dilapidated

Posted on April 20, 2009 | 2 comments

A word for a discombobulated, shabby, ramshackle building, perhaps collapsing clapboard, an architectural jalopy. It certainly has a slapping sound of boards tumbling, doesn’t it? Well, or how about bricks or stones? If those seem more suited to crumbled rubble, well enough, but this word did originally refer to the stones of a building being dispersed as if thrown: Latin dis “away, asunder” and lapidare “throw stones” (from that lapidary lapid root – how far we are from lapis lazuli in this wind-whistling hovel with its panels flapping in the atmosphere). This adjective is now much more common than the verb from which it comes, though one could still say that careless tenants (and weather) dilapidated a building, or simply that the building dilapidated (it’s an ergative verb, like break – the object of the transitive is the subject of the intransitive). The written form of the word could seem to have boards sticking out at all parts: ascenders, dots, and descender. The sound of it we have already explored; the percussion of the word is more accentuated in the common mispronunciation dilapitated (if a person is decapitated and so brought low, then a house that has oft crepitated may seem suitably dilapitated, I suppose). And what words do we commonly see it with? Houses, buildings, and homes, as well as structures, dwellings, and barns, and even apartment, and of course old, but also that great – and spooky – contrast, mansion.

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wharf

Posted on April 19, 2009 | 1 comment

Should we go fishing with this word, we may find ourselves at Worf, a name for a linguist and for a Klingon. Benjamin Lee Worf hypothesized that the language we use affects the way we act on or even perceive reality. Worf came to the idea because he found that people treated “empty” gas drums carelessly, when although empty of gas they were full of explosive vapours. A Maine merchant who unloaded dozens of unsaleable cappuccino bowls to tourists by calling them chowdah bowls would likely agree with Worf. But many linguists take issue with his idea, or particularly with the simplistic version of it that suggests that people can’t conceive of things they have no words for, a prima facie absurd notion. Perhaps his namesake Klingon should be set to resolving the issue in a less cerebral way – for instance, by throwing someone off a wharf at warp speed. The old word for throw, after all, became our modern word warp, cognate with German worfen, while the old word for warp became our modern word for throw in a twisted little linguistic semantic metathesis. But we’re at sea here: neither of these is related to wharf, which comes from Old English hwearf. Wharves – or wharfs, if we prefer the older British-style plural – are, in origin, embankments at water’s edge for docking boats at; now they may be wooden or similar structures. Tell me, though: if someone builds an embankment at water’s edge, what do you see its function being? How about if it is a dock? How about if it is a wharf? Three names for what could be the same structure. And for which of the above do you envision fishing, and how readily? In San Francisco there was one that was favoured for docking fishing vessels. Now the fame of Fisherman’s Wharf has fixed an image in the mind, and it may for some predipose them to thinking of fishing when hearing the word wharf. Now tell me, if a boat is coming into or pulling away from a wharf, what sort of sound does its horn make? Are you more inclined to think of a train-whistle-type sound, like a “wharf, wharf”? Tell me next what noise a dog running after the boat makes: “bow wow” or “woof woof”? (Or does it say “arf arf,” to match the end of this word?) And if a Klingon were piloting the fishing boat… Well, no need to be silly. Klingons prefer warfare to wharf air.

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strudel

Posted on April 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s a word to keep on your tongue – it stays mainly at the tip, but its object can continue on. It has that great Germanic str onset that covers the waterfront from striking to stringy, strain to stroke, straitjacket to strumpet. And then it goes on to rhyme with noodle, poodle, and the rest of that kit and caboodle. ‘Strue! Does it sound crisp like pastry? Not really, though it does sound like something to be served by a damsel in a dirndl. We’ve only had this word in English since the late 19th century; we got it from the Austrians: it’s German for “whirlpool.” Not that you see a hint of a whirlpool – or of the phyllo-like millefoglie of the pastry – in the shape of the word. A little play will find anagrams of turds, led, and rust in it. Ah, how rude! And yet how sweet. How do you like them apples? Probably a fair bit – although strudels can be made with other fruits (and even with mushrooms), the one that is a standard collocation with strudel is apple.

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schism

Posted on April 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word manifests a schism between spelling and pronunciation – and between two ways of pronouncing it. One might say there is a (somewhat repaired) historical schism in its form, too, but really it’s a manifestation of language change over centuries… followed by atavistic orthographic reversion, which in turn has given rise to a recrudescent pronunciation. Even more amusing, the version preferred by prescriptivists is a medial, not original, form – and it goes against the spelling, by contrast with such reverted spelling pronunciations as for the suffix ing, which was [In] for a long time until brought back to match the spelling by the yardstick-wielders.

But perhaps the thing to establish first is that this word does not sound like schist with an m swapped for the i, even though both words come from the same source: Greek schizein, verb, “split” (you will recognize it in schizophrenia, “split head” by origin). Instead, this word – which has been used in English since the 14th century, in reference first to ecclesiastical splits and then, starting a century later, to splits in general – passed into English already mutated as cisme or scisme, with [s] at the beginning. Then, with interest in and awareness of the classics growing, in the 16th century it got changed to schism to match the Greek (and intermediary Latin) source. And only over time, and with considerable resistance, and only by some speakers, has the onset come to be said [sk].

So let us look at the two pronunciations severally. The first presents us with a silent ch, which I defy you to find in another English word. It hisses and sizzles, and snips like scissors – which word, by the way, is unrelated. The vowel can almost be subsumed into the fricative flow: see how slightly you can separate your tongue from your alveolar ridge, so that rather than cleaving, it cleaves. Then decide whether to ply it slightly again before the [m] or dive straight in without even a hint of a schwa. One syllable or two? Or is this a word that may be used in arguments against syllables as an essential unit, or at least in favour of fractional syllables? In any event, though ism is a common suffix, few unsuffixed words (I was going to say “one-syllable,” but let’s not take that issue as decided) end with it: prism is perhaps the most common, and jism the least polite.

But if you wish to say the ch, you start the word with [sk], and thus enforce a schism between the fricatives. Certainly [sk] is common enough, and schism is not the only word that at first in English had a c (or s) pronounced [s] that then was respelled sch on historical grounds and is now sometimes pronounced with [sk]: schedule is the other one I can think of, and it has a similar history. But let me not get off schedule; I’m running long as it is. The skipping jaunt or sketchy scratch of [sk] lends this pronunciation a distinctly different air from the softer [s] version, a bit of a kick.

On paper, of course, it’s all one word, glaring at you and daring you to decide which way it will be pronounced, a sort of Schroedinger’s cat that could be either version or neither version until you ask which. And on the page it sometimes hangs out near religious and church, but its closest friend is between.

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hegemony

Posted on April 14, 2009 | 2 comments

The first time I saw this word, I was struck by what an awkward-looking thing it was, and by my uncertainty as to how to pronounce it. There is persistent confusion, in fact, as to the latter; the version with stress on the second syllable – “Hey, Jiminy! You have hegemony over the crickets!” – is perhaps the more “proper” (preferred by those who arguably have hegemony over English usage), but the version with stress on the first – “The banking system is suffering from the hegemony of hedge money” – is common enough. One thing to nail down at any rate is that the g sounds like a j, even though the Greek source, hegemon, “leader,” had a [g]. We used to make that change as a matter of course in English, and we also represented any j sound before e or i by a g as a rule. That this has changed for imported words is illustrated by the fact that we now generally say [g] in Gibran and Genghis even though these relics of an earlier era of transliteration would have been Jibran and Jingiz (or Chingiz) had they been set today.

You’re probably most likely to meet hegemony in an academic context, likely in cultural studies or perhaps history. Those who criticize hegemonies are themselves typically among the oligarchs of the academic hegemony over theoretical discourse. You would get the sense that hegemony means “this group is hogging all the toys to themselves,” but really it refers tout court to leadership or preeminence, and not necessarily to a quasi-autocratic dominance. The academic hegemony over discourse on hegemony is illustrated by the words that appear often in the neighbourhood (within a few words) of hegemony: Gramsci (Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist leader and philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini, whose writings on hegemony inform much of the discourse on it), bourgeois, masculine, ideological, and even hegemony used again nearby, as well as dominance, cultural, regional, global, and a whole lot more of the same ilk, including of course American.

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noxious

Posted on April 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word is prohibitive off the top: no, x. The ox could be an emoticon for a skull and crossbones. Given the sense of the word, the x in the heart is not catchy as in extra or maximum or functional as in fixing; the o and o stare back at you like a baleful glare – or the lights on a railroad crossing marked by the x (the i may be the post, the signal arm, or the person tied to the tracks). This word has unpleasant echoes, such as toxic and Nixon. It keeps bad company, too: common nouns it modifies include fumes, weeds, odors, chemicals, gases, emissions – is one of these words not like the others? Note how this word, which came to us from Latin noxa “harm”, has taken on an almost exclusively gaseous air (I cannot say whether the steam-hissing sound of the second syllable had any influence on this narrowing), with the exception of the more technical use with weeds. Add the obstacular ob to the front, on the other hand, and you get a word mainly applied to persons: obnoxious, which tends to modify behaviour and often to be preceded by rude and or loud and. And yet obnoxious has another sense, a bit older but now largely disused: “exposed or subject to something, especially to something harmful.” In this sense, a person who is obnoxious may be the victim – and quite innocent, perhaps ironically, given that the noc in innocent comes from the same root as noxa, the heart of obnoxious.

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bagel

Posted on April 12, 2009 | 1 comment

As bready as a baguette, with a hole through it like a bugle, this word’s object looks like an overgrown doughnut. But though its origin (by way of Yiddish) is a Germanic word meaning “ring,” bagel doesn’t present any simple roundness. There are the rings in b, a, and g, but always attached to something else, and e is a broken ring and l no ring at all. The word makes a nice design, sure, with the ascenders as bookends and the descending loop in the middle, but it’s hardly iconic. Its sound is straightforward, even blunt, perhaps chewy, with the two voiced stops and final liquid, bouncing front to back to middle – or, well, simultaneous front and back, with the tongue curving between constrictions at back and tip, the closest thing to a ring in the enunciation. But to add the crispness of voiceless stops, you need lox or cream cheese – a couple of common collocations (along with breakfast, toasted, shop, chips, plain, and of course New York, every one of which has at least one voiceless stop). Its echoes run from beagle through bigger to gable (imagine Anne of Green Bagels!). The word gets around – even if its object doesn’t get a round word.

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senescence

Posted on April 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

Such a gleaming, shiny, silvery word. It has the three [s] sounds like shining steel unsheathed, padded by the pair of [n]s, but, better, it has such a neat near-symmetry to its two parts. And everything is even: two each of s, c, n, overlapping pairs like links of silver chain, and woven in between are the two pairs of e‘s. And all curves: every letter has a curve or two, and only the n‘s and e‘s have straight lines to match (four vertical lines and four horizontal lines). All together the letters shimmer like rhinestones. But this shine is not metal but mettle, the silver of hair, the wealth of wisdom earned in a life lived, and now as the contents improve the container weakens, the shimmering like that of a mirage ready to evanesce, in a sense. Ah, sense – something one may gain in greater amounts with time, as one sees the scenes and senses the scents of experience. The chain is the chain of life. And of language: words from words from words from words… sen from Latin, as in senex “old man,” whence also senator; escence also from Latin, escentem, a participial suffix for a verb, indicating incipience: something is beginning to happen, as in adolescence, somnolescence, and recrudescence. It sounds like essence but it is the bud… in this case, the bud of the decay, the aging, the going to seed, but also the culmination of experience, the acme of a life well lived. The cents have been saved and have gained interest and, germinating, bloom silver.

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can’t

Posted on April 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

The siren song of negativity, the leaning of lassitude, the jargon of just say no, the argot of no got: this word sounds like cant, cant, cant, or cant, but says can it – not can it do something? but just can it! But can it be a word? It’s can plus not, right, so two words, not one, right? No, that’s the point of contractions: two words come together and the contraction gives birth to a new word – the amoeba in reverse. Some may proclaim that can’t isn’t in their dictionaries (the ones in their minds, or else they’ve done a razor job on Oxford), but it’s a word no less (just like ain’t, millions of schoolteachers notwithstanding – ain’t may be a very informal word, a word you can’t – or, more accurately, shouldn’t – say in certain contexts, but it’s a word).

The word seems straightforward enough in sound – voiceless stops at front and back (the latter of which is often reduced to a glottal stop or even nothing, so you often can’t hear it but still know it’s there, partly due to the emphasis this word gets that can may not), the nasal (often reduced to a nasalization of the preceding vowel, with the tongue not touching until the t), and a vowel – but people can’t even get together on that vowel. Canadians and most Americans say the same a as in that (Hall and Oates: “I can’t go for that!”) – whatever vowel that is, relatively open in some dialects and more like “eeyuh” in some – while many other speakers move it farther back to rhyme with want. A characteristic of Boston-area dialects (of the “towny” class) is to use the more front vowel for can but the more back one for can’t, as if it just can’t make it any farther forward. There are a few other words this word sounds like, most of them spelled cant, but also, for instance, Kent, as in Clark or State.

But you can see which word you’re dealing with here thanks to the apostrophe, that little marker that many people can’t quite get a grip on in many places – because you can’t hear it in speech, and because some of the places it’s used have no historical justification (I’m thinking specifically of the possessives, which were not formed from a word plus has, as the misguided sorts who inserted the apostrophe a few centuries ago thought; they’re an inflectional ending that happens to have converged in form with the plural ending and by coincidence sounds like a contraction of has). Me, I’d like to get rid of apostrophes almost everywhere; George Bernard Shaw demonstrated how easily it can be done without harming clarity, and, for that matter, so do all speakers who don’t hook their fingers in the air every time they say a word with one. But language operates by common agreement, and if you make a change like that it might become too distracting from your message, so I probably can’t get away with it…

But you never know. Which, come to think of it, is where can’t comes from: can is formed from the past tense of cunnan, “know”, the source of modern (uncommon) ken. It’s originally a “preterite present” verb, meaning that it took a past tense and made it a present tense: I have known or have learned, so I am able. Now it’s an auxiliary and can’t (in standard English) work with an other auxiliary – we have to say you won’t be able to do that rather than you won’t can do that, even though be able to is just a paraphrase, not another form of the same verb. Not, for its part, comes from nought (and who says nought will come of nought?), which in turn is ne plus aught; ne is the original negator in English, and could often be seen in negative concord – where if one thing in a phrase was negated, the others were as well (he ne shall never do it). But then it was decided by some people in the 18th century that that was a double negative and illogical, and so now you can’t do it. Can you think of a reason to insist that, in spite of all of English’s illogics, one must not violate some mathematical conception of logic in one place, even though it used to work fine and still does in many other languages? I don’t know any. But I still can’t.

But then, when faced with all my whines of “I can’t,” sometimes I find it best to open some wine, decant, and recant.

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aegis

Posted on April 7, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s a word from the ages. Its opening ae – originally (and often still) a digraph (æ) – bespeaks a Latin origin, but if you go for that, the Greek will get your goat: it originally comes from Greek aigis, referring to a shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena, with a gorgon’s head in the middle, and it’s thought that aigis comes from aix, “goat,” because of a type of shield made of goatskin. But just as we no longer make shields of goatskin, we no longer make aegis sound similar to I guess; now, thanks to vowel shifting and a palatalization of the velar, it’s more akin acoustically to the Irish English eejits (which is idiots pronounced as though it were written in Irish Gaelic). Ah, geez! And the watchful eye, fortunately, is now not that of Zeus, Athena, or a gorgon; it might be that of an elder, if that’s not ageist, but it can be the auspices of any organization or authority, be it sage, aggie, or even Regis. If you know this word, you probably know the two words that usually come before it and the one that usually comes after it: under the aegis of… If you’re a weaponry buff, you may also know that it’s the name of an integrated weapon system used by the US Navy on some destroyers and cruisers. Which seems rather a return to the gorgonizing eye. But not, I hope, to the goat.

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