gotten

Posted on May 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Should gotten be shotten, forgone and forgotten? Cast to the side like a thing that is rotten? Left on the shelf like a trinket unboughten?

Understand, first of all, that this is not a note on get. Get over that right off. I don’t have the time to write, and you don’t have the time to read, a tasting of that word – it simply gets around far too much. Perhaps sometime when I can get around to it I will write a little operetta about it or something. Now watch me get carried away…

Anyway, gotten is – or isn’t, depending on whom you ask – the past participle of get. (Those who say it is not say it is got.) It displays very nicely a feature of English phonology – a feature that, while not universal (and sometimes considered a mark of a casual pronunciation), is so common I have heard the Queen herself doing it: in any word ending with unstressed tten or tton – mitten, kitten, button, rotten, flatten, and on and on – instead of releasing the /t/ and saying a vowel (a schwa) before the /n/, we simply hold the tongue in place, lower the velum (opening the nasal passage) and say a syllabic [n]. (If we’re really being lazy, we don’t quite touch the tongue, and the sequence becomes a glottal stop followed by a narrow nasal vowel.) If we wish to emphasize the word and articulate it fully, we will of course release the /t/ and so on, but otherwise, the principle of economy of effort gets the upper hand.

So, then, why would not the principle of economy of effort also have gotten the upper hand with the past participle of get? Well, why should it? Past participles in en are quite normal in English. And indeed the en suffix is quite time honoured for this verb too. Getten was actually the first version, and could be seen up to the 16th century; Oxford tells me it’s still common in Yorkshire. But the ablaut series (the vowel moves down and back: drink – drank – drunk, for instance) exerted its influence in the Middle English ages, so that we had get – gat – gotten (which we still get in beget – begat – begotten) in place and taking over by the start of the Early Modern English period (16th century). Then gat shifted to got by influence of gotten. And then, in some versions of English, epsecially in England, it gradually took over altogether, except in some idiomatic forms. It would seem that gotten – with its two crosses in the middle – was double-crossed and gone. And so some people, on the basis of this British desuetude, believe it universally wrong. But it persists in North America – persists and is correct even in the most formal English in North America (except in the eyes of those few  who have decided it should not be).

Well, if the British can do without it, why can’t we? Are we just out of our gotten-pickin’ minds?  Well, heck, other people don’t have a chef’s knife, a carving knife, and a filet knife in their kitchens, but I can tell you there are things I can do with each of them that I can’t do as well with either of the others. So too with get, got, gotten. It is even possible to allow a contrast between got and gotten as past participle when you use have got where one could use have: I have got to see her etchings versus I have gotten to see her etchings, the former signifying need or desire and the latter signifying past attainment. The former could be said I have to see her etchings, but it loses the punchy emphasis. And the existence of the have got usage, even if you do not use it yourself, in fact necessitates gotten for clarity in many such situations, especially given that the have auxiliary may become aurally indiscernible in some contexts: We got it versus We’ve got it – clearly We’ve gotten it removes the ambiguity.

In any event, gotten has history and analogical patterns on its side, so just because it’s gotten disused in England doesn’t mean it’s somehow ill-gotten or misbegotten. It was good enough for Samuel Johnson (“If the money with which he retired was all gotten by himself”); it was good enough for Thomas Hobbes (“Reason is not . . . gotten by experience only”); it was good enough for David Hume (“The duke of Parma, who had gotten intelligence of their approach”); I really do think it’s gotten its place in the language quite honestly. We’ve gotten away with it this long. And let us hear none of that “Well, the Brits should know, it’s their language”; it’s our language too – my ancestors spoke it as surely as theirs did, and we’ve preserved some things that they’ve changed. Why would they get to set the fashion all the time?

Thanks to Jim Taylor for requesting gotten.

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desolate

Posted on May 11, 2010 | 1 comment

A word with a dry wind whispering through it /s/, speaking of a place full of empty (o), defoliated, deflated like a balloon. You’ll likely think of a dry plain, looking like the surface of Mars, a spot so sorry that even the sun has been stolen from it. The valley of the shadow of death, perhaps… no one around… you’re so late, too late; all is gone. Perhaps it never was there in the first place.

And one may feel desolate at heart, too. It is so easy to transfer the barrenness, the sense of desertion and desertification, to the heartscape and mindscape: no sun up in the sky… how a person might feel if isolated, cut off from all human company.

Indeed, although the word readily suggests the loss of sun (de and sol), it is solus that is the true Latin heart of this word originally, via solare, “make lonely”. The de is here in the sense “to the bottom; completely”, as in denude, derelict, deplore, deliquesce, decoct. Thus first of all it is the depths of loneliness, all around you boiled away and you left with you alone and no one to relate to. I’m put in mind of a poem I wrote in high school (apologies if the vagaries of formatting result in indelicate alignments):

Now I’m in an empty room tomb
Completely bare air
The walls so far between clean
The ceiling very high sky
And I so all alone stone
Just standing on a spot dot
In the middle of the floor more
And all that I say echoes knows
In this empty place space

But what poetry is there in a desolate place? In truth, barely the least ode. No doubt echoes of desert and perhaps the hint of lack of sun – and soil, also sol – contributed to the shift in sense to a place where there is not one but no one, no one and nothing. In the main, it passed from “lonely” to “lacking” to “barren”; at times it appears to have been confused with dissolute.

But just as the English sense has reduced from one person to none, a place without traffic at all, and emotional desolation is reduction to a sorry state indeed, we may look to another language to see how excessive traffic may rub a word nearly smooth of sense: French désolé, commonly the short way to say je suis désolé, which literally means “I am desolate” but has come to be a sorry statement – that is, a statement of “sorry.” As when (for instance in The Killing Fields) the officer hands back the passport with barely a shake of the head and a “Désolé, monsieur.” The “sorry” that really means “sigh, please go away” – if it means that much.

Well, as word taster David Moody has reminded me, Lena Horne has gone away, and there is no sun up in the sky. This is a new desolation, and not just a mumbled “Sorry for your loss”; as David writes, “To be truly désolé is to have the very sun snatched from out of the sky… as it was after Lena Horne’s last appearance in a picture or on a soundtrack.” Not simply loss; not merely isolation (which comes from Latin for “island”); desolation. On the date we look back and lose, we are desolate.

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gutta-percha

Posted on May 11, 2010 | 6 comments

This may sound like something one does with a freshly caught fish, but look beyond that to its echoes of the old British empire and its South Asian trading. For me, the word always brings to mind the play Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness, by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, set in Rangoon (and written on the basis of a 1914 trip by Witkiewicz and Bronislaw Malinowski to that area of the world). Rapacious colonials straight out of a crazier version of Conrad spew (or, in the version done at the University of Calgary when I was a student there, sing) lines such as “We’ll drink to the success of our General Rubber and Coffee Trust. Long live coffee and gutta-percha, united in an invincible mass of power and glory. Long live tropical fantasy!”

It seems to me that that play was the first time I encountered the word. Of course, a boy growing up in Alberta in the 1970s and ’80s would not have had so much cause to hear of gutta-percha. This is indeed a tropical word, a Malay phrase rendered in English style: getah “gum, sap” plus perca, the name of the tree that makes the sap (in English it tends to be called the gutta-percha tree, it seems).

And it is a word of the height of British imperial glory, that excursion that also gave us punch, bungalow, dungarees, pajamas (all from Hindi), amok, bamboo, gingham, kapok, launch, orangutan, rattan (all from Malay), and many others, all washed down with gin and tonic (invented to help make the quinine go down easier) under the midday sun – which, of course, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in.

You can just hear the plummy colonial officer’s accent saying this word, the rhythm and final vowels of it already signalling foreignness, something that had come from some Singaporean gutter perchance, and beating its tattoo on the tongue with a tap at the back, one at the tip, a pop at the lips and a catch on the tip: back-mid-fore-mid, like a military march or whatnot. Not so unlike a vocal warmup I learned in acting class: butta gutta butta gutta butta gutta.

Gutta-percha’s virtues for such things as sealing roofs, gutters, and perches had long been known to the Malays when, in 1842, westerners first noticed that the sun-dried sap of this magnificent tree made a latex that could be made flexible again with the aid of hot water, and which would not become brittle like unvulcanized rubber. More gloriously still, it did not react with things like acid or enzymes, conduct electricity, or taste good to fish. It thus enabled the first undersea cables (in 1851) once a means of extruding it as an insulator had been invented.

Many other things were also made with it, thanks to its plasticity: pistol grips, rifle butts, furniture, jewelry, canes… In 1856, U.S. Congressman Preston Brooks used a gutta-percha cane to beat Senator Charles Sumner so badly he required three years to recover fully. (Brooks did this in the senate chamber; he had originally thought of challenging Sumner to a duel, but a fellow representative counselled him that Sumner, though a senator, was of lower social standing and so did not merit a duel.) Speaking of sports, gutta-percha golf balls (known as gutties) were quite popular for half a century.

So this fruit of imperial excursion made possible commercial and cultural excursion and assorted ballistic activities. Many of gutta-percha’s uses have since been supplanted by newer, better materials (vulcanized rubber, polyethylene, etc.). But it still has a few applications. Most notably, if you have a root canal, gutta-percha will be used to fill the resulting space.

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hung

Posted on May 9, 2010 | 2 comments

“So,” I said to Albert Denton, of the Sheffield branch of the Order of Logogustation, “how about that election of yours?” We were lunching at a restaurant on Spadina on the first day of the E8 word tasting summit (the eight main English-speaking countries), held this year in Toronto.

“We haven’t got a proper government,” he said. “Our parliament’s bloody well hung. Pardon.” He ate a spoonful of soup from a bowl the size of his head.

Also at our table was Ross Ewage, who heard his cue. “Well hung?!” he said. “Then I’m sure they’ll all be men enough to rise to the occasion.”

Albert glanced at Ross. “And you should be bloody well hanged.” Ross raised an eyebrow and mounted an assault on his soup.

“So nice of those judges of past centuries to have used the archaic weak form of the past tense in passing sentences so we could have that distinction persisting to the present,” I observed.

“Ironically,” Albert said, “the weak form was the intransitive.” He paused for another sip. “Our modern hang actually came from three different verbs, as you perhaps know: an Old English strong transitive, an Old English weak intransitive, and an Old Norse causal verb. But in the end they all merged into one… and, funny enough, though they all merged into the weak form, they moved towards strong vowel-changing inflexion, and the past tense hung was actually invented then by analogy. As they say, Who would have thunk it?” (This discourse was given an extra resonance by Albert’s Sheffield accent, which has u‘s as in hung and thunk said like the vowel in book.)

“So,” I said, “three parties, as it were, all coming together to a common agreement by finding a third way… with just a little dissenter off to one side.”

Albert allowed himself a chuckle. “As if the Tories and Labour got together and shut out the Lib Dems.”

“I’m quite amused at the level of dismay your situation has been greeted with in England,” I said. “It’s rather common in Canada, with four parties sitting and a first-past-the-post electoral system. Some people say minority government should be the accepted norm, most likely with set times between elections to preclude such things as bullying the other parties by making any chancy vote a confidence vote. But I really do think an important difference in the way we see things is the term we use. Minority government: Well, it’s still government, and in Canada, minority doesn’t have such a bad sound to it, since nearly – or perhaps actually – a majority of our citizens are members of identifiable minority groups.” I looked around us; more than half the people in the restaurant were East Asian. “Whereas hung parliament means it’s suspended, hanging in midair, perhaps by the neck…”

“Or it has the sword of Damocles hanging over it,” Albert said. “It’s as though the election campaign was a great binge, and now we’re all hung over from it. Well, it could get to be like game meat that’s been hung too long… It gets very ‘high,’ which means ‘rancid’. But the term hung parliament only dates back to the last hung parliament we had, in 1974. Simon Hoggart, of The Guardian, was really the one who spread it. It just happens that in England, after an election, the ruling party doesn’t automatically change; there has to be a resignation or vote of no confidence first, which is a matter of course most of the time but not when, as in 1974, no one had a majority to force the loser out. And Edward Heath, prime minister at the time, tried to stay and build a coalition. Well, his party did get more votes, though fewer seats. In the end he had to resign in favour of Harold Wilson. But it was contentious, as I hope this one will not be.”

“Well,” I said, “one would think that everyone would want those who are hung to agree.”

“Speaking of which,” said Jess, appearing over my shoulder, “I’m hungry. Sorry I’m a bit late.” She grabbed the remaining chair. “I see it’s pho all around. What’s the topic of discussion?”

“Hung,” said Ross, with extra lung.

“Huh,” Jess said. “What’s the preposition?”

“An indecent one,” Ross said.

“Well, is it hung up, hung out, hung over, hung around…?”

“Well,” said Albert, “we’ve hung in there.”

“A couple of blocks that way –” Jess jerked her thumb towards the door – “there are paintings, hung by the curators with care. And no doubt curtains hung too.”

“Down the block, I think I saw a store called Hung Far Low,” Ross snickered.

“Yeah, you probably didn’t,” said Jess, “though this is Chinatown, with lots of Vietnamese places, too. Like this one. You’ll see Hung here and there.” She held up the menu that the waiter had just handed her. “I case you forgot where we were.” The restaurant’s name was, of course, Pho Hung.

Thanks to Sheila Protti for asking for something on hung parliament.

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peregrination

Posted on May 8, 2010 | 3 comments

I wouldn’t be surprised if this word made you think first of peregrine falcon. That would seem to give it a somehow nobler air, that aloofness of birds of prey, with the possible hint of patrician and the distinguished air that many words starting with p can seem to have. The /gr/ in the middle of course has a bit more grip; it here makes for echoes of green and plants a grin in the heart of the word. But the pere brings back a French father – and an English pear, perhaps. The scope of the word gets a boost from the expanse of the nation. And perhaps that nation is one you cross on foot, as one makes one’s pilgrimage across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

One need not be making a pilgrimage to be on a peregrination, but anyone who is on a pilgrimage is making a peregrination. This word comes to us little altered from Latin peregrinatio, “travel”, “journey”, “being abroad”, but the same root – or its noun form peregrinus, “journeyer” – has wandered a little farther to show up also as pilgrim and pilgrimage, the first /r/ now transformed to an /l/. A peregrination thus will always be a journey or wandering, most typically by foot (although in the modern world cars and airplanes are not proscribed), and sometimes symbolic.

Which leads me to what this word makes me think of first: the text of the music by Sergei Prokofiev for the battle on Lake Peipus in the movie Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The words sung over and over, a leitmotif for the Teutonic knights, are peregrinus expectavi, pedes meos in cymbalis. When first encountering it (and having to sing it), I understood the first part – “a pilgrim I waited” – and thought the second part had something to do with feet and with something that looked like cymbals but clearly couldn’t be. Well, in fact, it was – Prokofiev had snipped words from four places in the text of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and stuck them together to make something meaning “a pilgrim I waited, my feet on the cymbals”. It starts comprehensible but then kind of wanders off (in the grand tradition of lorem ipsum)… neither you hearing nor I repeating can make it not clash; whatever you’ve awaited, what you get is just symbolic. So don’t have a bird; just relax – go get a glass of San Pellegrino, which will have journeyed from Italy just for you.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips, currently on a peregrination of her own, for suggesting this word.

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costus

Posted on May 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

OK, with a plant – actually a whole genus of tropical herbaceous plants that produce pretty flowers – with a name like this, the first question is quite obvious… is it costive?

Actually, we may assume that it is not – it’s related to ginger, and while that’s a non-binding relation, we may assume that something runs in the family.*

The various species of costus are in fact used for various medicinal purposes. Costus igneus (fiery costus, or spiral flag) is thought to build up insulin in the body. And Costus speciosus has been claimed to be good for treating fever, rash, asthma, bronchitis, and intestinal worms. The Kama Sutra says put it on your eyelashes to be sexier (would Benylin do?). Of course, that claim may be specious.

For the ordinary flower buyer, however, the main feature of costus species is that they are pretty. They often have a flame-like look to them (which would remind one of the word holocaust except that that word is not now used to refer to burnt sacrifices, as its transferred meaning has become entirely dominant). They are lively, hot-looking flowers, suitable for adorning a señorita’s hair – or the coat of arms of Nigeria. In short, they seem almost utterly at odds with their Greek-derived name, which is rather cold and a bit hard, echoing cough and a bit of tussive and mixing up scouts.

There are probably other echoes and wordplays available; I will leave you to work them out. Perhaps you may wish to do so while meditating on a potted Costus speciosus (you can easily buy them – in the US they cost $15–$20 potted).

* For those unfamiliar with the word costive: it means “constipating” or “constipated”.

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however

Posted on May 4, 2010 | 4 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd, lately elected Grand Panjandrum of the Order of Logogustation, was in town and made a stop by our local Domus Logogustationis for the monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event. We took this as a chance to generate a little extra interest and invited various parties to come be addressed. And so Montgomery stood in the middle of our Rather Good Hall (not quite up to the level of a Great Hall) surrounded by students, journalists, and student journalists, and gave a rousing and mercifully brief discourse on why English should be viewed as a game, and not one with tightly fixed rules, either. He then entertained questions.

One young fellow in a red shirt piped up: “Why does the name of your society mix Latin and Greek? Doesn’t that seem a little sloppy?”

Montgomery arched an eyebrow slightly. “It’s hardly the first macaronic word in the language. In fact, we mixed logo and gustation partly as an expression of the sort of play I was just speaking of. It’s true that a more cleanly Latin formation would be verbogustation. However, that would have far too strong a taste of bogus.”

The assembled scribes scribbled. One said to her friend next to her, “Comma with the however?”

Red shirt looked back over his shoulder. “Never!”

A green-shirted young woman said, “What do you mean, never? Always!”

“No,” said a slip of a thing in a black dress, “a period.”

“A period?!” said the first. “Oh… no, I meant after.”

“Not a period!” said red shirt. “Always a semicolon. One should not start a sentence with a conjunctive adverb.”

Montgomery’s eyebrow raised a titch more. Before he could interject, the first woman’s friend, a girl in a pink button-up, said, “People don’t speak with semicolons. Didn’t you learn that? Any journalism professor will tell you that.”

“I speak with semicolons,” Montgomery interjected. “And I believe some journalism professors do as well. However, in this instance, I intended however to be the start of a new sentence.”

“Boy,” said red shirt, “you really are a lot of descriptivists, aren’t you? Throwing Strunk and White out the window?”

Maury, in the background, had anticipated this, and had plucked a copy of the very book off the shelf. He handed it to Montgomery open to page 43. Montgomery read aloud: “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in first position.” He handed the book back to Maury. “Two observations: first, even were Strunk and White holy writ, which it certainly is not, that is a recommendation, not an absolute rule; second, as just mentioned, it is not holy writ. It is opinion. And whoever told you never to start a sentence with however is terribly misguided.”

“We need rules,” protested red shirt.

“We have rules,” Montgomery said. “Otherwise me to able you understand wouldn’t be.”

A chorus of “What?” broke out.

“Exactly,” said Montgomery. “Now, let’s see what you all have for the disputed phrase. However you may have it, it is likely to be understood; however, you may have it in a way that transgresses the expected norms of standard English.”

Those assembled surveyed their transcriptions. Aside from assorted other errors and inaccuracies, the following renditions were found:

…verbugustation, however that would have…
…verbogustation, however, that would have…
…verbogustation however, that would have…
…verbogustation. However that would have…
…verbogustation; however that would have…
…verbogustation; however, that would have…
…verbogustation. However, that would have…

“Formally,” Montgomery said, “only these last two are correct, and it is the last which I intended. Conjunctive adverbs are offset from their clauses with commas. If they come first in a clause, the preceding clause boundary is marked with a period or semicolon, as always. A however without commas setting it off is the other however.” Montgomery paused for the briefest of moments. “Which, however,” he added, “is the same however. It is simply differently used.”

Several of the scribblers were darting their eyes around at their friends to see if they had successfully parsed Montgomery’s latest utterance.

Montgomery continued, warming to the subject. “The ever – which, incidentally, is as etymologically puzzling as dog – is attached to wh-words to give them a sort of generalized, indefinite force: whoever said whatever whenever wherever however. (There may seem to be no whyever, but whyever shouldn’t there be?) As a conjunctive adverb, however is shortened from however this may be, which is why we treat it as a dependent clause. We see a similar shortening, for instance, in the use of as far as: whereas formerly all would say as far as ‘however’ goes, now many will say simply as far as ‘however’. Goes to show, doesn’t it?”

Montgomery smiled slightly and gave his little round button of office a tweak. “Clearly there is some confusion over this word; faced with it, we hover between certainty and despair, and know not how to veer. But let its form serve as a mnemonic to you: just as it has a w and then a v, you may think of it as having a single mark – a comma – after, and a double mark – a semicolon – before, or a double-strength pause – a period. Then your usage will not change as the weather.”

Another pause. Most of those who had been writing were no longer certain whether to write or not.

“However,” Montgomery added, “those are the formal rules, required of editors; linguists have the luxury of simply observing the variations. And in the Order of Logogustation we usually hew slightly more to the linguist’s side, with a healthy dose of fun tossed in.” He smiled. “Are we having fun yet?”

Red shirt, stuffing his materials in his bag, looked up. “Whatever.”

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trifle

Posted on May 4, 2010 | 1 comment

Other organizations have cake sales or bake sales or similar events. At the Order of Logogustation we’re just a little more paronomastic in our purveyance for mastication. This fact was gradually dawning on one of the visitors to our little sale, who was finding at every table nothing but variations on the same theme: a layered dessert, with a base of sponge cake or Swiss rolls soaking in peach juice and sherry, fruit and fruit-flavoured jelly next, then custard, and whipped cream on top.

“Lovely desserts,” said the gentleman, finishing his fourth bowl, “but it’s a bit odd that it’s all versions of the same dessert.”

“A bit odd?” said Maury. “A trifle bizarre, I’d say.”

He pointed at the sign hanging at the back of the room, which read A Trifle Bazaar.

The gentleman arched his left eyebrow, then peered at it again over his glasses, presumably so that he would not have to see it in focus. He made a sally of his own. “You’re trifling with me.”

Philippe, at an adjoining table, leaned forward and said, “Would you like to try fol another one? Mine is marked with a trefoil.” He displayed a three-ring shape.

“That could be trouble,” the gentleman said.

“Foiled again,” Philippe replied.

“At least you didn’t make it with truffles,” Maury noted.

Philippe was unruffled. “I was going to use the chocolate kind, not the fungus.”

Jess joined in from the other side. “Deviation is not brooked. No trufflemakers here. Trifles are very tribal.”

“So,” the gentleman said, “are you getting much traffic?”

“There may be later, when we have the raffle,” Jess said. “Then there may be a kerfuffle.”

“There was one last year,” Maury said, “because there was a mix-up. The winner took home not a trifle but a lifter.”

“Went home,” Jess said, “had some t, and came back with a rifle.”

Philippe rejoined. “I thought it was a filter that was won.”

“You don’t seem to have much in the way of filters around here,” the gentleman observed. “The language is open to an e flirt.”

Everyone paused and looked at him. They were all thinking that the Order of Logogustation could suit him to a t – he could become a lifer.

“But surely you are not saying,” he continued, “that truffle, trefoil, et cetera are all related to trifle.”

“Naturally not,” Philippe said. “We just jest.”

Maury explained. “Trifle comes from trufa, Spanish, ‘jest, leer’, or truffa, Italian, ‘cheat, con’. Now, however, although it is on the books as meaning ‘an insignificant thing’, the great majority of its use is as an indefinite quantifier. Like a bit, only fancier.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, stepping over to Philippe’s table, “that seems fitting enough, as I fancy a bit more.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting trifle and passing on the idea for the opening joke.

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pissaladière

Posted on May 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Mmmm… does this sound appetizing? I had some yesterday and it was good.

Whaddya mean, no?

OK, look, it has nothing to do with piss. And it’s not a salad (but see below: there is a cognate relation). And it has nothing to do with your – or anyone’s – derrière.

It’s also unrelated, as it happens, to pis (meaning “worse” or, vernacularly, “then”), picalilli, saloperie, palais de glace, the Salpêtrière, Place Pigalle, Camille Pissarro, or pizza – pizza the word, that is; it sure looks an awful lot like pizza the thing.

So what is the object of this word? It’s the Provençal answer to pizza, in fact: it’s a flat bread with onions, black olives, and anchovies. There are other seasonings, too: thyme and basil, perhaps, salt and pepper, and garlic.

Ah, now I have you a bit more interested, eh? Well, good. It’s not too often we taste an Occitan word.

Oh, stop. Occitan has no relation to occult. It’s a language, and its name actually comes from its word for “yes”, oc (whence also the area of France called Languedoc). It’s a romance language closely related to French and Catalan that is still spoken in the south of France. (Well, it’s not standardized, and there’s a fair amount of arguing about what version people should be speaking, and whether to call it Occitan or Provençal, but, hey, look, food!)

Anyway, where does this dogpile of a word come from, this overloaded verbal salad (two of everything: two a‘s, two i‘s, two e‘s, two s‘s, two loops with stems – p and d are the same form at 180-degree rotation – and two liquid consonants) that looks like it should be naming something more closely resembling, say, muffuletta? Well, the first part is from pissalat, which may look like what you’ll do after a few pints of beer, but you might do a bit less after eating one, because it’s Occitan for “anchovy” and comes ultimately from Latin piscis “fish”. Merging into it is salat, meaning “salted”, cognate with salt and, as I said, salad (an essential feature of salads used to be that they were salted). The ière is just a noun suffix comparable to the English agentive er suffix.

So if you don’t like the overtones of this word to English ears, just think of it as being a pizza légère. And just have a frickin’ bite, eh? And a glass of Tavel rosé to wash it down.

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A new way to be a complete loser

Posted on May 2, 2010 | 4 comments

I have just read an article in the New York Times, “The Self-Appointed Twitter Scolds,” about a set of people who have taken it on themselves to correct sloppy grammar on Twitter whenever and wherever they find it. Some even have automated programs that will send criticisms to complete strangers.

This is, perhaps, not surprising, but it is nonetheless disappointing. To think that there are people whose lives are so pathetically devoid of any sense of control or significance that they feel the need to dispense wholesale rudeness personally to anyone who fails to match their idea of grammatical perfection! These people need to go out and buy some manners. Even the cheap kind of manners they can get at discount stores will prevent this. This sort of behaviour is like walking down the sidewalk looking for people who are, for instance, wearing stripes with plaid, or even blue with green, and saying rude things to them about it.

I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it: The rules of language are made to serve communication, not the other way around. The rules of grammar that we have are a codification of common practices that arose through actual usage, and the point of them is to give people a clear and consistent means of communicating with each other – so one human mind can reach out and come into contact with another human mind. Grammar is the means. The moment it is taken as the end, we have what is now commonly known as a FAIL. To use a Buddhist analogy, what these people are doing is like focusing on the finger rather than on the moon that it is pointing at.

Or let me use an analogy familiar to concert-goers. How often have you been at a concert, or the opera or ballet, and heard someone across the theatre going “SSSHHHHH!” at someone? Tell me, now, how often have you heard the person they were shushing? The SSSHHHHH is louder and more disruptive than what it aims to correct. It is a form of rudeness pretending to be a form of enforcement of politeness.

Likewise, while it may be bad manners to tweet in all caps, it is much worse manners to send a tweet to someone out of the blue carping on their use of all caps. And while making a lot of typos may be a little distracting and may seem to show imperfect concern for the reader, that’s hardly at the level of rudeness shown by those who tweet back complaining about them.

The truth is that no one is a perfect user of English all the time. It’s not really possible, since there are points of dispute such that some people will think one thing correct and others will think a different thing correct. But, more than that, English is not one language with the same rules and structures all the time. It has a variety of levels of usage appropriate to different contexts. (See “An appreciation of English: A language in motion” for some background.) It is as wrong to use formal locutions in a casual context as vice versa, for instance. And certain grammatical “errors” can be a good way to signal a casual, friendly context – don’t say it ain’t so.

More to the point, one thing I have never failed to observe is that anyone who is inclined to be hostile about other people’s grammar inevitably makes mistakes and has false beliefs about grammar. Often the very thing they’re ranting about they’re mistaken about (see “When an ‘error’ isn’t”). But beyond that, you can feel sure that they will get other things wrong even by the prescriptive standards they adhere to, be they idioms, points of grammatical agreement, or what have you. And you can feel entirely certain that they are utterly uneducated in linguistics, having false beliefs about, for instance, what is and isn’t a word.

Am I advocating an “anything goes” approach to grammar, whereby we toss out all the rules? Of course not. I’m a professional editor, after all. If you want to deliver a polished message, you want to make sure that it doesn’t have deviations that will distract or annoy people. There is a reason for having standards – we want to make sure we all have a point of reference so we can communicate with each other. But, again, the point of those standards is to serve communication, not the other way around. They are tools. They are not indicators of a person’s quality. An infraction of them causes no one injury.

And breaking grammatical rules is simply nowhere near as bad as being unspeakably rude to people about their use of grammar. Let it go, people. The English language is not being destroyed by people who make typos. The most damage that has been done to English has been done by people who appointed themselves its correctors.

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