gongoozler

Posted on April 3, 2009 | 1 comment

You’ve probably heard of trainspotters, people who occupy much of their free time watching trains go by and noting which locomotives and cars they’ve spotted. They may even take pictures. The apparent vacuity of this avocation has led to trainspotting becoming also one of the less vulgar terms for wasting time. Well, trainspotter has a kin, one that in its extended sense carries perhaps an even greater sense of slack jaws and vacant eyes. The very origin of this word is thought to be two terms for blank staring: Lincolnshire dialect gawn and gooze. You easily get the sense of gawping and gaping, jaws yawning, ga-ga, as though bamboozled (or just sozzled on booze), a goon, a loser, gone from the world, with an empty head that would ring like a gong if banged. Yet there are those who happily claim the name: those great, intrepid souls who choose freely to while their hours watching locks and yachts and cargo barges, the viewing gallery of a canal. Wave at them as you wend on the water, these riparian kibitzers, these bywater bystanders, the idlers on the towpath.

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combinatorics

Posted on April 2, 2009 | 2 comments

Just last weekend I was talking with some fellow linguists about where one would insert an expletive (as we do in abso-frickin’-lutely – this process is called tmesis) in a word with a dactyl followed by the main stress. At the time I couldn’t think of a good English example; place names such as Constantinople and Kalamazoo presented themselves. But, hey, I forgot about this word: dactyl plus trochee, five syllables. Now, how many different ways could you arrange the main and secondary stresses plus three off-beats? Viewed as a bare arrangement exercise, it’s trivial combinatorics, but once you involve English phonotactic constraints it may limit the options slightly… While the total imaginable arrangements of one primary stress, one secondary stress, three off-beats, and an insertion – after at least one syllable and before at least one syllable – number 80, the total you’ll ever hear in English is rather fewer: it turns out that the location of the tmesis is normally predictable for any stress pattern (but also subject to morphemic influence), and when we work in other details of English stress patterns, we find that there are really only a couple of ways you’re likely ever to get it. But, ah, this is so dry – unless, that is, you happen to like mucking around with the calculation of permutations and combinations, which is what combinatorics is all about. It sounds so nice and technical, too, doesn’t it? Those clicky [k] sounds, the final [ks] on a word that is treated as singular (like other academic field names – semiotics, mathematics, and so on – but not so adventuresome as, say, Vercingetorix, which anyway puts the dactyl after the trochee), the obvious combine connection and the resonances of laboratory, binary, imbricate, and frankly quite a few other sesquipedalian (a dactyl plus dactyl!) sawbuck words… Not to mention the fact that we adopted (and adapted) the word from German (which took its components from Latin). For some people, just knowing and using a word of this sort is enough to sound smart. But if that’s not enough, application of it to aspects of life in casual conversations ought to do the trick. And, for that cowboy tinge on the geekiness, add that expletive, that taboo tmesis… And where would you insert it?

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swage

Posted on April 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s a word that showed up unexpectedly in one of those Nigerian scam emails (it was used improperly as a past tense for “swing”). You’re unlikely to encounter it anywhere else, though, unless you’re in a blacksmith’s shop, say. It brings echoes of swing and wages and perhaps sway and, to look at it, swag – and, alas, sewage – but in pronunciation may assuage these with, well, assuage. If you’re looking for some hint of the sense in the letter forms, you’re in a little luck: the semicircular indents in the s and, arguably, the concavities in the w could be seen to represent the grooves in mouldings, and the semicircular dents in anvils and dies, that the noun refers to; the verb refers to the application of the latter, though there is another sense (even less used now) which is an alteration of assuage. The word comes from Old French souage and is cognate with modern French suage. But the only way the Nigerian email is likely to swage you is that you will, on discovering you have been beaten, get bent.

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slattern

Posted on March 31, 2009 | 1 comment

Does this word have a misogynistic edge? Perhaps so, although it does at least embody the expectation that women are usually neat, clean, et cetera, in designating an exception to that. Men, it seems, are sloppy and dirty more as a matter of course, and so one is hard put to come up with an equivalent males-only word. To the word, anyway, if it’s not too distasteful: does it present a picture of a sleazy, sly or sullen slut peeping through spattered slats, with ladders in her hose and her slip in tatters, along with a smattering of other unflattering details? Phonaesthetics do aid the connotations. And if this word seems rather close to splatter, well it should: though they may or may not have arisen independently, splatter and this word’s source, the dialect verb slatter, are both imitative – onomatopoeic and generally phonaesthetic – words signifying much the same thing. From that comes slattern to refer to a woman of untidy habits (yes, indeed, why only a woman? but there you have an eye into British cultural history – this word has been applied to men, but only very rarely), and, as with the apparently unrelated (though again so similar!) slut, looseness of physical hygiene was extended quite readily to looseness of moral character, as of one whose mattress rattles in rentals as she natters… I leave further exploration of the unflattering patterns of sl words and the various effects available with att and ern to the reader as an exercise.

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velleity

Posted on March 30, 2009 | 3 comments

This word inspires in me a fleeting wish to seek out music sung by Elise Velle. Others my be more inclined to muse on acts of villainy or levity. But their lives lack vitality who linger at the level of velleity, which is veiled volition – a wisp of a will, a thought sans thelemite. The crossbow of desire is furnished, but velleity does not give the order to level it. That obscure object of desire, be it elle or it, notches in at v and takes root at y, but does the root lead to germination or does it wither on the vine? The e‘s are like heavy-lidded eyes, but is the ll a nose for business or simply a chimney through which impetus goes up in smoke? Thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and, as those condemned by Rousseau, we mistake velleity for resolve. This word has come to us little changed from Latin; its root is velle, verb: “will, wish.” Its euphony lives at the lips and alveolar ridge. It is pretty, perhaps, but rarely seen in action.

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tentiginous

Posted on March 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Aren’t you itching to know what this word means? Does it keep you on tenterhooks? Does it perhaps signify a genius in a tent? Someone who is an indigenous ten? Tense? Feeling an igneous twinge, at least a tinge? All gin and tentacles, tentatively touching us? The options may be a bit vertiginous. And pardon me if I seem a touch tendentious, but I want to cross the t‘s and dot the i‘s… and round the n‘s, I guess. This word seems to want two: it has two each of t, n, and i, and when you take those out you’re left with ego leading into us. So what does ego want of us? Well, like this word, it wants two. Boy, does it ever want to! It is seized with a fit of cupidity – of tentigo, an equally disused word, meaning “priapism” or simply whatever kind of “lust,” from the identical Latin word. And when you have tentigo, you tend to go… but isn’t it so much better than lentigo, even if it, too, means showing your true spots?

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opprobrium

Posted on March 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

Would it be appropriate to say the experience of opprobrium is as pleasant as having your opposite probed? (Or, as probrium suggests, having a probe in your – oh, right, family readership.) Certainly the word has all the uptightness of probity with none of the redeeming moral character in its referent. If you’re wondering whether it’s related to opposite or probity, the answer is yes and no: yes in the op of opposite, which is from Latin ob “against,” and otherwise no. The pro in opprobrium is the same as in pro bono (the kind of legal favour you might need if you find yourself in opprobrium): “for” or “towards”; the brium comes from a root meaning “bear” and a Latin neuter case ending (and you’d better hope the judge in your case is neutral, given how public opinion is against you). The ten letters of this word give us two o‘s – oh-oh! glaring eyes? – and those two p‘s and a b, which look kind of like two thumbs down, one thumb up (is that a thumb pointing up? ooh…). The double bilabial-plus-r, with the um at the end, in North American speech (with the retroflex r‘s, as opposed to the gentle trills of the more British style) gives it a sound somewhat like a judge making an official cough followed by a throat clearing – and from there, of course, one proceeds to the sentence.

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threshold

Posted on March 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

Quick: how many h‘s are in this word? OK, now how many h‘s do you say? If you said “three” to either, please play again, as the coffee cup rim says. We write it with two, but we only say [h] once in it – and the [h] we say isn’t written. After all, th and sh don’t have a pronounced [h] in them; the h simply pairs with the preceding letters to make fricatives for which we don’t have a single letter (in the case of the opening th, we used to have one, but then European movable type was brought in, and they didn’t have it, so we no longer had it either). OK, so next one: what has threshold to do with threshing? Answer: thresh – really the same word as thrash – referred first to trampling with the feet. This was done to grains to separate them out. Then someone got the bright idea of using flails to do the job, and the acting of threshing (or thrashing) came to be thought of as beating with the arms (with or without an implement, in the extended senses). But the door part was already named. And the hold? What hold? Do you see a hold after thresh? I don’t, just an old. It’s uncertain where the ending of this word came from – in Old English it’s scold or xold from the s onward, and Swedish and Danish make the word tröskel and tærskel – but it has nothing to do with holding. That’s just a bit of reanalysis (a.k.a. folk etymology). Now, thresh has a sound somewhat suited to threshing, with its voiceless fricatives like flails whistling through the air, but it doesn’t really sound like a doorsill to me. But the thing about a doorsill is that it’s a point of transition. Ah, you know: those points of constriction where people just love to pause, blocking the way of those behind them. Pause? Hold on a moment. Yes, that suits: it’s a place where you stop and hold. And in the more metaphorical sense of any sort of limen, hold conveys the suspension, or the point where things start to take hold. Do echoes of fresh or pressure – or threat – come into play? Perhaps they may. And with what other words does threshold often come out to play? Consciousness, device, element, logic, function, switching: all attach to make compounds. Other words often seen in its company: aerobic and lactate (ah, exercise! runners know those ones), cross and crossed, below, above, exceed, step, hearing, pain, across, low, high, certain… And quite a few more, obviously below my threshold for noting them. Below? Yes, the metaphor has become a vertical one, with no image left of the doorsill. It, too, has crossed some threshold, it seems.

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writhe

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

Write this word in italics and you may see the w writhing in its spiral. The very juxtaposition of w and r at the beginning may invoke a mental entanglement: two sounds too similar to say in sequence. So we say the one, with its attendant lip-rounding, and think the other before it. And then the tongue writhes in the mouth, flopping like a fish from the retroflex [r] through the open [a] back to the press-up of [I], finally touching the teeth at the end. It starts like ride and rhyme (and write, right, and rite – or just almost if you do Canadian raising, which makes the diphthong start higher before a voiceless consonant) and rhymes with such nice words – blithe, kithe, tithe – but the lovely word it’s perhaps most like is the one it’s akin to: wreathe, and of course its noun wreath. It began (in Anglo-Saxon, straight from the Germanic) as a transitive, referring to twisting and turning, as in working a wreath; in Middle English it added the intransitive, which is the sense we normally use it for now. And how much less festive it has come to be. We need not blame its anagram wither anymore than its others, whiter and I threw. When, after all, do people writhe? In ecstasy, perhaps, but much more often in agony or pain. And what, other than human bodies, is writhing? A writhing, twisting mass of snakes completes the set of most common collocations for the gerund. I’ll take a wreath, thanks.

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disgruntled

Posted on March 23, 2009 | 2 comments

“So how come there’s no gruntled, huh?” Well, guess what: there is, disused as it may be. Just look in the Oxford English Dictionary. But don’t expect gruntle to mean the opposite of disgruntle: the dis is here (as more often in Latin formations but occasionally in Anglo-Saxon ones of dispersion or undoing) an intensifier and perhaps signifier of direction, not a negater. Grunt, the root, is an onomatopoeic word for that noise hogs make. The le is a frequentative suffix, as we see in suckle, sidle, and a number of other English words. So gruntle is “utter a low grunt” and, for people, “grumble, complain.” And disgruntle could be read as “cause to go gruntling away” – or, more plainly, “piss off,” a sense it’s had as long as it’s existed. The form works well enough with the sense: the grunting, grumbling sound (with that classic animal gr), combined with the negativity and hiss of dis, and the disintegrative echoes of dismantled. And what sort of person is most often said to be disgruntled? Employees – especially former employees – and workers (need I mention that they are archetypally postal workers)? But also customers, fans, students, and even officers and voters, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. And we know that disgruntled people, especially former employees and postal workers, don’t always stop at mere grumbling and grunting. In fact, this word, over time, has taken on an ominous, even baleful tinge, so that its use even flippantly can make one feel like diving behind a desk.

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