opening? Or simply the static hiss of entropy? Well, next things begin to vibrate – a vowel comes, and then the avidly vibrating /v/, made with the teeth and the lips: what bites and what kisses. And finally the mouth opens to the final vowel and lets it all go, like a sand mandala.

Speaking of dust in the wind… I know I must have a copy of that short story somewhere, the one I used a cut piece of as the entry to this note. But I wrote it on a laptop computer that I haven’t used in years (I don’t even know where it is now). I’m sure I saved it to a floppy, and I’ve transferred what I can of my floppies to my hard drive, but I just looked and I can’t find it. Well. This was the same laptop computer that developed a hairline crack in the motherboard in the middle of my dissertation research. (It did get fixed eventually.) I guess I was just getting what I asked for when I named it. Named it? I almost never name my inanimate objects. But I did name that laptop. Guess what name I gave it?

Shiva.

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thrall

Posted on November 7, 2010 | 3 comments

He threaded through the throng, enthralled by the thrum of a threnody; the thrill of threat throbbed as he thrust himself to a stone’s throw from the throne. The thrum, like a thrombus in his throat, enthused him, and he had no thought of thrift. He threshed through the throng, but as he threw himself thither, throneward, three murtherous thugs, in ruthless wrath, earthed him, thrashed him, then throttled him. And yet he could have done none other: it was all there was – he was thoroughly in thrall.

Ah, those thr words, rustling like heather: the soft, voiceless dental fricative, followed by the roll of the tongue through the liquid /r/. It may even seem to give a frisson, like a light finger up the back of the neck or athwart the throat. That “thr” onset is not utterly distinctively English – Greek certainly has it, as does Icelandic, as do some other languages that have both sounds – but there certainly are many people learning English who have trouble with it.

But not all thr words have the same feel or flavour, the onset notwithstanding. There remain also the qualities of the following vowel and the subsequent consonant, if any. A word like thrip is a swift little flip, and thrift adds just a slight shift; threat and throat both stick dry; throne resonates, but on the cold side; thrum gives a warmer hum, and throng is even stronger; thrill gives a bit of a chill; but none other than thrall has quite the steady chordal effect, as from a band of theorbos or reed and pipe instruments (Corvus Corax, anyone?). It has the steady bright open low back unrounded vowel followed by that lateral liquid with velar coarticulation – the rime of all, ball, call, fall, gall, hall, mall, pall, tall, wall, and y’all. It holds you and keeps you.

And a thrall is kept – kept in thrall. What, exactly, is a thrall? Well, we know what enthralled is used to mean: “fascinated, entranced, captivated”. Of those three, “captivated” is most directly accurate to origins, for a thrall was first of all a slave, a prisoner, one in bondage: the word comes from a Scandinavian root for servitude or drudgery (and will you now turn up your collar and pull your lapels together against that chill wind of the north?). From that, thrall came also to mean the condition of bondage or slavery itself.

But, perhaps thanks to the taste of thrill, and to an ethos where love was equated to a sort of ecstatic slavery (as in Shakespeare, for instance Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape”), enthralled has taken on a sense of willing captivation, of an enjoyment beyond enjoyment. And thrall likewise may be a thrill that cometh before a fall, but a thrill it often is, or even something more… like the sound of a pipe, leading you onward; all you can think or feel is that you must follow…

Thanks to Laurence Cooper for suggesting thrall.

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bahuvrihi

Posted on November 6, 2010 | 4 comments

Here’s a word suited for some silver-tongued polymath, some big-vocabulary linguistic high muck-a-muck. You can be sure that its appeal would be greatest to big-head eccentrics, even as it is itself a headless exocentric.

Really, does this seem like a bit of linguistic heavy breathing? Oh, you don’t know the half of it!

Let’s start with its appearance: it’s a sort of high-tail or fright-wig kind of word, with those ascenders sticking up kind of like your hair might when you see it.

Or when you hear it. It’s all voice and breathing, and the sound of it takes me back to junior-high-school days and the sound of some adolescent bully breathing intimidation into my ear. But you see those h‘s? Well, it just so happens that in Sanskrit – yes, this word comes to us from Sanskrit, a language with a panoply of sounds that could frighten Alexander’s army – the phoneme here written as h was voiced. In fact, anywhere in a Sanskrit word you see an h, it was voiced… except at the end, which is just the place in English we never put a /h/ sound.

I’ll let you wrap your head around that a little. Yes, a voiced version of /h/. There’s an International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for it, but it won’t come through in ordinary character sets, so I’ll leave it. But what, exactly, is the voiced counterpart of /h/?

Well, one British book helpfully described it as the sort of noise a small boy makes to try to startle you. I rather think most people would approach it more by the medium of panting or heavy breathing. Imagine you’re a pervert on the phone… now say (lustily) “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” making sure to keep the voice involved throughout. That’ll give you some idea.

In the context of this word, what it really means is that the vowels before the h‘s are extended with a breathy quality. And it happens that the first /i/ is long, which in Sanskrit actually means long – that is, like the short one but taking up about twice as much time. So you’ve got a couple of vowels that get a chesty quality at the end, then melt into the next vowel – and the last one is almost like a pervert’s slow giggle, “eeee(h)ee”.

But this word is an English word now, so maybe don’t actually try to say it the old Sanskrit way… you’ll be taken for some sweaty-palm mouth-breathing lowbrow, I daresay.

Oh, and what does this word mean? Well, I’ll start by telling you that it’s an example of what it names (rather like other, newer linguistic terms such as eggcorn). Bahu means “much” and vrihi means “rice”, and put together they make a word for a rich man – a “much-rice”. And they also make a word for words that put an adjective and a noun together to name something that the two words actually describe rather than name – like lowbrow, which refers to someone to whom is attributed a low brow, rather that referring to a low brow itself. The compound is exocentric: it focuses on something external to it.

We actually have a lot of cases of this in English. I’ve sprinkled a few throughout this note, as you may have noticed. We also have some terms that originated in this but aren’t viewed as such now. One such is high muck-a-muck, which comes from hayo makamak, meaning “plenty food” and referring to a rich person – very much like bahuvrihi itself.

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dogpile

Posted on November 5, 2010 | 1 comment

I saw quite a noteworthy dogpile today.

No, I didn’t step over it on the street. That’s not what a dogpile is. No, no, it’s not.

Dogpiles these days typically happen on the web. They’re when masses of people all jump on someone. Figuratively, I mean, of course.

In today’s case, a blogger reported that she had found an article by her published on a magazine’s website, and that when she emailed the magazine, she got a response – from someone claiming to be an experienced editor – on the order of “your article was on the web; what is on the web is public domain; you should be lucky we even put your name on it; university students do this all the time, in case you didn’t know; and in fact you should be grateful for all the editing work we did to tidy up your article, which frankly wasn’t all that great but now will be a good addition to your portfolio.”

That’s paraphrase, of course, but that’s the gist of the email this blogger reported receiving. Well. This went viral (meaning people started passing it around from one to another – do you remember that ad from about 30 years ago, “You’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on…”? Well, how about “You’ll tell your 138 Facebook friends, and they’ll tell the 462 people on their listserv, and so on, and so on…”). The magazine in question has a Facebook page. With a wall and discussions that may be posted on. I took a look. Ooo. Massive dogpile. Scads of posts about the falseness and rudeness of the reply. Great big loathe-in.

That kind of manifestation of mass outrage is a new thing. Mass outrage, of course, is not such a new thing; Marie Antoinette was reported (falsely) to have said, when told the people did not have bread, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” Well. A lot of people were calling for her head. And guess what… they got it. We’re not necessarily so violent today. But we still dogpile. (And sometimes it really is a justifiable and effective response.)

Dogpiling can also be a physical thing, certainly. If you have a bunch of stoked-up jock types who, for instance, want to have a bit of aggressive fun at the expense of one of their number, they may dogpile on him: all throw themselves in a pile on him (and of course on each other). It also happens in football games and frat house fights, as noted by two early citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

And how early are the citations? Well, I had been wondering whether this term started where I heard it first: in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where a bunch of stupid, thuggish dogs, on seeing Bugs, shout “Dogpile on the rabbit! Dogpile on the rabbit!”; when the view pans up to the top of the pile, we see Bugs jumping up and down on the top of the pile, shouting the same.

But that, although likely a very important vector for this word, is not the origin. No, the earliest citation the OED has is from 1921 (about a football game). And where did they come up with it from? After all, if you think about it, it’s not stereotypical behaviour for dogs to pile. Well, dogs, no, but pigs yes. And pig pile dates from 1880 or earlier. It would seem that dog replaced pig – probably due to the other associations pig has, but that’s a guess.

This word has a bit of a clotted taste or sense to it, I find, due to the /gp/ in the middle. When you have both the lips and the back of the tongue closed, you have a sealed chamber in your mouth – one that can have its air rarefied or compressed: put your mouth in a /gp/ position and then widen your jaws before opening your lips. Bit of a pop, eh? It’s more of a logjam than logjam. The voiced first stop and unvoiced second add to the clotting effect. Then, of course, it all opens up. But you may find that the sound of /l/, perhaps especially after /p/, gives you an little sense of layers, perhaps by association with other similar words.

Oh, and if you want to know more about the dogpile I was talking about, you might find it with a web search. Google is of course the most popular search engine now, but there was a time when there were many others, and guess what – many of them still exist. And one I especially liked also still exists: a metasearch site that searches several engines – www.dogpile.com.

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Are this kind of sentences wrong?

Posted on November 4, 2010 | 1 comment

A colleague was puzzling over a “correct” example in Words into Type (page 358): “This kind of cats are native to Egypt, but they are common in America.”

Does that sound odd to you? It rubs my ear just a bit. But why?

One colleague averred that the problem was that this and cats don’t match. Ah, this question of matching parts.

Not “these question of matching parts”!

Anything after of modifies the word before of. What’s the word before it? Kind. What is kind? Singular. It’s the head of the noun phrase, and the specifier – which agrees with the head – is this. This kind. This box of cakes, this quintessence of dusts, this kind of cats.

So why does it sound odd? Well, to start with, if kind is singular, why is it “are native”? Shouldn’t it be “is native”?

In fact, there’s a very good argument to be made for sticking with the singular, and many people will do it without being wrong. But it also happens that kind is often used as a collective, an indefinite plural, like bunch and lot and percentage. As in “a very large percentage of people find this sentence odd,” or “a lot of people think it’s strange,” or “a bunch of people said it must be ungrammatical.” Wait – which bunch are saying it’s ungrammatical? Oh, this bunch are. This bunch right here are saying it’s ungrammatical. This…X…are.

But kind feels a bit off in that role, because it’s not a group per se as we usually see it, but rather a class identifier. Like style: “This style of coat is popular.” Who would say “This style of coat are popular”? Well, actually, in other times and places that would count as not only acceptable but in fact expected English. It’s a difference in construal of properties.

In fact, many of us wouldn’t say “This kind of cats is native”; we would more likely say “These kind of cats are native.” Oh, yes, you know you’ve heard it, and perhaps even used it: “These kind.” So we have evidence that in Canadian English “kind” has a quality of a plural.

Still, I find the sentence sounds odd too. And when something sounds odd, that’s because in the version of English you know so well, it’s just not done that way. So in Canadian English, while we may get away with treating kind as a plural (“these kind are”) and as a singular (“this kind is”), we can’t always get away with it as a collective without its sounding odd. Caveat editor.

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zucchini

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 2 comments

Take one Italian word for “gourd”: zucca. Add a diminutive suffix, ino, to make zucchino (note that the root is feminine but the suffix makes it masculine; note also that the h is added to the spelling to keep the consonant as [k] rather than becoming an alveopalatal affricate). Pluralize to make zucchini. Borrow into English and serve, one or more at a time.

Yes, it’s hard to miss the Italianness of this word. Generally when you see a cch there’s a very good chance the word has come from Italian (yecch notwithstanding), and if you add the z it just ramps the odds up further. Italian, unlike English (with exceptions, e.g., bookkeeper), actually says double consonants as double consonants, and it happens to like them. And in Italian, anytime you have a /kk/ before a front vowel (/i/ or /e/ are the only two in Italian), you have to add the h after the cc – because the letter k is not as a rule used in Italian words (excepting loans).

But of course when it’s borrowed over to English, some of this is elided; most of us don’t know all the rules of Italian, and we certainly don’t follow them in English. As mentioned, double letters, except across morpheme boundaries, are almost always said as single sounds in English, so we say this word as [zu ki ni]. And since we don’t have a connection between sound and spelling for double letters, it’s common to see various confusions: zuchinni, zucchinni, zuchini, zuccini, zucinni.

The other thing we do with loan words, more often than not, is conform them to our morphology. We say gondolas, not gondole, for instance. Generally we borrow the singular and handle it like an English noun stem. But not always: if the idea of a borrowed plural morphology gets entrenched for a word – for instance, criterion/criteria, alumnus/alumni, graffito/graffiti (among a certain set, anyway), etc. – then we will keep the borrowed plural too. And sometimes there’s a bit of fussiness and controversy: I know quite a few people who get prickly when they see or hear “a panini.” “A panino!” they think or sometimes even say. “One panino, two panini.”

You’ll notice in the case of panini that it’s the plural that’s being used as a singular. And, since nothing escapes you, you will already be thinking about how that is also the case with zucchini. Yes indeedy. But the difference is that panini is a fairly fresh borrowing, with still a very noted Italian flavour, whereas zucchini came into English nearly a century ago (not so much in England, where courgette took hold) and it just happens there weren’t enough tut-tutters to make the singular stick. (In fact, the rather redundant zucchini squash was – and still in some quarters is – common, too, with no pedants seen out trying to stop it.)

Ah, the singular stick – how often do you ever have a singular stick of zucchini anyway? They tend to grow in such quantity that if you have friends who grow them you’ll come home to plastic bags of the stuff hanging on your doorknob, and if you buy them at the store they’re so cheap you might as well get two. You can see multiplicity even in the appearance of the word (just by coincidence, of course): two i‘s like two zucchini (or, as is often said, two zucchinis), two c‘s like two slices of zucchini (note its use there as a mass object: not slices of a zucchini), and even the u and n really the same shape rotated.

But what’s the most common word seen next to zucchini? One. Or, rather, 1. The second most common is 2. Why? Well, other common words it goes with include add, cut, medium, and small. Do you see where this is going? That’s right: you usually see this word in recipes.

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Commas before quotes

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 6 comments

Does quoted material always need a comma before it? Not necessarily. When the quoted material is within a narrative frame – even if it’s the only thing in the narrative frame – and we’re being taken to the scene, as it were, a comma is generally used. But when the quoted material is being treated as an instance of an utterance of that phrase, and the verb is the main thing rather than being an entrance point to dialogue (in other words, when the quoted material is truly the complement of the verb rather than an act of locution introduced), a comma is not called for. Some comparisons:

These are the sort of people who say “Sure thing” and then don’t do anything. [no comma there – it’s not bringing in an actual dialogue situation]

The pepper jar broke. Mary sneezed. John said “Aw, nuts.” The cat fled. [what John said is being treated as another action like Mary’s sneeze]

The pepper jar broke. Mary sneezed. John said, “Aw, nuts.” The cat fled. [you’re expecting further dialogue here – at the very least, the instance is framed as one of a dialogue situation]

Don’t shout “No, don’t do it!” at an actor in a play. [don’t use a comma here – this is a general comment, not an entry into a specific situation]

John stood, horrified. He shouted, “No, don’t do it!” at the actor. [this is an entry to a dialogue situation, even if no further speech is said]

John is a fool. Last night at the play he shouted “No, don’t do it!” at an actor. You can’t take him anywhere. [this is not entering a narrative]

John is a fool. Last night at the play, he shouted, “No, don’t do it!” at an actor. I had to grab him and drag him back into his seat. An usher ran over and glared at him uselessly. [this is entering a narrative]

In the end, the General said “Nuts.” [there was something he said at the end, and we’re just establishing what it was]

In the end, the General said, “Nuts.” [it’s taking us there to the instance of utterance]

There was the time Mary came home and found Debbie Travis in her living room. She ran out of the house shrieking “It’s her! It’s her!” and the camera crew had to sprint after her. [this is a more anecdotal, broad-view description]

Mary walked into her living room and saw a large number of people she knew. In the midst of them was Debbie Travis. Mary’s eyes popped. She ran out of the house shrieking, “It’s her! It’s her!” as the camera crew sprinted after her. [involved narrative]

There’s a certain amount of wiggle room and, yes, some variation in opinion on this. It can be a slight but important variation in tone in some cases; in other cases, the wrong punctuation will make it jarring.

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yank

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 1 comment

First of all, is a yank a jerk?

Well, in some parts of the world, certainly, people will tell you Yanks are jerks. Which is not necessarily fair, though I have to admit American tourists can often be quite grating, even if you are one (I tend to lean to my Canadian side when travelling – as though Canadians are never obnoxious, hah). But there’s Yank and there’s yank.

Both have the same sound, reminiscent of pulling on, say, a rope attached to something or someone – short, beginning with an accelerating impulse and then ending abruptly. Both have the same letters, with that final k like a wall with something being pulled away from it and that initial y like a wishbone that parties pull on – but the capital Y is perhaps more wishbone-like. Also more dowsing-rod-like.

But Yank is short for Yankee, which outside the US means “American” and in the US more often means “American from the northeastern states, or specifically from New England”. Its origins are not altogether certain, but most likely it comes from Dutch Janke “Johnny” or Jan Kees, a dialectal variation on Jan Kaas “John Cheese”, used as a derisive nickname (remember that there were many Dutch settlers in the northeastern US in the 17th century). The lower-case yank, on the other hand, seems to come originally from Scotland, where it means “a sudden sharp blow” (yerk is another word in the same vein); the “sudden pull” sense comes from the US, and the verb is formed from that noun.

So, in the American sense, yank is synonymous with “jerk”, but in the sense “American” it is not necessarily so. But it is good to have a word yank that is like jerk but different, since jerk has its own flavours – jerkin and jerky, certainly, but also jerk as in “annoying person” (as we have already implied) and jerk in some other, ruder uses. And given that yank is often used in conjunction with out, away, open, and, yes, off, that matters. It’s also good to be able to speak literally of “yanking someone around”, whereas “jerking someone around” has an overriding figurative sense. Yank also has a more completive feel: if we talk about “yanking someone or something”, that means pulling them or it from a program or lineup. “Jerking them” is not available for that kind of use.

And along with the imitative feel of it, it does get a little boost from echoes of yikes and all the ank rhymes (thank, spank, tank, and so on), and that [jæ] onset that could be positive but is always energetic emotionally. And, of course, the inevitably American flavour of it.

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting yank – back in September 2008.

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curry favour

Posted on November 1, 2010 | 2 comments

The food court had suddenly become busy, and stomachs were growling. I was along for something to munch on, but the options that didn’t involve waiting were few.

Actually, the options numbered exactly one: only Chennai Kari House was unmobbed. Turning to Maury, who was slumped in a seat in dismay, and Jess, who had one eyebrow arched in that love-child-of-Ellen-DeGeneres-and-Mister-Spock way she has, I said, “Well, I favour curry.”

“You’re just saying that to curry favour,” Jess said.

“That old chestnut!” Maury snorted.

“Chestnut!” I said. “I rather think it’s been lying fallow.”

“Well, the point is, I think you’re just fawning.”

“Ha. That would make me a horse of a different colour.”

Jess’s eyebrow ratcheted up a notch. “I think I must have been away when you covered that one. Perhaps you could go over it again?”

“With a fine-toothed comb?” I said.

“A curry comb would do fine. I’m sure that curry as in combing down a horse, from a Latin word meaning ‘make ready’, is the source of the curry in curry favour. But could you do me a favour…?”

“Curry favel,” Maury said drily.

“Favel being an old term for ‘fallow’, ‘fawn’, or perhaps ‘chestnut’ – as in a colour,” I explained. “For a horse.”

“In medieval French allegories,” Maury explained further, “the fallow horse was a symbol of cunning and deceit.”

“Oh, yes,” Jess said, with an of-course toss of the hand. “The Roman de Fauvel.”

“All the potentates come to bow down before the titular donkey and to brush him off – curry him,” I said. “Sucking up and fawning over him. So originally it was a donkey, but later a horse. And then, reasonably enough, the phrase was reconstrued as curry favour.”

“All that fawning led to their roan-ation, anyway,” Maury said.

“I think the lack of food is getting to your head,” I said.

“Pappadum preach,” Maury shot back.

“Don’t talk naan-sense,” I retorted.

“OK, guys, I don’t want to be playing ketchup,” Jess said.

We both looked at her. “I’m guessing,” I said, “that that’s a reference to curry the food coming from Tamil kari, which was originally a word for a sauce or relish for rice, and to ketchup coming from Malay kechap, which is a fish sauce.”

“No,” Jess said, looking again at the Chennai Kari House counter, where a line was forming, “I’m saying I don’t want to play catch-up. We’re going to be stuck behind the mad rush for Madras if you two don’t get off your punning butts.”

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lunch

Posted on October 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

“I have a hunch,” Maury said, “we’ve beaten the lunch bunch to the punch.”

“Yes,” I said, surveying the still-deserted food court, “we’re ahead of the crunch.”

Jess nodded approvingly. “That’s good. I hate to have to use a truncheon to approach my luncheon.”

Maury looked at his watch. “Of course, the fact that it’s barely eleven would have something to do with it.”

“So we’ll call it a brunch,” Jess said.

I shrugged. “I just want something to munch.” I looked around. “Not too many options in that respect.”

“We’re surrounded by food places!” Jess protested. “Not too many options?”

“Most of what they serve does not make an audible crunch,” I said. “I am not of that school who – like some restaurant reviewers – would use munch for eating foods such as fried eggs or mashed potatoes.”

“Or soft tacos or hamburgers,” Maury added. He looked over to his left and jabbed me with his elbow. “You could get a Double Down.”

I looked down at his elbow. “What was that?”

“A dunch,” he said. “A short sharp blow, with the elbow.”

“Well,” I said, returning to the main topic, “double down is what I want in my pillow, not on my plate – and goose down, not chicken down.”

“Well, then, what sounds tastiest?”

“So far,” I said, “unch.”

“You can’t make a meal of a phonaestheme,” Jess pointed out.

“True,” I said, “but it works the jaws and, with that final affricate, makes a sort of crunch.”

“Would you really call it a phonaestheme?” Maury mused. “Do the words all have some element of sense in common?”

“They mostly seem to have an onomatopoeic origin,” I said. “Even bunch is thought to have an imitative basis.”

“Well,” said Jess, “I don’t know that I’d be as definite as that. I seem to recall that the OED gives ‘of obscure origin’ for several of them.”

“My favourite is its source for luncheon,” I said. “It says ‘related in some way to lunch.'”

“Which, in its turn,” Maury said, “may have formed on the basis of lump the same way hunch may have been based on hump and bunch may be related to bump.”

“And then there’s the other lunch,” I said, “basically obsolete now: ‘the sound made by the fall of a soft, heavy body.'”

“A lump, perhaps?” said Maury. “Does a lurch by a lump count?”

“Well,” declared Jess, “I would like a lump of something for lunch.” She looked around again. “Holy cow!”

We looked up. In the short time we had been tasting words, lines had formed at all of the food places. Maury threw his hands up as if crying “Uncle!” and audibly collapsed onto the nearest seat.

“Well,” said Jess, “that was our ‘lunch.'”

Thanks to Gabriel Cooper for suggesting the unch words.

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