betweennesses

Posted on January 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

We are in a time of betweennesses. As the year turns and many things in the world are in transition, we are in a condition between the dark and the daylight, between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between you and me and the wallpaper. The old year now away is fled, the new year now is enterèd. Shortly we will be at Twelfth-Night, when traditionally for a liminal evening the social order was revocably overturned, a kind of Las Vegas of the ecclesiastical season. Shortly after that, this time around, political changes will occur that, history has indicated, will not be so readily revocable. 

But for the past fortnight, more or (likely) less, we have been on holiday, we have been in YOLO-days, we have been pivoting at the sun’s minimum (or maximum, if you are in the antipodes), we have been on a break from our usual rules of consumption. We are seeing double – and not just because of the doubles we may have been drinking.

And so there are the betweennesses: two e’s for taking time to ease ourselves, two n’s for the two ends of the years, two s’s for… hmm, what? In the southern hemisphere, for spring and summer, but up north it’s winter and fall, and winter to fall is WTF – the same as the first three weekdays of 2025. Let’s say the s’s are for stop and start – how is that? So-so? Let’s assess.

It is, truly, a time of be-twin-ness: two alike and yet different, a year and another year, good twin and evil twin, and never the twin shall meet except at the passing shadow of midnight.

“Never the twain shall meet,” you insist? Yes, well, twain and twin are, in origin, the same word, as is the tween in between, and they have the same root as two too. The be- is not an imperative (“be tween!”) but just an old form of by; between meant – and means – ‘by two’, as in by one on the one side and by the other on the other. And -ness is an old suffix that has always served to make a noun of quality, and -es is just the plural for the extra s (excess? ha, success).

But betweennesses makes a fine lengthy word that can be divided so many ways: a bet to start (the odds are always betweennesses); a twee that is a little too cute; een, which is an odd kind of even or, if hallowed, evening; the nnesses, which is Guinnesses after the first good quaff; the nesses, which is one less than onenesses; ness, the name of a loch in the Great Glen, the deep valley that cuts aslant the Scottish Highlands, the meeting point of two tectonic plates, a place with its fault (a strike-slip fault) but not without its creature comforts; esses, which self-describes with ease; sses, which is what’s left if you assess asses and they lose their head.

But what goes around comes around, not just years but decades and centuries, even though the turning happens almost imperceptibly, like the smallest sound. A century ago this year, T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men,” a poem about betweennesses, and this is how it all comes around in the end:

Between the idea 
And the reality 
Between the motion 
And the act 
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception 
And the creation
Between the emotion 
And the response 
Falls the Shadow

            Life is very long

Between the desire 
And the spasm 
Between the potency 
And the existence 
Between the essence 
And the descent 
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is 
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

But in every instant a world ends and another is born. We know only the world that has passed and can act only towards the world that is yet to come, so our lives are an infinite series of betweennesses. So happy new world, and again, and again.

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Pronunciation tip: “Happy new year” in 27 languages

Posted on December 30, 2024 | Leave a comment

I’m overdue for a pronunciation tip video. Sorry – I’ve been busy doing things that earn money! (Also things that cost money. Travel in particular.) Here’s how to say “Happy new year!” in 27 languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Welsh. And I give a bit of linguistic geekery here and there too.

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libricide

Posted on December 27, 2024 | Leave a comment

Libricide means ‘the act of killing a book’. You can find the word in dictionaries, but not in too many other places. But why not?

Well, can you kill a book?

If so, how?

A book, once it has been published and distributed around the world, is not dead as long as someone has a copy and remembers it. Some books are even still alive in a kind of shadow form, spoken of or described or quoted from, long after the last known copy is gone – Aristotle’s second volume of the Poetics is one such, and there are quite a few others. 

But a book is not alive like a person, an individual with volition, a singular existence, an internal world that can be obliterated in an instant. A book is like a chord, a complex note that causes sympathetic resonances of varying detail in people who have read some or all of it or even just heard quotes from it or descriptions of it. No one can experience all of what a book can bring, but indefinitely many people can experience some of it, and it is alive to some degree for anyone who encounters any copy of it. So banning books, burning books, and other such destructions can kill opportunities for that book to come alive in some people, but as long as there is a known copy somewhere, the book is not altogether gone. A book is only fully gone if it is fully forgotten. A dead person may have an epitaph, but a book is words, and even its title is part of its living self, so if its title lives the book still has a last breath.

And so, of course, there is no list of books that are truly gone. But there are countless such books. Most of them were never published in the first place. That’s the surest way to kill a book: keep even one copy from getting out into the world. Someone writes a book, tries to get it published, no one wants it, the person eventually dies and, with that, no one remembers the book (unless, I suppose, someone finds it among the deceased person’s papers thereafter).

And then there are others, written once, published once, never having made a real mark, and somehow all copies of them have succumbed to entropy, all mention of them lost and all memory of them evaporated. It must happen from time to time. Every so often someone finds a copy of a book no one can remember, no other evidence of can be found, and the book has effectively come back from the dead – at least for the person who finds it and those the person tells about it.

In a broader sense, however, libricide is a more common thing. You may use the synonym biblioclasm, modelled on iconoclasm: it’s from Greek for ‘book-breaking’, and it refers to the destruction of books. Even if it is hard to kill a book for all people and all time, you can kill the book for some people in some times and places. You can destroy copies, making the book effectively unalive for those who would otherwise have had access to it.  You can kill the opportunity for some people to have the book resonate in them. You can slowly deplete the store of ideas in the same way as you can kill cells in a body. In this way, libricide is a kind of wasting disease of the body politic.

Libricide is also the title of a book by Rebecca Knuth, and I regret to say that I haven’t read it – it was published in 2003, and it is not easily available now, so I could say that it exists only in an adumbrated potential form for me. But here is what it’s about, from the author’s website:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings, declared German poet Heinrich Heine. This book identifies the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven, and systemic destruction of books and libraries in the 20th century that often served as a prelude or accompaniment to the massive human tragedies that have characterized a most violent century. Using case studies of libricide committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and Chinese Communists in Tibet, Knuth argues that the destruction of books and libraries by authoritarian regimes was sparked by the same impulses toward negation that provoked acts of genocide or ethnocide. Readers will learn why some people – even those not subject to authoritarian regimes – consider the destruction of books a positive process. Knuth promotes understanding of the reasons behind extremism and patterns of cultural terrorism, and concludes that what is at stake with libricide is nothing less than the preservation and continuation of the common cultural heritage of the world.

We know quite well that such libricide is not a thing of the past. Not even a decade after Knuth wrote her book, libricide was attempted – and, in a limited way, succeeded – in the great historical centre of learning in central West Africa: Timbuktu. Books from past centuries are a great treasure there; many households have preserved them over the years, and the dry desert air helps minimize the rot that can lead to a libricide-by-neglect in damper climates. These books illuminate the understandings and views of past times in the region, and they show a greater openness in many ways than most modern people remember. A local librarian, Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, was key in efforts to collect the books from their many family chests and assemble them in one place so that they could be read, studied, shared. But when the Ansar Dine group of religious reactionaries occupied the city, Haidara had to turn his energy to coordinating a secret evacuation of the books from Timbuktu to Bamako. The Ansar Dine were finally driven out of Timbuktu, but as they were leaving they set fire to what books remained in the library – more than 4,000. But Haidara and his colleagues had successfully gotten more than 350,000 to safety.

Well, “safety.” They are assembled in one place in Bamako, which has a more humid climate; they need proper conditions for preservation, which costs money, or they need to be taken back to the desert climate in Timbuktu, which also costs money and may not be safe.

So 4,000 books were killed – except for any burned volumes that had copies that still exist. But how do you keep these books alive? When they were all gathered in one place, they were an easy target for those who would destroy them, but they were also easier to smuggle out. When they were stored in chests in people’s houses, they were perhaps less likely to be actively destroyed, but more likely to be lost to memory, or known of by only very few. If a tree falls in a forest, and it is used to make paper that is used to make a book that no one alive has read and almost no one knows exists, is the book alive?

Fortunately, the Timbuktu books are, gradually, being scanned, digitized, saved in electronic media, so they can be propagated and preserved in a distributed redundancy. Which is good, but electronic media are also vulnerable, and electronic formats change over time. Electronic media provide new ways to keep books alive, but they also provide new ways to destroy them, even to seek them out and erase them (ask anyone who has ever had a book deleted from their e-reader because the rights changed).

And there is one more way in which books can, at least by degrees, die: when people can see them and read them but no longer understand them. An obvious instance is if they are in a language no one knows anymore, but less obvious cases are ones where the language seems understandable but the cultural references, the metaphors and idioms and turns of phrase and common cultural knowledge, are no longer current, and people read the book and take from it something quite different from what its writer(s) had in mind. (A Canticle for Leibowitz is an extended playing out of this.) The book has been zombified, or transmuted like a person in the movie The Thing. It is alive as a text, and it looks the same, but is it alive as the book it at first was? 

And yet no book is understood exactly the same way by two people, or even by the same person at different times. How do we decide what is alive? Should we speak, as atomic physicists do, in terms of “half-life,” the time it takes for a given quantity of an element or particle – or, perhaps, a book, or the understanding thereof – to decrease by half? And how would we measure it?

And what is half alive? What makes a word alive? A linguist can say “I used it, you understood it, it’s a word.” But if I try to play LIBRICIDE on the Scrabble app (which permits only words in the official Scrabble dictionary), it won’t let me (this is what brought this word to mind for me to write about it!). Does that make this word less alive than others? Or how do you measure the life of a word? Common words are more used and so are in one way more alive, but uncommon words can have much more effect when they are used – speak of petrichor and many people will stop for a moment and inhale happily through their noses. And some words bring to mind other things too, like many-branched trees. Libricide looks like it could be libericide, ‘killing liberty’, and indeed the death of a book is the death of a freedom to experience what is in that book, to resonate in a way you will never otherwise resonate. It also looks like it could be libracide, ‘killing scales’ (libra), ‘killing weight and balance’, and again, the weight and balance of knowledge books can bring is also relevant.

On the other hand, we know that some books carry lies. Some books sow evil. Some books are toxins or pathogens waiting to be spread. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” some people say, but anyone who has caught COVID on a clear day or been gassed under a blue sky will have another perspective. The best disinfectant is preventing the spread in the first place. But the second best, which is optimally kept in reserve for when the first fails, is antigens and antidotes that require knowledge of the harmful agent. There are vials of smallpox frozen securely in a few places, and it is similarly worth keeping the most vicious books around, carefully, so we know what we are fighting against. And also because we are not always right about what is wrong, and things suppressed at one time may at another be found to bring balance and freedom.

But really, it is not the book that does these things. It is the people who read them and act on them, and the people who wrote them in the first place. The existence of books is always contingent: they need humans to preserve them and to preserve the understanding of them and the knowledge about their use and effects. There have been stories and other texts that stayed alive not in print at all but through repeated telling and retelling. A book only lives when it lives in a person, and it has its own life – or its own lives – in each person. Its printed existence helps make that life possible. But it is up to us to keep books alive, as much as we can, in as many ways and as many people as we can.

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feckful, feckmore, fecksome

Posted on December 23, 2024 | Leave a comment

You know what feckless is, of course. It means ‘ineffectual, aimless, hapless’, and various other words that all seem to have negative prefixes or suffixes. 

And you may or may now know what feck is that you may be without it. If you don’t know, I’ll tell you briefly, because my friend and colleague Stan Carey has given a good in-depth look at it, in particular from the perspective of someone from the place where it’s used most (Ireland). Feck is, in short (literally), an aphetic (hacked-off) form of effect. And so feckless is, in origin, effectless. It came about in Scotland first, but it has really latched on in Ireland, perhaps in part because of some other fecks there, including Irish feic, ‘look’. And it is used most often as an expletive, substituting for another word that is identical to it in the consonants.

That’s all well and good. But what is the opposite of feckless? Is it, as my friend Tony Aspler suggested to me, feckful or feckmore? Or could it be fecksome?

First let’s get a grip on what the -less is. It is not the same as the less that stands by itself. When we say feckless we don’t mean ‘with less feck’, we mean ‘with no feck at all’, just as senseless means not simply ‘having less sense’ but ‘having no sense at all’ and sugarless means ‘utterly without sugar, pinky promise’. The two, less and -less, merged in form from similar Old English words. Less comes from lǣs ‘smaller, less’, from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘shrink’; -less comes from lēas ‘without, false, loose from’, from a Proto-Germanic root meaning ‘loose’ – and, yes, it is related to loose (hmm, feckloose and fancy free?). So -less and less are alike in form but not in effect.

Which means that feckmore, while it has humorous potential, doesn’t have the backing of etymology. Also, we don’t use -more as a suffix. On the other hand, Feckmore would make a great name for a country home in Ireland – perhaps one that’s quite the, uh, thing to look at, since in Irish feic as a noun means ‘sight’ (though usually derisively) and mór – always the source of -more in Anglicized Irish place names – means ‘big’. Feckmore could be the acme of Irish fugxury.

Fecksome seems reasonable to me. It’s true that some is not an antonym of less, nor for that matter of -less, though the presence of some does mean that there is not none. But the suffix -some is not related to the word some (here we go again – can these word-suffix doublets not get their feck together?); it denotes the presence, usually ample, of a certain quality, as in tiresome and cumbersome and quite a lot of others. So fecksome is a perfectly fine antonym for feckless. But English speakers have not put this word into effect – no one uses it (at least not yet).

Feckful, on the other hand, can be found in a dictionary. Wiktionary defines it as “powerful, effective, efficient, vigorous” with the note that it’s from Scotland and northern England. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it. And it just happens that the -ful you see on it does come from the same root and have the same sense as full – even if -ful is one letter less full than full. They differ in form but not in effect. So perhaps the lesson here is that when your suffixes get their feck together, so does your word. For which let us be effectively thankful.

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avoidoing

Posted on December 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

Sorry I’m late with this one. I’ve been avoidoing things.

No, that’s not a typo. (OK, maybe it was once, but I immediately saw its potential.) Even if you’ve never seen avoidoing before, you’ve surely engaged in it at some time. Famously, writers with something they need to write end up doing housework to avoid writing, and writers with housework to do end up writing to avoid doing housework. Between the two, ideally, they end up with a clean house and a finished manuscript, each of which was done while avoiding doing the other. By avoidoing one and then the other, they avoidid them both. But avoidone is a form of done!

You can see it, right? Avoiding + doing = avoidoing. And the past tense is naturally avoidone. You can also say avoidoes, avoidid, and avoido. The only question is whether, if you do A to avoid doing B, you are avoidoing A or B. I say you are avoidoing A.

Avoidoing has some juice, not just in usability but in form. It’s a nice merger of two well-known words (plus conjugational endings). Do is a classic basic verb that has come up from Old English and beyond that all the way to Proto-Indo-European, with many cognates in many languages with many forms due to sound changes, and speaking of which, it is the Great Vowel Shift in English that caused the original /oː/ (long /o/) to become /uː/, as in some other words too (two, to). Avoid, on the other hand, comes – as the presence of a v hints – from Latin by way of Old French, and the void is the same void as in the word void and is also related to vacuum. Which means that its first senses were on the order of ‘empty out’, ‘clear out’, and from that ‘leave’, ‘get out of the way’.

And so avoidoing takes avoiding and adds a void in the middle of it, o, which paradoxically takes on the stress – just as avoidoing does – and voids the avoidance by doing another otherwise evitable thing, and often avidly. And at such a busy time of the year, it’s a great way to get a lot of things done, since we can always have the relief of not doing something while we are avoidoing something else.

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fudge

Posted on December 13, 2024 | 2 comments

“Oh… fudge.”

Maury trudged out from the kitchen of Domus Logogustationis. His apron and various parts of his physiognomy were smudged. In fact, they were smeared with a sort of sludge.

“A bad day for the kitchen drudge?” I said.

“Don’t judge.”

“Oh, I don’t begrudge a bit of mess in the making of good things,” I said. “But… what is it you’re producing?”

He paused for a moment, looked over his smirched appearance, and raised an eyebrow.

I gave a verbal nudge: “My nose says it’s sweet.”

“And sticky,” Maury said.

“And apparently chocolate.”

“Well,” Maury said, “I was attempting the Vassar recipe.”

“Ah,” I said. “Fudge indeed.” Vassar College is widely credited as, if not the birthplace, then at least an early vector of fudge, and the recipe is readily available.

“Well, in thought and perhaps in word,” Maury said. “But in deed, well, you judge.” He ducked into the kitchen and came back out with a bowl in which an uneven dark slurry oozed unfortunately. “As you see, it will not fadge.”

Here is where I insert a little etymological explication: fadge, a now disused verb meaning ‘make do, be suitable, agree, get along’, is generally thought to be the origin of the word fudge. Or at least it’s the origin of the verb fudge as in ‘fake, cheat, cut corners, approximate, misrepresent’ – as the Oxford English Dictionary says, fudge is an alteration of fadge “with vowel expressive of more clumsy action.” The interjection “Fudge!” may or may not borrow from that, but it takes little effort to think of another word it is euphemizing. The family name Fudge is unrelated to fadge, but may have been at least a partial origin or model for one or more of the uses of fudge. And the confection? Probably drawing on the ‘make do’ sense, but we can’t be entirely certain… all of the etymologies involve, yes, a certain amount of fudging.

Which making fudge probably should not. 

“It appears to have broken,” I said.

“I found that we did not have all the specific ingredients required, so I tried to…” Maury looked at the bowl and pursed his lips, searching for a way not to be trite and repetitious, but the word lodged in his cortex wouldn’t budge.

“Make do with a substitute,” I said.

“Indeed,” Maury said. “Several substitutes. We had only icing sugar. We had only pure dark chocolate. We had only, for some reason, margarine. We had only, for reasons that escape me, low-fat milk.”

“No cream?”

“No cream. No evaporated milk. What have we come to, James.”

“We have come to the kitchen without having shopped for the necessary ingredients,” I said.

“Oh, and no thermometer.”

“And yet you went ahead.”

“Don’t judge! I was taken by a fancy. Also, I wanted to have some for tonight’s event. When it failed to budge, I thought perhaps the addition of some elbow grease would resolve the problem.”

“Meaning you stirred the heck out of it.”

“I would rather say,” Maury said, holding the bowl up, “the heck is all that’s left.”

“Well, fudge indeed. And now we are without.”

At that moment the doorbell rang. Maury handed me the unfortunate bowl and went to it. It was a food delivery driver, who handed a nicely wrapped package to Maury. Maury said thanks, took it, closed the door, and then set it down on a side table and took out his phone to acknowledge receipt. I looked at the package. It was a pound or so of quality fudge. I looked up at Maury and raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t judge!” Maury said. “I think it is perfectly fungible.” He took the bowl from me and went over to a serving plate that had been waiting empty; he dipped a finger in the bowl and smudged the plate a bit with it – to give it a home-handled air, apparently. He looked again at me. “Now would you like to help me arrange my fudge, and dispose of the evidence?”

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scelerocracy

Posted on December 9, 2024 | 1 comment

Democracy means ‘government by the people’. Aristocracy means ‘government by the best or most noble’ (no comment on whether it really is that; that’s just what the word means etymologically). Kakistocracy is the antonym of aristocracy; it means ‘government by the worst or basest’. And kleptocracy means ‘government by thieves’.

There are various governments around the world that might seem to fit either of those last two. But I have an itch for a word that conveys more of the moral reek that some governments have. When a government is run by people who, however venal and vicious they may be, are not of low status or low achievement, kakistocracy might not be le mot juste. And when their effect on the government is not simply bleeding money and goods off but rather opening the gates to a complete takeover of criminality, an installation of a method of governance that is a sort of civic cancer, so that using it for actual good would itself require a sort of diversion or subterfuge, then kleptocracy doesn’t really cover it.

There are various terms that have been used for governments that have run this way: some of them are monarchies or autocracies, some oligarchies; some have been fascist, some communist; but none of these terms describe the kind of people who are running them. Which is why I prefer scelerocracy.

To hear scelerocracy, it sounds like seller-ocracy, as in everything is for sale, and in a way that’s true, if the price is right, but at the same time some things will be pocketed and some things will be subverted and some things will simply be killed or left to wither away. It also sounds like accelerocracy without the ac, and indeed a bit of criminality in government can, if it takes hold, accelerate in a spiral. And it looks a bit like sclerocracy, with the same scler- as in sclerosis, which refers to a hardening (as in hardening of the arteries), and this has an appropriate tone of sickness, though there is at the same time a kind of softness of decay that pervades a scelerocracy.

Scelerocracy is, in brief, criminal government. The root sceler- is from the Latin root for ‘crime’ and ‘criminal’, scelus – which can also mean ‘criminality, wickedness’ or ‘evil deed, crime, wicked thing’. From scelus we get scelero ‘I defile’ – and indeed scelerocracy is a defilement of government – and sceleratus ‘criminal, villain, wicked person’. So the root covers all levels and aspects, and it presents an entire orientation that built on lies, deceit, greed, hatred, degradation… the fundaments of a criminal organization, in which all those who are “in” view those who are not “in” as suckers and marks, and all kindness is seen as weakness. It is not merely being bad, and it is not merely theft. It is a whole way of being, exemplified by the quote from Agamemnon by Seneca: “Per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter” – the safest way through crime is by further crime. Once you have started the way of crime, honesty is your enemy, for it will weaken you.

English has other words that contain scel – scelerate, scelerous, scelestic, scelestious – but they’re hardly ever used. However, French has the commonly known word scélérat, which means not just ‘criminal’ but ‘major criminal’ – as Littré says, “Coupable ou capable de grands crimes.” It’s like English villain but worse, and it hisses contempt in the saying. (It is also used for humorous exaggeration: a cat that has killed a mouse might be called un scélérat, as might someone who has toyed with your heart.)

Do we truly need this word scelerocracy? English does have the word corruptocracy, and it’s clear enough, but I don’t really fancy it; it’s too… obvious. Also it focuses merely on the corruption, whereas scelerocracy presents an image of an organization not just venal but bent on subjugation and degradation. And it hisses with a vicious erudition. The objection that corruptocracy mixes roots from different languages is valid, but it also holds for scelerocracy: the -ocracy is from Greek, not Latin. But in a scelerocracy, rules are whatever the people running the show decide they are, and consistency is mere weakness. So why shouldn’t the word embody that too?

It would be nice, of course, if we had no need for this word. But there are too many scelerocracies around the world, at various levels of government from nation all the way down to town, and their numbers increase from time to time. But take heart: their numbers also decrease. “Per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter,” but when they run out of consistent crime, or when they run up against those who robustly confront and punish crime, they may eventually find themselves on a plane out of the country, or caught like a rat in a dirty little hole, or on public display in a way they would not have chosen for themselves. Or even, sometimes, mercifully, just voted out. And then follows a lot of clean-up and repair.

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gore

Posted on December 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Aw, man, were you watching the toro and the matador? Did you see the gore?”

“The mess of blood? I mean, I wasn’t looking for it, but—”

“No, I mean—”

“When the toro speared him with its horn? Fortunately, I didn’t—”

“No, I mean the gore of his costume.”

“The what?”

“You know, the triangular panel in his vest. That’s where the horn pierced. It made a big hole. And a big mess.”

“So… the gore is covered in gore because it got gored, is what you’re saying.”

Yes, there are three kinds of gore. One is a noun referring to blood, particularly after it’s been exposed to the air; one is a verb referring to puncturing with a horn or spear or similar; one is a noun referring to a triangular panel or clothing or piece of land or similar shape, such as the space between two close lines of longitude as they converge at a pole. In surveying and cartography, this third gore refers to an area that is unincorporated due to a gap between two competing surveys or a similar error; it can also refer to the triangular patch of land between two converging or diverging roads (like that bit that people do screamers across when they realize they’re missing their exit).

If you take a moment, you can discern connections of sense: gore, as in blood, is produced when you are gored, and you are gored with something pointy just as a gore of land or clothing or whatever is pointy. So, then, which came first?

Ha. They all did. They’re three separate roots.

They all come by way of Old English, mind you – this isn’t one of those cases where you have words that look the same but one came from Latin and one from Germanic. But they were different words in Old English.

The gore that means ‘drying blood’ comes from Old English gor ‘dirt, filth, muck’, from a Germanic root for ‘manure’ – the sense extended onto drying blood and then largely shrank to it. It is traced to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘warm’.

The gore that means ‘pierce’ comes from Old English gar ‘spear’, from a Germanic root for ‘spear’, traced to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘spear’ from an older root meaning ‘fling’.

The gore that means ‘triangular piece’ comes from Old English gara, from a Germanic root for ‘wedge-shaped piece’, traced to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘spear’ from an older root meaning ‘fling’.

Oh, wait, those last two do come from the same root… way back in PIE. Then they sort of… diverged. At an angle. Meanwhile, the first one comes from somewhere else altogether; there’s a sort of unsurveyed gap between them.

But now all three have converged – in form, though they continue to diverge in sense. It’s all kind of messy. Well, words will do that sometimes (cleave and cleave are a prime example). It’s an inconvenient truth.

Incidentally, the family name Gore probably traces to the triangular patch of land. But until AD 2000, “bush versus gore” was just your two choices when walking by the forested edge of a field and seeing a bull charging towards you.

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Cochrane

Posted on November 30, 2024 | 4 comments

There are several Cochranes.

I mean that in several ways. 

There are, as you may know, several places in the world named Cochrane (all pronounced “coc-run,” if you’re not sure). People in Ontario, where I live now, tend to think of Cochrane, Ontario, a small town with the main distinction of being way north where most people never go, between Iroquois Falls and Kapuskasing. In its Wikipedia article, the first subhead under “Attractions” is “Polar bears.” Its motto is “Wonderfully Unexpected.” 

People in Alberta, where I grew up, think of Cochrane, Alberta, just to the northwest of Calgary, a town draped over hills and a river valley, with 230 metres difference in elevation between its lowest and highest points. Its motto is “How the West Is Now,” which is, in my opinion, reasonably accurate. 

There is also a Cochrane in Wisconsin, really a suburb of Buffalo City, which is a metropolis of over a thousand people on the northern reaches of the Mississippi River. And there is a Cochrane in Chile, towards the southern end of the country, in a river valley surrounded by mountains. There are also various smaller places of the name, such as Cochrane Street, in Hong Kong, which hosts the world’s longest outdoor covered escalators, which ascend (and descend) more than 135 metres.

All of these Cochranes are named after people who had the surname Cochrane, no two the same: Frank Cochrane, former mayor of Sudbury, Ontario; Matthew Henry Cochrane, a cattle baron and senator; a railroad conductor, first name not given, who had the bad luck of being injured in a village in Wisconsin; Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, the first admiral of the Chilean navy; Rear Admiral Thomas John Cochrane, commander-in-chief of the East Indies and China Station of the Royal Navy. 

But of course there are many other Cochranes. By this I don’t just mean that there are many people named Cochrane, though there are (I have a good friend by that name; an old friend of my father’s also has that name; the lead singer and songwriter for the group Red Rider, known for such hits as “White Hot” and “The Lunatic Fringe” and “Cowboys in Hong Kong,” is Tom Cochrane; and so on). There are also many other versions of the name: Wikipedia lists Cochran, Cocrane, Cocran, Cochren, Cockram, Cockran, Cockren, Cochern, Colqueran, Coughran, and Cofran. And they all trace to the same several origins.

Yes, several: two Scottish and one Irish. The Irish origin is from Cogaráin (family names Ó Cogaráin and Mac Cogaráin), which probably comes from a root meaning ‘confident’, though I can’t be entirely sure of that. One Scottish origin is a place near Paisley. Its etymology is disputed; it may mean ‘red’ or it may mean ‘skilled’ or it may mean something else. The other Scottish origin is as a modified version of the name MacEachrain, which means (as far as I know) ‘son of a horse lord’.

Which brings me back to the largest place called Cochrane, the town of Cochrane, Alberta, population over 30,000 – it could be incorporated as a city, but it doesn’t want to. This is the town that was named after a horse lord, Matthew Henry Cochrane. There are still horses in the area, and cows too. But when you walk in the western-themed centre of town, or drive from big box parking lot to big box parking lot in the shopping sprawl across the tracks, or stroll on the paths of Bighill Creek as it winds its way through the heart of typical Alberta 1970s-era suburban neighbourhoods, or stroll through the new neighbourhoods up above the Cochrane RancheHouse (I would gratified if they could replace that excrescent e with a decent space), or ascend (or descend) the town’s most famous feature, the hill on Highway 1A with its 200 vertical metres and a frankly spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains to the west, you are more likely to see spandex than leather. It’s an outdoorsy, sporty place. Cowboy hats are seen, but less often than trucker caps. Pickup trucks, of course, but Honda Civics too.

I see Cochrane often. My parents live there. But I didn’t grow up there; when I was a kid, it was a town we’d pass through on the way to or from Calgary (but only if we didn’t take the Trans-Canada, which we usually did) or, quite infrequently, stop in for ice cream. It was a lot less prepossessing in the 1970s. It has grown quite a bit since then, and it is still growing. 

And when I say it I really mean the several Cochranes, the whole patchwork of places overseen by the Man of Vision horse-and-rider statue dominating a hill above the intersection of highways 1A and 22. My parents moved there about a quarter of a century ago and have become thoroughly embedded and well known in the town. And I enjoy my visits, especially the lengthy strolls I take around town with my camera in hand. 

I can’t show you what every bit of Cochrane looks like, because there are some things I don’t feel like photographing (the huge parking lot in front of the Save-On-Foods, for instance). But here, by way of adding some of the particular flavour that Cochrane (the town and thus also the word) has for me, are some of the parts I have pointed my camera at.

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balm, balmy, barmy, barm, balsam

Posted on November 10, 2024 | 2 comments

It’s been a bit balmy lately, more than one might expect. 

When I say weather is balmy, I mean it is pleasant, even soothing (leaving aside worries about why it might be so warm in November). That word, balmy, is indeed balm plus the adjectival -y. A balm is a fragrant soothing resin, and something that has balm is balmy; by extension, something pleasant and soothing, such as warm sunny weather, is also balmy.

I have been thinking, though, of this passage from Jeremiah 8:20–22 (I’ll use the King James Version, since it’s so often quoted):

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me.

Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

That’s not quite so gentle and soothing, is it? But it gave rise to a quite graceful African America spiritual, the refrain of which goes like this:

There is a balm in Gilead,
To make the wounded whole;
There’s power enough in heaven,
To cure a sin-sick soul.

I’ll leave Gilead aside; in the Bible it refers to an area on the east side of the Jordan River, south of the Sea of Galilee, in what is now northwestern Jordan. The name has also gained another cultural currency thanks to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But I’m here to talk about balm.

The balm of Gilead is a specific balm, storax balsam, still produced in the same area. But there are other aromatic resins also called balsams. (And other pleasing extracted vegetable matter can also be balsamic – notably balsamic vinegar.) The word balsam comes from Hebrew by way of Greek and then Latin, always referring to fragrant substances. But when it got to Old French, the Latin balsamum was distilled down to basme, and that became our English word balm (the l was added back in the 1500s to display its classical origins, like the o in people and the s in isle). So, yes, balm and balsam are two versions of the same word, and balmy could have been balsamy.

However, there’s another use of balmy that is not quite so pleasant: to mean ‘insane’ or ‘foolish’ or ‘not right in the head’. It’s not quite so clear how it gained that sense, but eyes quickly turn to the British equivalent, barmy. Some people believe that balmy is the origin of barmy, with some other influence, but others believe that the “other influence” is the whole thing, and that this use of balmy is just based on a mishearing.

The other source is definitely something to do with the head – at least if you’re a barmaid or barman. It’s barm, which has in the past also been used to refer to the head on a glass of beer, but originally – and still – refers to froth that rises on the beer during fermentation. It’s an old Germanic word.

You can see how barmy comes from that, yes? Either from being light in the head, or similarly excrescent, or from foaming at the mouth. Probably not from being scum, though; barm is actually useful – it’s full of yeast and can be used in dough.

With unwanted shifts in the climate, some would say that what we have experienced this week is not balmy but barmy. But what can you do? The summer is ended, and we are not saved.

But now the sun is down, and it’s cooling off. I’ve poured myself a beer and can soothe my soul for the moment. And tomorrow, however balmy it may be, there will be work to do.

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