meatus

Posted on November 18, 2020 | 2 comments

This word sure looks like cod Latin for meat, doesn’t it? Like “Omnes stuffunt meatus in mouthorum.” But there are two problems with that (aside from the extremely dodgy Latin): one, it’s not pronounced “meat-us,” it’s pronounced “me-ate-us” (/miˈeɪtəs/); two, it’s not something you stuff into a hole, it is a hole.

The Latin word meatus (with a long a) originally meant ‘path’ or ‘passage’, and came from a verb meare meaning ‘pass’ or ‘traverse’. That in turn came from a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as *mey- that gave rise not only to words for paths (as well as Latin trans-) but also to English mean (‘think, intend’) and, up a different path, English mean (‘common, nasty’). It even led to immune.

So what kind of a hole is a meatus? Well, it’s not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat, but it’s also not a hobbit-hole. It’s a hole in your body – the kind that is standard with the body, not the kind added by an external article of metal, stone, or wood. 

There is, for instance, the meatus auditorius, also known as the auditory meatus, or the hole of hearing (that’s what one H. Crooke called it in 1615), or the earhole. Various other simple holes into the body also get called meatuses (I’m sure you can think of the most popular ones). However, it seems the mouth is not typically called a meatus – it’s too complex an opening, I think. Pity; I think I could like meatus crusti (‘cake hole’; actually Latin for ‘cake hole’ would more likely be meatus placentae, but we couldn’t use that) or perhaps meatus carnis (‘meat hole’) – though it would probably really just be something like meatus escarius, ‘eating hole’.

So there that is. You can put the figurative meat of a message or meaning into your auditory meatus, but you shouldn’t try to put actual literal meat into any meatus, especially the hole of hearing; that would be mean.

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Pronunciation tip: schism and schedule

Posted on November 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

People have opinions on how to say schism and schedule. Strong opinions. I’m here to set the matter straight.

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alieniloquy

Posted on November 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” as Terence (i.e., Terentius) wrote in Heauoton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor): “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” Or, more idiomatically, “I am human; human affairs are my affairs.” In other words, everything’s your business (the character speaking was very nosy), and nothing’s off topic.

Well. You see the alienum there, and you see the alien in alieniloquy (which, by the way, is said like “soliloquy” but with “alien” instead of “sol”). Does it seem strange? Out of place? Incongruous? Yes, well, yes, that’s the point. Alien, our English word, comes from alienum, which comes from alius, meaning ‘other’ (also inflected as alium, as in Spem in alium, which is a lovely piece by Thomas Tallis, not a recipe for canned meat in garlic), which comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₂élyos, ‘beyond, other’, which is the source of English else and Irish eile (‘other’) and various other ‘other’ words; *h₂élyos in turn comes (according to the reconstructions) from *h₂el-, which has nothing to do with hell but does trace back forward to English all and Latin ultra and olim (‘one day’ or ‘often’ or ‘at that time’ or ‘once upon a time’, as in the Medieval song “Olim sudor Herculis,” a lengthy recitation of all the occasions Hercules happened to sweat), and of course a whole bunch of other words too.

But that’s neither here nor there. Well, no, actually, it is there, as in back in time. And it’s here, because alieniloquy is nothing alien to us in modern times, alas. There are some people who, given a microphone, will have quite a lot to say about quite a lot, and if you ask them a question, you get the answer to everything – well, perhaps everything but the question, because it’s been a great year, and we’ve accomplished a lot of things, like John over there, whose business has really been dealt a blow but he’s been helped by us, and it’s important to make sure he can keep feeding the children of the community, which has been here for a long time, the heart of the city, which is why we want to take this moment to talk about our plans for tax relief.

Given a microphone? Given any opportunity, in fact, some of them; you’ve met them at parties, I’m sure, where you manage to find out far more about the political climate of Transylvania or the intricacies of HO-scale train sets (also and more originally correctly H0, because half zero, but not half of nothing) than you had intended (which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with either of those, or for that matter both at the same time, if you would like to construct a model train environment of Transylvania, complete with Carpathian mountains and, of course, some of that forest for being on the other side of which Transylvania is named – you did know that Transylvania means ‘land on the other side of the forest’, right? as in trans ‘other side’ plus sylva(n) ‘forest’ plus -ia ‘place’? obviously so called from the view of people to the west, in particular Hungarians, Latin speakers, and so on).

But the truth is that, while alieniloquy is annoying when people such as politicians and speakers at charity events and essayists do it, and some people who don’t let you get a word in edgewise, it’s nonetheless largely how our conversations go: we start with one topic and then we move on to another and another and another by tangents. And even more so our internal monologues proceed by alieniloquy, and that’s not just OK, it would be worrisome if it didn’t happen at least some of the time; the mind needs to wander, you know?

Oh, have I actually defined this word? the Oxford English Dictionary definition is “An instance of straying from the subject one is supposed to be talking about; rambling or evasive talk.” Which, yes, includes the proviso “one is supposed to be talking about,” whereas casual conversation and thoughts are not always so directed, but we do always suppose that we have a topic, at least until we have another. But, then, if we’re just talking about life, it’s all on topic, right? Because humani nihil a nos alienum puto? We can wander as wide as Molly Bloom’s closing thought soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it into him for a month yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out or a nun maybe like the smutty photo he has shes as much a nun as Im not yes . . . [it continues for quite a long time]

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lutarious

Posted on November 10, 2020 | 1 comment

From Latin lutarius, from lutum, ‘mud’. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, lutarious means “inhabiting mud.” Wiktionary (like others) expands the definition a bit: “of, pertaining to, or like, mud; living in mud.” But both agree the word is obsolete.

As though living in mud, being like mud, sheer muddiness of nature and dwelling, mind and body, were obsolete. As though the world were not a big ball of wet dirt.

Here’s a poem.

lutarious

I am lutarious, I
like fresh wet soil under my
fingernails, between my toes,
squishing in and out of my pores.

You like it clean and dry,
the dust, the rocks, blue sky,
hard, and whispering of death,
no muck, no suck, no breath.

You scorn my wormsome ways,
streambeds, puddles, bays,
ooze, nematodes, cnidaria,
as though you contained no bacteria.

But in a millennium or two,
when they find mummified you,
your face like a parchment scroll
unchanged and unread in your hole,

I’ll be dissolved, remixed,
reborn, remade, unfixed,
untraceable, fungible, teeming
with living and loving and dreaming.

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eucratic

Posted on November 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

Which would suggest that eucratic means ‘pleasant power’ or something like that. And, well, it sort of does. Canadians tend to be familiar with the phrase good government, as in “peace, order, and good government,” which is generally taken as the Canadian answer to the American “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” though of course each is intended to imply the other: Canadians believe that with peace, order, and good government, you can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whereas Americans are more likely to believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the appropriate basis for acceptable peace, order, and good government. But the point here today is that both countries (among many others) can have good government, which is more on the line of what eucratic implies (allowing that it’s an adjective, not a noun).

But what is that, really? Let me quote from the single English source for this word, the translation (unsigned) of Fragments of Politics and History, vol. 1, by Louis-Sébastien Mercier: 

Is this word Greek to you? That’s OK; it’s Greek to everyone. If it looks a bit Socratic, it is: Socrates’s name, Σωκράτης, means ‘safe power’, and the cratic in eucratic is the same cratic as in Socratic and democratic and all the other cratic words, from κράτος, meaning ‘power’. But the eu is from εὐ- meaning ‘good’ or ‘pleasant’, as in euphoria(‘pleasant bearing’), eulogy (‘pleasant words’), euthanasia (‘pleasant death’), and even euphemism (‘pleasant talk’).

It is a maxim among physicians, “that no body is perfectly sound.” The same may be said of every government: the least imperfect live in a middle existence, in a state truly eucratic, that is, where good and ill are intermingled, but where the good preponderates.

Here’s from the 1792 French original, Fragmens de politique et d’histoire, vol. 1:

Les médecins disent, nemo perfectè sanus, personne n’est parfaitement sain. On en peut dire autant de tout gouvernement : les moins imparfaits vivent dans un moyen être, dans un état véritablement eucratique, c’est-à-dire, mêlé de bien et de mal, et où le bien l’emporte sur le mal.

So you can see that English gets the word from French. However, in French as in English, the word (at least in this sense) is traceable to a single source: the one you’ve just read. Which, of course, assembled it from the Greek kit.

But still. It’s a good word, as good as one could ask for, for good government, a good state of a state – as good as one could ask for.

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clipsome

Posted on November 4, 2020 | Leave a comment

Let not the clipsome go unclasped,
Nor yet the handsome go ungrasped;
Chase me, embrace me, squeeze me well,
And let us snug and hug a spell.

What is clipsome? It’s something that many a person feels after a long time of lockdown. No, not needing a haircut – I mean, that too, but that’s not what clipsome means. It means embraceable, huggable, claspable. Like Judy Garland and all these lads in Girl Crazy: 

Why is that clipsome? Well, consider the clip – I mean the kind you use to hold things together, not to cut them off. This word clip comes from an old Germanic root meaning ‘clasp, embrace, kiss’; that was its first sense in English, too. From that came a sense ‘grip tightly’, and from that came a word for devices that grip tightly. Sort of like clamps, but, at least these days, a little smaller and lighter – clamps can hold lamps, but clips are sized for lips (well, ouch, but I couldn’t not use that). And as late as the 1800s, the ‘embrace’ sense was common enough that clipsome was a sensible word meaning ‘fit to be embraced’.

In case you’re wondering about that other clip, by the way, the one you do to hair, it comes from a different root, one that comes from the sound – just like clap, click, clank, et cetera. Scissors make a “clip, clip” sound (or at least they can; the ones I use tend to sound more like “snip, snip”). 

And so it just happens that we have a phonaesthemic doublet. Some words that start with cl- have to do with abrupt onset of sound or action: clack, clang, clank, clap, and the rest of the largely onomatopoeic (if regularized) bunch, plus perhaps cliff. Other words that start with cl- have to do with things being or coming together: clam, clamp, clan, clasp, cleave, clench, cling, clot, clump, cluster, clutch… There are, of course, other cl- words that have nothing to do with either (clerk, clever, clinic, clover…), but cl- tends to show up a bit more often than chance would have it with one of these two general senses. 

Which shouldn’t be so surprising: most of us don’t bear etymology in mind when speaking; we just think of words in terms of resemblance – the more words have a certain feature to them, the more we are likely to associate that feature with that sound. The bigger the cluster, the more clipsome it is.

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Geierfaszination

Posted on November 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

Here’s another word we all need, especially right now. Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) asked Twitter,

What is the German word for “feeling physically nauseous from anxiety at the news but also morbidly unable to look away and stop scrolling”

She got a number of responses, of course. I’ve decided, however, that the mot juiced is Geierfaszination – “vulture fascination,” i.e., inability to look away when you see a vulture eating something (e.g., your cat).

Don’t bother looking it up; it’s not in any dictionary. I’m not even going to call it a “new old word”—I’m owning this puppy up front. (And any German speakers out there who find it ill formed are welcome to issue a correction.) If you want to say it out loud, it’s said like “guy-er-fass-i-na-tsyon” or however close to that you’re up to.

The word is made of two plain parts. Geier means ‘vulture’ (it traces back through German roots relating to ‘greed’ and ‘desire’ to a root that mainly gave rise to words meaning ‘gladly, willingly, eagerly’ in various Germanic languages, such as German gern and Swedish gärna). Faszination is plainly the German cognate of English fascination, from Latin fascinare ‘bewitch’, which traces to fascinum, which meant ‘evil spell, witchcraft’ but also meant ‘penis’ and, binding the two senses together (and – according to some people – the origin of both), ‘a phallus-shaped amulet worn around the neck as a preventive against witchcraft’ (to quote Wiktionary).

Which means that the roots of this word for ‘vulture-fascination’ could also have developed to mean ‘eagerly wear a magic dildo around my neck’. And, frankly, if you saw someone walking down the street proudly wearing a magic dildo around their neck, you might well feel queasy and worried but have a hard time looking away.

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aporrhiptocracy

Posted on October 31, 2020 | 1 comment

When I was young we used to call them “rejects” (said as “re-jects”). Maybe you did too. Maybe people still do.

I mean the kind of people (more often guys, now that I think of it) who rejected and were rejected. They were the unpleasant ones who hated everything and found something to condemn in everything, and everyone hated them. You’d see them walking around school or the university campus looking like they were wearing underwear made of greasy turkey skin, and even the cafeteria cashiers would only speak to them under duress. If you had the dreadful fortune of being trapped with one in some occasion – perhaps a classroom – they would lecture you about the depravity of all the things you liked best, or they would go on about all their autoexcoriatingly sketchy designs on members of the opposite sex, or both. The rejects thought themselves better than everyone and everything, and everyone else thought themselves better than the rejects. It was mutual rejection.

We generally thought these people would go away or grow up or, ideally, both.

But imagine having them running your country. Or even your city or your province or state.

There’s a word for that. Because of course there is. The Meccano set of classical roots is an almost infinite resource. 

The word is aporrhiptocracy.

Wow, that’s an unpleasant-looking word, innit? Especially that rrh in the middle, which looks less like the purr of a cat or even of a motorcycle engine and more like a belch or… wait… what common word contains it? Oh… yes… diarrhea.

It happens that diarrhea is not related to aporrhiptocracy, except in that they both come from Classical Greek, and in Classical Greek if you put a prefix ending in a vowel onto a root that starts with a devoiced “r” you get a doubling of that devoiced “r” that is transliterated into the Latin alphabet as rrh. And in the case of today’s word, the prefix is apo, απο (‘from’ or ‘away’ or ‘remove’), and the root is rhiptō, ῥίπτω (‘I throw’). And then there’s –(o)cracy (from -κρατία), having to do with rule (democracy, autocracy, etc.). So it’s throw-away-rule – or, more to the point, reject-rule.

Now, it’s true that being rejected doesn’t automatically mean you are a bad person. Anyone who knows Händel’s Messiah knows the aria that goes “He was despised, rejected of men,” which reminds us that a great person may be scorned by the middling multitude. And I’m sure that many of you reading this had experiences in youth like mine: of being generally unpopular because of being different and awkward. It is known that some people we look up to now were looked down on by their peers in their time.

But that’s also part of the problem. Because being rejected can be taken as a sign of virtue, of being scorned because you’re better. I think a lot of kids who are rejected by their agemates decide that must be the case. I did. It helped for a long time to keep me from noticing that I was often obnoxious, rude, condescending… Sure, they were defensive responses, but eventually we’re all supposed to grow up, right?

Except for those who don’t. And aporrhiptocracy isn’t about being ruled by people who were scorned as children due to their virtue. It’s about being ruled by people who even as adults take every negative response as proof of their rightness and superiority. People, for instance, who insist priggishly that every “modern” “innovation” (meaning they became aware of it after their seventh birthday) is “degenerate,” that one race or gender or language or mode of clothing or style of architecture is intrinsically superior, that if you can trip someone you must be better than them and you can prove it by kicking them while they’re down… People who rule by rejecting. As they themselves were rejected.

Obviously, the fewer reasons we have to use the word aporrhiptocracy, the better. But, people being people, it will never cease altogether to be of use.

…Though I will confess that, as you may have suspected, it’s a new old word. I put it together myself from the Greek roots. And, yes, if you know Classical Greek, you may have noticed that I cheated: I used the present indicative of the verb, rather than the past participle. This is because I didn’t like apoerriphocracy as well. But, hey, most people will never notice. 

In fact, I could have made it rejectocracy, mixing Latin and Greek. But that would be obvious, and where’s the fun in that? But if you prefer to use rejectocracy, I can’t blame you, and I won’t object.

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sackbut

Posted on October 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

I’m going to hit the sack, but I have a word for you first. It’s a word I think of every so often, and Tom Allen mentioned it again today on his CBC Radio program, Shift. It’s sackbut. Also spelled sackbutt and sagbutt, and a few other ways, as we shall see.

I have to be honest, as much as I love early music (meaning, variably depending on who’s saying it, from before about the 17th century; not meaning played before 9 in the morning), I think of this word more often when walking down the street and looking at the various clothing fashions promenading thereabout.

I think you know where I’m going with this. Some pants do not fit the fundaments very well. They sag in the butt, so that it looks like the person’s bottom has been dumped into a sack.

Well, this word has nothing at all to do with that. But no one can possibly be blamed for thinking of it. Because what it does have to do with is not something that obviously connects with it. Yes, both have to do with wind instruments, in the broadest sense, but…

…sackbuts sound like this (in conjunction with some cornets):

So, yes, rather more refined and all that.

And you can see one, or anyway one end of one, next to Stephanie Dyer in this video:

Yes. A sackbut is basically an old trombone. There are differences in design from modern trombones, so the distinction is one worth making, but if you take trombone as the class of brass instruments with sliders, a sackbut is a member of that class. And Stephanie Dyer even introduces herself as a trombonist. So there you have it.

If you don’t hear (or see) the word sackbut too often these days, that’s because sackbuts are indeed instruments from another time. Their revival (such as it is) is due very much to a group that was at the vanguard of the early music movement in the 1980s: His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, which – for that early feeling – uses an older spelling. You can find out a bit about the group’s origins from Jeremy West:

The question that remains is, “Why the name?”

And the answer is, “It comes from French saquebute, which was formerly saqueboute or saquebotte.” The next answer is that the French word comes from an Old French word for ‘pull’ – saquier – and another Old French word, most likely bouter, which means (and meant) ‘push’. So it’s actually (apparently) a pullpush.

Which might seem a bit weird and Doctor Dolittle-ish, until you remember that the instrument we call a piano is in full a pianoforte, which is Italian for quietloud; it got its name from the fact that you could play it with a wide dynamic range, unlike the keyboard instruments that had been around to that time (harpsichords, clavichords, etc.). If you can have a quietloud, you can have a pullpush. I suppose you could even play them together, though I don’t know who has written a piece for that duo.

So there you have it. As the Oxford English Dictionary documents, the spelling of the English word went through several variations, as was typical for English words in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s: sagbut, sagbot, sagbout, saggebut, sagbutt, shagbot, shagbote, shakbott, shakbut, shakbutt, shakebut, shakebutt (no attestation of shakebooty, though), shagbush (no comment), shagbut, sackbot, sackbutt, sacke-but, sacbutt, sacbut, and finally settling on sackbut. And, of course, if you want to seem old style, you can pick an auncient spelling.

But now, I’m hitting the sack.

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epicentre

Posted on October 26, 2020 | 2 comments

I passed a real estate advertising sign – “PRIME REAL ESTATE NOW AVAILABLE” – a couple of blocks away from where I live, on a commercial property – a once and probably future restaurant on the ground floor of an office building – in downtown Toronto. The previous occupant hadn’t been forced out of business by the global pandemic; it had closed some time earlier, due (I am told) to damage caused by a truly Biblical cloudburst and, I guess, some rather astonishing drain-pipe decisions. The sign, atypically, was in rather forbidding white letters on a black background, but that wasn’t what struck me the most. It was the line above the main all-caps line. It said “Be at the epicentre of it all…”

I really don’t think that’s an optimal word choice. But, hey, at least this is Toronto, not LA or San Francisco or Vancouver or another city with a notable earthquake risk. On the other hand, there is an epidemic – sorry, a pandemic – going on at the moment, and Toronto is, relatively, a bit of a hot spot in Canada… you know, what they call an…

So, OK, I am not by inclination a heavy-handed prescriptivist (unless you pay me, and even then only while and where you’re paying me). I may be an editor with more than 20 years of experience, but I also have a master’s degree in linguistics, and I know how this language stuff actually works. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like absolutely every usage, however popular. And the very broad use of epicentre I see so often currently kind of… gets on my nerves, I guess.

I mean, epicentre (or, and I’m throwing this in here just once for the Americans, epicenter) is a word with a nicely refined sense, one that means something more and other than centre or hot spot. Yes, yes, I understand that people feel that longer words are stronger and more technical; there’s a reason that punctilious prose uses utilize rather than use, for instance. Obviously that is in play with epicentre, along with whatever resonances of epic it might have, and there’s no doubt that it’s gained an air of importance by dint of the company it keeps. (What’s the difference between a centre and an epicentre? A historic event can take place at a centre, but an historic event takes place at an epicentre!)

But what makes epicentre something more than centre with extra épice? What gives it the extra jab, as with an épée or an EpiPen? Well, yes, it is the same epi as in EpiPen. As you may know, EpiPen gets its name from epinephrine, which is what it delivers. And that epi – the same one as in episodic, epitaph, epilogue, epitome, and so one – is from Greek ἐπί, which means ‘on’. (The nephrine is not from Greek for ‘nerves’, sorry, so I can’t make a “getting on my nerves” joke; it’s from νεφρός nefros, ‘kidney’.)

So epicentre means ‘on centre’? Sort of. English got it from German, in which K.A.L. von Seebach invented Epicentrum in 1873. He used it in the sense that is still its most specific technical sense: ‘the point on the earth’s surface directly above the focus of an earthquake’. Earthquakes tend to start somewhere underground, but we (most of us) experience them on the surface, so it’s useful to specify the spot on the surface that’s closest to where the actual thing happened. It’s the mirror image of ground zero, which means (or anyway meant between about 1945 and 2001) the point on the earth’s surface directly below the airburst of an atomic bomb. (In fact, epicenter is quite literally the mirror of ground zero in the military use that refers to the spot directly above an underground bomb test.)

But, like ground zero, epicentre is such a catchy and impactful term, it’s been borrowed for use in other disasters – and, sometimes, for use in other things that aren’t as disastrous. When I look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I see people writing of epicentres of (or for) Ornithoptera diversity, skiing, scandals, hemp, a global battle of the soul, commerce, culture, coffee, culinary creativity, bad feeling, influence and power, nightlife, design, technology, violence, “this whole twisted fantasy of yours,” and soooooo much more.

So, yeah, this word has come to be used so widely in so many senses, I’m almost tempted to say its meaning has no epicentre. But even in the looser sense, that’s not true – there are definitely things that it’s most often applied to – and, really, if we want to be as close to its epicentre as etymology will allow, we must note that its origin, beneath the surface of our language, is the earthquake sense. And, more broadly, it does retain a negative tone. Especially these days, since every damn place that has a spike in Covid-19 numbers is being called an “epicentre” in the news.

So be it. Words have figurative uses. There’s nothing keeping you from using epicentre to mean all sorts of things: that spot on your tummy where you can feel the borborygmus within, the office candy bowl, your latest crush, or even an empty restaurant site a short block north of Yonge and Front in Toronto. But at a certain point it gets to be like using a crystal goblet as a coffee mug. It’s not that you can’t use it for that; it’s just that it’s not the best thing for it. And when you see someone using a crystal goblet all the time to drink whatever, you begin to think that they just want to make sure you know they have one.

And, yeah, I see you have one. So do I. So do we all. I’m not shook. Get a nice mug, and save your crystal for a more fitting occasion.

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