pitchblende

Posted on February 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

I sang in an excellent concert this evening, Verdi’s Requiem with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir (hence my presence), conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This word would thus seem appropriate.

What? It’s not about blending pitches? Well, I knew that, actually. It’s not some move or measurement in baseball, either. And while the p, b, and d are reminiscent of musical notes (two of them backwards), I don’t find the word euphonious, though its central consonant cluster does remind me of some words from when I used to sing with a choir that did music from the Republic of Georgia. In fact, one would expect its association with music to be mainly with rock music. I don’t say that because there have been at least two bands named after it – Pitchblende, a 1990s American art-punk band, and Pitchblend, a 2000s British alternative rock band. No, I say it because pitchblende is a rock.

Pitchblende is a compound word, just as it appears to be, and entirely from Germanic roots. The pitch is the same pitch as the sticky black tarry stuff (unrelated to the other pitch, which has evolved to refer to inclination, tone, etc., as a noun and throwing, etc., as a verb). The colour of pitchblende is very dark, just like pitch, and just like the mood in a requiem. The blende is misleading, which is apposite given that it basically means “misleading” – its source is a Germanic verb blenden, “deceive”, and it is used of ores that look like something useful but aren’t. Sort of like the e on the end of it, which not only is silent but does not even affect the quality of the preceding vowel. Pitchblende was useless at the time it was named. That’s because nobody had a use for uranium at the time. Pitchblende, you see, is an older name for uraninite.

But, while pitchblende is uranium oxide, it also has some other things in it as a product of the inevitable decay of uranium – which is like the inevitable decay of the flesh (libera me, domine), but uranium isotopes do nothing but decay, half-life through half-life (is that an asymptote to morte æterna?). One of the products of that decay is helium, first found on earth in this rock, though it didn’t make it light. Any light, in fact, is more likely to come from the glow of radium if you extract it from the ore: pitchblende is also the rock in which Marie Curie discovered radium.

Which is why miners in the Joachimsthal* mines, where Curie got her pitchblende, had unusually high rates of cancer. But their excess mortality is also not why pitchblende is an appropriate word for my concert this evening. It’s because of the radioactivity. The Verdi concert will have its own radio activity, you see: on CBC 2’s Choral Concert on the morning of April 18 (2010). It’s really worth a listen – Noseda is a fantastic conductor.

*Joachimsthal is where silver coins were minted in the 16th century that came to be called Joachimsthalers, and then thalers for short, which mutated to dollars. Joachimsthal is now called Jáchymov, because it is now in the Czech Republic. So from coins it has passed to Czechs. But they still get credit!

Thanks to Alan Yoshioka for suggesting pitchblende.

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squee

Posted on February 20, 2010 | 6 comments

“Dude,” Jess said, setting her pint down and leaning forward, “let it go. You’re harshing the squee.”

“I…” I paused. “What?” I glanced at Daryl, who seemed to have understood her.

“You’re harshing the squee,” Jess repeated. “Don’t go pick pick picking at fiction all the time. Willing suspension of disbelief! Sci fi is allegory anyway, so never mind about their needing three years to learn the language after arriving on the planet.”

“Harshing the squee.” I pulled out my soft leather Letts and my Cross mechanical pencil and wrote it down. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

Daryl reached into the basket and grabbed a sweet potato fry. “It means you’re pissing in the popcorn.” He dipped the fry and relaxed back with it.

I looked at the two of them. “This is apparently a term I’m supposed to know? It’s current? Squee?”

Jess smiled. “You’re getting old. And out of touch.” She stuck her tongue out.

“Squee is a noise fangirls make,” Daryl said. “You know, anime fangirls, so excitable. It started out as onomatopoeia –” (“An ideophone,” Jess interjected) –”and has become a verb and a noun and probably an adjective too somewhere.” Ah, yes, the versatility of the English language – and of ideophones, which are words that have a performative aspect to them, like lickety-split, whoosh, and so on.

“No doubt,” I observed, “the fangirls become ‘woo girls’ once they’re old enough to get into bars – those girls who scream, ‘Partyyyyyy! Wooooo!'” I sipped my dark pint. “Squee is a really nice, expressive word. It has an imitative feel to it, as you say, but also draws on some good current phonaesthemes. It echoes squeal and squeak, using the /skw/ to intensify the high-pitched /i/, sliding in on the /s/ and then, like a shuffleboard puck, knocking the rest of the word forward with the /kw/.”

“And that /i/ by itself,” Jess added. “An expression of glee, as in whee and whoopee and yee-haw.”

“And there’s also the hint of squeeze and squeegee cut off,” I mused. I reached for a sweet potato fry and found I was taking the last one.

“Another reference you’re too old to know,” Daryl said, “is that Squee is also the name of the main character in a comic book series.”

“Oh, come now,” Jess said. “Surely James has read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.”

I looked at them with a slight smile and washed down the rest of my beer.

Daryl was getting busy with his iPhone. After a moment he held it out to me. It was displaying the webpage tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Squee , which turned out to be a treasure trove of citations from popular culture of uses of squee. I scrolled and read. Scroll scroll scroll. “Only tweenage screams of ecstasy have the strength to cut a hole in space itself!” Scroll scroll scroll. I stopped and stared at yet another must-take-out-my-Letts-and-Cross-pencil word. “Nerdgasm!” I looked up. “Squee!”

The waitress had just happened by at that very moment. Jess turned to her and said, “He needs another.”

The waitress looked at me. “I think I might need to see some ID.”

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phylum

Posted on February 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

The first I ever recall seeing this word was in an amusing collective art project called Beyond Exceptional Pass, displayed in the Whyte gallery at the Banff Public Library in 1978 (and preserved in a book, of which my father bought a copy – the which is now sitting in my lap as I write this). It was a fanciful natural and explorational history of an exceedingly strange place somewhere in the Canadian Rockies (in the Rear Ranges, to be precise). Somewhere around Tunoa Vale and Wake-Up Col, in an area explored by such notables as the Swedish pair Bjorn Frie and Liv Frie, along with the Azzyu lichens, are various exotic life forms belonging to the forgotten phylum. The explorers, not knowing just how to deal with them, assigned them all to the phylum Phorgettum.

Those who have studied biology and remembered much of it will know that a phylum is a rather high level in taxonomy, a division of kingdom and itself in turn divided into classes. Originally, the idea was that all members of the phylum were assumed to have had a common ancestor; now it’s more accurate to say they share a basic body plan.

So humans, for instance, are members of the phylum Chordata (of the kingdom Animalia), because we have backbones. So do an absolutely huge number of the critters around us; they’re all in the same phylum as we are. Taxonomically, we humans are just off in a little corner: Mammalia are just one type of chordate, and primates just one type of mammal, and hominids just one type of primate… In the kingdom Animalia, there are about 35 phyla, of which most are slimy things you’re probably never heard of, including quite a few different kinds of worms, which are apparently more different from one another than we are from, say, fish. And while there are over 100,000 species of Chordata and well over a million species of Arthropoda (which includes insects), some of these phyla have fewer than 100 species; two of them have one each (Placozoa and Micrognathozoa).

But I’ve been encountering the term phylum lately in linguistic contexts. When we study languages and their relations to one another, a phylum really is a group that is assumed to have a common single ancestor; family is another word sometimes used interchangeably. From that proto-whatever, various dialects formed and then diverged enough to be distinct languages (the line between dialect and language is very fuzzy, but at a certain point you know it’s a different language), and those diverged some more and so on. Indo-European is one language phylum. In Africa, there are generally thought to be four phyla: Afroasiatic (which includes Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Hausa and Somali, and a few hundred others), Nilo-Saharan (which includes Maasai and couple hundred you’re sure never to have heard of), Khoisan (which includes a couple dozen languages of the “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” – languages with a lot of click sounds), and Niger-Congo (which includes more than a thousand languages, some 500 of which are Bantu languages, ranging from Swahili to Zulu and Xhosa – yes, Xhosa is Bantu, not Khoisan). The especially interesting thing is that if you draw a tree of descent and divergence of the Niger-Congo languages, you have all these branches off near the top with just a few languages on them, and further down some branches with more languages, and then, way down in one corner several levels down, are all those Bantu languages. It’s like going down a hall with offices off it, opening a door into one office and finding doors into a few other offices from that office, and then opening what looks like a closet door in one of those offices and finding a concert hall.

It seems that in languages, as in creatures, most branches at high levels of division don’t branch that much further, but some just keep going and going and going. It’s sort of like file folders – real ones or ones in your computer: many have just a few items in them, but some have subfolders within subfolders within subfolders, and they’re pretty stuffed. Well, that’s just the way you file ’em.

Phylum is clearly taken from Greek, with that ph (which is typically either professorial or, lately, rad); its etymon is phulon “race, tribe”. It brings to mind (for classicists) the Battle of Phyle, about 404 BC, which was fought to restore democracy to Athens. It may also make one think of philtrum, the grooved bit of your upper lip under your nose. It may seem a lumpy kind of word, perhaps presenting itself humbly; at the very least, it has a softness and roundness to it, and nothing especially sharp-seeming. Which is fair enough for such a blunt instrument. It cannot escape having a bit of a silly or jokey overtone for me… presumably because of my first experience of it.

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shrove

Posted on February 17, 2010 | 2 comments

Just as Thanksgiving is often (especially in the US) called Turkey Day (an appellation I detest, incidentally, perhaps even more than I detest May Two-Four for Victoria Day), Shrove Tuesday is often called Pancake Tuesday. But shrove does not mean “pancake” (“Wouldja like some maple syrup on yer shrove there?”).

In some other countries, the same day – the last day before Lent – is called Fat Tuesday, but, of course, in the local language: in French, Mardi Gras. The reason is the same reason as calling it Pancake Tuesday: traditionally, one ate up all one’s remaining store of the richer foods – which includes the eggs, milk, and butter used in pancakes, and whatever other fat you may have – before starting the penitential season of Lent, forty days of giving things up. Such as, you know, fun. But shrove does not mean “fat”.

Fasting of course also meant giving up meat. Goodbye to meat! Or, in Latin, carne vale! …Which is a purported etymon of carnival (which is now also the name of a cruise line on whose ships you can eat rich foods nonstop). The point is definitely to party hearty! Woo hoo! Get porked up on pancakes (and bacon, too, I reckon, and steaks, and so on, chocolate too, for sure), and then – if you’re a Catholic, as everyone in Western Europe was (or else!) when this tradition started – you go to confession to be purged of your sins (possibly after going to a different altar to be purged of your gastronomic sins).

And what is confession, penance, and absolution? It’s shrift. That noun is formed from the verb shrive, which has as its past tense shrove. They are all related to words for writing, including the whole script and scribe family. Now, shrove does have a past participle, shriven, so you might expect that the Tuesday on which one goes to shrive would be Shriven Tuesday or Shrift Tuesday, but for some reason it has become shrove. Perhaps because shrove is easier to say with a mouth full of pancakes.

It really is a mouth-full kind of word, isn’t it? The whole thing can be said with the tongue very concave. There are some foodstuffs that have a shr connection – shrimp, shrooms, Shreddies – while other words using it can be less pleasing: shrew, shriek, shrill. The ove, which may recall eggs, gives it a bit of a resonance of shovel, which is what one does to pancakes today, into one’s mouth. And then one hovers by the griddle awaiting more.

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cloaca

Posted on February 16, 2010 | 1 comment

I don’t know whether you’ll find this word pretty, with its collection of five round letters and a tall, straight one. It has a certain prettiness of sound, at least in the opening: the aspiration on the /k/ spreads onto the /l/, devoicing it, making that voiceless liquid which seems so mystical and charming in Welsh (written ll), and with the stop at the beginning it is rather reminiscent of the voiceless lateral affricate famous in Tibetan (written lh as in Lhasa) and also present in Icelandic (written ll), among other languages.

It’s a word that seems to involve a relaxing effect, too: the unstopping at the beginning, the easing into the voice, the relaxation of the lip muscles from the tight ring at /o/ to the wider /æ/ and then the fully relaxed final vowel. It makes me think of Dulcolax, a brand name for a laxative that, the way they say it on their commercials, seems almost to have a laxative effect by itself.

And fitting that cloaca should seem laxative, just as it is fitting that it anagrams to lo, caca. Oh, its referent is something you will want to cloak (perhaps in a garderobe – which means “cloakroom” but in medieval times was also a word for an indoor outhouse, as it were). A cloaca, you see, is a waste canal. If cloaca sounds like it should be a kind of bird, well, it’s a kind of thing that birds (and monotremes, e.g., the platypus) have: a single excretory outlet, rather than the two that mammals have (known generally as “number one” and “number two”).

It’s also a kind of thing that cities have. Most cities don’t call their sewers cloacae, but the Romans did – why not? It’s their word, taken right from them, and derived in its turn from cluere, verb, “purge”. Rome had its Circus Maximus; it also had – and in fact still has – its Cloaca Maxima, running in a tunnel under its fora and letting out in the Tiber. (Now it just drains rain, but it was formerly a full-on sewer, and a big one.)

And it’s a kind of thing some art galleries have. Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has made several versions of a machine he calls Cloaca. It is “fed” a meal twice a day, and that is processed through a series of containers, which emulate the action of the human digestive system. At the end of it is a conveyor belt, which carries away what comes out of the end of the “digestive” system.

I suppose now would not be a good time to mention that cloaca also has echoes of chocolate, would it? I might be safer noting the hint of Coca-Cola. Well, anyway, I think we’ve gotten to the bottom of this word.

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Valentine

Posted on February 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sweetnessheart, o darling mine,
won’t you be my Valentine?
If your sweet heart shall prove contrarian,
I’ll be valetudinarian.
For my love, be a Roman saint
(who maybe is and maybe ain’t,
and was not one but really two,
martyred for what? – we never knew;
the basis for romantic glory
is a much-later-made-up story).
Gelasius I (a pope) et alia,
to put an end to Lupercalia
(a pagan fest whose prime utility
was the promotion of fertility),
placed something meant to be contrary
upon the ides of February:
a day for saints of deeds unknown.
But, my oh my, how it has grown.
A.D. four-ninety-six, it’s chaste;
by fifteenth century we’re faced
with drawing sweethearts’ names by lot:
your Valentine is who you’ve got.
And now it’s chocolates, roses, cards,
inducing girls to let down guards…
The letter V sure plays its part:
the bottom half of every heart.
Why not? It revs some words of love:
vivacious, violet, velvet glove,
voluptuary, va-va-voom,
the divan in the living room…
The vale recalls the veil of wedding,
the lent the linen of the bedding;
the tine rhymes well with wine and dine
and pretty please will you be mine
(although a fork has tines as well,
and Valentine, in miscast spell,
could leave you with a venal nite:
from V to nine to late you fight.
Elative? nn-no; she won’t yield –
her vital navel stays concealed…
Your Valentine’s Day is nothing classic or
wondrous; you find it comes with massacre).
This name, so often serving Venus,
comes down to us from Valentinus,
which in its turn used to belong
to valens: “powerful” or “strong.”
And if that valens makes you itchy,
you’re probably thinking Ritchie,
the teenage lad whose hit La Bamba
made swooing girls cry Ay, caramba.
His plane went down, you may have heard,
in fifty-nine – February third.
But now it’s fourteenth – where was I?
Oh, yes: Our music shall not die…
please let me fill your valence here.
If you want love, I Valen-teer!

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doobie

Posted on February 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Imagine, for a moment, Hamlet, pondering his question, wondering, instead of being or nothingness (to be is to do?), or non-being and somethingness (to do is to be?), the choice between action and essence (do be do be do? – oh, no, that’s Sinatra). Oh, he’d have to refer that to a joint session. Got it? Doobie! Reefer! Joint! Ha ha ha hahahahaha oh pass me that thing again man.

I’m not endorsing the use of marijuana (or, if you’re in the RCMP or sticky about original spellings, marihuana), but the Olympic games are here and there will be snowboarding and much of the games are set at Whistler, home of Ross Rebagliati, who almost lost a medal due to using a performance-impairing drug (!), who now runs the Rebagliati Alpine Snowboard Training Academy (RASTA) (this is true). And I think I used the term doobie in a recent word tasting note. What? Oh, huh. Yeah…

So anyway, this word has a kind of snub-nosed roundness to it, with those two voiced stops; it’s also rather childish, with its open consonant-vowel syllables and its [u]–[i] vowels, making the mouth start with a pucker than then spread wide open. Say it again and again. Actually, it’s a pucker like taking a toke and then that silly grin some guys like to do thereafter. It sure is round, anyway, that opening bit, doob, looking like a slow turn of the head, or like two dudes blowing smoke rings at each other, or ears and glasses or whatever… And then the spliff right there i and the guy with the smile e. Or something. Spliff is a softer word with echoes of split, and joint has a point and has echoes of, um, knees and elbows and things and… So but doobie is another word for the same thing but it just feels. Different. You. Know? Know? Now? Ow? W? Oo…

So where did this word come from? What? Huh. Oh, what? No, they don’t know. It’s been suggested that it’s related to dobby. That really helps. I don’t know either. But I guess the fondness of the members of an American rock band for smoking weed has greatly increased the currency of this word, because they took the name The Doobie Brothers and then they got famous for a whole bunch of songs with that a sound that’s both funky and heavy (“China Grove,” “Black Water,” “Takin’ It to the Streets,” “Minute by Minute”). OK, wait, try this, this is really cool, take a 45 of “Urgent” by Foreigner and play it at 33 1/3. It sounds exactly like The Doobie Brothers. No, really! Yeah!

What do you mean no one has 45s and LPS anymore? I have a whole bunch right here. Man, pass me that thing, you’re making me nervous…

No plant matter was combusted or ingested during the writing of this word tasting note.

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welkin

Posted on February 12, 2010 | 2 comments

Just the other day we turned on the TV and found an episode of Lawrence Welk. And although welk is a rare verb meaning “fade”, Welk’s star has not faded at all; no, it is as firmly ensconced in the welkin as a whelk in a sand bed. (Whelk, originally welk, names an edible sea snail. Or, rather, it names a few different kinds.)

And why not see Welk in the welkin? We live in a skyscraper, after all, which by definition is grating the star bed (in German, “skyscraper” is Wolkenkratzer). Although welkin may sound like a leather vest (that would be jerkin, perhaps plus waistcoat, which is pronounced “weskit”), it’s actually the firmament.

The firmament? You know, what Atlas holds up. Oh, the earth? No, Atlas is holding up the heavens; he’s standing on the earth. (So are the dumpsters one sees around town with ATLAS stenciled on them – see http://www.harbeck.ca/James/atlas.html.) Welkin – like firmament – means the vault of the sky, the heavens.

And why not? It has that swoop of the /w/ leading through the vowel to the liquid /l/ and then a stop, the same swoop that made the Walt in Walt Disney seem to the young me like the sound of the wave of a magic wand. But then it echoes /In/, like a ringing sound (“Thy hounds shall make the welkin answer them,” as Shakespeare wrote in The Taming of the Shrew). If you look to see your long-dead ancestors in the heavens, you may even find a well kin in some constellation.

The kin ending gives it an archaic tinge, too, like bumpkin, lumpkin, larkin, gherkin, firkin, and, again, jerkin. This abets its use as a word of poetry and high-flown fancy. The sky is blue, so a blue eye may be, as in A Winter’s Tale, a “welkin eye.” An astrologer and almanac maker is (or was in 1596) a “welkin wizard.” One may swear, as in works by Ben Jonson and Walter Scott, “by the welkin.” If it is raining on Charlotte Brontë, then “deep lowered the welkin.” And one may even declare a person of much different social standing “out of my welkin” – Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night.

So look up in the welkin to see the star of the famous departed, Lawrence Welk; watch him welcome in his new ilk… and watch them winkle!

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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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