seductive

Posted on October 5, 2008 | Leave a comment

This is a word that dwells in the duct-work of leading, like conduct and viaduct, but the leading in this case is astray. When you hear this one say “duck,” you might want to – or say “Leave me alone, I’m a family man.” And yet it’s far too tempting, with its whisper and quick light moan of se and the nuzzling buzz of ive – with a plunging neckline at v – which speaks an echo of the commands give and live but on paper also shows the same end as connive. And, looking back, do you think of vice and victim? But this word has ameliorated in tone of late. Everybody wants it; you may hear an alto voice murmur it in reference to clothing or chocolate. It referred to leading (duc) apart (se) – perhaps to secede from the party to a secluded place – but now it almost seems mainstream.

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catarrh

Posted on October 4, 2008 | 2 comments

A word to be said with nose stuffed and throat phlegmy. For those who have ever seen this word actually used, it may have resonances of 19th-century advertisements for medicine. Its sound brings contradictory echoes: a dry, arid Arabian country and a resonant stringed instrument. Pet owners may look at it and think of a hairball. But if you focus on the tar, you begin to get the sense of the thing. The first half has a stickiness suitable for saying with the sinus passages inflamed. The second half simply lolls the tongue, but the spelling tells the true tale of woe: a double liquid rolling followed by heavy breathing… a throat clearing, or a grunt of frustration. If the rrh reminds you of diarrhea, it should, not just because that’s also unpleasant but because they both come from the Greek for “flow.” The cata is the same one as in cataclysm and catastrophe: down.

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ennui

Posted on October 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word that seems to give up out of boredom. A heavy-lidded e hunkers down into two sheep-like n‘s; the third one has keeled over and is lying feet skyward, staring at the blue emptiness. And at the end: the i, a brief candle about to go out. Others may see in it a little train of thought with a locomotive smokestack puffing on the right, but this train is crawling forever across an eternal Great Plains of the soul. The word can give less impassive overtones, with its echoes of annoy (which is in fact a related word) and an incomplete suggestion of “on we go” – but, you see, the go got up and went. Ennui can sometimes be seen with its Anglo-Saxon cousin boredom, and is also occasionally to be seen with its German relation Weltschmerz, but this is clearly the sort of word that smokes a Gauloise under the bleu, blanc et rouge while sipping absinthe for want of anything, oh, anything better to do. It started out as Latin inodio, proclaiming its hatred, but it got worn down over the years, lost its stop, its censorious io now trailing off instead as a tongue-relaxing ui, and it just can’t be bothered to care any more.

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qwerty

Posted on October 2, 2008 | Leave a comment

This word may well be your type. Although it sounds off-key, it also resonates with Canadian classical music lovers as a homophone for Kuerti, one of the country’s most noted pianists. But this word attaches to a different keyboard. Its very existence is a simple accident of an arrangement of keys producing a sayable word – even if one deviant from the usual English spelling rules. It is surely also luck that saying it produces two tyepwriter-like taps, with a whir in between (perhaps the sound of a Selectric or the daisy wheel on a 1980s Olivetti). It has a quirky look by dint of its opening q, and binds the lips and brain ever tighter with a double u rather than a single one. It has faint resonances of twenty and thirty and forty, and rather stronger ones of query – and the suitably inclined mind may hear some of flirty and see some of erotic. The most common neighbouring word is keyboard; after that, it’s probably uiop and asdfghjkl, neither of which is a word per se and the latter of which would tie the tongue of even a Czech or a Georgian. But why QWERTY? In fact, the layout was developed by trial and error to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam. But even after the keys didn’t stick, the layout did. It may also be no coincidence that one may type TYEPWRITER using only the top row of keys.

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serendipity

Posted on October 1, 2008 | 1 comment

A real find of a word. It presents an interesting mixture of bits – a new discovery at every turn: is it serene? dippy? is there pity? if you are in a sere place, will it rend you – or render you to a dip to end it? The word brings pleasant resonances to those who know it, and its sound delivers nice contrast: a smooth trochee followed by a bopping dactyl. It starts with a snakey s, but it won’t bite; the pair of eyes you see are heavy-lidded e‘s, like those of a relaxed dreamer (as the lid of r droops to n). But then a d pops up, and in the twinkling of an i it has flipped over to p. And after you’ve seen it… y? Well, why not? And where was this word found? Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, once known in Persian as Serendip… but as seen through a spyglass from England: in the 18th century, Horace Walpole coined the word on the basis of the story of the three princes of Serendip, who were ever discovering happy wondrous things unsought and unexpected… perhaps they, too, were word tasters.

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each writer should remember this

Posted on September 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

An example of what you get when you apply what you think is a rule in defiance of what sounds natural, from www.cbc.ca :

The Green party and the Bloc Québécois each has nine per cent.

The mistake is in thinking that it has to be “has” because of the word “each.” But the word “each” is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. The two party names are, as a coordinated compound subject. So of course it’s “have.” “Each” is an adverb, and could have been moved to the end – which would have made the grammatical structure more obvious:

The Green Party and the Bloc Québécois have nine per cent each.

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pupil

Posted on September 30, 2008 | 1 comment

A bright-eyed word of school days. The smell of “pew” and its restricting churchy sound only impart a puerile and disciplinary air suited to it and do not diminish its pull for people – especially its counterpart the master. We see the two rosy cheeks and smile in between of pup, and indeed many a pupil is but a pup. Add an il like a hand raised to ask a question and you are in the right class. But in the other lens we see this word collocating with “dilated” and carrying airs of eyes, clinics, drops and drugs. And yet this is a reflection of the first sense: Latin pupilla is a doll or the little girl who carries it; it gives us both the star student (also from pupulus, the little boy, whilom an orphan ward) and the mirror of her little image in the teacher’s eye (as a doll, pupa – also a chrysalis, like the student).

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bonk

Posted on September 29, 2008 | 1 comment

A sound word for an abrupt encounter. You know just what it is the moment you hear it; that rap on a melon you hear could as easily be a rap on your melon. The low opening knock receives a hollow nasal resonance and a high echo. The b, bellied out like a balloon, is chopped and popped to a k. This word has the dumb tones of bunk and bum and some of the hardness of conk and the rudeness of honk, but if you try to bank it you will hit a wall (and, if you are a runner, when you “hit the wall,” bonk is what happens – that sound of your blood sugar level hitting bottom). Some people use it more loosely when two bodies bump with each other. Oddly, this obvious onomatopoeia appears to be a child of the 20th century. We feel sure that it will not go away as long as the school of hard knocks is holding classes.

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marathon

Posted on September 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word that runs fluidly, prettily, and not overlong. O, that its object were such an experience! Fourteen kilometres per syllable, more than five per letter – but the last syllable of the word is as long as the first two together, which is closer to the reality of the race, where the last quarter is as hard as the first three quarters together. We may note a fairly even run from m over a, r, a, but then, spiked by the t, we hit a wall at h – but there is no option but to go on. The word, mellifluousness notwithstanding, sweats endurance from every pore for those who know it. It starts with echoes of mare (a fast horse or the end of a bad dream) and perhaps even marriage (commitment and endurance); the remainder does not echo, it is echoed, in telethon and myriad other -a-thons. The word’s course has been as long and anfractuous as its race is. In 490 BC, Athenians put the Persians on the run at a place called Marathon, named after the fennel – marathron – that grew there. A runner carried the news of the victory – or, according to one source, ran to Sparta to ask for reinforcements. In 1876, Robert Browning write a poem about this; the runner, reaching Athens, 25 miles distant, shouts victory and collapses dead, which will sound about right to many a modern marathon finisher. In 1896, the modern Olympics were born, and a race from Marathon to Athens was held, inspired by Browning. In 1908, to make the race reach from royal children at Windsor to royal adults in London, the distance was extended to 26 miles 385 yards; after some further deviations, it was permanently set in 1921 at the London distance, and thus it remains today, about 6 miles past the point where a human’s fuel tank normally runs out (look for a future word tasting note on bonk).

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rook

Posted on September 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

Look carefully; by hook or by crook, this word may fool you. It stares cagily back with two blank eyes, then speaks with a beak of a k. It could pass for a rock in a brook, but it will come out as a castle – or a crow. The trick, if you check, is that it is not one word but several. The raucous Corvus inspired a Germanic name, known in Old English as hróc. Persian rukh, which may have been a chariot or bird, is the foundation of the castle in chess – its upper storeys come from the word’s disguising itself as Italian rocco, meaning castle. A rook may also be a fog or a rookie. Or it may be a verb: a legal move in chess, or a cheating move in life (the sense of swindling comes by way of the bird – as Mr. Cairo found when he was rooked by a falcon). It was once applied also to the person who had been rooked, making a rook a gull. It has but four letters, no more than three phonemes, but trust not the rook on the roof of your castle, or you may get took, and rue it.

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