brachydactyly

Posted on February 10, 2010 | 1 comment

Oh no! Have you heard about Megan Fox? It’s terrible! She’s got this…

Who’s Megan Fox? Oh, you know, that sexpot who looks kinda like Angelina Jolie. Anyway, if you look at her thumb, it’s, like, really stubby! She’s got this condition! It’s called, uh, barky, bracky, uh…

Brachydactyly. Yeah, that’s it. So that’s really nasty, right? What does it mean?

Well, brachy is from the Greek for “short” and dactyl is from the Greek for “finger” (or “digit”). And the y is a suffix that in this case indicates a quality or condition. It shows up in words from company to courtesy to infamy to poesy to idolatry to, well, syndactyly, polydactyly, brachydactyly…

So anyway, it means she has one or more short digits.

But while saying “short-digit-ism” or its equivalent might be fine for speakers of some other languages, it’s of course far too prosaic and plebeian in English. If it’s medical, technical, high-end, formally defined, et cetera, it really helps to have a nice polysyllabic formed from Latin and/or Greek roots.

So we have brachydactyly, which is, after all, a defined condition – or, rather, about a dozen defined conditions (indicated by letters and numbers, e.g., A1, D) with varying manifestations and severity; it may be a part of a syndrome, and it can also be a symptom of some other conditions. For most people who have it, it’s perhaps a bit unaesthetic (Megan Fox apparently had a thumb double – somebody else’s hand – for a closeup in a recent cell phone ad), but nothing more; in severe cases, it can be debilitating; if it’s part of a syndrome or another condition, that syndrome or condition could have some very bad effects that much outweigh the problem of a stubby thumb or toe.

But, now, let’s taste this word a bit more. The first thing we notice is that it’s a long word for something markedly short. We can also note that a dactyl – be it a finger or a three-beat metrical foot – has three parts, whereas this has five (syllables), made of a trochee plus – yes – a dactyl, peaking in the middle with the stressed dac.

Probably the next thing you will notice is those three y‘s. It’s as though one is looking at one’s claviform thumb and saying “Why, why, why?” There are five ascenders to go with those three descenders. This word sticks out in all directions – as though it has seven digits. And in the middle of that it has the ac and ac again, and the one other x-height letter, r. Thirteen letters in all… And quite a few words hidden in them, some rather arch, so you may want to be chary.

And how can it be at all pretty? The two non-y vowels are both that flat /æ/ sound – brachy rhymes with tacky, hacky, lackey, and assorted other generally unpretty words. The whole word echoes with “Yakety yak! Don’t talk back!” and maybe with Hacky Sack (the playing of which may be impaired by brachydactyly). It has a clicky rhythm like a skeleton tapdance, too. And it starts with this brach that looks like it has a jaw-jutting “ch” but gives that hard back [k] instead – dissonance right from the beginning, and an echo of brackish to add to it. As for the rest, you’ll probably think of pterodactyl before you think of dactylography. The yly helps that – it looks like a bat hanging upside down.

But for all that, brachydactyly is endearing to me. Why? Because I’m sure it’s the longest and most technical-sounding word many entertainment reporters will have to say all year. And they can’t even find an acronym or abbreviation to say instead!

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pinchbeck

Posted on February 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

As much as I have reason to like names ending in beck – as my own does – I find this one a bit less than likeable. It’s the pinch, certainly, which induces a distinct physical recollection of discomfort. English got the word pinch from French pincer, and it has taken the tightness of inch (a small space, and we can see how it tightens cinch too) and blended it with the sharpness of pin. Its tone is not helped by such collocations as penny pincher and in a pinch. (Nor is it helped by nurses who say, just before sticking a needle in you, “You’ll feel just a little pinch.”)

The pinch in pinchbeck does not actually come originally from our word pinch, though (not that that matters much for the user who can still see it sitting there); Pinchbeck is the name of a place in Lincolnshire, England – a marshy area that has pumps keeping it suitably drained, and canals cutting up the countryside. Its name comes from Old English for either “minnow stream” or “finch ridge”; it was named a millennium ago, and has been inhabited ever since, so no one’s completely sure anymore, and in form it could have come from either.

But it matters less where pinchbeck comes from than who came from Pinchbeck: a progenitor of Christopher Pinchbeck, a 17th- and 18th-century London clockmaker. He was a very clever sort; he made a musical clock for Louis XIV and an organ for the Great Mogul. He also came up with an alloy of copper and zinc that looked rather nice and somewhat like gold, and that alloy has since borne his name. He used it to make affordable ornaments and jewelry for travelling (highway robbery was common in the literal sense in those days; now it’s what you pay jewellers). But some other jewellers got into the practice of passing it off as actual gold, and so Pinchbeck’s good name became tarnished by way of the devaluation of his eponym – pinchbeck has come to mean something cheap, tawdry, or counterfeit, and in fact by scarcely half a century after Christopher Pinchbeck’s death his name was being extended metaphorically to devalue all manner of things and properties, concrete and abstract.

Perhaps he should have seen it coming. Already by 1600, 70 years before his birth, pinchback was used to refer to a miser, and the best part of a century before that, pynchbeke – which would in modern respelling be pinchbeck – was being used to mean “miserly”. Were the users psychic? Had the future been adumbrated to them through some cosmic mystery? No, the word came about through ordinary English compounding – pinch, the actual word, and then beck from back or beak, it’s not certain. But essentially the same miserly meaning was also conveyed by other pinch compounds: pinch-belly and even pinchfart. (Pinch your nose!) So he was in a bit of a pinch from the beginning, the beck notwithstanding.

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esoterogeny

Posted on February 9, 2010 | 2 comments

Suppose you were part of a culture that felt itself in some way threatened by encroachment or assimilation from another culture with which you were in common contact, or that anyway you wanted to maintain your distinctiveness. What might you do?

Well, you could decree that no one in your culture adopt key sartorial or culinary habits of the other culture; that’s been done. You could come up with a variety of ways of doing and being and appearing that are different. But there’s something else you could do that costs less and is perhaps even more fundamental to culture: you could make your language more distinctive, harder for the outsiders to understand. For instance, you could add complexity to the structure of your language; you could add new lexical items; you could add new phonemes.

In fact, this very process has been observed by linguists in Pacific nations (for example Papua New Guinea, where there are many languages in a comparatively small area) as well as in Africa (where there is in many places a similar density of languages). And what is this process of making a language hard to understand, more of an in-group thing, called? The term being passed like a doobie from one linguist to the next is esoterogeny, a word first confected by Malcolm Ross in the late 1980s.

Well, that’s a nice, long, somewhat obscure-looking word, isn’t it? Actually, if you know your Greek roots, you have some good clues to its meaning. You know what esoteric means – Greek eso means “inside”, and esotero is the comparative form (“more inside”); esoteric refers to things that are in-group or secret knowledge, or that are anyway not easy to understand. And ogeny shows up as a suffix on various words (ontogeny, phylogeny) and its more basic form ogen or gen on numerous others (hydrogen, oxygen); the root gen has to do with being born or becoming (and appears with the vowel removed in the word cognate, which I toss about and which means “having the same origin” – it’s not cognate with cognition). So esoterogeny (which will have the stress on the middle o) is origination in, or because of, obscurity or in-groupness.

It has a few nice hints and echoes: besot, teratogen (something that causes birth defects), perhaps ornery, soterology (christology) or soteriology (doctrine of salvation), restore, tosser, Rogaine, energy, gentry, estrogen, oh, well, a whole bunch of different things, any one of which looks like it’s been chopped up and tossed into this letter salad. Seriously, did your eyes almost cross the first time you looked at this word? Why do scholars insist on coming up with this jargon, anyway? I mean, it trips along on the tip of the tongue once you sort out how to say it (“Oh, what’s that called – it’s on the tip of my tongue…”). But couldn’t they come up with something more patent? You know, exoteric?

Well, of course, concision of terminology and a sense of precision give some justification for scholarly language, as does maintaining a certain tone. But no one should be surprised at the existence of this word or the concept it refers to – or the desire to increase linguistic distance. Like, d00d, teh jargonz iz teh r0xx0rz if u want 2 b l33t! Im in ur langwidj 3sot3r0genizing ur wordz…

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awkward

Posted on February 8, 2010 | 1 comment

This is just a perfect word for its meaning, isn’t it? You can hear the awk! of someone slipping on marbles, or trying to get a couch through a doorway, or finding himself at a dinner party with his ex, or going in through the out door or up the down staircase. The kw makes the same questioning, perhaps querulous, sound as qu, and the wkw just looks like a person trying to handle large and difficult things on each side – a pair of sedated albatrosses, perhaps. Oh, wait, add the a‘s: awkwa. Now they’re albatrosses with fish hanging out of their beaks. Or, if not albatrosses, auks (no relation, etytmologically). Or two grocery bags on each arm with a jug of pop in each hand. Or… oh, try it yourself! There are surely many awkward images that you can conjure up.

For all that, of course, awkwa is symmetrical, which isn’t necessarily all that awkward. Until you blow the symmetry with the rd, that is… like a couple of intruders into a nice, tidy little party. But the rd allows the awk to be followed by a draw-back… again, ever so appositely.

Where does this gawky awk-word come from? Well, the ward is the same as in backward and forward; it means “in the direction” and is related to Latin vertere “turn” (it is also related to worth via the sense “become”). And awk? It’s an adjective, not used by itself since the 1600s, meaning “in the wrong direction” – or, as we sometimes say, “backasswards.” That’s also what awkward first meant. Apparently awk wasn’t long enough – or awkward enough. But why stop there? My friend Barry Clegg, talking of self-describing words (e.g., pentasyllabic), mentioned awkwardnessful.

Awkward is something one often feels; it is often modified by somewhat or a bit. But various things are awkward, too. Family photos are a popular one lately – see awkwardfamilyphotos.com. But the top five nouns preceded by awkward, in reverse order, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, are situation, pause, moment, position, and, in the top number one spot of awkwardnessfulness…

…silence.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting awkward.

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pika, pica

Posted on February 7, 2010 | 6 comments

“Isn’t he cute?”

Elisa Lively was showing us some pictures of a hiking trip in the Rockies. The one at hand was of a round, furry little thing with rounded ears and a small tail. It was playing peek-a-boo behind a rock.

“Is that a pika?” I asked. (I used the anglicized “pie-ca” pronunciation.)

“It doesn’t look like a magpie to me,” Maury commented.

“Yes! No… what?” Elisa said, first to me, then to Maury, then to space.

“Pica is Latin for ‘magpie,'” Maury said.

“This is pika with a k,” I said.

“I see,” Maury said. Or maybe it was “I ‘c‘.”

“Wait,” said Elisa. “Pica with a c is like when I used to eat clay when I was a kid.”

“A compulsion to eat non-food things,” Maury said, “so named because magpies will eat just about anything.”

“They could have named it after goats,” I noted. “Caper or capra. If it had been caper it might have been especially picaresque. Capra seems to me a bit more of a wonderful word, to be frank.”

“Capraphilia?” Maury said macaronically. “Well, that does sound like a kind of pica. But yuck.”

“Pikas do eat their own doo-doo,” I mentioned, “like rabbits. They pass everything through twice.”

Elisa pulled a face. “That’s not why they’re called that, though, is it?”

I waved the suggestion away lightly. “No, with a k it’s from a Siberian language, Evenki.”

“Siberia!” Elisa said. “They get around for such little things.”

“How big is it, anyway?” Maury gestured at the photo.

“About eight inches, I think,” Elisa said. “I didn’t place a ruler for scale,” she added, a rather dry remark for her.

“A pica ruler?” I quipped.

“About forty-eight picas, by the sound of it,” Maury riposted.

Elisa looked at the two of us and then at the photo and appeared to be about to ask for clarification. We didn’t wait. “A pica is a measurement of type,” I said. “One sixth of an inch. There are twelve points to a pica.”

“It was originally a size of type, when they used to refer to type sizes by name,” Maury added. “It seems to have been named after an ecclesiastical directory, which was set in type of that size; the directory in turn was probably named after a magpie, and I don’t know why. Something to do with its colour and appearance, maybe.”

“Well, those magpies do collect,” I said, not really expecting the double pun to be appreciated.

“Yes, they’re not pikers,” Maury tossed in. “Or perhaps they are. And on what pike did you pick this little peeker?”

“It was near Lake Louise,” she said, “back towards Skoki Lodge, actually.”

“Oh, well, that’s suitable,” I said. “There’s a ski run on the back side of the Lake Louise ski area called Pika. You would have passed it on your way to Skoki.” I paused and a little lightbulb went on over my head. I grinned. Neither of my interlocutors were ski racing fans but I didn’t care. “Lake Louise is also where Picabo Street won her first World Cup downhill victory. She won there the following year, too. Not on Pika, though – that’s an easy run.”

“Peek-a-boo Street?” Elisa said, her brow furrowing. “What are you talking about?”

“Spelled P-i-c-a-b-o,” I explained. “The Lindsay Vonn of the mid-nineties.”

Elisa and Maury looked at each other for a moment and then Elisa flipped to the next picture. “Now, this is Skoki Lodge,” she said. “It’s run by this nice guy called Leo Mitzel and his wife, Katie…”

Thanks to Theresa and Alan Yoshioka for suggesting pica.

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scrum

Posted on February 6, 2010 | 3 comments

Here’s another one of those bunchy scr words (e.g., scrimp). It may bring to mind some other images that would be a bit O.T.; one may even think of delicious food (with or without crumbs) without being bumptious. It can be given a military drumming sound with a roll of the /r/, and it also has echoes of scram, and those work well enough with its senses.

I should say first that this word was brought to my mind by the title of a guy at another company who I’m working with on a project: Scrum Master. I had not seen this term before. It turns out that scrum (often capped, Scrum, and occasionally needlessly all-capped, SCRUM) is, in this usage, a software development process wherein cross-functional software development teams work in defined phases called sprints and have daily brief meetings as well. There’s a lot more to it, including calling clients and managers chickens and the developers pigs, but I leave it to the interested reader to look it up for details.

The term scrum was borrowed for this approach from rugby because in rugby the whole team “tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth.” I do feel obliged to point out that, in rugby, scrum refers not per se to the cooperation of the team or to, say, a huddle, but rather to the mayhem and mêlée between the teams. From that it has gained the more general sense “a confused, noisy throng,” as the OED puts it.

And where did rugby get the term? Well, it’s short for scrummage. The other version of this word that is used commonly in games such as American football is scrimmage. Are you thinking “Hey, -age is a suffix, so how can scrummage be the source of scrum rather than the other way around?” Well, the -age noun suffix is a reinterpretation, to suit the sense, of an original -ish. But wait! Scrimish is not “like a scrim”; it in turn is an alteration of skirmish, taking on that bunchy scr.

We know what a skirmish is, of course. It’s a small, disorganized engagement between two groups of troops in a war – like rugby, but with more (or maybe less) blood. But where does the word skirmish come from? Well, not “like a skirm”; it’s from French escarmoche, which is from Italian scaramuccia. We don’t know where that term came from, but we do know where else it’s gone: it was applied as a name to a roguish clown in Commedia dell’Arte. And that name was also borrowed into French as Scaramouche.

Scaramouche, Scaramouche… I will have to ask my colleague: Will you do the fandango? (If he finds it very very frightening, or moves from rhapsody to protocol, he may pale in response…)

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wrest

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 2 comments

Picture this: You grab a jar – say, marmalade – and grab and twist to free the lid, but though you wrap your grip around it and your wrist wrangles and wrestles with it and you wrench and wring, and even writhe and wriggle on the floor, you cannot wrest the top from the jar. In your wrath you whack it on the counter, break the glass and strew it all over, and wreck formica, marmalade, and sandwich all. And then, overwrought at your snack gone wrong, you rest… and stew.

Not all of those wr words are related etymologically. But nearly all partake of a wr phonaestheme that gives a flavour of twisting to what words it attaches to (you will note, however, that not all wr words partake in this). Actually, it would be better now to call it a graphaestheme, because it’s the written form that distinguishes it; although centuries ago it actually was pronounced [wr], now it is simply [r] – you may observe that your lips round as you say it, but they also round when you say just r. Go find a friend and say wrest and rest in random alternation, with your normal pronunciation, and see if they can tell which you’re saying. You might be thinking w, but it has no appreciable effect on your actual physical act of pronunciation.

But one reason for this whole grouping of wr words to do with twisting is that several of them are related. Wrestle is formed on the basis of wrest, which originally had to do specifically with a twisting exertion, and is related to the word for the body part that tends to make that exertion, wrist; they are both also related to writhe (which in turn is related to wreath).

On the other hand, some words that might seem related are not. Wrought, for instance, is formed from a past tense of an older form of work – the regular form worht (like modern worked) underwent a metathesis (transposition) to wroht or wroght. But, ah, it is somewhat flavoured by association, isn’t it?

Wrest is less used than several other wr words, and this is no doubt at least in part because it sounds exactly like a very commonly used word. It tends to show up in a few limited contexts. One rarely talks of wresting the lid from a jar (and if you were to write that, odds are good readers would think you meant wrestling). Rather, we wrest control or wrest power (from or away from someone or something) – or we try to do so. We may also try to wrest a living from some barely tractable land or field of endeavour: we go west, strew our seeds, and stew and swear and sweat… it will double you (w) over before you can rest. And you thought the jar was a tough twist!

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting today’s word.

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vibrio

Posted on January 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

Now, this is a nice word to have on your lips and tongue: it starts with a vibration – /v/ – and at the next stop releases with a trill. Such a stylish-looking word, too: like two people dining at a table – candles i i, and is that a bottle of Chianti b? One of the people is wearing a v-neck; the other, across the way, has a – turtleneck? choker? halo? And perhaps vibrio is the cell phone in her purse, or the setting she has it at for quiet; maybe it’s the car they drove to the restaurant in; perhaps it’s the Italian soda in her glass, or a name for the seafood appetizer they’ve ordered.

Well, as long as there aren’t any vibrios in their water, soda, or seafood. Oh, that would be bad. The word may be nice on your lips and tongue, but its object not so much. Um, I hate to break it to you, but the most common collocation of this word is Vibrio choleræ. Does that second word there shake a frightening image out of your memory tree? Look, the word may seem nice, but it’s no gentleman, cholera.

Vibrio, you see, is a type of bacteria, and with a capital V it’s the name of a genus of bacteria. Along with choleræ its members include vulnificus (oh, my, that’s a villainous-looking word), parahæmolyticus (kill you just by saying it), fischeri (which is symbiotic with the fishery – in fact, it produces bioluminescence), and harveyi (which also glows, and, like fischeri, is able to communicate with other bacteria). Also quite a few others. Many of them are very bad for marine critters, and many of them are bad for people too. But especially choleræ – no one wants cholera. It may come to you in water, but you won’t have much water left in you if you get it.

So how did these microbes, some of which so unpleasant, gain a name like some Italian fashion god? Well, they have flagella – little whip-like hairs (many have just one each) – that vibrate to help move the beastie. Vibrios are generally shaped like s or like a comma, by the way. But while a comma may come with a pause, this one is not a pause that refreshes.

I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, so word tasting notes will be more sporadic until early February.

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bodkin

Posted on January 22, 2010 | 2 comments

Ods bodkin! Is this a dagger I see before me? Well, yes, but wrong play. If you know this word at all, it’s a fair bet you know it from one place and think of one phrase with it: “When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?”

Yes, it’s that word from the most famous soliloquy in the English language, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” (translation: “Should I kill myself? Why not?”). Well, that speech is laden like an overgrown, overripe fruit tree with what linguists call “low-frequency words” (you don’t see them much!) – and, of course, oft-quoted phrases. And what instrument can help one to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, cut out the contumely, and unbind the fardels? Why, a bare bodkin.

Words, words, words… And what the heck do those words mean? Ay, there’s the rub. That soliloquy is worth a week’s worth of word tasting notes at the very least. Well, one at a time, and perhaps not all together; otherwise you would get something truly epic in your inbox. First to the bodkin! As word taster David Moody, who recommended this word, says, “if one needs to use a bare bodkin on oneself, it is a body’s kin, a boon to end what can so easily become a boondoggle…” A consummation devoutly to be wished, but we’re heading for undiscovered country here…

But what a punk little word it is, no? The kin is a diminutive – well, it is in some other words, and is thought to be in this one. (Actually no one is really sure where this word comes from; it seems to have appeared as though floating in midair, but it was around centuries before Shakespeare – Chaucer used the word too.) Kin can also call to mind family. Its shape is given a kick by the k. The bod is, well, a clear echo of body and perhaps of bawd too (“Get thee to a nunnery”? Nunnery was also a slang term for a whorehouse). It has that little perk like bud, but it’s not at all bad. It’s a very round little thing, too: three circles between two lines.

Put together, bodkin is more like a pumpkin than a poniard, but its object is something of the latter – a dagger, or an awl-like implement for piercing fabric, or a pin-shaped hair fastener. You probably don’t have one. Hamlet may not have, either – he used a sword, but in the end foiled and was foiled. Idiomatically, God has one: the expression of surprise ods bodkin means “God’s bodkin,” and evidently trades mainly on the rhyme. It is a family name, too: you may at some point meet a person with the last name Bodkin, and I don’t know whether there is a relation to this word (though most of us have relatives who are rather sharp or, anyway, brief and to the point). And then there was that hard-boiled Shakespearean-era murder mystery that was a hit at the Edmonton Fringe Festival two decades ago (I was there but missed seeing it), The Maltese Bodkin by David Belke.

Well, I think we have covered the point here, and may put up. The hour is late, after all. To bed, to bed… To sleep? Perchance to dream!

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high muck-a-muck

Posted on January 21, 2010 | 1 comment

Oh, you’ve known one of those lucky ducks who have it made in the shade – a whale of a guy, a mogul, a big kahuna with lots of moola, so stuck up, so high and mighty he leaves you muttering – or singing with Billy Joel,

All the servants in your new hotel
Throw their roses at your feet, ohh
Fool them all, but baby I can tell
You’re no stranger to the street

Yes, the nose may be high in the air, but the feet are still stuck in the muck. And we all know anyway, don’t we, that what goes on at those upper levels is a dirty business – mucking around with all sorts of dark and desperate things.

Well, we may call such a person a high muck-a-muck (or even, by further alteration and with a more muttering sound, a high muckety-muck), but what really counts is not his dirty shoes but his full belly… at least in the origins of the phrase.

High muck-a-muck, you see, may have been attracted to some relevant-feeling English words (with that nice contrast, too, between the lofty and the… well, in fact, muck referred first to dung, and is also cognate way back there with mucus), but it comes from Chinook (west coast) jargon hayo makamak, “plenty food.” That, in turn, comes from Nootka words for “ten” and for the part of the whale meat between the blubber and the flesh.

Some days you eat the whale… some days you are the whale.

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