pulchritude

Posted on March 22, 2009 | 2 comments

To my eyes, this is a rather ugly word. It brings to the eyes broken patterns of pulp, mulch, rude, punch, pull… In sound it tosses in a couple of the allophonic effects in English that non-English-speakers are apt to find unpleasant or vulgar: our aspiration of syllable-initial stops (the puff of air after the p that makes this like p’hulk) and our velarization of l – the tongue in an inverse arch, touching at the tip and raising at the back, like a stretching cat, raised even farther to the point of a voiceless choking by the following k. But this is not a word for some rude hulk; it signifies beauty, by grace of the Romans using pulcher to mean “beautiful” (perhaps they read Rosamunde Pilcher in a pull-chair? except that the ch is, of course, [k], and Pilcher was born in 1924). And so, by association with its sense, it manages to pull off at least the effect of a lace frill on a purse-sized pug or a set of long lashes with thick mascara on a wizened doyenne. And if you don’t focus too much on the aesthetics of the word’s form, you can certainly use it as an erudite-sounding compliment – but only if the hearer knows what it means. If she doesn’t, you could end up wearing Krug on your Versace, Taittinger on your Jones New York, or at least Freixenet on your Freeman’s.

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wend

Posted on March 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word for making one’s way, but with a winding and weaving waft to it. And this word, too, has wended its way through English – in a rhizomatic relationship with some others. A first look may bring to mind Wendy, one word that is not related to it: the name for a girl was invented by J.M. Barrie in his Peter Pan of 1904, taken from a childhood nickname a friend of his had for him: Fwendy-Wendy (childish labializing of the r in friend plus a playful reduplication). If you wonder (while you wander) whether wind is a related word, the answer is a definite yes if you mean the verb, [waInd] (as opposed to the breezy noun, [wInd], which also used to be pronounced [waInd]). Wend is in fact a causative formed from a preterite of wind (like throng from thring, among others). Wind first referred to rapid or forcible motion, as with projectiles or water, and it also referred to self-directed motion for persons and other agents. It came to refer specifically to curved motion. Wend referred thus first to moving an object, and subsequently gained a sense of independent motion and sometimes specifically with curvature. Generally it became a synonym for go. A past tense version of it was went. But went came to be used so commonly for going anywhere in the past that it took over from the past-tense forms of go (which had been Old English eode, Middle English yede, yode, also not originally formed from go – who knows where the equivalent of “goed” had gone), while the present and infinitive of wend largely went out of common use. The word experienced something of a poetic and literary revival around 1800, especially in the phrase wend your [his, her, my, etc.] way – or, in the past, wended, since went was now married to someone else. Wend does not mecessarily imply a curved, indirect, or weary path, but there are enough echoes to wend it thusward. And after a path of some three turns, say – \/\/ – we now end… or is there no end? Will we know when?

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boondocks

Posted on March 19, 2009 | 1 comment

I know, it’s not normal to cite a word in its plural form. And this isn’t a pseudo-plural, like kudos: the dictionary entry is boondock, from Tagalog (Filipino) bundok “mountain.” But ever since this word hit English (apparently during World War II), it’s been used in the plural as a rule, and with the (that regional the, which (the) Ukraine wishes to shed, and (the) Yukon is ambivalent about, matched with the hand-waving plural: the suburbs, the sticks). Lately its derivative form boonies has become rather popular (also with the). Readers of the comics may think of the comic strip The Boondocks about urban African-American kids living in white suburbs (now an animated series too). Lovers of 1960s music might remember Billy Joe Royal’s 1965 “Down in the Boondocks.” Down is not normally so common with this word, though; out is a more natural match. Perhaps Royal was too much influenced by the docks part of the word. At any rate, in his song, there’s no boon to being in them! The word itself has a sort of sound of a thunderclap – in reverse. It also shares features with sundog (and Moondog, another musical name) and boom box, and even goombah and poontang. There’s a sort of exotic quality to it, in that very rustic way in which ordinary things (boon and docks) can take on strangeness in a dilapidated shack in half-light (or in an Adrew Wyeth painting). That lowing nasal-influenced oo may be heard in moon but it’s also in doom and gloom, and the bookending b and d give it an added hollowness that reverberates voicelessly with the cks, like an echo off a rocky mountainside.

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galore

Posted on March 18, 2009 | 2 comments

There is a certain wantonness to this word, a revelry that goes beyond the sense of bounty. It brings out echoes of a glorious gala with gallons to gulp and lots of lore to listen to, and of all those bumptious gal words: galumph, galoot, galoshes. It even sounds like a guffaw from a cartoon character. And, to top it off, James Bond fans will collocate it with Pussy. In Irish Gaelic, go leór may really mean “sufficient” or “enough,” but in the more than 300 years that English has had loan of it, it has acquired a tinge of glut and gluttony. And since it begins like Guinness and ends like beer (and more), gregarious garrulous goliards will, on St. Pat’s day, go rolling home having gorged and guzzled lashings of both.

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elegiac

Posted on March 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

A lyrical word, its legend an elegant sigh for one elevated to the Elysian Fields. Its origins are pure Greek, calling forth an elegy, a poetic threnody (though W.S. Gilbert may have thought it a fit verse form for enumerating the crimes of Heliogabalus). Its fluid beginning – begging in print to be the nose and eyes of one sublimely bereaved – tilts the back half away from available less-pleasant echoes. In the standard British pronunciation, with its stress on the gi and its [aI] diphthong, we get the heart of giant, angina, gyre, that wild i that tenses the tongue from yawn to constriction and is in so many countries a wail of mourning or distress – but this word’s object distills the mourning into poetry. The more American version makes the last three syllables a dactyl, the foot of the elegiac verse; the central two vowels are [i], as lee and gee (like weejee?), and the ending ac risks a sound of yak, but the poetic distillation flavours this with Cognac and Armagnac – though a sip when crossing the Lethe, river of forgetfulness, may bring back amnesiac, the necessary preparative for metempsychosis. Weep no more for your past life; it is simply not there, like the missing foot in the second verse of an elegiac couplet.

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hinterland

Posted on March 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word will immediately remind many Canadians of Hinterland Who’s Who, which peppered our younger years with brief televised vignettes about fauna in the great backyard of our vast land, accompanied by a cheery little flute tune. In fact, it’s still active – see www.hww.ca (they’ve jazzed up the tune a bit, but the flute’s whiff of the ’70s is still discernible). Those not so primed may be influenced by the hint or inter (with that h that can add a haunting or hairy breath coming up as a gust from the hinterland of the vocal tract, while the remaining consonants are voiced – except for the t – and at the front of the mouth). One might hear echoes of winter or hinder. But speakers of German will know that hinter is “behind.” OK, but behind what? Well, the coast, originally, and the doctrine of the hinterland assigns as territory to a port those inland areas that supply it. But now coasts aren’t the only centres of commerce or primary points of encounter; some rather large inland cities don’t seem as “hinter” as all that. So hinterland now refers more to the boondocks, the backwoods, the bush, the sticks – a place where the only people who go around dressed in black all the time are the Amish. Ironically, a word often seen near – though not abutting – hinterland is city, for the contrast. The adjective you’re perhaps most likely to see with hinterland, however, is vast.

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What flavour of English do you want?

Posted on March 15, 2009 | 1 comment

This is taken from a presentation I gave at the Editors’ Association of Canada conference in Edmonton, June 2008. For the bibliography and a concise summary of some key points, see the handout (PDF, 72 KB)

I thought I wouldn’t call this “Register, collocation, and reflected meaning” because, well, that sounded a little dry. And I’m going to be starting into this subject with the use of a metaphor of sort. The metaphor I’m going to be using—and I think it’s a pretty viable one—is, as you may have guessed, that a piece of a text is like a piece of food. A document is like a dish. Words are like ingredients. Continue reading →

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laconic

Posted on March 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word’s current flavour of meaning is undoubtedly influenced to some extent by echoes of lax, lethargic, lacklustre, and perhaps lazy. There might even be a bit of a yawn in the central con. On the other hand, conic and its phonetic sibling comic don’t seem to have played into the mood much. Art history and aethetic philosophy types might (like Lessing) muse on the sublime suffering of Laocoon, but the classicists will more likely head straight to the Peloponnesus (we’ll get to that). Ask people what image this word brings to mind and it’s a pretty good bet it’ll be one of those strong, silent cowboy types – some might think of the Clint Eastwood or John Wayne types, while others might have a lazier layabout type in mind, but always it’s someone who speaks as though every word costs a dollar. The equivalent of those cowboys in ancient Greece was the Spartans, and in particular the Lacedaemonians (aka Laconians). They didn’t talk much. Too busy fighting, I reckon.

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aspic

Posted on March 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word made me snicker when I first heard it. I was about 10 years old. I soon learned that its object was some unfun adult version of Jell-o – I found that to be a less auspicious aspect. Still, a spicy aspic is as pickable as pickles, and I certainly grasp I can prefer it to some versions of picas. One does need to get past the unpleasant overtones of a racist epithet. But the word has an unavoidable bite to it, not simply from the sharp stab of pic or the snake-like hiss before it, but from the snake that not only begins it but actually is it: aspic is an extended form (useful in poetry) of asp (one of them bites Shakespeare’s Cleopatra). How does that come to be savoury jelly? One suggestion is that the jelly was said to be “froid comme un aspic,” a cliché in French. Or it could be that it is of the same colour as an asp. Either way, it doesn’t seem to be any connection to the third aspic, which is another word for spikenard (great lavender).

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brazen

Posted on March 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

What’s the next word? It might well be hussy. On the other hand, it could be Head, as The Brazen Head is Ireland’s oldest pub, serving since 1198 and mentioned by James Joyce – and imbibed at by Brendan Behan – a touch more recently. If you said image, you’re probably thinking of graven. But one thing’s for sure: the sense is as bold as brass, and the word likewise. There are notes of of fire and food, with blaze and braise echoing, and the noise of braying (with a buzz in the middle) but also a bit of bravery. It lacks the primness of praise, with its voiceless p spreading to rob even the r of its resonance. Certainly there is nothing of Zen about it beyond the letters; whether the bra applies depends on the hussy, but I suspect she would be more brazen without one. Mix it up and you get zebra plus an n, but that’s a horse of a different stripe. The mettle of this one is metallic, and it has an echo of bronze – but it’s all brass all the way, baby; from the oldest version of English, this word means “made of brass” (brass, for its part, is not only old but untraceable: we don’t know where it came from before Old English. It just showed up one day uninvited, it seems. The nerve). And brass is bright, shiny, in your face – and, musically, loud: glaring and blaring. So someone who horns in, or some trumpeting strumpet, gets this word, however unpolished they may be. And they just have to brazen it out.

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