blizzard

Posted on February 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, 
Snow on snow

Christina Rossetti’s vision of the bleak mid-winter is one that quite a few people are seeing just now, including many who haven’t seen it in a long time. Temperatures have plunged throughout the heart of North America and snow has fallen on snow on snow. It’s a blizzard.

The defining feature of a blizzard, for most of us these days, is snow. Lots and lots and lots of snow. Great blizzards are often memorialized with photographs of snow by the yard: cars buried to the roofs and streets and sidewalks carved out between human-high snowbanks. If there is wind, so much the worse; you are trapped by the weather, and power may be knocked out. You most certainly should not try to travel, although once the storm has passed you may want to go outside to shovel, and sled, and shovel, and ski, and shovel.

But why this word blizzard? Why the zz? What is so buzzy about snow? We can understand that blitz is a great word for lightning, fast and zappy; we can think that lizard and buzzard are acceptable words for unpleasant hot-climate creatures; we can imagine that a wizard has some magic, and whizz is almost as onomatopoeic as buzz; but snow is soft and quiet. Unless you have too much caffeine or a migraine, you can’t even hear it falling. The wind that brings it, yes, perhaps, but…

No but. It’s the wind that brings us this word, the whizzing of the windspeed and the blowing hard – especially the blow. In fact, before blizzard was a word for weather, it was a word in some parts of America for a sharp blow or shot, probably formed on the basis of sound symbolism (think of not just blow but blast, blister, bluster, and blunt). It was in the wicked winter of 1881 that its use for hard winter weather was introduced to the broader American readership, as the New York Nation noted: “The hard weather has called into use a word which promises to become a national Americanism, namely ‘blizzard’. It designates a storm (of snow and wind) which men cannot resist away from shelter.”

The definition of blizzard in the Oxford English Dictionary, first included in 1887, is “A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow, in which man and beast frequently perish; a ‘snow-squall’.” It was that condition that Robert Falcon Scott had in mind in 1913 when, two weeks before his own death on his ill-fated Antarctic expedition, he wrote, speaking of his companion Captain Oates, “It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.” 

And it is, really, that condition that I have always thought of with the word blizzard. When I grew up in southern Alberta, snow, even snow on snow on snow, was not a rare thing, but you had to watch out for the times when it was not only snowing a lot but blowing so hard you couldn’t see – or do anything else sensibly outside. And the zz seemed somehow appropriate, not because the wind buzzed (it did not; it howled and roared) but because it was hard, like the angles in zz, and it was uncommon, like the letter z, and it was the last thing you wanted, just as the letter z – also called the izzard ­– is the last thing in the alphabet.

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eyey

Posted on February 14, 2021 | 2 comments

“It’s – aieee!”

At least that’s what I thought I heard Jess say. She was sitting in her apartment, and I in mine, and with us were a few other members of the Order of Logogustation, peering into our respective computer cameras and thus out of our respective windows in the fly’s eye of a Zoom screen. (Word tasting, like everything else, is not quite the same in the Year of the Plague.)

“What’s wrong?” I said. Some of the others said “What?” and “Huh?” and “You OK?” Daryl said, “Did you just get stung by a bee?”

“No,” Jess said, and held up her iPad to her camera. “It’s eyey! It has lots of eyes!” Once the camera had focused, we could see a word in the Cyrillic alphabet: многоꙮчитїи.

Margot, in one square of the screen next to Daryl, flinched and turned away. “Sorry,” she said sideways, “I have trypophobia.”

“Oh, these aren’t holes,” Jess said. “They’re literally eyes! Seven eyes looking out at you from the centre of the word!”

“Eugh!” Margot said, shuddering, and absented herself, leaving Daryl to hold down the frame.

“Is…” Maury said, and leaned in as he pulled his glasses away from his eyes. “Is that Old Church Slavonic?”

“Of course it is!” Jess said. “Mnogoochitii, ‘many-eyed’. As in many-eyed seraphim.”

“Nice,” I said. “Genuine typographical eye-conicity.” No one seemed to recognize the clever pun I had just made.

Elisa, up in the corner, snorted and giggled. “Sorry,” she said. “It looks like a potato with all those eyes!”

“The eyes have it,” Jess said. “Old Church Slavonic scribes liked to make eyes out of O’s.”

“That gives a new sense to ‘dotting eyes,’” I said. Nobody also laughed.

“Here,” Jess said, scrolling and flipping through some things on her eyePad. She held up a page of what I now know was a PDF from 2007 about the inclusion of additional Cyrillic characters in Unicode. The key paragraph was hard to see until I clicked the button to put her full screen:

MONOCULAR Ꙩꙩ, BINOCULAR Ꙫꙫ, DOUBLE MONOCULAR Ꙭꙭ, and MULTIOCULAR ꙮ are used in words which are based on the root for ‘eye’. The first is used when the wordform is singular, as ꙩко; the second and third are used in the root for ‘eye’ when the wordform is dual, as Ꙫчи, ꙭчи; and the last in the epithet ‘many-eyed’ as in серафими многоꙮчитїй ‘many-eyed seraphim’. It has no upper-caseform.

“These are all in Unicode,” Jess said. “You can insert them as characters in a document. James, you could use it on your blog.”

“I was just about to ask you for the link,” I said. I clicked Zoom back to the multi-person view.

“But these are scribal ornaments,” Daryl said. “They’re just decorative forms of the Cyrillic letter O. Right?”

“Yup,” Jess said. “But I guess it’s worth keeping them for archival purposes.”

“Well, it will get many more eyes on them,” Maury said.

“Eye eye, sir,” Jess said.

“I think I’d like to have Unicode characters for some of the ornamental capitals in medieval documents, in that case,” Daryl said. In the background, off camera, Margot’s voice came in: “Just what we need. More rabbit penises.” She reappeared and sat back next to Daryl, turning their Ꙩ into Ꙫ.

“Too bad we can’t do that with the English word for ‘eye’,” Elisa said.

“There’s always ꙩcular,” Maury said. It seems to me he dotted the o as he said it.

I said, “I think the word eye looks like the e’s are two eyes giving someone the side-eye.”

“What was the word you said before, Jess?” Elisa asked.

“Which one?” Jess said. “Mногоꙮчитїи?”

“No, the one that sounded like you found an eyeball on your chair.”

“Oh – eyey! A great word, not used often enough, and usually applied to potatoes and cheese.”

“And Zoom screens,” Daryl said.

We all paused a moment and looked at our screens. There were our eyes, Ꙭ, looking out from our respective frames, and the whole thing looking like a squared-off version of ꙮ.

Margot breathed “Aieeee” and absented herself abruptly once more.

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whutter

Posted on February 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

You are out by the lake shore, you and one other person. You hear the susurrus of the tall grasses, the soughing of the trees in the breeze, the lapping plashing of the little waves, perhaps the whiffle-fluffle of corduroy walking. A dog off leash darts from the boardwalk onto the strand, whereupon a half hundred wings lift fitfully off the soft shore and, feathers flapping frenetically aloft, a flock of waterfowl fly far from the bounding hound. Your companion, jolted from reverie, says “Whut?”

You have just heard a whutter.

Not your companion. Well, perhaps your companion too. But in the main, it’s the birds you heard. A simple flipping and flapping of feathers is a flutter, but when the source is something larger – a big bird, or a bunch of birds (a big bunch of birds or a bunch of big birds or a big bunch of big birds) – the word for it is whutter. Even a murmuration does not murmur; for startling starlings, you are rewarded with whuttering.

Why? Why not. Who knows when this word was first heard, but the Oxford English Dictionary has an 1831 quote from John Wilson in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “A sound like the whutter of wild-fowl on the feed along a mud-bank.” It has been used since, not often but enough to keep it in the air.

And where did it come from? You know perfectly well: nothing other than the ears of the hearer and a sense for the feel of words. Flutter has been around since English’s earliest days, and the whispering and whistling of “wh” is always available, round, soft, dark, and hollow, heavier and harder to capture than “fl.”

Don’t you love it when words take flight?

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cacology

Posted on February 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

As Steve Martin put it, “Let’s face it: some people have a way with words, and other people… oh, ah… not have way, I guess.”

Cacology looks like it could mean ‘talking shit’ – you know, caca plus -logy. But this is caco, as in cacophony, from Greek κακός; it means ‘bad’.

Of course, that could still mean talking bad about someone – you know, vilipending them, as the kids say, or, yes, talking shit, as professors say (well, the ones I know, anyway). And back in the 1600s, that’s what cacology meant. But that sense has fallen into desuetude, and now, when this word is used, it’s used to mean ‘talking badly’.

Which can still mean a number of things. It could mean talking wildly and crazily –

– or articulating insufficiently –

– or, even if speaking (or singing) smoothly and clearly, still incomprehensibly –

– but it can also mean just, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “Bad speaking, bad choice of words; vicious pronunciation.” (Does that sound like a reprimand to a talking dog?) 

Opinions vary widely on what is “bad,” of course. Some people cannot abide the word get in any circumstance; some promote superstitions such as that you should not end a sentence with a preposition; some believe that “[person] and me” is always an error for “[person] and I.” On the other hand, some dislikes have some basis in fact and established usage. Think people most this that sentence grammar correct not has, and as long as we’re following the established rules of any variety of English I’ve ever seen, they’re right. But blenderized syntax is uncommon. Tired clichés, needless circumlocutions, other obfuscations, and dime-machine buzzwords, all quite common in usage, are also disliked with good cause.

And of course so are vicious words – racial epithets, for instance.

And, for that matter, swearwords, cusswords, naughty words – whatever you want to call them. I’m not at all opposed to swearwords; they serve a necessary function, and they do not bespeak poor character or intelligence (oh, believe you me: some of the nicest and best-educated people I know use cusswords freely as the occasion demands, and some of the worst people I’ve ever met would never utter an impure word – though there are plenty of very nice people who don’t swear, too, and no shortage of nasty people who do). But I do think they need to be seen as cacology, or else they lose their charge. After all, talking shit is less effective if the shit is just… caca.

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hebicentric

Posted on February 6, 2021 | 3 comments

There was a time, I remember, in the 1990s, when it was considered deep and true and honest for singers of popular songs to sing with a certain… “style,” what one might think of as “poor voice placement” and a lack of what one might call, um, “tuning.” A sort of strained half-shriek, half-grunt one might hear from someone with a cold and dysentery who is sitting in an outhouse and has just seen a hornet headed straight for him. It was not eccentric, not exactly; that would mean they were off-centre, and as far as this goes that’s beside the point, because if the fashion is to be unfashionable, well…

Anyway, as I worked away in the mail room at the Tufts library to pay some bills while I was dissertating, I would have the radio on, and the local station would play stuff by, you know, Porno For Pyros and Bush and Jane’s Addiction and The Wallflowers and so on, and there was no lack of this style. And then I heard a song use a word that seemed like the mot juiced for this whole thing, this, um, kind of rough and underripe vocal styling paired with expensive studio production values that were pretending not to be expensive (like high-priced fake craquelure). The song introduced the word but didn’t explain it, just threw it down there, which was also so damn typical of these uber-cool guys who were trying so hard to be hip it was tragic, and were so tragic it was hip. (To be fair, the singer of the song in question was actually able to sing well when he chose to, which at key moments he did not.)

The etymology of the word was not completely obvious. The second part was clear enough: centric. But the first part? It sounded like “heb-I” or “heb-eye” but I assumed it was spelled hebi. The thing is, there’s no classical root that matches that. But there is a Greek root hebe-, referring to youth; perhaps it was blended with bi, meaning ‘two’ (as in the duality of expensive production values and good instrumentals with a singing style that I had always known as “bad”). Or maybe they were just being deliberately obscure and difficult. Like, hey, I just mutated this word, isn’t it so awful you have to love it and buy it. But there was no doubt that the song was about someone who embodied this value, because they sang it over and over again: “You are a hebicentric! You are a hebicentric!”

I suppose if I had already been studying linguistics at the time (I was still a drama scholar) I might have decided that it was deliberately incomprehensible, like the famous sentence confected by Noam Chomsky to illustrate that a sentence could be syntactically coherent but semantically incoherent, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” After all, the whole line I heard sung was “That’s when the hornet stung meeee, and I had this furious dream! You are a hebicentric! You are a hebicentric!”

In the end, though, I realized that I had created a mondegreen (but one every bit as plausible as classiomatic, I’d say). What I was actually hearing, which even contained the title of the song (not that radio deejays ever bothered saying the titles of the songs), was “You are ahead by a century.” (Also, the words before it were “feverish dream” and later “serious dream” but never “furious dream,” alas.) But I still think hebicentric is a good word for that hiply tragic, tragically hip style…

Anyway, here, if you don’t know the song. It’s “Ahead by a Century” by The Tragically Hip, from 1996.

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Thule

Posted on February 4, 2021 | 1 comment

Is there, truly, a Thule?

Edgar Allan Poe thought so: in his “Dream-Land,” he begins,

By a route obscure and lonely, 
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.

But we know there is no place out of space, out of time. There is no end of the earth. There is no where so far away that we cannot displace it, misplace it, replace it. We can go so far that we want to go no farther, but we will always want others to go farther for us. And when we go around, we come back around.

In ancient days, the people living on the sea between Europe and Africa thought it was the middle of the earth – that’s what Mediterranean means – and the ends were as far away from that as one could get. In 325 BC, around the time that Alexander the Great was expanding the Greek empire eastward, a man named Pytheas, who lived in the western reaches of that empire, in Massalia (now Marseille, France), headed north to see who they were trading with. He reached, he said, the end of the earth, a place so cold that land, sea, and air were all one like a jelly, and in the middle of summer the sun barely set. Of course there were people there already.

Pytheas called the place Θούλη, which would transliterate into English as Thoúlē, but it passed to us by way of Latin to be Thule. Officially, by the dictionary, in English we say it like “thoo-lee” or “thew-lee” or sometimes “thool,” but many people assume the Th is “t” – which it is in languages that don’t have the “th” sound, such as Danish. Pytheas may or may not have made the name up; either way, no one really knows its origin or etymon.

Pytheas, as is now known, improved his travels overmuch in the telling. If he made it to his Thule at all, it was some island off Norway (or perhaps Estonia), still south of the Arctic Circle (as we know from the fact that the sun set at all in midsummer). Or he may just have written down some accounts collected in a tavern. But Thule held onto the popular imagination, calling us into the unknown. Poe would know:

Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,—
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

Does that sound like the idealized Canadian north, as represented by painters like Lawren Harris? I think it does.

But everyone knows Thule is in Greenland.

I certainly knew. I knew Thule was in Greenland long before I heard of its mythical connections. In fact, the first time I saw mention of Ultima Thule – it might have been in one of Umberto Eco’s novels – I thought, “Huh? Someone made some myths about this cold town in northern Greenland?”

Well, someone brought myths. Knud Rasmussen did. Knud Rasmussen was part Inuit, born and raised in south Greenland; he went to study down south in Europe, but came back to Greenland and made his name as an Arctic explorer. He gave the name Thule to his northernmost trading post. Of course there were people (Inughuit) already living in the area, as there had been for nearly four millennia; little point having a trading post if there’s no one to trade with. In 1912 Rasmussen set off from Thule to transit the ice cap at the north end of Greenland. He succeeded, and then came back around to Thule again.

Four decades later, the United States Air Force arrived to bring the Cold War to the cold world. The site they chose had people living there, so they chose another site some 60 miles north – not for the air base, for the people. They told them they had four days to get out, so they got out. And then the Americans built the air base where the people had been. 

We can go so far that we want to go no farther, but we will always want others to go farther for us.

Thule Air Base (said the Danish way, with a “t”) is still there. The place farther north where the Inughuit were made to move to is also still where it is. It is home to more than 600 people; it has stores, a hospital, a church, all ranged up a hillside between the sea ice below and the inland ice above and beyond. But there is less ice than there used to be. The world there is changing, rapidly and obviously, thanks to the doings of those of us far to the south. Still, though, it is never what we would call warm, and for four months of the year the average temperature is below –20°C. The forecast for tomorrow is –32°C all day, with zero hours of daylight. On February 13, the sun will rise, briefly, for the first time since October 27. It always comes back.

This town, which was once called New Thule, then just Thule, is now known as Qaanaaq. Indigenous place names in Greenland generally mean something – they name a land feature or a thing that happens there. But Qaanaaq? It seems to mean as much as Θούλη, which is to say, nothing other than the name of the place: “According to the language secretariat for Greenland,” writes one American who now lives in southern Greenland, “Qaanaaq is only a place name and has no literal meaning.” (But The Great Danish says it means ‘caves by the beach’.)

And when Qaanaaq goes, it comes back around, like Rasmussen and like us, and like the sun: It starts out with q at the back of the throat, comes forward to touch the tip of the tongue softly at n, and returns the same way to q. It, too, like Poe, has, at the end, 

wandered home but newly 
From this ultimate dim Thule.

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longage

Posted on February 1, 2021 | 1 comment

When the pandemic arrived, we all expected shortages: toilet paper, medicine, paper towels, fresh vegetables, toilet paper, imported electronics, coffee, toilet paper, oil, voyages, fun, and toilet paper, among other things. But what we may not have anticipated were the longages.

I don’t mean the long ages, as in endless expanses of time, except yeah, I do mean that too, because we have a longage of available time. Just ask the managers of people who are still employed; they generally seem to believe no one has anything better to do, and yet simultaneously to think if they don’t hold their employees hostage to a longage of work they will just skive off and, uh, go for walks to see the foliage or something. 

What, in fact, many of us do do is try to avoid shortages of items by buying on line and having them delivered, resulting in a longage of mileage for people in the haulage and porterage business and a longage of packages in the lobbies of buildings – and a longage of some kinds of items in our homes. At this time last year, my wife and I had two devices for making coffee and two kinds of coffee beans in bags ready for the making; now we have four different devices and a dozen kinds of beans. 

We also have, in spite of our shortage of storage, an increasing longage of wines of various vintages. And our stacks of books waiting to be read have grown like the skyscrapers that continue to sprout fungally around us here in downtown Toronto – construction is “essential,” even in the ice age, and if you’re in the building trade here and now you have a longage of work adding to the longage of office and dwelling space. If, to take advantage of my longage of spare time, I go for a stroll, I often encounter a shortage of sidewalk space because the construction is hoarding it up.

In short, many people have a longage of work hours, and many have a longage of leisure time and leisure devices and the various baggage of adultage; many – especially those with a shortage of employment – also have a shortage of funds, while a few people (Bezos, Gates, and the ilk) have a considerable longage thereof, thanks to their leverage on percentages. And everything seems to be overage and underage and never average. It’s easy to get discouraged and to disengage.

This word longage is not of my coinage; it already existed in our language, though it’s not often seen. Wiktionary assures me it’s in informal use in economics (“A shortage of supply is a longage of demand”), while the Oxford English Dictionary has never heard of it, except as a Middle English variant spelling of language. (Oxford does inform me that shortage has been with us since the mid-1800s and appeared first in the USA.) 

But Wikipedia knows the word… OK, it knows Longages. Which is the name of a commune in the department of Haute-Garonne, 35 kilometres south of Toulouse. Longages has been around a long time. The town website says that the name comes from a Gallo-Roman root, longaticum campus, meaning ‘long field’; the only catch with that is that longaticum isn’t proper Latin, and the only search results I’ve found for it so far are as the Latin form of the name of the Slovenian town Logatec, a Latin word itself apparently derived from a Celtic root. But one Jacques Lacroix, looking at the many French place names that have Long- in them, has reckoned in his article “Le thème gaulois longo- dans les noms de lieux” that it traces to a Celtic root (France was Celtic before it was overrun by Romans, and its place names and many other parts of its language – including its weird way of saying 80 – have considerable Celtic pentimento). The Celtic root in question, longo-, relates to boats and other vessels. Many of these Long- places are nowhere near where you could use a boat, but Lacroix views the usage as more figurative, relating to topographical forms. In addition, for names with -ag- he cites research connecting it to Germanic awja ‘humid meadow’ (or, as he gets to it ere long, ‘swamp’). So, in his view, Longages gets its name from being on a hillside dominating a plain between two rivers. (Google Street View makes it look pretty flat, but I dunno.) The possibility that this Celtic root long- comes from Latin navis longa, as is sometimes suggested (though not by Lacroix!), is beside the point, though it would be an interesting long way around.

Yes, yes, that’s a longage of verbiage and gymnastics on a tangent about historical onomastics. Well, what. I have a longage of time and a longage of resources. And what’s your hurry?

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Authority? What authority?

Posted on January 30, 2021 | 1 comment

Look, I know what I’m talking about.

Have you ever said that? And has anyone ever said that to you? It’s an appeal to authority, and, according to some people, it’s an instant fail: the argumentum ab auctoritate (argument from authority) – a famous logical fallacy!

Except when it’s not. Because if appeals to authority were always fallacious, our entire legal and educational systems would be voided. Among many other things. 

I’ll explain.

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jnana

Posted on January 29, 2021 | 1 comment

What does a mirror look like when it reflects only itself, and no one is looking?

You know what it is to know. To see things and people, and to recognize them, and to know that they are there, and that you are here seeing them. But that is not the same as knowing their thoughts or feelings or knowing what it is like to be them. You are here and they are there and there are two of you. How would it be if you looked and knew you were not two, but one?

The essence of knowing is the mind perceiving external things and concepts and modelling them and assimilating those models into its schemes and structures and mental Minecrafts. Which means that knowing is an intrinsically separate and separating act; even knowing yourself takes parts of your self as objects, models them, and adds them to your miniature village of the mind. So what do you call the knowing that knows that the knower and the known are the same? The realization that all that is realized is all that realizes, and that at root the watcher is watching the watcher, and any plurality is just the reflector reflecting?

Well, you can call it jnana, if you want.

Yes, yes, jnana looks (a) like the word banana if it were in the process of realizing that it is a banana (does not a j resemble a banana?) and (b) rather hard to say. In truth, English speakers who use the word tend to use it on paper more often than on tongue. But it comes from a Sanskrit word. And the usual transliteration of the Sanskrit is jñāna, with a tilde on the n to indicate that it’s palatalized just like Spanish ñ. The way it’s written in Sanskrit even makes one out of two: from ज “j” and ञ “ñ” comes ज्ञ “jñ” – which sort of looks like your tongue trying to say “jñ.”

How do you say it? In English, just try to say what you see – it’ll end up sounding like a posh merger of “Jenna” and “banana.” In Sanskrit, you could say it like English “j” immediately followed by “ñ” (with no intervening vowel) and then “ana” (like in “Ana Gasteyer”), but you could also say it like “gyana” – the affricate-nasal-palatal sequence becoming one, sort of, as a palatalized stop, because when you’re speaking Sanskrit all the time you’re going to merge things and simplify things just like any other human will. Just like ज्ञ merges ज and ञ.

Why did that j and ñ get that way in the first place, then? Well, we know that its root jñā also gave rise to jānāti ‘know’, which shows clearly its parts, but we also know that it came from Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃-, which also led to Greek roots (e.g., γνῶσις gnosis) and Latin roots (e.g., notio, source of our notion) and Slavic roots (e.g., Russian знать znat’ ‘know’) and English know. It’s always the blade or back of the tongue (first g, from which k and the affricate j and the fricative z) followed by n and an at least somewhat open vowel. Same general form, same general meaning.

So yeah, this word for knowing the knowing that is beyond (or at the root of) knowing is the word for… knowing. And indeed, in Sanskrit that’s just what it meant. The word jñāna is the Sanskrit word (well, one of several) for ‘knowing’ or ‘knowledge’, in all the everyday and specialized senses, and its modern descendants in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, Kannada, Telugu, and even Burmese, Khmer, and Thai all mean the same thing and are all pretty similar in sound. It’s a very basic and broad word, just as English know is, and we know that know can have many special and distinctive senses, a few of which are suitable for a nudge and wink.

So why use jnana (our English borrowing of jñāna) rather than just, you know, knowing or knowledge? Well, it has that special sauce – the same special sauce as salsa has. 

You probably know that salsa is Spanish for ‘sauce’; in Spanish that’s what it means, ‘sauce’, and there are plenty of people who will point out that salsa sauce is redundant. And yet we’ve borrowed the word salsa to refer to a particular kind of sauce – a sauce we specifically associate with Spanish cuisine (well, Latin American cuisine). It’s not the only sauce called salsa in Spanish, but it’s the one we decided we liked, and part of its charm for English speakers is its exotic quality, so of course we took the word with it. This kind of culinary borrowing is popular in English but, let’s be fair, is pretty widespread around the world. 

Anyway, we did the same thing with jnana. All the other senses of knowing we pretty much have covered. But this idea of knowing that one is not separate from the ultimate unity of the universe (specifics depend on religion – Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh – and particular sect or school within the religion), well, that’s something that we particularly wanted to see as an exotic thing we could borrow from them, like a jewel from the East, the prize of a secret journey to find a holy man. Not that such ideas didn’t exist in the Western traditions – oh yes they did, and do, thanks to our own “mystical” traditions – but yeah, look, man, it’s jnana! It’s like, um, tikka masala of the mind!* Yum yum!

Do you discern a certain irony? That this word for knowing non-duality, non-otherness, is the result of a deliberate othering, a focused exoticism that treats something that has been known in our own cultures – and names something that, if it’s real, applies exactly the same to everyone everywhere – as something apart, distinct, foreign? And with an added bonus of a flagrant resistance to our own phonological rules (i.e., things we consider pronounceable)?

But, then, even the very idea of a word and concept for the realization of utter unity is irony on irony. And all words are a form of alienation. So perhaps this jnana split is as much apposite as opposite.

*Tikka masala, by the way, is a dish based on Indian cuisine but most likely invented in England, though most people who eat it don’t know that last bit.

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McMurdo

Posted on January 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Last word tasting, we looked at Longyearbyen, which, aside from being a word that you probably feel unsure how to say at first, is the name of a town of almost 2400 people just 12 degrees from the North Pole. Today, for the sake of balance, and because I thought of it while talking to my mother, we’re going to look at McMurdo.

McMurdo is a Scottish name, yes, you probably guessed that; it’s from the Hebrides, and it comes from Gaelic Mac Murchaidh or Mac Murchadha, meaning ‘son of Murchadh’, where Murchadh is a personal name that means ‘sea battle’. So… Seabattleson. 

It matters to us here today because of Archibald McMurdo.

Archibald McMurdo was born in 1812. He joined the Royal Navy in 1824 (yes, at the age of 12). He was made a lieutenant in 1836; he progressed through the ranks, making captain in 1851; he retired as a rear-admiral. He had command of the ship HMS Contest, detailed to the west coast of Africa, but he had already made his name in much colder climates, as a lieutenant on the warship HMS Terror. The Terror had made its mark in the year of McMurdo’s birth at Fort McHenry, firing rockets that glared red and bombs that burst in the air; McMurdo was on it first in 1836–37 in an expedition to try to find a Northwest Passage through the Arctic (it failed and returned to England, but nearly a decade later, without McMurdo, it went back under Sir John Franklin, and you may have heard how that went), and then in 1840–43 to find Antarctica – successfully – with James Clark Ross. And that’s where McMurdo gained his fame.

It’s not that he did anything special in particular. But I guess Ross liked him well enough, or at least found him to be a sound officer. When Ross’s two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, sailed into an Antarctic bay of the Ross Sea (as it had just been named), Ross named the two nearby volcanoes after his ships, and he named the bay McMurdo Sound.

And when, in 1956, the United States opened a base on one of the few patches of bare ground in Antarctica (technically on Ross Island rather than the mainland, but it’s all iced together), right near where Robert Falcon Scott had set up a camp in 1902, they called it McMurdo Station, because it’s on McMurdo Sound. Today, McMurdo Station, or McMurdo for short, or Mac-Town for shorterer, is the biggest human place in Antarctica. In the summer (the warmest months are November, December, and January, because it’s the South Pole, not the North one), its population gets up over 1200. In the winter, there are about 250 people keeping it going. It provides services and support for a number of research stations in the area. It’s just over 12 degrees north of the South Pole, but its location shelters it from the worst of the polar weather; midwinter temperatures are usually in the –20s (Celsius), and the coldest it’s ever been recorded is just below –50°C (for Antarctica, that’s not so bad). On the other hand, the warmest it’s ever been recorded is just under 11°C, and average daily temperatures never break freezing any time of the year.

Most people who have heard of McMurdo, including – I suspect – many of those who spend some or all of their year there every year, don’t know who it’s named after, let alone that it might as well have been called Seabattleson. But so it goes; we usually don’t know much about where our words come from. And Archibald McMurdo couldn’t have guessed the fame his name would gain from his service as a lieutenant on an exploring ship. But everything turned out well enough for him. After the two polar trips, he headed for someplace warm while his former ship ended its days frozen in the Arctic Sea. And his name carries on.

Do you want to know what it’s like at McMurdo? Of course you do. It’s different from what you probably imagine. PBS Terra did a series on it (and its environs). Here are the three little episodes you’ll certainly want to watch to know about the town:

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