Mesopotamia

Posted on December 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

“They sure made a mess of Mesopotamia,” Daryl said, blowing steam off his chai. “A hippopota-mess.”

“And traded peace for a mess of pottage,” Jess added, a bit of whipped cream from her polysyllabic latte on her nose.

Daryl, Margot, Jess, and I were discussing Stuff Happens, a play we had just seen by David Hare about the US invasion of Iraq. “Interesting,” I said, “that someone in the play referred to the area as Mesopotamia in the present, as we’re doing. I mean, it’s still there – the area between the rivers, meso ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’ – but usually you see the word Mesopotamia somewhere near the word ancient. Civilization and years B.C. show up often with it too.”

“Interesting, too,” Margot said, “that everyone says it ‘mess-o,’ even though the same prefix in other places is said differently – mesomorph and Mesozoic, with ‘me-zo,’ for instance.”

“Both of which are said with ‘mess-o’ in England,” Jess pointed out. “And can be said as ‘mez-o’ in North America.”

“Which would seem to be a happy medium,” I chimed in.

“Well, it’s a rare medium that’s well done,” Margot said, which Jess parried with “You speak as though you have a stake in it.”

“Anyway, if we’re going to be particular,” I said, “we can’t forget meson, which can have ‘s’ or ‘z’ and ‘ee,’ ‘eh,’ or ‘ei.'”

“Well,” Daryl said, with a pause for a sip, “there’s sure a whole pot of them.”

“And perhaps that’s a reason that it doesn’t seem to carry a very strong associative effect from word to word,” Jess said. “I mean, Mesopotamia, what does it make you think of? Not mesons or mesomorphs or the even more ancient Mesozoic period, and probably not a hippopotamus either.”

“Since they don’t have them there,” Margot interjected, dunking her teabag.

“A mess of petunias, perhaps,” I said.

“I’d like to tame ya,” Margot replied.

“It makes me think of ancient civilizations, and friezes of battles and bearded kings,” Jess said. “National Geographic kinds of things.”

“Ziggurats,” Daryl added. I pulled out my little black book and made a note to do a tasting of ziggurat.

“Cuneiform,” Jess said, relishing evey phoneme.

“Hittites,” Margot said.

“Et in Akkadia ego,” I added.

“You can’t be Assyrious,” Margot shot back.

“Babylon,” Jess said. “The moment you bring in Babylon you have a huge variety of associations, all the way from hanging gardens to figure skaters.”

Daryl looked up. “Figure skaters?!”

“Tai Babilonia,” Jess explained. It occurred to me that not too many people now would have heard of her; her world championship in pairs skating was in 1979. (But she did get back in the news a couple of weeks ago doing a PETA promo stunt at Rockefeller Rink.)

“But Sumer is icumen in!” I punned.

“In some area” – or did she say “Sumeria”? – “but not here,” Jess replied. “I think Ezra Pound’s parody of ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is more appropriate for today’s weather. ‘Raineth drop and staineth slop, and how the wind doth ramm!'”

Daryl knew the poem too. “‘Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, an ague hath my ham!'” He raised his coffee to toast the weather.

“Well,” I said, raising my decaf, “we’re a long way from Mesopotamia now. It may not be confined to the impossibly distant past, but it’s nowhere near here.”

“And we’re nowhere near its temperature,” Jess said, raising her fancy coffee. “But I’ll take Canada anyway. And our freezes don’t last as long as their friezes.”

Margot raised her tea. “Stone cold either way.”

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obnubilate

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 8 comments

“I have only the Vegas memory,” Maury said. Or perhaps it was “vaguest.” His eyes were hazing in that way that indicates the beginning of a recounting. “It was late,” he continued, “and she was nubile.”

I felt myself privileged finally to hear Maury tell the tale, so often adumbrated but so rarely revealed, of his brief marriage.

“It was a Lebanese restaurant. No – Algerian; they were playing nuba music. I was nibbling a bit. Through the haze – ob Rauch, ob Nebel – I glimpsed a figure, obnubilated.” (Maury does not limit himself to English in his periphrastic peregrinations; the German he said meant “whether smoke or cloud.”) “I did a belated double-take; she had eluded my gaze. But when I turned back to my libation, I was elated to see her coming my way. I say elated because she was, in this lugubrious tableau, a jubilee, a liberation. I invited her to sit, and introduced myself. She said her name was Luba. I observed that it reminded me of ya vas lyulblyu” – Russian for “I love you,” as Maury knew I knew. “She was bubbly but knowledgeable. We ate, and libated, and debated; it was ennobling. By evening’s end it was indubitable: we did not dabble; we were a couple. We went to the chapel.”

Maury stared off into the near distance. I waited. “Well?” I asked at length.

“It is no coincidence that obnubilate and nubile – and nuptials – sound similar,” he said. “Latin nubere, ‘wed,’ shares a root with nubilum, ‘cloud,’ apparently through the idea of veiling. Indeed, my eyes were veiled metaphorically just as she was veiled – obscured, obnubilated – literally. We had chosen, as our music, Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds; it proved to be apposite, not only because of the obnubilation of thought and vision but because I found myself soon thereafter on the dark side of the moon.”

“How so?”

“She was nobility, and her family, on hearing the news, mobilized. ‘Noblesse oblige!’ It seems a lowly plebe was not suitable. Our ring was no longer a dollar-store bauble; it was the veritable baleful band of the Nibelungen. They saw their world in rubble if I did not enable annullment. Luba and I, in the light of day, saw our position as impossible with their opposition. We abjured, annihilated.”

Another pause followed. After a suitable wait, I asked, “Do you remain in touch?”

“In touch? No, alas. (Did I mention her nubility?) No further touching could be possible. But we have remained in word. We exchange letters every so often.” He held up his French cuffs to display links, Scrabble tiles: L and M. “She sent me these for my birthday.”

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permanganate

Posted on December 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word is typically preceded by potassium or sometimes ammonium, calcium, or even sodium. Does it, perchance, mean there is, for instance, one potassium per manganate? Ah, no, this is a different use of per: it’s the “thoroughly done” sense that has come from the “through” sense of per. We see this in words such as perfect and permute. As to manganate, it is a derived form of manganese, that element word that everyone confuses with magnesium – and the two words do, in fact, come from the same Greek root, magnesia. So anyway, what permanganate is is manganese in its highest oxidation state (thoroughly oxidated) – with four oxygens stuck to each manganese in a neat four-pointed formation reminiscent of a pocket-size tripod.

The sound of this word starts and ends with voiceless stops, but in the middle we have the nasals and the /g/. It seems like something that has a crust but a softer or more malleable inside. Actually, one typically gets permanganates in powdery form, and there’s not much that’s powdery about this word. It kind of lumps up, especially with the stress on the second syllable.

Permanganate has many overtones in its taste: pomegranate, mango, ptarmigan, mongoose, permeate, magnet, permanent, impregnate… But none of them really have the deep purple of its object. And while pomegranates have antioxidant properties, they’re not a match for the strong oxidizing qualities of permanganates, which can make them good aging agents, disinfectants, and – in some uses – explosives. (Which reminds me that grenade comes from the French for pomegranate… but that’s a whole other note.)

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walrus

Posted on December 8, 2009 | 2 comments

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – of cabbages – and kings – and why the sea is boiling hot – and whether pigs have wings.” Was he talking to clams? No, to a semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower, who was an elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna. Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.

That’s very well and all, but who is the Walrus? Well, I am he as you are me as you are he and we are all together. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus! Goo goo goo joob! And here’s another clue for you all: the walrus was Paul! But no, wait, The Walrus is a Canadian intelligent general interest magazine with nothing in particular to do with walruses aside from their both having a certain Canadian something about them, at least in Canadian eyes. To others, a walrus might look more like an old British colonel with a bushy moustache. And yet, as everyone knows, Wally Walrus was a nemesis of Woody Woodpecker, and the Walrus was a minor villain in Spiderman comics.

Now, how is it that walruses come to have such incoherent, surrealistic associations? And aren’t they walri? This is all less clear than a message in Morse code.

Well, to the second question, no, they’re not, it’s not Latin, it’s from Dutch possibly from Scandinavian and comes from words meaning “horse-whale” transposed to “whale-horse” or perhaps “shore giant” but probably not. And as to the first, blame Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who recite the poem in Through the Looking-Glass, but don’t blame them, because they were written by Lewis Carroll, so blame him, except he was really Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose biographical details would be a considerable digression, so I won’t leave you sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.

But also blame John Lennon, because he wrote three false starts on songs that needed a place to be stuck and he took some acid trips and heard that a teacher at his old school was analyzing Beatles lyrics, and so from all of this he made a song that wraps up the A side of Magical Mystery Tour. The second-most-common collocation of walrus, after walrus moustache, is I am the walrus. And the walrus was John in Magical Mystery Tour but then they said it was Paul in the white album song “Glass Onion.” And after two University of Michigan students invented a hoax about Paul McCartney being dead, it became an “everyone knows” thing that the walrus is a symbol of death in some cultures. Which cultures? Well, someone said that the walrus was a harbinger of death in certain Scandinavian countries. Uh-huh, but not in the uncertain ones? Well, we’re not sure. Maybe we should ask Barbara Wallraff. She might know.

The word walrus has a round, fat, woofy or throaty sound to it, enhanced by our English “dark l,” which raises the tongue at the back when the /l/ is in the end of a syllable. It’s not altogether out of line with the grunting sounds walruses make. The w gives a certain visual echo of the moustache as well. We have no idea, of course, whether any of this helped walrus to replace the previous word used in English for the beast, morse (which was borrowed from Slavic languages and is unrelated to the family name Morse). But we may have a clue as to the associated incoherence. The morse being a symbol of death, we turn to the requiem mass and find that mors stupebit. So we may immerse in a morass of more stupid bits without remorse.

Carroll’s walrus eats bivalves in copious quantity. However, in real life, walruses eat bivalves in copious quantity. They do not share them with carpenters. But without walruses, youths and those adults who have not forsaken youthful humour would be bereft of something to do with pairs of straws or breadsticks. You can’t do it with jujubes; they just get gooey. But if you really want a tusk, why don’t you ask him if he’s going to stay? Why don’t you ask him if he’s going away? But answer came there none – and this was scarcely odd, because they’d eaten every one.

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stentorian

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 1 comment

When I was a child, itinerant preachers would sometimes come through the area, set up a tent and have a camp meeting. They would address the hundreds gathered on folding metal chairs in loud voices so God and the neighbours could hear (and no snore would taint the hortatory). Such tent orations take stentorian voices: sonorous, orotund.

O, o, o… How does it come to be that words for loudness so often have these o‘s? We can’t say that they only come from the mouth shape of the letter o. There is a greater sense of echo when the oral cavity is wide open (with the tongue at the back) but the lips are rounded. The narrower opening increases the pressure coming out, too – those who have used Xcelerator hand driers know that a narrower stream of air moves faster and makes much more noise. Add to this the st_nt first syllable, which, whether in stunt, stint, or stent can seem to rear like a lion rampant.

Is such a voice the sound of authority? It can certainly command rotations of the head. But the owner of one may equally be just a loudmouth. Stentorian is applied to a variety of loud things, from singing to jubilation to the bellows of animals. The aesthetics of the word (and perhaps resonances of senator) may aid an air of authority, or perhaps just a sense like that of a trumpet sound – rather than tan-ta-ra it may blow sten-tor. (There is, too, a unicellular trumpet-shaped organism called stentor.)

I’ve known a few people at various times throughout my life who have had truly stentorian voices. They weren’t necessarily the orneriest – nor the ornatest – but they could certainly cut through glass just talking. One such was a neighbour, whose conversational voice sounded like an address to a person in the next room. Another was in a production of Marat/Sade I was in. In moments where crowd shouting was needed, we knew what was in store and I would try not to stand near him. Another is in the choir I sing in. Should there be opportunity to open the throat and roar in oratorio or other entertainment, he is the sort to hurt your ear if you are the next chorister.

But the archetype of them all was Stentor, a Greek warrior – a herald, unsurprisingly – mentioned in the Iliad, who was as loud as fifty men. He is said to have died after losing a shouting match to Hermes. Ironically, the adjective formed from Hermes, hermetic, suggests silence and secrecy. Perhaps silence truly can be deafening.

Thanks to my mother, Mary Anna Harbeck, for suggesting today’s word.

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ouche

Posted on December 4, 2009 | 2 comments

“Ouch!”

Jess held up a brooch encrusted with stones of indeterminate preciousness.

I looked at it. “Did you stab yourself?”

“No,” she said, “I just wanted to broach the subject. Do you like my ouche?”

“May I touch it?” I replied.

“That sounds louche,” she observed.

“Touché.”

She handed me the ouche. Yes, ouche, also spelled ouch, is a term – used now mostly poetically and as a deliberate archaism, but found in such luminous sources as Shakespeare, Kipling, Bulwer-Lytton, and the King James Bible – for a clasp, brooch, or buckle set with precious stones. (Brooch, for its part, is in origin the same word as broach; two divergent senses – the piercing and the ornamented piercer – took on divergent spellings.)

“It’s shaped like an O, you see?”

“Like an O-you-see-H?” I volleyed back.

“Do you want a jewel?” she said. Or maybe it was “Do you want to duel?” They sound so similar, especially if the person has any British tinges in their pronunciation.

Either way, the best I could give back was “I think you’d have me pinned.” I looked at it. “Will you wear it on an apron?”

She smiled. “An orange one.” She, of course, knew that an ouche, an apron, and an orange came originally from a nouche, a napron, and a norange. It’s just another way our language has of making n‘s meet, eh? She added, “But I might wear it out. Sh!” She raised a finger to her lips.

“Where did you get it?” I asked. “It looks like a bit of an ‘ouch’ in the wallet.”

“Oh,” she said, waving it away with a flip of her hand, “I had a voucher.”

“Well,” I said, handing it back, “don’t lose it in the couch.”

“Sofa, so good,” she said, pinning it on. Then “Ow! Affricate.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s ‘ow’ followed by a voiceless affricate. Makes a bit of a moue.”

Her mouth was indeed in a moue – sucking her fingertip. “No,” she replied, “I said, ‘Ah, frick it.’ I poked myself.”

“Ouch,” I said in sympathy. Or perhaps just to needle her.

Thanks to Amy Toffelmire for suggesting today’s word.

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ophicleide

Posted on December 4, 2009 | 1 comment

I was singing in the choir for the Andrea Bocelli concert this evening. We were at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra. I was right behind the timpani. (I.e., kettle drums. They got quite a workout. Would you believe they even used them in “White Christmas”?) My friend Miles, who is not only bass but also brass (a retired trumpet player), drew my attention to a large instrument at the end of the row of brass. It had tubing that went down to the floor and back up, with assorted involutions and a number of keys, and a final length of tubing that bent over the shoulder and then forward again into the bell. He said, “Do you know what that’s called?”

I thought for a moment. Nope. I confessed I did not.

He did, of course. And now you will too: an ophicleide.

Now, that’s a large word for a large instrument, and with about as many curves in it as the actual item (consider the six ascenders, descenders, and dots to be a down payment on the keys – there are usually nine or twelve. Or you could just take one letter per key). It also looks as complex and unusual as the keying of the instrument is said to be. Miles was wondering if the cleide ending didn’t ironically mean “small” – he had German klein in mind. I noted that since kleid related to clothes in German, ophicleide sounded more to me like “take off your clothes.” In fact, now that I look it up, I find it is something in a different key, so to speak: the cleide comes from Greek for key, by way of French.

And the ophi? Hmm, with its hint of oomph one might think it suitable for big brass, though if you were to see ophicle in this word you would wonder again if it were some diminutive. It might even have a faint floral suggestion, or something of Hamlet’s girlfriend. But you should look at the coils of this brass beastie for a clearer clue. You might also get a hint from the fact that it was designed – in 1817 – as a replacement for a large wooden, leather-covered, finger-stopped, end-blown instrument now more often associated with early music. Said item curved back and forth and so was called a serpent. And tonight’s big instrument was meant as a keyed improvement on it (so the holes could be where the sound was best, rather than where the fingers could reach). It is a keyed serpent. Ophi is from the Greek for “serpent” or “snake.” The inventor, Jean Hilaire Asté, named it in French on the basis of Greek, ophicléide.

Now, when I heard Miles say this word, I wasn’t sure how it was spelled. As you look at it, you’ve probably been wondering how it’s pronounced. It may, in fact, leave you in a quandary, all fickle-eyed. It may help you that my first response was a play on off-glide, which is something one may have in a diphthong. But ophicleide is actually three syllables. Say “aw, fick lied” and you pretty much have it.

Which is really quite amusing. You see, the Greek kleid would, in classical times, have been said similar to “clayed” (in Modern Greek it would be more like “cleethe”). The French processed that into “clay-eed.” But English took a root from Greek that had been run through French and pronounced it like German! But only partly like German. The ei is normally said like “eye” only in German, and in English imitation of German pronunciation in non-German loan words such as this, but in German the final e would also be pronounced. So what we have here is the great English dog’s breakfast, pronunciationally.

I don’t find it a very brassy-sounding word, with its voiceless fricative and stop and the nice liquid /l/ (which is largely devoiced due to the preceding /k/ sound). It seems to me it could as easily be a name for any of a variety of other instruments, from the cute (like an ocarina) to the large (like a calliope), but in any case exotic and quaint or intricate.

And what does an ophicleide sound like? To be honest, I really couldn’t hear it. When it was playing, so were the rest of the brass, and higher and louder and closer. And Andrea Bocelli was letting loose up at the front of the stage, amplified by huge stacks of speakers hanging high above the floor at the Air Canada Centre. And then there were those timpani. I could hear them very, very well.

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Rule-bound tut-tutters?

Posted on December 3, 2009 | 1 comment

I mentioned, in a discussion on editing, that editors don’t want to be seen as a bunch of arbitrarily rule-bound tut-tutters. One of my colleagues replied (tongue in cheek, she assures me), “at least when we’re NOT at work – after all, the essence of most editing is being a rule-bound tut-tutter!”

To which I replied:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Sorry for the emphasis, but I must respectfully disagree at the top of my lungs. We are, or we certainly should be, pragmatists, and friendly, helpful ones at that. That means that we understand that rules are made for the sake of communication, not the other way around, and everything we do is to help the author communicate well with the audience. We don’t enforce a rule if there’s no good reason for it – and we have to be able to explain the reason – and we should be helpful, encouraging, and empathetic, not prissy tut-tutters.

English is too good, fun, and useful to be some kind of gotcha game. One of our primary jobs as editors is to pry it loose from the morbid grips of those who would make it simply an arbitrary and devious status game (you know, those who say “Aaargh! I hate idiots who start a sentence with ‘hopefully’!” or who insist coolly “Split infinitives are a sign of poor breeding”). We are not bound by rules; we understand them and understand why each rule exists and we apply them intelligently, not dogmatically. And we ought not to tut-tut! Such is for those who are still in the middle school of the mind, pretending to be adults but maintaining their status by trying to bring others down.

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gaga

Posted on December 2, 2009 | 1 comment

Who’s got the giggling girls all going gaga? They aren’t going to gogo dance to gagaku – Japanese ceremonial music isn’t their gig. Is it Kajagoogoo? No, they’re too shy for the ’80s one-off wonder. And Gigi is greeted with “Good grief!” No, the popular person with the poker face peeping past paparazzi is none other than Stefani Germanotta, also known as Lady Gaga.

And why is she Lady Gaga? She’s not a champion player of the ball game ga-ga – it’s more popular in Israel and at Jewish summer camps in the US. (Nor is it that her fans yearn for her – gaga also meaning “yearn” in Hebrew – though they surely do.) She’s Italian-American, after all. Nor does her singing sound like quacking (gaga) to Mandarin speakers (in Albanian “quack” is gagaga; in Russian, gaga means “eider duck” – onomatopoeia has consistent effects, but she’s still not a duck). She may or may not be thought strong or dashing (gagah) by Indonesians and Malays, but never mind.

But in Portuguese and Spanish, we see that gaga means “senile” (it can also mean “smart” in Spanish), and in French it means “silly.” And while Lady Gaga is neither of these, they are related to our English word gaga, as in going gaga over her.

But Lady Gaga doesn’t get her gaga from that, either. She gets it from being compared to Freddie Mercury. How is that mercurial singer a source of gaga? Actually, it was the drummer for Mercury’s band (Queen, if you don’t know), Roger Taylor, who is the source. He wrote a song about the increasing dominance of television and the reduction of variety on the radio and used a term he heard from his toddler son in it. The song was called “Radio Ca-Ca.”

Before you stick your hand up, yes, the song was renamed after it was recorded, just before release in 1983, to “Radio Ga Ga.” And that was the source of Lady Gaga’s name.

And our English word gaga, now, where did that come from? Well, from the French, as noted above. And the French – and Portuguese and Spanish? Well, somewhere back along there, people evidently thought of senile old fools as going gagagagaga… not so much agog as just gurgling. It is indeed an almost archetypally incoherent string of sounds, the tongue and lips lax; a single utterance may make gaaah, a classic sound of alarm, dismay, shock, et cetera. And while type faces tend to make a g and a that look like a kneeling girl in a kimono facing a penguin, standard hand printing gives us a gaping jaw on the g and just a round blob with a tail for the a – or the ga together like two eyes above a smiling mouth. Either way, it’s good and gaga.

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scintilla

Posted on December 1, 2009 | 1 comment

Lady Scintilla, scantily clad, strokes your skin with a scented nail till a thrill ascends your sacroiliac. But the skill of this scelerate Scylla is not in palliating sciatica. No, she slaps her cat-o’-nine-tails and says, “It’s not a sin till ah say it is!” But when the sparks finally fly, you see it was nothing at all… And when they escort her into court, the jury abjure any injury; there was not a scintilla of evidence.

Oooo… scintillating? As well it may be. Scintillating means, originally, “sparkling”; scintilla is the Latin word for “spark,” now pronounced in English with the c elided into the s. It is used most often (and in English always has been) to speak of minute amounts, or more particularly to deny the existence of even minute amounts. Lawyers like it best: when I ask the Corpus of Contemporary American English to list the top words (not including a) found within two of scintilla, the top six, in descending order, are of (overwhelmingly), evidence, not, one, proof, and doubt.

This is a word you can drop into a dry context, a flat assertion, to add a thrill, a titillation; it’s an electric eel of a word, the ll its gills, the dots of the i‘s the sparks it sends. There really is something to send chills in that illa; never mind Godzilla, think of Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sibylla (see – on YouTube – Verdi and Mozart, for instance).

And yet its object is a mere spark. Ah, but such a divine spark! Divine, in this case, by dint of its absence. One does not find or discern a scintilla; it is like the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (as mentioned in Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze”: the dog did nothing in the night-time; that was the curious incident). And so it is the whip that does not crack, and its silence is salient – and thrillingly injurious.

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