plankton

Posted on July 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

Imagine you’re a right whale. Left to your own devices, you wander around the oceans, filter-feeding and taking it as it comes. No planked salmon for you, just plankton: copepods, krill, pteropods… the true drifters of the ocean, riding the current from past to future until they are baled by your baleen: a live-and-let-die diet. They’re not chewy; they’re so small, they’re indistinguishable from foam (and not the kind that’s gotten tired on Michelin menus – just the sea foam you see foam on the sea). You could have ten million in a dessertspoon of saltwater. In one baleen-filtered rightfully right full right whale mouth you could have as many microscopic life forms as there are whales and humans hosted by our whole planet, all brought together by circumstance, not a phalanx but just a huddled mass.

You could also have that as a human, if you were to drink seawater. But don’t. It will make you sick. Among the plankton are not just vanishingly small shrimp-looking and flea-looking and jelly-looking things but also mightily many bacteria and viruses, not to mention far too much salt for a human gut. Plankton is, after all, a whole class of thing: any kind of small living thing that drifts in the ocean, ranging from the micrometre scale to the centimetre scale – even a jelly or squid relative that is carried willy-nilly by currents counts as a plankter. It only matters that it not motivate volitionally in counteraction to currents.

The definition of plankton – and indeed the word itself (and the individual plankter) – was created in 1887 by the German marine biologist Victor Hensen. Plankton is, tout court, organisms that drift; the word is from Ancient Greek πλαγκτός (transliteration plagtós but phonologically plaŋktós), which means ‘drifter’ or ‘wandering’, from πλάζω (plázō) ‘I wander’.

Wander? Hmm, I wonder. There is another Greek word for ‘wander’: πλανάω (planáō), and it seems as though it could and should be related to πλάζω but it’s not clear how – the phonological transformation required is troublesome. Perhaps the two simply drifted together. It’s a big enough planet…

…and, by the way, planet comes from πλανάω because the planets (Mars, Venus, etc.) were seen by early astronomers to wander in the sky. Of course now we know that our own island home is also a planet like those others, and also that they are not wandering aimlessly; they are carried by the currents of gravity, swirling in the eternal gradual gravitational whirlpool of a star. Physics! We are all plankton, from the galactic to the Planck length.

What is the Planck length? It’s a short walk; before you know it you’re in the foam. Planck distances are the smallest conceivable distances in space and time; the Planck length is so small a hundred quintillion fit in a proton, and even the smallest bit of plankton is a whole universe, relatively. To quote David Mermin, “spacetime becomes a foam at the Planck scale.” It’s the great class equalizer, invented by Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck – or, as he called himself from childhood on, Max Planck. (Why Planck? It seems that – to abridge a prolix peroration – his ancestors lived near a bridge, i.e., a plank across a stream. And plank, as it happens, traces back through the seven seas of European languages to Greek φάλαγξ, phalanx, which names a wooden board, or a mass of infantry arrayed for battle, or one bone of a finger.)

Well. That’s all a whale of a tale, isn’t it? But it’s not just a tale of a whale. In this ever-changing world in which we’re living, we all intake our share of plankton. After all, it’s not just adrift in saltwater; a dessertspoon of tapwater will likely have some too, as everything carries myriads of myriads of microscopic beasties, just drifting. The air does, too: aeroplankton includes viruses, bacteria, fungi, and even pollen and similar plant propagations. And of course aerosols; if you sit in a space with other people, they will exhale not just aeroplankton but microscopic water drops with various entities in them, and you will inhale some in turn (unless you’re wearing a well-fitted N95, and even then a few may pass through). They drift into you as you drift on this planet, whether wandering in the woods or tapping into the daily phalanx of the digital sea. Such is the foam of time and space, the walk we are planked on.

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lizardry

Posted on July 4, 2025 | 1 comment

Let us say, just to taste the air, that you want a word for the state, quality, or practice of being a lizard. Lizardlikeness? Hmm, no, not like. Lizardsomeness? Well, er, OK, but that’s just to do with the essence, you know, the state of being, rather than, say, the actual practice and so forth. We need a word that covers eating dragonflies, shedding skin, staring into space, occupying prominent appointments in certain political administrations, that manner of thing. 

Say… there’s an inspiration. What would be the equivalent for, say, coward? Or, on the other hand, wizard? Well, there’s cowardice, and cowardliness, and, on the other hand, wizardry. Is there wizardice or wizardliness or cowardry? And, to get to the point, is there lizardice, or lizardliness, or lizardry?

There is, in fact, wizardliness, though not, it seems, wizardice (except perhaps in some role-playing game). And there is cowardry. And, to get to the point, there is lizardly and, by extension, lizardliness; there is no lizardice (except in some social media handles and brand names, I guess), although I rather like that; and yes, Iva, there is lizardry, and I must say, I fancy it.

The truth is that -ry nouns have a broad appeal, and a broad range too. Wiktionary lists 308 of them. And among those, there are 12 that have -ardry. The rest are bastardry, blackguardry, drunkardry, dullardry, haphazardry (I like that), hazardry (gambling, apparently), Lollardry, niggardry (note that this refers to miserliness and is not related to a racial epithet that it somewhat resembles, but I’m inclined to avoid it anyway), and stewardry.

I should say that neither Merriam-Webster nor Oxford has lizardry. But Wiktionary does, and it has citations to support it – the first being from 1940, from Esmé Wingfield-Stratford’s Crusade for Civilization: “just as we can imagine that when Tyrannosaurus met Brontosaurus, no consideration of common lizardry prevented them from tearing each other to pieces.” (For those who wonder about the likelihood of this Jurassic picture: Mr. Wingedlizard-Stratocaster was not, I find, a paleontologist.)

Wiktionary’s definition of lizardry is “The state or quality of being a lizard.” But I can’t help but wonder whether there could be also some lizardmongery possible – you know, lizard husbandry: not wedding lizards but wielding them, or anyway enchanting or otherwise impelling them. Or would that technically be suborning lizardry? I mean, if you can suborn perjury and suborn bribery, you can suborn lizardry, right?

Which is not the same as saying you should, mind. If we’re talking figuratively, about being lizardly as a human, it may not be something we want to foster. As long as the lizards are merely lounging, we have little to fret about, but if they are being skinky right from the gecko, they will need strict monitoring, no heel dragon, lest you have a reptile dysfunction. 

On the other hand, if we’re talking about literal lizardry, well, that’s lovely; suborn to your heart’s content – perhaps you can be the Dame aux Chameleons.

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slog

Posted on June 27, 2025 | 1 comment

A while back, I asserted confidently that “traipsing is exactly like walking, only much much worse.” Several people responded to disagree with me, which just goes to show that different people even in the same culture have quiet but real differences in the meanings they attribute to some words. (For the record, dictionary definitions are broadly, though not invariably, in agreement with my sense of traipse; but the dictionaries clearly have not consulted absolutely everyone.) I will hazard a guess, though, that I will not get such disagreement when I say that a slog is never pleasant.

Let me put it this way: If someone said “That was an easy slog,” what would you think?

You might hear someone say that, after all. But you’d probably think they were being witty, or perhaps that they’d grabbed the wrong word, or that slog was a word they hadn’t fully gotten a grip on. Because by definition, a slog isn’t easy. Right?

But let’s look at it from another angle. If I search the Corpus of Contemporary American English to see what words most often precede slog, I see long, hard, tough, uphill, slow, and frustrating, in descending order. We seldom refer to just “a slog”; a slog is pretty much always “a long slog” or “a hard slog” or something like that. So I have to ask: To what extent are those adjectives superfluous?

Consider: Wiktionary defines slog (noun) as “A long, tedious walk or march” and “A hard, persistent effort, session of work or period.” Merriam-Webster says it’s “hard persistent work,” “a prolonged arduous task or effort,” or “a hard dogged march or journey.” So can we not agree that, on the face of it, long slog, hard slog, and tough slog are all pleonastic?

And yet. Somehow, the reinforcement – and perhaps the emphasis on the particularly salient quality that makes the instance a slog (the duration or the effort) – seems part of the expression. Besides, think of the berry in cranberry: there isn’t cran- anything else (except in blends like cran-apple), but we can’t just say cran. So why not an overspecified slog? And anyway, the extra word adds a certain iconicity: Concision would not be in the spirit of a slog. A slog is something you gotta keep slugging at, like a…

…well, not a slug, because slugs don’t slug other slugs (or people). But slugs slog, don’t they? The verb slog means ‘move or work slowly, deliberately, and tediously’ – though it can also mean ‘hit something with a heavy blow’. In other words, to slog, either be a slug or slug something.

Incidentally, slugs are called slugs because they’re sluggish, and not the other way around; slug referred to a slow person long before it ever referred to a gastropod. But slug meaning ‘hit’ doesn’t seem to be related; that verb probably comes from the same root as German schlagen ‘strike’ (which shows up in Goldschläger, which has made many people sluggish, but only coincidentally). 

Anyway, as it happens, slog might be related to slug. We’re not sure. But if it is, it’s related not to the slow-moving person or animal, but to the blow. As in you keep slugging away (rather than, say, going on strike).

But, as I say, we’re not sure. The use of slog to refer to hitting hard showed up in the earlier 1800s; the use to refer to working hard showed up in the later 1800s. Either way, that’s pretty recent, as such words go, so it’s probably drawing on another English word – or on several, on the basis of what just sounded right, as people sometimes confect words by vibe. After all, you won’t find too many bright and sprightly things named with similar-sounding words. Slog sounds like slow going: A slovenly slob in a slum may slobber slop slowly and slothfully down a slope, but you need to move the vowel sound up and forward in the mouth if you want anything slick or slippery or even slim. You can slog doggedly like a hog on a log in a clogged foggy soggy bog; you might go jogging with a frog, but you won’t do a vigorous jig on a big twig with a pig. 

Which makes me wonder whether a slog that is not long and hard might be a slig – a slight reduction, and why not? But there is, in fact, no such thing. If you take the labour from the slog, you have nothing at all… or anyway, you’re done already and it’s time for a break.

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clod, clot, cloud, clout, klutz

Posted on June 23, 2025 | 1 comment

Look, lexically, and in life, sometimes things just get bumped about. The school of hard knocks and all that. But if you – as I once did some years ago, with my head in the clouds – clout your cranium like a clod on a block of wood or concrete, leaving blood to clot on whatever you’re clad in, you can rightly be called a klutz.

All of which works together just fine – leaving aside the scar on my forehead – because clod, cloud, clout, clot, and klutz are all of the same family, not just in sound (though they do all sound rather like what was echoing through my head after its brisk contact with that beam) but in origin.

Here’s how it goes. There was a Proto-Indo-European root that referred to balling up or clumping or clenching. It descended to a Proto-Germanic word, reconstructed as *klott, that named a lump, ball, or similar clod, as well as to another Proto-Germanic word *klutaz, naming a lump, boulder, rock, or hill. Clumps of earth, in short.

And then from *klutaz we got cloud, because, somehow, a cloud was seen as a boulder or hill in the sky, or a clumping of the whiteness in the air. And we got clout, which named a fragment of cloth – a mere shredded piece, barely worthy of mention – and also, somehow, a blow with the hand (and, from that, via Chicago English, social influence). We also got cleat, for a wedge of some hard material used for attaching things or stopping things or grabbing things.

And from *klott we got clot – originally earth, or a ball or lump thereof – and, emerging as a variant form of that, clod: a lump, for example of earth, and also a stupid or clumsy person. Blood and soil, but specifically the kind of each that agglomerates. And then, at length, by way of Old German kloz and then Yiddish klots, both – like modern German Klotz – words literally denoting a block of wood or other hard material, we got klutz, borrowed into English only about a century ago: originally a word for the same kind of person as we would call a clod – slow of wit and body, and rough of reflex – but now we focus particularly on the tendency to physical calamity. Which means that a person may be quite intellectually acute and yet be a klutz… but not a clod.

And so now how heaven and earth, for a time broken into their own clumps, are collated by clumsiness and lack of cautious coordination: the clod of the earth, the Klotz of the wood and stone, the clout of striking, the klutz who strikes, the clot resulting from clouting, the clouds high in the sky, all from the same original agglomeration. That’s quite a lot to bear in mind! And when the beams of wood or of earth (e.g., concrete) are moved from their origin with the clods of earth up closer to the clouds, or anyway to forehead level, the insights can indeed be striking.

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dalliance

Posted on June 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Did I,” said Maury idly, “ever tell you of my deli dalliance?”

“Your dilly-dallying?” I said, looking up from my daiquiri.

“No,” he said, “not dilly. It wasn’t a Dairy Queen. I was a teen, working in a delicatessen, and I formed a… daily alliance with a charming co-worker.”

“Do tell,” I said. “You say it was a dalliance, so…”

“Yes,” Maury said, “it was not a serious thing. Mere dabbling. An alternative to indolence. On occasions where we would need to go to the cooler together, we would simply cool our heels for a little longer.”

“And heat your passions?”

“They needed no encouragement, just a bit of time. And a bit of time we took. A small delay. A small delayance.” Maury knew as I do that delayance is not a word in our dictionaries, but that delay and dally are doublets: both come from Old French delaier, which was de- plus laiier, meaning ‘hinder, delay, leave alone’. But dally, and in particular its derivative dalliance, somehow gained a specific sense focusing on a particular way for a pair of people to make the time pass…

“…Just chilling,” I said.

“Yes,” Maury said, “as the younger sets would say it. No Netflix necessary. Simply letting the minutes pass pressed against the pastrami, noodling next to the macaroni salad.”

“Until your boss wondered where you were,” I said.

“Ah, well,” said Maury dolorously. “There was the rub. Dolly—”

“Dolly?” I said.

“Yes, that was her name. Dolly had a dual alliance. I was getting afternoon delight, but my idyll was additional. We were dwelling for a few moments in the cooler, but she was dwelling much more durably with my supervisor.”

“I see,” I said.

“And so, and length, would he,” Maury said dully. “We both recognized the indelicacy of the dalliance, and I knew that she would rather cleave to her spouse, my boss, than cleave from him. I also recognized his skill with a cleaver. So, one day in July, I delayed no longer, and kissed my job – and her – goodbye.”

“A wise move,” I said.

“It is best to follow an unwise choice with a wise one. And, duly de-allied, I thereafter distributed my amorous dilettantism more dutifully.”

“Did you really,” I said. I raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” said Maury, after draining his drink, “I’m not the Dalai Lama.”

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greenlighted, greenlit, gaslighted, gaslit

Posted on June 1, 2025 | 1 comment

I’ll launch today’s word tasting with the following exchange:

“I thought they greenlighted the project?”

“Nah, the dude gaslit me.”

Wait, no… maybe it’s this:

“I though they greenlit the project?”

“Nah, the dude gaslighted me.”

Ah, come on, I need someone to give the official go-ahead on one of these. Right now I’m questioning my sense of reality.

You see the issue, right? If you’re not sure which to use – gaslighted or gaslit, greenlighted or greenlit – dictionaries tend to list both, and Google’s Ngrams show both options as current for each one.

So why is it an issue in the first place?

The verb light is irregular; its past tense is lit. Some people will say, on that basis, that the past tenses of greenlight and gaslight are naturally greenlit and gaslit. But the issue is that we’re not really dealing with the past tense of the verb light here.

Let’s say – by way of a parallel example – that you see a fellow in fancy dress, bespectacled, bowtied, top-hatted, and smug-faced. We can accept that bespectacled is past tense of bespectacle, ‘put spectacles on [someone]’. But bowtied? Top-hatted? Smug-faced? All three of those are using the adjective-forming function of -ed. You can add -ed to a noun to make an adjective. Top-hatted means wearing a top hat. If you object that you can say “I’ll top-hat him” meaning to put a top hat on him, consider the others: smug-faced doesn’t mean ‘faced smugly’; bowtied doesn’t mean ‘tied in a bow’. Both use the ‘having or wearing or otherwise associated with the noun modified’ sense of -ed. And likewise with greenlighted and gaslighted.

However, if a project has been greenlighted, as in given a green light, you might say that metaphorically green light is shining on it. So it is lit green. So it is greenlit. And while that is not the origin of the construct, I can’t object to the reconstrual.

But gaslighted is less ambiguous. You know where the term comes from, right? It’s from the 1944 American movie Gaslight, which was based on the 1940 British movie Gaslight, which was based on the 1938 play Gas Light. In the play and movies, a man does things to cause his wife to question her sanity, including telling her it’s just her imagination that the gas lights in the house are dimming at certain times (which they actually are, because he is turning on other gas lights – but I won’t give away any more). 

So deliberately doing things to make a person question their grip on reality is named gaslighting after the movie. And that is a verb: you gaslight someone. But when you gaslight someone, you are not lighting them with gas. This is not a modified form of the verb light; it is a verb formed from a noun, and in such cases, as a rule, the word gets regularized. To give a parallel example, if you butterfly a pork chop, you do not say “I have butterflown the pork chop” or “I butterflew the pork chop yesterday.” 

Yes, of course butterfly the verb is named after butterfly the insect, which is formed from butter plus fly noun, not fly verb, but that’s exactly the point: fly the insect is named from fly the verb that it does; light the object is named from light the verb that it does. Butterfly is named as a kind of fly (yes, yes, it’s really a different genus, but nonetheless); gas light is a kind of light. And butterfly the action is named after something associated with the butterfly (its shape), while gaslight the action is named after something associated with gas light (the play and movie). So it’s parallel.

And yet. Few people would ever say “I butterflew the pork chop” (except to be funny), but many people will say “She gaslit me.”

There are a couple of reasons I can discern for this. 

For one thing, gaslit does have literal use: something that is lit with a gas flame is gaslit. In the Google Ngram, if you check the hits for gaslit, you will find quite a few literal ones. So that establishes a precedent that doesn’t exist for butterflew.

And for another, it’s just not all that jarring. Especially if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t know the details of the reference, it quite plausibly might seem to refer to lighting someone with gas; and even if you have seen the movie, the scenes are gaslit, so… Common usage can tolerate the reanalysis, which also is, ironically, a kind of regularization – because the verb is known to follow an established vowel gradation pattern, and so lit is just expected.

Either way, whichever form seems natural or correct to you, there is the presence of the other one, used quite commonly in a way that might well make you question your grip on reality. But at least no one is intentionally gaslighting you with it.

And, hey, language evolves in many ways, one of which is reanalysis, and another (overlapping) one of which is alteration by analogy. So whichever of each you want to use, I’d be happy to greenlight it… but it’s not up to me anyway.

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cremate, incinerate, cinder, Cinderella

Posted on May 24, 2025 | 2 comments

It is Cinderella’s funeral. “Ashes to ashes,” someone says.* The mourner next to you leans over and says, sotto voce, “Cinders to cinders.” And you, knowing she started out in Italy as Cenerentola, mutter back, “Cenere a cenere.” Which, as your interlocutor may or may not know, changes the complexion of the matter.

Cinderella, being fairy-tale royalty, gets a requiem mass, in the old style. “Requiem æternam,” the choir begins.† At length it moves into the “Dies iræ,” at which point the person next to you whispers, “Is she going to be buried or incinerated?” And you are about to reply “Cremated” when you pause and think about this.

Because, even if we normally speak of the human dead as being cremated, wouldn’t it be more apposite for Cinderella, la Cenerentola, to be incinerated? And why don’t we say “incinerated” for people, anyway? Why is it vaguely offensive to speak of the beloved dead as having been put into an incinerator, and just as vaguely offensive to speak of trash as having been cremated?

The word incinerate has a long tenure in English. Since the mid-1500s it has been used to mean ‘reduce to ashes’, which is its literal Latin meaning: in- for ‘into’ plus cinis ‘ashes’ – the ancestor of Italian cenere – but specifically cold ashes, what’s left after the fire has burned out and the wind has passed over. Latin had a different word for hot ash, and the choir has just sung it:

Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla

Yes, favilla. What we would in English call cinders. Different from cinis. (We’ll come back to that.)

But when a body is reduced to ashes, first hot, then cold, why do we not say incinerate (not to mention infavillate, which is a word that you will find nowhere)? Why cremate? Are we reducing them to the cream of their ashes?

It is worth noting at this juncture that cremation, as such, is comparatively modern. People have been burned on funeral pyres since time immemorial, of course. But the human body is not so easily reduced to ashes. It was not until the later 1800s that an oven was developed that would get so hot that, after three or four hours, all that would be left of an ex-person would be white ash. In 1873, at the Vienna Exposition, Professor Ludovico Brunetti presented an oven that would be able to reduce an adult body to 1.7 kilograms of cenere – which he presented as proof. (We do not know whose cremains they were.) 

His timing was good: cities were becoming dense, graveyards were filling up, and there was the problem that, along with taking up space, decomposing corpses were environmentally toxic. As Sir Henry Thompson, FRCS, MB.Lond., put it in his book Cremation: The Treatment of the Body After Death, 

The process of decomposition affecting an animal body is one that has a disagreeable, injurious, often fatal influence on the living man if sufficiently exposed to it. . . . The grave-yard pollution of air and water alone has probably found a victim in some social circle known to more than one who may chance to read this paper.

He, a founder of the Cremation Society of England, considered graveyard interment nothing more than “laying by poison . . . for our children’s children, who will find our remains polluting their water sources.” And just around the same time as he was writing this, Brunetti was presenting his furnace, and in England one Charles William Siemens‡ was also developing a regenerative furnace that was suited for the process. And it was just around then that cremate, cremation, and crematorium (and crematory, now disused) appeared in English.

Well, you know, people have feelings about funerary obsequies. Such an occasion is a special time, not common, and if one may use a word that is not the common word – especially for the new invention (new inventions always cry for the invention of new words to name them) – then so much the better. Why should your beloved be put in an incinerator? When there is a nicer-sounding, less besmirched word that can be used?

A word that comes from Latin cremo. Which does not mean ‘cream’. Indeed, cream is unrelated; it comes not from Latin but from French crème, which comes from a Gaulish word that was also influenced by Latin chrisma ‘anointing’ – a thing that one undergoes while still alive, even if it is done with a combustible liquid. No, although my Cremo brand shaving cream does not burn my face or give me an ashen complexion, Latin cremo means ‘I burn’ – transitively: the infinitive is cremare and it means ‘burn to ashes, destroy by fire’ and ‘make a burnt offering’.

And as you think about this, the text of the “Dies iræ” gets to

Ne perenni cremer igne

“That I not be cremated by eternal fire.”

And, after another stanza, it continues on to a familiar bit:

Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.

Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.

Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Iudicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce, Deus:

Pie Iesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem.

You can hear it in there: “Cor contritum quasi cinis,” “contrite heart crushed like (cold) ashes”; “Qua resurget ex favilla,” “which from embers will arise”…

And somehow, after being cremated, the cinders of Cinderella will cool to the cinis, the cenere, of la Cenerentola. But how did cold cenere become hot cinders anyway?

The same way the cream came to cremation: nothing but coincidence, and a fatal attraction of sound. Cinder is not related to cenere; it comes from an old Germanic root for ‘dross’ or ‘slag’. La Cenerentola became French Cendrillon, from cendre, which is cognate with cenere but sounds more like cinder. And in English we have Cinderella, who has become a hotter property than she was in the Romance languages.§

And soon she will be consigned to the flames. Just one question remains: Will her glass slippers burn? 

The answer is no. As it happens, a crematorium typically reaches temperatures around 900°C, while glass generally melts above 1400°C. But that’s not why her slippers won’t burn. It’s because they aren’t in the casket with her. The prince has kept them… for some more fitting occasion.

* Not the priest, because that’s an Anglican saying, and Cinderella was Catholic.

† At Sleeping Beauty’s, it was “Requiem temporalis,” on the basis of precedent.

‡ Of the Siemens family, whose companies have made many technological things, including for transportation within this world, not just out of it.

§ I will not mention that her German name is Aschenputtel. It’s relevant, but I find it off-putting.

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fatal, lethal, mortal

Posted on May 20, 2025 | 2 comments

A couple of months ago, I read the following passage: “an extremely hazardous, quite possibly lethal sea journey.”

What was your first thought was reading that?

Mine was “Not lethal. Fatal.”

OK, but why?

If you ask someone to define fatal, they might say “deadly,” and if you ask them to define lethal, they might also say “deadly.” If you ask for another way of saying “deadly,” they might offer mortal. 

If you want a more detailed definition, you may go to Merriam-Webster, which offers the following definitions:

  • for fatal: “causing death”; “bringing ruin”; “causing failure”; “determining one’s fate”; “of or relating to fate”; “resembling fate in proceeding according to a fixed sequence”
  • for lethal: “of, relating to, or causing death”; “capable of causing death”; “gravely damaging or destructive”; “very potent or effective” (in a more figurative sense)
  • for mortal: “causing or having caused death: fatal”; “subject to death”; “of, relating to, or connected with death”; as well as several extended senses

OK, yeah, they all can mean ‘causing death’. And yet.

But of course we don’t learn the meanings of common words from the dictionary; we learn them from seeing the words in use, and occasionally, when we’re young, from having someone define the word for us, usually with a synonym. And then we see how they’re used. 

We know, for instance, that you can receive a fatal wound from a lethal weapon in mortal combat, and maybe you can receive a mortal wound from a fatal weapon in lethal combat (or maybe not), but you wouldn’t receive a lethal wound from a mortal weapon in fatal combat. Somehow that doesn’t sound exactly right.

Words are known by the company they keep. So what company do these words keep? When I look at the Corpus of Contemporary American English and search for collocations, I find that the following are the top dozen words that come right after each of these:

  • for fatal: shooting, flaw, disease, attraction, mistake, accident, blow, accidents, crash, heart, crashes, error
  • for lethal: injection, weapon, force, dose, weapons, combination, injections, doses, drugs, violence, form, virus
  • for mortal: sin, Kombat, danger, enemy, man, enemies, life, coil, Wkly, world, men, threat

(You probably know what Kombat is doing there – Mortal Kombat is a popular game series. As to Wkly, Morb Mortal Wkly Rep is the citation abbreviation for the medical journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. So it’s kind of an interloper. To make up for that, the 13th word in the list is combat.)

To get more real-life insight, I asked people on Bluesky: “According to you (as in from your own mind, not from a dictionary), what is the difference between ‘lethal’ and ‘fatal’? Take your time. Consider instances where you could use one but perhaps not the other.” (I didn’t ask about mortal because at first I was just thinking about those two.) Here are some of the responses I got:

i feel like “lethal” is done to somebody, and “fatal” just happens. a disease is fatal, not lethal. an accidental self-administered drug overdose is fatal. if the fault of a doctor, they administered a lethal dose. a weapon attack is lethal, an accident is fatal.

Lethal has the potential for death – like a weapon; fatal suggests that death is assured, like an attraction.

Hmmm this sounds weird but: fatal is always what you say about something in the past. Like, the fatal blow is only talked about after a person is assuredly dead. Lethal feel more about potential. This is probably miles off.

Result? Timing? Lethal has ‘potential’, while ‘Fatal’ describes sometime that’s already happened and has definitely ended in death.

Broadly, “fatal” is about “fate” and so emphasises the result, not cause or intent, and often implies inevitability (fatal flaw). “Lethal” implies intent or design (though it may not imply will: a lethal venom is evolved). Of course, such distinctions are pretty fluid and subjective.

I have no idea why, but lethal sounds active. Fatal sounds more passive. Like, lethal is something one does. Fatal is just something that happens. Makes no sense except in my head.🤷‍♀️

To a first approximation, I think I’m more likely to use “lethal” to describe physical objects/substances, and “fatal” to describe events.

Off the top of my head, “lethal” can be adjectival in an abstract way, and carries a sense of “able to cause death.” “Fatal” has more certainty to it. “The third dose of heroin she took was fatal.” This is not definitive, rather, it’s how the nuance strikes me, and they overlap in various cases.

Lethal is a possibility. Fatal is a result.

So, then. Here is what I get from all that: 

Fatal has a sense of inevitability to it: if it’s about death, it’s unavoidable; if it’s more figurative, such as “a fatal error” or (for a computer) “a fatal exception,” it is still irreversible. Like the hand of fate. 

Lethal has a sense of purpose or potential: a lethal dose may remain unadministered, but a fatal dose already has been administered. A lethal weapon can kill you, but that doesn’t mean it will, let alone already has. 

And mortal puts a thing in the atmosphere of death: a mortal enemy is someone who wants to kill you, or vice versa; mortal combat might or might not guarantee death but definitely allows for it; in this mortal world we mortal beings must ultimately shuffle off this mortal coil.

All of which, if you look at the origins and histories of these words, makes sense.

Fatal is, by origin, ‘of or relating to fate’; it comes from Latin fatalis, from fatum, which means ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’, of course, but comes from a verb meaning ‘speak’: it is the word that is spoken, the prophecy, the edict, the divine utterance. It has been in English since the later 1300s and first meant ‘decreed by destiny’. It always comes with the echoes of “fate.”

Lethal is, by origin, ‘deadly’; it comes from Latin letalis, with an intrusive h that chance and confusion ordained should be there – it’s a misconjecture of an origin in Ancient Greek λήθη lḗthē, ‘oblivion, forgetfulness’. Letalis comes from letum, ‘violent death’, ‘killing’, ‘ruin’; its further etymology is uncertain. It has been in English since the early 1600s and first meant (as it still means), per Oxford, “that may or will cause death.” It doesn’t come with strong echoes of other words.

Mortal is, by origin, ‘involving death’, as in ‘susceptible to death’ (i.e., not immortal), or ‘causing death’, or ‘punishable by death’, or ‘relating to the time of death’; it comes from Latin mortalis, from mors, ‘death’, which in turn traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root also referring to death that has given rise to deathly words involving /m/ and /r/ and usually /s/ or /t/ in quite a few languages. It has been in English since the later 1300s and was first used in relation to battle, combat, et cetera, as in mortal foe (one who will be satisfied only by the death of their enemy) and mortal battle and of course mortal combat (fought to the death). It brings a lot of associative baggage with it, since mortal has such a wide usefulness for human things, and it also echoes many other related morbid mor- words.

So there it is: three kinds of -talis – fa, le, mor. In matters of killing, fa will, le can, mor can’t not. We all have a sense of how to use these words, and how not to, but we mostly just feel our way around them. And meanwhile, we still also have the Anglo-Saxon words that these three Latin imports have not completely supplanted: deadly and deathly.

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rude, crude

Posted on May 12, 2025 | Leave a comment

Obviously, you’d have to be a stupid a**h*** not to know these words.

Was that rude and crude enough for you?

Is there a way to be “rude” that’s not bad? How about “crude”? Is there any way for the rude and the crude not to be unrefined?

What, incidentally, is the difference between rude and crude? Do they overlap? What do they and don’t they even mean?

Let’s start with whether “rude and crude” is redundant. Can you be rude without being crude? Of course you can. “Good day, John. Tell me: Has your sense of taste entirely deserted you? That is an exceptionally ugly shirt; I would be ashamed to be seen in public wearing such a thing.” One could hardly call that crude, but, in most contexts, one could hardly not call it rude. How about the converse? “Hey, John! That is a beautiful f***ing shirt – I look like complete s*** next to it! Where in hell did you get it?” Undoubtedly crude, but entirely complimentary; in most contexts, at least if it’s not spoken sarcastically, it wouldn’t be at all rude.

This also highlights how we tend to use these words. Rude typically means ‘brutishly impolite’, ‘deliberately inconsiderate’, that kind of thing. Crude typically means ‘vulgar’, or at the very least ‘unrefined’ – and also literally ‘unrefined’, as in crude oil. Indeed, we might say that raw could be a sometime synonym for crude, as hinted at by crudités, which are raw vegetables often found at polite and refined occasions.

And that leads us right to its origin: Latin crudus, ‘raw, uncooked’ – which is related, via Proto-Indo-European *krewh₂-, to English raw. It showed up in English in the later 1300s meaning ‘raw, unrefined’ in literal senses, and, by the early 1600s, had spread to “products of the mind,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: “Not matured, not completely thought out or worked up; ill-digested.” If we look to poetry, we can see it covering that range of sense, literal and figurative:

You are content to keep that mighty love
In its first steps forever; the crude care
Of animals for mate and young and homes
—“To the Indifferent Women,” Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman

Expectation, like a cuckoo
taking shelter in the crudely scratched out nest.
—“Lapwing,” Hannah Copley

I do not think we are deceived to grow,
But that the crudest fancy, slightest show,
Covers some separate truth that we may know.
—“The One in All,” Margaret Fuller

Raw, roughly formed, artless – but not always bad in itself: “the crudely scratched out nest” and “the crudest fancy” could be better than they are, but they’re better than nothing.

But still, with all its developed nuances – its refinement of sense conveying a sense of a lack of refinement – “crude” is generally not good:

And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You,
Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You
—“The Day of Gifts,” Paul Claudel, translated by Jonathan Monroe Geltner

You know sleep will dart beyond your grasp. Its edges
crude and merciless.
—“The Night After You Lose Your Job,” Deborah Kuan

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
—“Lycidas,” John Milton

And that last one brings us to rude. Rude appears as an unfinished crude, one lacking the crisp beginning, that grasping and gripping c that differentiates crack from rack, crust from rust, cripple from ripple, crank from rank, crave from rave. But really it’s a different class of thing.

Well, it’s a strongly classist word from the very beginning in English. Since we first had it in the language in the 1300s, it’s conveyed ‘unintelligent, uncultured, uncivilized, uneducated, ill-mannered, ill-bred, low-class’. It came to us, via French, from Latin rudis ‘rough, raw, wild’. It traces back to Proto-Indo-European *Hrew- (‘tear up, dig up’), which has English descendants in rid and ridden and, possibly, redden. But there’s no evidence of any etymological relation to crude.

But when we look at poetry, it’s interesting to see how often the use leans toward a more neutral or almost endearing sense of ‘primitive’ or ‘low-class’ – a valorization of the rustic and unrefined – rather than the pointed ‘ill-mannered’:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
—“Concord Hymn,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wondered, over trees and ponds,  
At the sorry, rude walls
And the white windows of the apartments.
—“Birdcage Walk,” Thomas Merton

The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
And in the east one giant window shows
The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.
—“Chartres,” Edith Wharton

“Speak! speak! thou fearful guest!
Who, with thy hollow breast
Still in rude armor drest,
Comest to daunt me!”
—“The Skeleton in Armor,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We can’t easily imagine bridges, walls, and lawns interrupting someone or hurling insults. The armor might be a little impertinent, I suppose.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
—“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray

Our hut is small, and rude our cheer,
But love has spread the banquet here;
And childhood springs to be caress’d
By our beloved and welcome guest.
—“The Sleigh-Bells,” Susanna Moodie

The forefathers might have put their elbows on the table, but we don’t expect that they were actually bumptious – and Moodie’s rude cheer was more likely humble joy than, say, something a legion of English football fans might shout.

The poor have their virtues rude,—
Meekness and gratitude,
Endurance, and respect
For us, the world’s elect;
Economy, self-denial,
Patience in every trial,
Self-sacrifice, self-restraint,—
Virtues enough for a saint!
—“Christian Virtues,” Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman

Gilman’s whole poem is a mordantly sarcastic take on the self-important pieties of the moneyed set who self-aggrandize through benefaction. But this “rude,” while clearly conveying low class and a simplicity of mind and value, definitely does not connote impertinence.

I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph
—Richard III, William Shakespeare

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
—“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” John Keats

Still not to our usual sense, but getting perhaps impolite.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done—
“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“To come and spoil the fun.”
—“The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Lewis Carroll

Ah, well, there we are. That thoughtless, pushy, self-important sun – manifesting a kind of rudeness that, we may note, is just as available to those of high social station. 

And so we see that the words rude and crude have a kind of refinement of development, depth, and nuance, notwithstanding their senses, or their status as blunt and basic vocabulary items. Oh, they’re unpleasant words, in their way; in some contexts, they’re better avoided (in favour of, say, impolite and unrefined). But one can’t have a fully mature and well-developed language without such words.

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courgette, zucchini

Posted on May 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

You want to know how to make zucchini? I’ll show you how. I’ll also show you how to make courgette. They’re the same thing, literally. So get ready for some gourd times.

Let me start by saying that this summer squash, Cucurbita pepo, is brain food. How can that be, given that they’re about 95% water? Look, beer is about 95% water too, and it still makes you have thoughts. But in this case, I’m going to pretend that etymology is a suitable guide to essence.

The zucchini, also known as the courgette, is, in some places, called the baby marrow – baby because it’s smaller than a full-grown marrow. It’s not that it looks like part of a baby’s leg (although it does, at least of a baby Shrek). It’s that the pith of vegetables was, from Old English times, called the marrow, and from this the summer squash in question was called a vegetable marrow when it first hit the scene in England in the 1800s (although technically that’s what you call a larger version of the plant, hence baby marrow for our plant du jour). And the word marrow traces back through Germanic roots to Proto-Indo-European *mosgʰós, which meant ‘marrow’ and also ‘brain’. The brain is, after all, in one way of looking at it, the marrow of the head. So hey, brain food.

OK, yes, that’s kind of silly. But that’s not the only time the brain comes in when we’re making courgette and zucchini. Let’s start back with the Latin word for ‘gourd’: cucurbita. It was a name for the kinds of gourds that are used for fall decoration and music making, and also for other related squash, and also, figuratively, for someone who was kind of, uh, obtuse (we could say boneheaded). And when more kinds of squash were brought over from the Americas starting in the 1500s, cucurbita was applied to them too, as you can see in the Latin name for our vegetable du jour.

But not just cucurbita – also words descended from it. Because who speaks Latin besides botanists and choral singers and certain nerds and the occasional priest? However, Italian comes from Latin, and so does French. Over the centuries, Latin morphed into other languages through mutations both accidental and deliberate. Etymology is like horticulture in that way: people import seeds from a distant place and keep breeding them and making new versions of the plant until they have something that looks quite different from the source.

So this cucurbita got worn down over time, and in France, the second c and the b both got eaten and the t got voiced and it became coourde, which was dragged over to England and the c was voiced and we got gourd. Meanwhile, back in France, the d was softened to a fricative and they ended up with courge. And when, in the 1800s, someone bred a cute little version of a certain summer squash that had been imported from Central America in the 1500s, they added the diminutive -ette. And that’s how you make courgette.

But that diminutive version of the summer squash wasn’t bred in France, and it wasn’t bred in England. It was bred in Italy. And in the evolution from Latin to Italian, this word cucurbita lost the rb and softened the t to an affricate and became cocuzza, which was a name for a gourd and also for your “gourd,” i.e., your head. But the gourd times weren’t over yet: in some parts of Italy, over time, cocuzza became cuzza, and then the consonants swapped and it became zucca. Which is, again, a word for a squash and also, again, your head.

And then, when (as we mentioned above) someone made a smaller version of a certain summer squash – a baby version, we can say – it got the diminutive suffix. And zucca became zucchina – or, in some parts of Italy, the masculine form, zucchino. The plural of which is zucchini.

Which means, yes, if you want to be fussy, you can’t have “one zucchini,” you have “one zucchino.” Only, as anyone who has ever grown them knows, you can’t have one anyway. You always end up with many. It’s like spaghetto: Just ignore the singular, for your own convenience – and mental health.

So there it is. We could have called Cucurbita pepo a gourdette, or gourdlet, or gourdling, or gourdkin, or, um, gourdie (somehow), but we didn’t – although, etymologically, we did. Yes, some English speakers in some places call it a marrow or baby marrow, but it’s not bred in the bone for most of us, so never mind. Since about a century ago, some English speakers have called this plant courgette and some have called it zucchini, and in the end they’re the same thing anyway, even though they’re obviously not the same thing. And what’s the harm in using a word we got from somewhere else for a vegetable we got from somewhere else? It’s true that none of these names have anything to do with what the Cucurbita pepo progenitor was called by the people in Central America who knew it first, but on the other hand, our modern courgette/zucchini is quite different from what they knew too.

And if you slice it thick and fry it in hot oil, it makes a delicious and not-too-soft addition to a pasta sauce. Or you can slice it thin and cover it with olive oil and salt (and maybe a little sugar) and put it on a baking sheet in a very hot oven until it’s crispy, and that’s rather good too. Or have it raw in a salad. However you have it, it’s brain food. My proof? You already know more than you did a few minutes ago because of it.

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