Sesquiotica

octoroon

Posted on July 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

Is it a coin? It must be a coin, right, with all those o‘s like silver dollars and that sound like doubloon – is it pieces of eight? Nope. It’s the verbal currency of racism, pieces of hate. Octoroon refers to a person who is one-eighth black. And the o‘s might as well be a chorus of doom for a person it described when the term was current, in the US in the 19th century. The oon, to be sure, is the same one you see on doubloon – and cartoon, harpoon, balloon, festoon… All traceable back to a Latin nominalizing suffix that became on in French, one in Italian, and ón in Spanish. And from there it came to be, at least sometimes, this English oon. The word octoroon (earlier octoon) is modeled on quadroon, which means – you guessed it – a person who is one-quarter black. That word comes from Spanish cuarterón. But octoroon has a special vehicle for immortality: a play, The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault, first performed in 1859 and very popular in its time (and still studied), in which a beautiful heroine (named Zoe) faces a terrible fate because she is part black. (The play was adapted from a novel, The Quadroon, by Thomas Mayne Reid, but the play was the more famous.) The play had two versions of its ending: in the version performed in England, Zoe marries the hero; in the version performed in America, she dies tragically, which conveniently avoided the on-stage depiction of an “interracial” marriage.

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tang

Posted on July 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

The taste of this word is like drinking the beverage mix name-branded after it: it starts sharp at the tip of your tongue and ends soft in the back of your throat. Voiceless stop gives way to voiced nasal. Analogously, the printed form begins with a point upward, crossed off, and ends with a loop downward. Such movement in such short space: three phonemes written with four letters. And the sound of the ensemble is metallic, resonant, like the tongue of metal it can refer to (as opposed to the “ting” of glass or a small bell). The tip of that tongue, pointed back at you, might bite like a gnat – or something much more mordant, such as a serpant, whose tongue can also be called a tang. The sting of pain can called a tang too, and the penetrating sense makes a metaphor that gives us our sharp-tasting or sharp-smelling tang, a word that has acquired a sweeter tartness thanks to flavoured crystals. And now if you taste a tang in a sauce sweet and sour, you may think too of the Tang Dynasty, which ruled China while Britons were speaking Old English (the 7th to 10th centuries) – or simply of any of the millions of people bearing the name Tang – though the vowel in that word is more properly farther back in the mouth. The English tang, best known as a noun, has verb forms for both the piercing metal (and sharp taste) and the metallic sound, and there is another noun tang, a type of seaweed. We have Scandinavians to thank for these words (tangs, guys!).

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nefarious

Posted on July 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word for curly-moustached villains hatching plots involving horrible things done to sweet, innocent young ladies. What nouns are most often seen after this adjective? Plot, purposes, activities. The word does not automatically signal its object phonaesthetically; a nef, perhaps belonging to Nefertiti, is nothing to fear, and the nefar sounds more like a foreign-accented version of never. The fari is likewise unthreatening if you think of fairy; it may be cause for greater caution if you think ferry and whether you can trust the ferryman. The arious may end precarious but it also ends hilarious. Just as villains rarely wear their villainy so boldly (“one may smile, and smile, and be a villain”) – never mind the twitching moustachio or the monocle and fluffy cat – this word has such a soft approach in the sound. It even conceals its origins a little: Latin ne “not” plus fas “that which is right, moral, etc.” Oh, the French cognate néfaste wears it more clearly, but néfaste does not mean quite the same thing; it signifies harm more by ramification than by villainy. The change of the s to an r in nefarious is a result of a phonological camouflage called rhotacism: the [s] medially voices to [z] and the [z] medially flaps (or trills) to [r]. A fricative in liquid’s clothing! Ah, and this underhanded rhotacism, this bait-and-switch, could be seen as a cipher for the surreptitious (and serpentine) eroticism of the melodrama’s villain. So subtle: have some Madeira, m’dear… and come up and see my etchings. Or my escutcheon.

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idiolect

Posted on July 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

No, this does not mean the dialect of an idiot. Nor is it a reading by Idi Amin. It is also not pronounced like eye dialect, which refers to spellings that represent normal pronunciations differently – stomick, must of, stoopid – to indicate something about the speaker, usualy that they’re uneducated and would spell the word that way, even though it’s a normal way to say it. But an idiolect might engender eye dialect when transcribed, depending on the writer’s estimation of the speaker. It’s all about the speaker, anyway. Whether or not he or she is an idiot, he or she will be an idiotes, “private person” (in Greek), and perhaps or perhaps not an uneducated plebeian (a further implication in Greek and the source of our idiot), but anyway having a particular personal way of speaking, differing at least a little from everyone else in vocabulary, syntactic preferences, and pronunciations. The word, after all, comes from merging idios “private, own, peculiar” with dialect. But it’s not idiodialect! That would be a beast to deal with – you’d run a risk of getting lost partway through. So it limits itself to one tap and one lick, followed by the back-and-front lock-and-key of [kt]. And there is a visual echo of dialect – and of course of idiot – but that o is a cooler customer than an a. And there’s that d with its tandem torches, i i, guarding the gate. The clinical tinge of ect – which starts words like ectoplasm and ends words like dissect – and the echo of derelict do not make this word any friendlier. Rearrange it to get diet and coil and you are no happer, though if you cite an idol it may at least seem exotic. But this word’s object may be as friendly as you make it. It’s all yours, after all, as individually specified as your tongue and your lungs: others may emulate, but you have your own, ‘n that’s enuf fer innywun.

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psychopomp

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 5 comments

Psychopomp… qu’est-ce que c’est? Do you think you better run, run, run, run away? Well, that might not be the right thing to do. The object of this word is not some fancy graduation ceremony for serial killers. It also has nothing to do with killer high-heel shoes (those would be psycho pumps), deranged disco music (psycho pop), a very bad diaper situation (let’s just leave that one alone)…

Should you meet a psychopomp, circumstances will be such that you will want this enigma’s variation to lead you to the land of hope and glory. If you find yourself keeping vigil with Virgil, start worrying; in Alighieri’s allegory, he was the tour guide to Hell. Better to bide with Beatrice, who owned the stairway to Heaven (even though she was likely sure that not all that glitters is gold). If you find instead that you are in Charon’s boat, just remember: don’t pay the ferryman until he gets you to the other side.

They are all psychopomps, though: from Greek psycho “soul” (combining form of the word) and pompos “guide.” This is not a word one uses over coffee every day; it is more likely to come up in pretentious literary criticism and cultural theory, where it serves to pump up the pomposity of the prose. Or it may show up in mythological references. It has an eye-popping presence wherever it may be found, with the three p‘s (one flanked by o‘s), the four descenders digging down while only one chimney sends to the sky, and of course the eye-snag of the psycho, which when combining manages to carry the freaky overtones that seldom settle on psychology (with its different stress). And to hear it, it might resemble sycophant – a psychopomp is unlikely to be one – or cycle pump. Which you would certainly want in case of flat tire, if your Beatrice were a biker.

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fleer

Posted on July 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word makes me think first of chewing gum. I used to buy two-cent little square pink Fleer Dubble Bubble gums, and each one was wrapped with wax paper within which, wrapped around the gum, was a comic strip: Fleer Funnies starring Pud. Pud was the name of the kid featured in them. He wore red and white stripes on his shirt and cap. He did not have anything to do with puddings or animal paws (two meanings of pud), nor did he seem to have peptic ulcer disease (PUD). He was also not given to fleering. Or, for that matter, to fleeing. Nor, one hopes, were the baseball heroes featured in Fleer baseball cards – which I did not collect.

Fleer can, after all, mean “someone who flees.” But the verb fleer, which has also produced a noun fleer, refers to impudent laughter, a mocking smile, a sneer. It is thought to have come from the Scandinavian languages originally. It seems a suitable enough word for the purpose; it starts with the flippant flap of the fl, and then follows with the eer seen also on sneer as well as queer, bum steer, jeer, and of course a number of words with less negative tones. Those two e‘s could be mocking mouths or perhaps a pair of sloe eyes. Or they could simply be chewing on bubble gum, which was first successfully manufactured by Fleer, which was founded in 1885 by Frank Fleer. Which seems apposite enough – I would think that blowing a bubble and popping it in someone’s face (as for instance the girl does to the principal in the arcade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) could be seen as a rather frank fleer, if it were done mockingly.

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schlimazel

Posted on July 19, 2009 | 5 comments

You may have heard of Yiddish stories of three blunderers: Schmendrik, Schlemiel, and Schlimazel. All three characters are named for types of people; the first two are actually apparently eponyms – the common noun is based on the name of a person, in this case a character in a story. The third, schlimazel, is a a well-formed Yiddish word, as will see. All three have that sch (or sh) beginning that one often gets in Yiddish words and quite notably in derisory usage in the onset substitution schm: “Doctor, schmoctor. He’s a dentist.” It shows up on other derisory words too, notably schmuck (a word for a male body part, now applied to persons) and schmo (a euphemism for schmuck) as well as schmutz (junk, filth, undesirable stuff). Schlimazel doesn’t have the m but it does have a slippery sound that might to some ears have a sleazy side, or at least a messy, fuzzy buzz.

But a schlimazel is not a sleazebag or a fuzzball. One common definition is that if a waiter spills soup on a customer, the waiter is a schlemiel and the customer is a schlimazel. If you recognize the mazel in this word from mazel tov, you’re right on: it’s the word for “luck” and comes from Hebrew, as do many words in Yiddish. But Yiddish is not a Semitic language any more than English is a Romance language; no matter how many loan words a language takes from a source, its language type is determined by the source of the grammar and will generally be manifested in the sources of many of the basic words and affixes too. And for Yiddish, that source is German – it’s a dialect of Low German with Hebrew influence, long written with the Hebrew alphabet but now usually rendered with the Latin alphabet. (Low German is not “low-grade” German; the Low/High distinction in German is geographical.) We see this in the schlim (the double m in schlim mazel became a single one), which is from Middle High German slim “crooked” (yes, it’s the source of Modern English slim). This is emblematic of Yiddish in its mixing and also in its palatalization of the [s] initially.

So while Schlimazel’s companions are a naive fool (Schmedrik) and a clumsy oaf (Schlemiel), our hero du jour is just plain unlucky. How unlucky is he? Well, the word seems to have even had the bad luck to have been borrowed and mutated into a word for a messy situation, a complication, a quarrel, a row: shemozzle. This luckless lunk is being accused of causing the trouble – and they can’t even get his name right!

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escutcheon

Posted on July 17, 2009 | 4 comments

Lord Floppington: “Would you care to come up and see my escutcheon?” Miss Primsley: “Good heavens! Do I look like a tropical disease specialist?”

This word’s object is not actually so objectionable. But it does have a scratchy sound, doesn’t it? Or perhaps something metallic and scrapey, like a ratchety flivver or, more to the point, a sword against a shield. Ah, a shield! But not just any shield. This one goes with not a suit of armor but a coat of arms. An escutcheon is an object for discussion (perhaps at a luncheon), and has as little function in its ostensible design as a Freemason’s trowel. In short, it is a skeuomorph. And if you have a blot on your escutcheon, it is not so likely the blood of your enemies as the ichor of your wounded reputation.

Escutcheon is such an ungraceful word (if not the roughest you’ve lately heard) – escaped from the chat of retired captains, or sworn by sailors agrunt at capstans – where could it come from, this word of the bench, the musket, the whiskers, but from the French? Yes, of course, this ornament of fights came from the land of gallant knights. In Old French it was escuchon, and that in turn comes from the Latin for “shield”: scutum. Now, there’s an unpretty word (one could have a ball with puns, but I’ll let that hang)! But if you’ve ever wondered why in heck anyone would name a line of high-end rain coats Aquascutum, you now have your answer: they are not merely water shield but escutcheon, an emblem of membership in the plutocracy (as endorsed by generations of royalty).

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kerf

Posted on July 16, 2009 | 4 comments

A noun that sounds rather like a sandbag hitting gravel, or a fisticuff in a scuffle, or your dad’s hand whacking the side of your head for your part in the kerfuffle. Or like the half-stifled cough you make after inhaling a bit of sawdust, which is closer to the meaning. It has a variety of resonances: curve, kerchief, cuff, carafe, kerb, even mirror suggestions of freak and maybe firkin. There’s that rough-and ready k with its notch, and on the other end the two bent-over letters, rf, like wheat stalks in a crop circle. One might even discern a trough down the middle, cut out between the k and the f down to the tops of the e and r. If that trough were a notch made by a circular saw, say, then it would be a kerf. Kerf can also refer to the cut end of a tree or branch, or even the bit that was cut off. Or should I say carved off… since carve is not only another resonance for this word but in fact a close cousin. Kerf comes from Old English cyrf, which comes from an ablaut version (thus probably a past-tense form) of the stem that also produced ceorfan, now known to us as carve. So they are cut from the same branch! But where carve starts with a curve, kerf has the straight cut. And what word comes most often before this one? That toothy saw.

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oyster

Posted on July 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

Complete this sentence: “The world is my ___.” How about the phrase “cultured ____”? Ah, this word gives us a fair few pearls. It may sound a bit like waster but it’s not one (well, perhaps of money). Its object is a mollusc eaten in the raw, reputed to encourage other things done in the raw. It’s a funny word, though – it starts with that oy, so often followed by vey, and recalling oil and Brooklyn accents (eva hoid one?), and caps it with ster, like in lobster and mobster, huckster and spinster, youngster and punster… a sturdy, serviceable, often jokey-sounding agentive suffix… that you are not actually seeing in this word. Oh, no doubt the existence of the suffix influenced the current English form of this word, but the word is not attributing plaintiveness to its bivalve object. (They’re not very loquacious, anyway, oysters; ask them how they are and they clam up.) It comes to us from Latin ostrea, which in turn comes from Greek ostreon, which is related to the Greek root osteo, signifying bones. So, yes, it has a bone to pick, but in silence, with hoarse- – I mean horseradish. And perhaps it will get you to yes, and even to the second storey (where you will find toys and the rest). But if the oyster on the half-shell doesn’t make an impression, some may notice that other famous Oyster, the Rolex Oyster. That plus pearls and the world is your oyster – though if the oyster going down doesn’t make you queasy, your bank balance going down might.