Sesquiotica

wretched

Posted on January 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

This is a good word for someone in a state of dejection – or someone we would like to see ejected! It growls in with the opening /r/ (do you notice how you round your lips when saying it? it’s not because of the w – we always round our lips some when saying /r/). Then it releases roughly into the aggressive lax mid front vowel, closer and tighter than an /a/ but not so high and light as an /i/. And then it snatches again with the affricate, the teeth set as though ready to rip with the incisors. And finally, after a bounce, a thudding stop with a /d/. It’s like a large, nasty dog lunging at you in hopes of ripping your jugular. And perhaps a little like a sharp blast of thunder, and the rending of fabric. And then there’s the double resonance of retch – the sound of the word and the sound of the action. And the harshness of the echoes of ratchet.

The effect of this word thus varies from a bit of verbal dyspepsia to a corrosive condemnation. No wonder there are at least three musical groups called Wretched – one punk, one doom, and one death metal. Oh, and a TV series, Wretched with Todd Friel, which is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum – it takes its name from “Amazing Grace”: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

Well, we assume that Todd Friel and his listeners and viewers are not intending to be among those cast out at the last judgement. But they may see themselves now as dejected specimens needing salvation, or perhaps outcasts of some sort, and that would be reasonable, given the word. Dejected is from Latin “throw down; cast down,” and wretched is formed from the noun wretch, which comes from wrecca “exile, banished person”. (The same Germanic root that made this word wandered in a different direction in German, becoming Recke, a fairly rare word for “hero” or “warrior”.)

So we have conditions and people we may describe as wretched because they are in a terrible condition, downcast, perhaps decrepit – a wretched hovel, perhaps. And often we want to make it clear that the described thing or person is most wretched – a common collocation.

But we also have things that are not downcast but are vile and utterly demeaning or demeaned, as for instance wretched excess, a common collocation referring to unbelievable prodigality of expenditure (Google |”wretched excess” dubai| and you will get almost 2000 hits).

And of course we have things that we wish to demean, that we see as base and beneath us (perhaps we want to eject them – eject being from Latin for “cast out”), and for these we reserve the phrase wretched little – often to describe things or people that are not in fact physically small. It’s a phrase one almost has to spit after saying.

Also seen out with wretched fairly often: life, thing, man, and refuse. Refuse? The noun, not the verb (so note the echo in the first syllable). It’s on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty, near the end of the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus (written for the statue):

…
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Thanks to Dawn Loewen for suggesting wretched.

chillax

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

It is the deep midwinter, somewhere between Chilliwack and Halifax. A bucolic, nay sylvan, logophile is out hewing wood to warm his hearth – mainly by pulping it and making paper, so he can read books made with it, which warm the heart so much longer than a simply incendiary log. But as he surveyeth his piles of literature, chill axe in hand, our logophile – let us call him Alan – spieth a grating neologism, a forced blending of two words that, in colloquial use, mean the same thing. Alan knoweth what to do with gilded lilies: cut them down. He raiseth his weapon, when the very word crieth itself out from the page: Chillax! Chillax to the max!

But we are in medias res. Let us commence ab ovo (Horace be damned). In the beginning was the word, and the word was cool. From the very beginning, cool readily transferred its literal sense to an emotional one; various uses developed – cool out by the mid-19th century, and cool it by the mid-20th. But by the later 1970s, a need for something newer-sounding (and perhaps more specifically African-American-sounding, for those who like to emulate such usage) was needed, and so chill and chill out became current.

But, ah, chill, though it does seem to shiver as one says it, is not truly as relaxed a word as the easy cool, and it can be a bit abrupt. One needs something that can draw out into a dénouement. What word is a relaxing word? Well, relax, for one. Its power of relaxation is such that its sound is borrowed into brand names of laxatives – for instance, Dulcolax, the very sound of which is enough to loosen the bowels. Relax has not one but two liquids, /r/ and /l/, and that nice open /æ/ that ends with the released hiss of /ks/. This, surely, is the sound suited to add to chill – first the frisson, and then the ease. And so, by the mid-1990s, chillax was easing the shoulders and innards of the same set as would soon enough be wearing sweatxedos in which to do their chillaxing. And undoubtedly it was created consciously to be trendy. It appears to have succeeded.

It may seem ironic that this word is used principally as an imperative – a verbal mood so unrelaxed that in German it is compulsory to punctuate it with an exclamation mark. But sometimes one simply needs to be told, no? It is also an interesting contrast that the word’s appearance looks very excited: the hill in the middle looks like horripilation, and the x could be the pucker of a mouth, clashing swords, cuts in wood or skin, or, well, yes, perhaps closed eyes.

But, ah, this word, what she has in euphony and semantic double dipping she lacks in elegance. For one can never chillax in elegance – can one? “Alan, old sport, verily thou chillaxest most thoroughly upon my divan. Wishest thou a tankard of chill ale, or perhaps a white Russian, to enhance thy chillaxation?” But doth the dude abide, or doth he dispatch with quick whacks the churlish lexis?

Thanks to Alan Yoshioka for sending me his vexation with chillaxation.

What “Did You Know,” exactly, anyway?

Posted on January 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

For about the nine squillionth time, I’ve been forwarded the link to the video “Did You Know?” (a.ka. “Shift Happens”). You’ve probably seen it. It sure does impress people. And it has a lot of impressive numbers in it.

I have to admit it’s at a bit of a disadvantage from the beginning with me due to the fact that “Did you know?” in any forward is almost a guarantee that I’m about to be told something that’s inaccurate. Also, I’m getting tired of the music, which has been used on another video since, and is now for me, at least, the leitmotif for hype and hand-waving. It is rather apposite, though, in that the words start with strong-sounding repetition of a straightforward phrase without actually specifying what is right here, right now, and then go into something that sounds like detailed content but is actually indecipherable.

The video does present a fair bit of interesting food for thought, and some of the numbers are quite impressive (if wanting more context), but it can be remarkably fluzzy and often not especially thoughtful in itself. (Nor are the data referenced, so they could just be making it up, or misquoting, getting it badly wrong…)

So I just wanted to pick on a few things in it, as a bit of an editorial fact-querying exercise: Continue reading →

bosky

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 5 comments

You’re looking for the sky, but there’s something in the way. Who’s this bo? Is it some bolshy, stroppy youth, one of the Bos of Kentucky (KY) or a boy from Saskatchewan (SK)? Perhaps it’s Ivan Boesky, the famous insider trader of the 1980s, noted for telling Berkeley students that greed is good.

Ah, nope, it’s more bush-league than that. Boesky may have been rubbishy, but this is shrubbery. And not just a shrubbery, suitable for delivery to the Knights Who Say Ni!, but a whole condition of it. A bosky wood is a wood that’s plain old bushy.

Which is reasonable enough. After all, this word – and bosk (its related noun) and busky (a synonym) – are closely related to bush, which was originally busk. All of these, and similar words in other Germanic languages, are related to late Latin boscum, which is not that scum Bo again; it means “wood.”

But we’re not out of the woods yet. If you’ve bought Boesky’s belief that you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself – in hopes, perhaps, of getting a “boss” key to the office – you may, like Boesky, end up someplace boxy where the closest to this word you get is a Bosc pear to crunch on – which is named after Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, a French botanist. Ah, if only instead of greed you had listened to someone like St. John Bosco, a nineteenth-century priest and educator who focused on love and prevention (based on reason, religion, and kindness) rather than punishment.

But it’s not too late! You can yet escape your brush with the dark side and return to nature – to Shakespeare’s bosky acres, Milton’s bosky bourn, or Scott’s bosky thickets, where perhaps mountain men wear Melville’s bosky beards. And then, if the sky is still obscured, you may do what one does when lost in an Icelandic forest: stand up.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged bosk, bosky, busky, word tasting notes

scotomata

Posted on January 10, 2010 | 2 comments

“Yet here’s a spot.”

Lady Macbeth saw spots on her hands: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” She scrubbed but could not get them out. “What! will these hands ne’er be clean?”

But what if the spots were in her eyes? If the blood she saw on her hands could not come out because it was spots of darkness in her vision instead?

We know about seeing spots. It’s a recognized medical condition. The term for a spot or dark area in your vision is scotoma. The plural is scotomata. That looks suitable: you can see the spots – o o a a. (And are those t t crosses or daggers?) The word may make you think of tomato. (Well, that’s red, like the blood.) It may bring to mind automata – plural of automaton, which can refer to a person who is acting mechanically or involuntarily. (Perhaps compulsively scrubbing while walking in her sleep.)

Scotoma comes from classical Greek skótos, meaning “darkness.” There are other scoto words in English, none of which sees the light of day much: scotoscope, something that lets you see in the dark; scotophor, something that darkens when bombarded with electrons (the opposite of a phosphor, and usable in “dark trace” cathode ray tubes); scotopic, pertaining to vision in dim light; scotography, taking pictures with X-rays…

There is plenty of darkness in Macbeth. Many of the dark deeds happen in the dark of night; visions of daggers and the dead, too, come in dim light, scotopic as it were. People are killed.

In modern Greek, “kill me” or “take my life” is skótose me. There are a few songs by this title; you can find them on YouTube – sung by Nino, Despina Vandi, Eleni Peta. Mostly they are romantic: take my life so I can’t love you anymore; away from you life is not worth living… You may happen on “Skótoseme” by Diamanda Galás and John Paul Jones. It is not a romantic song. It would, in its way, form a good soundtrack for the murders in Macbeth. Diamanda Galás has a way of singing that is not persuasively human. You have been warned.

So is that what’s the matter with Lady Macbeth? Well. she is a Scot, yes? And consider this: mata is Malay for “eye” (mata hari, literally “day eye,” means the sun). Irish eyes may smile, but Scottish eyes – scot-o-mata – see darkness.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged scotoma, scotomata, word tasting notes

Somerset

Posted on January 9, 2010 | 2 comments

OK, picture this dream: Alanis Morissette is in the bath, taunting you by singing “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles). And then she does a backflip from standing! What could it mean?

Well, perhaps it means you have your summer set out for you. One way or another, though, you’re dreaming of Somerset. (Or, as denizens of that county are famous for saying it, “Zomerzet.”)

Somerset is historically a county of England, over on the west side, across the mouth of the Severn from the south side of Wales. Significant cities in it include Bath and Taunton. Bath, ah, that famed spa, popular with the summer set coming from London in times past. Well, why not summer? Somerset comes from Sumortunsæte, meaning “Sumortun’s people,” and Sumortun for its part is now Somerton (not as important a place in itself as it once was) and is thought to get its name from being, originally, a summer settlement – a farmstead abandoned in the winter.

OK, but the song? In “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” – which is modeled on nineteenth-century advertisements for popular entertainments – you will hear this: “And Mr. H. will demonstrate Ten summersets he’ll undertake on solid ground.” Now, summersets is an uncommon spelling. You’re more likely to see somersets.

But that’s misleading, because somersets is itself altered from somersaults. Oh, well, now, that’s helpful, isn’t it? I’m not saying the county is named after a flip; that would be rather flip of me. No, it was just a word confusion, a bit of folk-etymology reanalysis. And in fact somersaults is in its turn a mutation of sobersaults. Which are not so called because you can’t do them when drunk (perhaps on some Meursault); rather, it’s by way of French from Latin suprasaltus, from supra “over” and saltus “leap”.

It’s not that the articulatory gesture of saying somerset or somersault is highly reminiscent of a flip; there’s no flap of the tongue – the tip touches for a hiss, the lips meet, the tongue passes through the liquid /r/ and the tip touches again, and it ends in a stop, again at the tip. At most there’s that little back-and-forth, which is repeatable indefinitely, as we see in singing “Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime.”

But, now, put that into French phonotactics and you get a bit of a turnover. Some places in Quebec had been given English names, and one of them was Somerset. Well, the English aren’t the only ones who can do folk-etymology reanalysis. Say Somerset with a French accent and what do you get? Something that easily enough slips towards a more recognizable French form. Morissette is one of the grand old pure laine Quebec family names (along with Tremblay, Paquette, Bouchard, Duceppe, Dion…), and the merset sounds rather like it when you put it into French phonemics. And the first syllable? Well, must be saint, reduced as it tends to be. And so was invented a saint who never existed: Saint-Morissette, a place in Québec. (But, hey, Stanfold became Saint-Folle!) But, given that Alanis Morissette has played God (in the movie Dogma), that’s close enough to a saint, no?

So! How do you like them apples? If you like ’em well enough, make cider with them – it’s popular in Somerset.

Thanks to Roberto De Vido for suggesting somersault.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged somersault, Somerset, word tasting notes

prorogue

Posted on January 7, 2010 | 2 comments

This word is all the rage in Canada lately. Until late 2008, it was something that happened without anyone outside of Parliament really noticing: when a legislative session was done, or when it was anyway a good time to wrap up business for it and start afresh, the queen (or king) would – or rather the governor general, the queen’s (or king’s) proxy in Canada, would – on the advice of the prime minister prorogue parliament. There would perhaps be a little wrap-up speech, and any bills not yet voted on would die and would have to be reintroduced the next session if they were to see the books.

And then Stephen Harper did it in an unexpected situation, to end a session when it had barely begun, just to avoid a vote of no confidence. Everyone suddenly had heard this word prorogue. And now, a year later, prorogation is being used not in such a dire situation but nonetheless in what had appeared to be the middle, not the end, of a legislative session. Although technically the governor general is not obliged to assent to the prime minister’s request to prorogue, it would appear that the current governor general views the decision as the prime minister’s proroguative.

This is leading some people to say Stephen Harper is a pro rogue. Not just any amateur rogue – he’s making a career of it! But prorogue is not actually related to rogue (nor to that Irish – and subsequently military – term of abuse, pogue, which, like rogue, has a French-style spelling but does not actually come by way of French). No, it comes from Latin pro, “for”, and rogare, “ask”. (You’ll see the latter root in interrogate and abrogate, for instance.)

It’s a funny word, prorogue. Certainly it sounds kind of funny; the two /r/s give it a Scooby-Doo sound, or perhaps something like an engine failing to start on a January day in Ottawa. It may seem like an altered pronunciation of prologue (as in “what’s past in prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge” – from Shakespeare’s Tempest, avec ou sans teakettle). It may seem to want to be followed with “row your boat, gently down the stream,” in a round. It has that strange double-vision of the roro (“This again?!”). It may seem like an out-of-order poor urge, or like watching an ogre pour confusion.

But beyond all that, it is also a contronym of sorts. It has a – now obsolete – meaning “make last longer” and a similar – still current – meaning “formally extend (e.g., an appointment in office)”. And yet, pretty much from the beginning of its use in English, it also has had a meaning “defer, postpone” and a related more specifically legislative meaning “discontinue meetings (for a period of time or until the next session)”. Both meanings can be in operation simultaneously on the same act with different recipients: in 2008, Harper prorogued parliament (the discontinuing sense) and in so doing prorogued his party’s term as the governing party (the lengthening sense).

So, really, what you mean when you use prorogue – “ask for” – depends on what you’re asking for. And this is one thing that brings Canadians together: they all agree that Harper’s asking for something. And they all want him to get what he’s really asking for. They simply don’t all happen to mean the same thing by this.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for asking for this one.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged prorogation, prorogue, Stephen Harper, word tasting notes

pashm

Posted on January 6, 2010 | 1 comment

The eyes, met with this word, may not quite know what to do. You may begin to stare at parts of it: the comb of the m on the end, the fireplace of the h, the slinky scarf of the s or the cozier curve of the a, the p at the opening, perhaps ready to pop…

Certainly the mind will go a bit woolly. How, after all, do you say it? Are the letters in the right order? There’s an ash in the middle, but is this really more than mixed-up remnants of mashed potatoes or shampoo? Is there ham or spam? Is it from Hampshire or the Hamptons?

You figure that it must have a two-beat rhythm, pa-shm. You might stick in a schwa between the “sh” and the “m”. But when you say it, you hear it: so soft, like falling into pillows. The mouth opens but is quickly closed again and then stays closed, lips pressed into a hum, like someone who was about to say something but had a marshmallow quickly popped into the mouth… Perhaps the lips are sealed with a kiss, an act of passion.

In fact – I’ll tell you – the pash isn’t quite like the start of passion. It is an “ah” as in are or as in father, or it could be more central, like the vowel in lush. And then if you can slide onto the “m” straight from the “sh”, do so; otherwise, make it rhyme with hush ’em.

There’s no way this is an originally Germanic word. No, it’s not, you’re right. If you think it looks like pasha, yes, it does, and though it’s not cognate, they do come from the same language: Persian. Ah, exotic Persian… also known in modern times as Farsi. It is an Indo-European language, and many of the words in it are obviously related to their equivalents in many other Indo-European languages (including ours). For instance, if you were to take your pashm and have a shirt made of it, you could use the Persian word for shirt: kamiz. Give it to your mother: mader. Give her six: shesh.

You may have reasonably inferred that pashm is a fabric. In fact, I have misled you slightly: pashm actually refers to the wool of the changthangi goat, which is indigenous to the Himalayas, notably Kashmir (there’s a reason Kashmir sounds like cashmere, by the way: they’re two spellings of the same word, originally). The goats are now often raised in the Gobi desert and outer Mongolia. The word pashm is simply the Persian word for “wool”.

The fabric made from it, for its part, is called pashmina. Ah! Now, does that look familiar? You may have seen it coming. And if you know what pashmina is, you know that you don’t usually make shirts from it. (Wool shirts?) No, in fact, you’re far more likely to get a shawl made of it. And that shawl can also be called a pashmina. And if you give your mother six pashminas, she’s very lucky, and you’re probably rather well off, I must say.

Or you could get her a different kind of Pashm: Max Pashm. He’s the “King of Falafel Techno”; his band play Jewish/Greek/Balkan ethnic-techno music. You could get her a copy of his CD Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Max Pashm. Assuming she’s a Sex Pistols fan, she’ll recognize the reference – and the album cover design – right away.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged pashm, pashmina, word tasting notes

For a thousand years it’s good English, then it’s a comma splice?

Posted on January 6, 2010 | 10 comments

I was a bit surprised by a query from a freelance editor I’m working with. She was asking about how to treat sentences of the “First do this, then do that” type. “Adverbial conjunction? Run-on?” she asked. “Truth is, I’m fine with it in informal writing, especially when the two parts are very closely connected. But because so many people consider it a run-on, I usually change it.”

So many people what?

Well, it turns out she’s right. Many people do think that it’s wrong to write, for instance, “I picked up the groceries, then I stopped at the liquor store.” “Comma splice!” they admonish. “Should be ‘…and then.'”

Well, geez. They should have told that to all those educated, fluent people who have been doing it that way for the past millennium or so, so they wouldn’t have been wrong all this time! Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged adverbs, and then, but then, comma splice, conjunctions, English grammar, run-on sentences, then

gangbusters

Posted on January 5, 2010 | 1 comment

Imagine a whole gang of Buster Keatons. The Keystone Kops could try to catch them, and great injuries and pratfalls would happen all around. Things would go bang. Masonry falling, people getting tossed around… And, of course, if it were made today rather than in the silent movie era, a lot of noise: police whistles, sirens, machine guns, screeching tires. And it would be a huge success. Like gangbusters.

Gang Busters was, in fact, a huge success. The true-crime-case radio show, which ran from 1936 to 1957, had exactly nothing to do with Buster Keaton or with the Keystone Kops, and was the perfect inverse of a silent movie: it was all sound and no vision. And such sound! The opening of each show featured a barrage of loud sound effects: police whistles, sirens, machine guns, screeching tires… By 1940, English speakers had taken this vigorous noise (and probably the great success of the radio show too) and mapped it onto vigorous being, and coming on like Gang Busters meant “doing really well.”

Which it has meant ever since, even though few people now know about the radio show; like gangbusters is by far the most common collocation for this word, and go (and going) and come on are the verbs that typically come before; go(ing) gangbusters is also common.

As to the overt sense of it, well, anyone can figure out what gangbusters means, and they won’t be wrong: “people who bust gangs.” When gangs were big news in the US – the roaring twenties, the dirty thirties – law enforcement officials needed to break them up and jail their members, and one who was successful at it (Eliot Ness is now the paragon) was a gangbuster. Not that they are a common vision of success now; the word seems to have taken on a life of its own such that a calling someone a gangbuster now would seem like a reference to the idiom.

And the word has the right sound and rhythm for a thumping success: three syllables, banging down the stairs like Buster Keaton, primary stress, secondary stress, unstressed, with the first syllable taking almost as long as the other two together, rather like the sound of something heavy hitting a floor and bouncing twice – or bouncing once and smashing across the floor on the second hit. The gang has a “bang” kind of sound, aided by the bursting b, and then the voiced stops with nasals give way to a voiceless fricative/stop pair /st/, like the the bouncing thing breaking, followed by the scattering sound of syllabic /r/. One is put in mind of James Brockman and Leonard Stevens’s song from the late 1920s, “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom.” Only in this case it’s a smashing success.

No need to stop just yet, though: gangbuster is a compound word. Gang comes from the verb gang “go,” as in Robert Burns’s “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley” – though Burns was no gangbuster where mice were concerned: “I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, Wi’ murd’ring pattle!” Anyway, gang (noun) refers to things that go together, and has more recently narrowed in sense to mean a nefarious group of persons. And buster is bust plus the agentive er; bust, in turn, is burst in an American vernacular alteration. Burst, like gang, is a good old Anglo-Saxon word, and it has always meant “break.” These days we think of it mainly as the kind of breaking that happens to things that go “bang” or “boom.” Which brings us back to Joseph Frank Keaton, who got his nickname Buster at a very young age from surviving a fall unscathed that an observer (Harry Houdini, in fact) reckoned could have broken bones. And it appears that he in turn was the original and source of the nickname and nonce-name Buster.