“So the piece of string,” Maury said to the table, “having been turned away from the bar twice because ‘they don’t allow his kind in there,’ got angry. He hurled himself against a wall and bashed himself up until he was all at loose ends. And then he got twisted – literally, he twisted himself around himself. And he went back to the bar and sat down. The bartender looked at him and said, ‘Are you a piece of string?!’ And he said” – pause for effect – “‘I’m a frayed knot!’”
General chuckling. Montgomery Starling-Byrd, who was in town and with whom we were dining at a local Michelin-starred restaurant, said, “Oh, that’s frightfully good.”
“Oh,” said Elisa, laughing, “frightfully, afraid – same word!”
“If I may enter the fray,” I said, “the two are, oddly, unrelated.”
“What, fright and afraid?” Elisa said.
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Maury said. “And what’s worse, neither is related to fear.”
“Oh, that’s just wrong,” Elisa said.
“And yet,” I said, “it is, alas, so. But afraid is related to fray… but not the fray as in ‘at loose ends’, so to speak. The other one.”
“The one you get at a football match,” Montgomery said. “And yet I seem to recall that both have to do with getting a beating.”
“You are, of course, right,” I said. “Fray in the string sense comes via French from Latin fricare, ‘rub’, source also of friction; fray in the melee sense – and afraid too – comes from affraien, ‘attack, fight, frighten’, and so on, which comes from Vulgar Latin exfridare, and that comes from a Frankish word *friþu for ‘peace’. So… out of peace.”
“Whereas fear,” Maury said, “comes from a different root, the same one that became peril, and fright from yet another root, which somehow has not been traced to a common ancestor with the others.”
“Oh, for—” Elisa said, and did not say a rest of the sentence.
“It’s rather freighted,” Montgomery said. And then he added, “Freighted is also unrelated.” Then he refrained from conversing for a moment and turned to speak to the waiter.
“So there are two frays,” Elisa said. “Yes?”
“You could phrase it that way,” I said. “Or you could say there are three, because there’s also a verb fray, which means ‘frighten’ and is from the same root as the fray meaning ‘fight’.”
“And then there’s another,” said Maury, “but seen only in a prefixed form. It comes via French frais – as in sans frais, ‘free of charge’ – from Latin fractum, which is the same root as fraction. The English word—” he broke off and looked at Montgomery. “Did you just give him your credit card?”
“Yes,” Montgomery said, with a small smile, “I’m afraid I’ve paid for dinner. I felt it would be simpler than breaking down the bill – to avoid the friction of fractions, as it were. To come to your word, Maury, I had reserved some spare funds to defray the expense. Perhaps it was knotty of me to string you along. But now” – he glanced at his watch – “I think I must, as the youth say, peace out.”
Of course it was. Incoherent and chaotic, right? Barely formed and still messy? And then later, as the cohort achieved concatenation, it became choate?
Rather not. Strap in. We’re heading into the woods.
We look at this word, inchoate, and we see the in- of incoherent and incomprehensible and incomplete. But that’s where the trouble starts, for this is really the in- of incipient, intend, and inject (and, yes, inflammable). And the word’s history is rather uncouth.
For starts, what’s with this choate that spells “co-8”? Is it chaotically inspired? Yes, literally, it would seem – the resemblance to chaos is probably what caused the h to slide over. You see, the Latin source of inchoate is incohatus. It’s the past participle of incoho, ‘I begin’ – which comes from cohum, which names a strap that is used to attach a pole to a yoke, plus in- as in “strap in!”
So it means, literally, ‘strapped in’ (or ‘yoked up’) – and, figuratively, ‘begun’. That seems kind of ho-hum: it makes “In the beginning, everything was inchoate” vacuously true. Which, in fact, it is – but the word inchoate has also added some developments to its sense, not just from the general implications of ‘just begun’ as ‘immature’, ‘rudimentary’, ‘not yet assembled with Allen keys’, et cetera, but also from chaotic and perhaps incoherent rubbing off on it (inference by resemblance, a common factor that helps keep language messy). I should say, though, that the spelling inchoate has been with us since the 1500s, but the sense of ‘chaotic, incoherent’ is only documented in the Oxford English Dictionary starting in the early 1900s.
So while the implication is that chaos and incoherency are inherent to incipience, the irony is that this word has become more chaotic and incoherent in spelling and in sense as it has aged.
But what, then, is choate? You could try backforming it – against the cave breeze of etymology – to mean the opposite of inchoate, but you might run into the difficulty of people not knowing what the heck you have in mind. Choate, you see, is already something.
Several somethings, I should say, but most famously a highly esteemed American boarding school, with many illustrious alumni, ranging from John F. Kennedy to Paul Giamatti. The school was named after its founder; the Choate family have been in America since the earliest days of English settlement, and their influence is very well developed indeed now. In recent years, the school has merged with its girls’ counterpart to become the coed Choate Rosemary Hall.
But where did the Choate family begin? It’s not absolutely certain, but it seems to have been in the Chute Forest area in Wiltshire, in southern England (about 8 km north of Andover, which coincidentally is also the name of a prestigious American coed prep school). This Chute is not the kind things slide down; rather, it’s a development of a Brittonic root that is likely also the source of Choate (which, as I probably don’t need to specify, rhymes with stoat). And that root has also descended to the modern Welsh word that means the same thing: coed, ‘woodland’.
Well. Now we truly are into the woods, seeing both trees and forest – and it’s even less coherent than when we began. But that’s the fun of lexical roots and their ramifications.
This here word is just as fancy as all get out. Which is right enough, because it’s a fancy way to say “get out.” And by fancy, I mean not fancy fancy, but just fancy is as fancy sounds, ya know?
Here’s the thing: absquatulate came out of the lexical confection shop of the earlier 1800s vogue for hifalutin words like hifalutin and discombobulate and conniption and spondulicks and sockdolager. Lots of syllables, put together in an ostentatious fashion like the multifarious typography emblematic of contemporaneous advertisements. And it has the added whiff of erudition of the fake-Latin formation, sort of like gazebo. Except…
…except it’s made from real Latin. It is fake in that it’s been assembled in English of parts borrowed and variously altered from Latin. But all those parts are actually Latin in origin.
Let’s take it apart. You know that it’s a verb of action or transformation, from the suffix -ate as in contemplate (taken from the adjectival suffix -atus and verbed). You may recognize the -ul- from words like regulate and perambulate; it’s a diminutive suffix that goes onto the root (as in pendulum and calculus) and is often seen just before -ate, so it hopped on for the ride here. The root, in this case, is squat, which may not look like it comes from Latin, but it does – via Old French es- (from ex-) plus quatir ‘press down, flatten’, which comes from Latin coactus, ‘forced together, compressed’. Squat in English eventually gained a noun form and added the sense of a place one might remain briefly (squatting down first literally and later figuratively), i.e., ‘lodgings’. So when you add ab- ‘away from’, you get ab-squat-ul-ate: ‘go away from your little lodgings’. An illegitimate Latin formation perhaps, but you can see the genealogy as clear as day.
But wait: there’s more. Or there could be more. We know that discombobulation has spawned recombobulation, because why not. Well, ab- means ‘away from’, but there are other prefixes that we could take from Latin to indicate other actions relative to one’s squatulus. Here’s a list of perfectly cromulent words that absquatulate implies the existence of:
adsquatulate: to head towards one’s little lodgings (“I’m done for the day, gonna adsquatulate and watch some TV”)
circumsquatulate: to go around one’s little lodgings (“I circumsquatulated trying to find my door keys, which I dropped somewhere”)
consquatulate: to share one’s little lodgings (“Ashley and I were consquatulating”)
desquatulate: to remove (from) little lodgings (“And, as I had not paid my hotel bills, I was desquatulated”)
dissquatulate: to sunder little lodgings (“The tornado utterly dissquatulated us”)
esquatulate: to go out of one’s little lodgings (“I was not going to absquatulate, but I wanted some fresh air, so I esquatulated and sat on the patio”)
insquatulate: to enter one’s little lodgings (“It’s gettin’ kinda cold out on the patio – I’m gonna insquatulate”)
intersquatulate: to go between little lodgings, or from one to another (“It was early Sunday morning and last night’s one-night stands could be seen sheepishly intersquatulating”)
intrasquatulate: to move within one’s little lodgings (“I have no taste for going outside today; I shall merely intrasquatulate, bedroom to kitchen to armchair”)
obsquatulate: to go against or block little lodgings (“The construction on my street is obsquatulating me”)
persquatulate: to go through one’s little lodgings (“I threw the windows open and the breeze persquatulated”)
retrosquatulate: to revert to previous little lodgings (“After I finished university, I retrosquatulated to my parents’ place for a while”)
subsquatulate: to go under one’s little lodgings, or to lodge under something (“Since I turned 18, I’ve been subsquatulating in my parents’ basement, but at least I have a separate entrance”)
supersquatulate: to go above one’s little lodgings, or to lodge above something (“That was back when I was supersquatulating the garage”)
transsquatulate: to go across one’s little lodgings, or to move from one lodging to another (“July 1 is transsquatulation day in Quebec – if you’re moving from on apartment to another, that’s the day you do it”)
Would you look at that: fifteen more words just from that one base. A full house – congratulations! What a lovely Lego kit our language is (with all its purloined parts). I fully expect to see some of these in use. Don’t just intrasquatulate; absquatulate and get to it!
This word is a matter of perspective. And of stress.
You know the Acropolis, of course. The high rock plateau that sits above Athens, layered and piled with ancient structures: most notably the Parthenon and, though less spoken of, the Erechtheion and the Propylaia, and with them the foundations of many other still older buildings, plus a flagpole and some public washrooms. It is within the city, it is surrounded by the city, but it is apart from the city.
Which might seem ironic, given that acropolis means ‘high city’. What city? It’s all temples! And they’re not in use or, for that matter, in usable shape at the moment. But on the other hand the polis is there too – the population, all the people. There are a lot of people up there anytime during open hours.
The parts of the word acropolis are as easily seen as the parts of the Acropolis: acro- as in acrophobia, acrobat, and so on, and -polis as in metropolis, necropolis, and so on. But right away we run into an interesting issue: its roots are akros ἄκρος and polis πόλις, but it’s not said acropolis, it’s said acropolis. Why the movement of stress?
The answer is not simply that we have a habit of putting the stress on the third-last syllable in borrowed Greek words, though we do do that – it’s why we put the stress on the first syllable in Socrates when it’s on the second in Greek. But even in Greek the stress in acropolis is on the second syllable, which is to say the third-last (antepenultimate): ἀκρόπολις (the accent on ό indicates the stress – which, in Classical Greek, is a pitch accent, but let’s leave that aside; if the ἀ catches your eye, that ’ is a breathing mark: it means the vowel doesn’t have a “h” sound before it). The stress has to move when the two bits are put together because it can’t be farther from the end than the third-last syllable.
Which is sort of like the shift in perspective if you go from the city of Athens up to the Acropolis. If you start where we started, you first see a cliff keeping it high above you; then you go around the side on city streets and gradually uphill, and when you are on the far side you come to the entrance, where it is an easy stair climb to the top. And then you are no longer looking up at it, the thing that dominates the view (until you get to higher peaks surrounding the city); you are looking down and across at all the surrounds. You are not in the high city; you are in the acropolis. And all the stress you brought with you? You might have left it down there. (Or perhaps not. Especially if crowds bother you.)
And of course it’s quite the place, iconic and historic but also scenic. Which is one reason it is by far the best known and most popular of all the acropoleis.
All the what?
I wouldn’t be surprised if you had never paused to think of what the plural of acropolis might be. If there’s only one, you don’t need to pluralize it, right? Well, yeah, but there’s not only one. An acropolis was a central feature of many ancient Greek towns. It was why they were where they were: they were built around a high, defensible place. Towns would grow around the bases (water’s easier to get down there, for one thing), but the strength and protection was in the high part. Rhodes and Corinth also have notable acropoleis.
OK, but why this freakin’ weird plural? Why not acropolises? Well, of course, you can also say acropolises if you want. But in English we have a pretentious habit of borrowing the nominative plural – and no other inflections – from loanwords, especially Greek and Latin ones. And it just happens that the nominative plural of ἀκρόπολις is ἀκροπόλεις.
But if you’re watching those accents, you’ll notice a shift: that ό is now in the second-last (penultimate) syllable. This is because the final syllable is “heavier” (it has a diphthong rather than a short vowel) and so it drags the accent towards it. So this means that the pronunciation in Classical Greek is /a.kro.ˈpo.lɛɪs/ – and in modern Greek, /a.kro.ˈpo.lis/ (but the singular in Modern Greek is ακρόπολη, with η rather than ις, just incidentally, heh heh) – and in modern English it’s… /ə.ˈkɹɒ.pə.liz/. Heh, sorry. The stress doesn’t move; we just say it the same way but with an “eez” instead of an “iss.” And in fact sometimes we spell it acropoles. Because while we like to borrow the plurals, we’re not really as sophisticated or, you know, nerdy as all that. We just like the scenic famous stuff.
I mean, I am nerdy as all that, of course. I once performed an entire speech in Classical Greek (complete with chanting diction, and in the full costume and mask). It was in a production at the University of Calgary of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. And as it happens, at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens (accessible with your ticket to the Acropolis) is the very place that play, and thus that speech, was first performed: the (partially recovered ruins of the) great Theatre of Dionysus.
Of course I went there. Of course I stood in about the spot where the speech was delivered. Of course I… did not perform the speech. I’m not that kind of dork! And there were lots of other people around. But I did note that it was very similar in size to the theatre at the University of Calgary. “Great” and “grand” don’t always mean the same thing, you see…
They’re not two places. Santorini is Thira, just as the sun I watched with hundreds of others setting across a caldera from a clifftop town is the sun I watched by myself rising over the open Aegean across a rural hillside.
This island has a pervasive duality. If you arrive by boat, you come in on the caldera side and land at the base of a thousand-foot cliff. You are in the watery gullet of an ancient volcano, in a basin formed over the ages by multiple eruptions, the most recent of which a mere 3600 years ago – an eruption that destroyed a large part of the caldera wall and buried much of the island under many metres of ejecta, an eruption that, records tell us, affected the atmosphere in Egypt and even in China.
At the top of the cliff is a string of villages like a strand of pearls along the crest of the colossal cauldron, with the famous whitewashed blocks and blue domes and patios and pools descending towards the drop-off, and sloping less spectacularly on the other side. And all the tourists and all the photos you always see are concentrated on this elevated perspective.
And if you arrive by airplane, you come in at the base of the gentler back side, a broad hillside with villages and fields and resorts and, just off the corner of the runway, a winery on a black sand strand that stretches into a seaside beach-bar town slouching at leisure into the water, the opposite of the busy ritzy clifftop aeries.
High above all of this is a monastery on a peak that dominates the back side and looks down on the caldera from a distance. At the north end of the curving caldera mouth is Oia, Οία (said “ee-a”), badly damaged by an earthquake nearly 70 years ago but you wouldn’t know now from its marble streets and moneyed shops. At the south end is Akrotiri, Ακρωτήρι, site of archaeological digs that have shown us that the people living here 3600 years ago had three-storey houses with colourful frescos – buried by that eruption, but still there if you know where to dig.
Even the name of this place is dual, and dual upon dual. The more widely known name, Santorini, may look more like Italian than Greek, and there’s a reason for that: it’s from Latin Santa Irini, ‘Saint Irene’, after a Greek saint (from Thessaloniki) to whom an old church is dedicated in the village of Perissa. (The Greek for ‘Saint Irene’ is Αγία Ειρήνη: Agia Eirini or, by sound, Ayia Irini.) The island’s ancient – and official modern – name is Thira,* Θήρα, after the leader of the Spartans who colonized the island. The capital and largest city has the same name, but with sound shifts: it’s Fira, Φηρά, with the stress moved from the first to the second syllable and the fricative moved from tongue to lip, making the letter for it 90 degrees different – Θ versus Φ.
And so it is. A simple turn and a change of perspective. But it’s all there for the looking.
* Also transliterated Thera – the letter η is classically ē but in rendering Modern Greek is usually set as i because it, along with υ and the diphthongs οι and ει, has merged with ι to the /i/ sound.
The doorways, the stairways, the white paint solid on walls and patterned on the pavement but not matching the cement between paving stones. The cat, one of ever so many. The street that’s about a metre wide – yes, that’s a street, have a look at Google Maps: it’s a normal-sized street of reasonable importance in the town of Mykonos. Google tells me it’s Delou Street. I saw no street signs.
The town of Mykonos is all this, plus stores and restaurants and bars.
I didn’t have a clear expectation of what Mykonos would be like, but I assumed it would be like European seaside towns I’d been to before. It has a reputation for nightlife. I imagined a sort of small glitzy Barcelona, perhaps.
No.
When we stepped off the airplane in Mykonos an hour or so after sunset, it was my first foot on Greek tarmac. It was dark and warm and it was a small air terminal. We came out front and caught a minivan to the Fabrika bus terminal, at the south end of town, where the one in our group who had arrived earlier was waiting to meet the other four of us. She said we wouldn’t be able to get a taxi or minivan any closer than that.
Damn right we wouldn’t. Not without breaking the laws of physics, and several other things in the attempt.
We dragged our bags and followed her down streets just wide enough for two people to pass on foot. Everything was open and busy. Stores in Mykonos mostly close at midnight during the warm season (and mostly don’t open in the cold half of the year). We took an anfractuous route that led us, after several minutes, to a narrow stairway up from a narrow lane. This was the view from the front door.
We were less than ten minutes’ walk from anywhere in town, and yet there was so much. Turn a corner and you find a bakery. Walk a little farther and the neighbourhood changes again. Go two very short blocks (scarcely farther than from one end to the other of the hallway in our condo building in Toronto) and you’re at a fabulous nightclub, with many others on offer.
And in the morning, you come out onto the rooftop deck and see this.
No, I had never been to another place like this.
On our first day we walked to a nearby beach. The beaches in Mykonos do not load you up with sand in your shoes and clothes. It’s no miracle; their “sand” is small pebbles, too large to adhere. These pebbles have been wearing down for all of recorded human history, but they still have a ways to go.
The next day we took a bus to a beach on the other side of the island. It was crowded and we didn’t like it that much. We found a nice bar with a nice view and nice food and had a nice time.
I didn’t take pictures of the landscape as we went by on the bus because I couldn’t, really, but the roads are neither straight, nor flat, nor wide, and the landscape is hilly and full of rocks of many sizes – the large ones, according to myth, are the petrified corpses of the giants slain by Hercules – and there is not much that is green. It does not rain much on Mykonos, or, as far as I can tell, on any of the other Cyclades.
And then we went back to town and sat at a seaside restaurant and engaged in what is apparently the most popular tourist activity in the region: watching the sun set.
Mykonos does have luxury stores and nightclubs, as advertised. But they are all in this old condensed town. It is not like walking down a boulevard in Barcelona, or even an avenue in Verona. It’s small and cute and intense, almost Disney-like, but it’s not Mickey Mouse; it’s Mykonos.
During the day, if there are cruise ships in the harbour, the streets are clogged with impossible groups of people following sign-wielding tour guides. But after 4:00, they’re all back on their ships. And the nightlife people don’t come out until about 8:00. Which means you have four very peaceful hours when people are largely either napping or watching the sunset. Of course, you might be too.
What does Mykonos mean? The island is, according to myth, named after its first ruler, Μύκονος, who was the son or grandson of Apollo. His name means… nothing else that anyone knows. It’s pre-Greek. It came with the island, I guess. The island’s nickname is “Island of the Winds” – hence the iconic windmills.
Mykonos has been inhabited for longer than people have been writing things down, but it used to be subsidiary to the nearby smaller island of Delos, which was an important site of trade and culture, in spite of having, really, no resources of its own. Now Delos is inhabited by 24 people and countless ghosts wandering among the myriad ancient ruins. But Mykonos is very much alive.
There’s much more to Mykonos than what I’ve shown you or what I’ve seen. This is just my cognizance of Mykonos, so far. Before I went, the name didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Now? It has gained considerable flavour.
The driver took us south across the river, along a boulevard, past some Communist-era buildings, onto a side street, and through the parking lot of a modern apartment block. He stopped at a gate.
The five of us sitting folded into the back of the Prius exchanged uncertain glances.
“This isn’t where we’re going,” one of us said.
“Yes,” said the driver. “I know this place. I live here.”
I pulled out my phone and showed him the name of our destination on the screen. “Restauracja Wręga. In Kazimierz.” The driver furrowed his brow.
I pulled my phone back and looked at Google Maps. We weren’t at Restauracja Wręga in Kazimierz. We were on a side street in the Płaszów area of Podgórze, and we were farther from our destination than when we started at our inner-suburban hotel on Dąbska.
The driver looked at his device. Then he said he couldn’t take us to the restaurant because he had a wedding to go to. He dropped us at a nearby convenience store and drove away.
He had won the distinction of being, by a large margin, the least helpful person we met in Poland.
We weren’t the first people who, wanting to be in Kazimierz, had ended up in Podgórze. But at least for us it turned out to be no more than an annoying inconvenience. Google Maps told me that we were two blocks from a streetcar line that would take us to four blocks from the restaurant. The next streetcar was coming in 18 minutes and it was a 20-minute trip. We let our friends know we would be late.
Anyway, it was a scenic detour. For a scant few złoty each, the streetcar gave us a scenic tour of the relatively modern and relatively not-so-modern parts of Podgórze, from boulevards with kebab joints past industrial parks and apartment blocks and into smaller older streets with smaller older buildings, at last passing the old graffiti-covered buildings along Limanowskiego in the heart of the former ghetto, where the Jews of Kraków had been forced by the Nazis to relocate, brooded over at its corner by the spires on spires on spires of the massive St. Joseph’s Church.
And then we turned north, crossed back over the river, and were in Kazimierz, the ancient Jewish quarter and modern hip funky area, just south of the Old Town. We hopped off the streetcar and met our friends at the restaurant just as they were paying the bill. Some of them headed off and would meet us later at an old-style basement restaurant near the Main Square, but one of them took us nearby to Eszeweria, a very boho coffee-and-beer place in a labyrinthine old building with candle lighting and tables that once held sewing machines. It’s the sort of place I would haunt if it were in Toronto. But it’s in Kraków.
Krakow. Cracow. Krakau. Krake. Krakiw.
If you haven’t been there, you probably recognize the name, but you might not know much about it. For me, when I was younger, I just thought of it as a semi-obscure Eastern European town. I was wrong on both counts.
Krakow (or, in Polish, Kraków, said sort of like “crock-oof”) is the second largest city in Poland. Because it’s not so much part of the Western European cultural sphere with the shared histories of all the neighbours and close competitors of England, Krakow figures much less prominently in the imaginations of most people in the English-speaking sphere. But it’s a city of no less historical importance and present interest than almost any Western European city other than the capitals (and even some of them). It’s the former capital of Poland, complete with castle; it was for centuries an important crossroads of trade and culture, and it’s home to one of the oldest universities of Europe (Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364) and one of the largest medieval town squares in Europe.
And it is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe. It’s just about due south of Stockholm, and is less than an hour by plane from Vienna.
Also, I have learned, it is apparently a popular spot for quick group trips from England for such things as bachelor and bachelorette party weekends. This is undoubtedly because eating and drinking in Poland is, relatively speaking, great value for money, and also because Krakow is a very nice city. And English is widely spoken there (but let me not discourage you from learning some Polish).
It’s not all ancient beauty, of course. There are stretches that lack both freshness and antiquity. Some parts are boarded up and graffitied. It’s a city, after all, and one with more than its fair share of history, having been controlled by various empires and political systems at various times. But the Stare Miasto – the Old Town – is as lovely as any old town in Italy or Spain, and quite able to handle as many tourists as it gets. And if you visit, bring your appetite – and be ready to have fun. You may be inclined to make some kind of pun on “krak,” but the most reasonable one to make is on the Irish crack (aka craic), ‘fun’.
It’s not just a party town or politically historically important town, either. Krakow is also a literary centre, with the oldest bookstore in Europe, and figures in many novels; I think the city I’ve been to that it’s most like is Prague.
Incidentally, we don’t know for certain where the name Kraków comes from. It’s commonly said that it’s after Krakus, its legendary founder, ruler of a local tribe, but the first mention of this idea dates to centuries after the town’s founding, so perhaps it’s really from a word meaning ‘crow’ or ‘raven’.
Why were we – I, my wife, our friends – there, by the way? To party. Yes, us too. We were joining a reunion for people who skated with Holiday On Ice (my wife did; I certainly did not). It’s a convenient location for many of the alumni, who are mostly from Europe. And, as mentioned, it’s value for money. And ever so charming.
Guten Morgen, as they say in Münster, and welcome to the mongermonger! I hope you brought your money.
Come examine our menagerie of mongers, from organic and grammatical to mongrels in the manger. We’ve had mongers in English for as long as we’ve had English – and before. Old English mangere traces through Old Saxon and Old High German all the way back to classical Latin mango, which meant ‘dealer’ or ‘trader’ – it’s not related to the mango you put in your smoothie (that’s a Dravidian word via Portuguese), but it certainly has borne fruit.
The fruit is sometimes marginal, mind you, more for ragmen than for royals, but so it goes: the life of a trader is sometimes meagrely managed. And the smirch of filthy lucre has clung to it; even half a millennium ago, monger was more associated with dealing in dodgy goods – sometimes fish, but sometimes fishy things.
But if you hunger for a monger, there will surely be something on the shelf to fill your bill. The available kinds of mongers are effectively endless, since you can always make new ones; if you want to call someone a meme-monger, you may. Here are all the kinds of mongers listed in Wiktionary (I’d show you the Oxford English Dictionary list, but I’m not trying to give you a migraine) – choose among them:
airmonger
alemonger
applemonger
balladmonger
barbermonger
beermonger
bloodmonger
bookmonger
boroughmonger
breadmonger
buttermonger
caremonger
carpetmonger
ceremony-monger
cheesemonger
coalmonger
cockmonger
cornmonger
costermonger
deathmonger
defeatmonger
dictionary-monger
doom-monger
doubtmonger
dramamonger
eirmonger
fadmonger
fancymonger
fashionmonger
fearmonger
feathermonger
fellmonger
feltmonger
fictionmonger
filthmonger
fishmonger
flashmonger
fleshmonger
flourmonger
foodmonger
foolmonger
fruitmonger
garlicmonger
ghostmonger
gospelmonger
gossipmonger
grievance-monger
hairmonger
hatemonger
haymonger
horrormonger
horsemonger
hypemonger
ideamonger
ironmonger
ironmongery
jestmonger
jobmonger
lawmonger
lease-monger
lightmonger
loanmonger
lovemonger
mass-monger
maxim-monger
mealmonger
meritmonger
miracle-monger
money-monger
mongeress
muck-monger
murdermonger
musicmonger
muttonmonger
mystery-monger
newsmonger
noisemonger
nostrum-monger
panicmonger
pardonmonger
peacemonger
pearmonger
peltmonger
phrasemonger
placemonger
pleasuremonger
poisonmonger
powermonger
prayer-monger
profitmonger
prophecy-monger
pupil-monger
pussymonger
questmonger
race-monger
relicmonger
rulemonger
rumourmonger
saltmonger
scandalmonger
scaremonger
shitmonger
sleazemonger
smutmonger
species-monger
spoilsmonger
starmonger
statesmonger
stockfishmonger
system-monger
talemonger
trouble-monger
twaddlemonger
versemonger
warmonger
watermonger
whoremonger
winemonger
wiremonger
witchmonger
wit-monger
wondermonger
woodmonger
woolmonger
woo-monger
wordmonger
Quite a megascopic list, isn’t it? I prefer the very last one, though I have been known to engage the trade of some of the others. I can’t say they mong to me, because we lost the simple verb – we had mangian in Old English, but by Modern English that had been sold down the river, and we had to reuse the noun.
So here I am, mongering mongers. (What a monster!) Do you want to take some home with you? Come along, I’ll ring you up.
…well, we’ve read that bit. Let’s flip to the back of the Bible. In the end, there was vermouth.*
Yes. Allow me to quote Revelation 8:11 in Martin Luther’s translation:
Und der Name des Sterns heißt Wermut. Und der dritte Teil der Wasser ward Wermut; und viele Menschen starben von den Wassern, weil sie waren so bitter geworden.
If you know German, you know that Wermut can be translated as vermouth. In fact, the word vermouth is what French (of its time) made of the German word Wermut. Here is a translation of the above:
And the name of the star was vermouth. And the third part of the water was vermouth; and many people died from the waters, because they were so bitter.
Hmm, that’s kind of a negative opinion of vermouth, isn’t it? I mean, I know a lot of people don’t like the stuff. There’s a famous comedy routine by Hudson and Landry in which a guy is ordering a lot of liquor from a store and says “no vermouth” because “it makes my wife sick” (“She’s out of town but I do it just in her memory”). There is also an anecdote of a famous bartender (there is such a thing?) who, when making a martini, in place of adding vermouth simply nodded in the direction of Paris. And yet, it gets used.
Not just the dry (“French”) kind in a martini.† The sweet kind in a Manhattan too. And a negroni. And quite a few other cocktails. People in some countries (Spain, for example) also enjoy sweet vermouth on ice, unmixed. Sweet, bitter, and strong together make a great drink.
Vermouth isn’t the only sweet and bitter beverage out there, either. There are various herbal bittersweet liqueurs, and gin and tonic also follows the same pattern – and all for the same original reason. You know the song “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”? Tonic water was created because the British invaders in India took quinine to deal with their malarial fevers, and sugar and fizz helped it go down. And, as Ogden Nash said, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”: if tonic, why not gin? On the same principle, vermouth was also created – centuries earlier – as a means of getting people to take a bitter medicine.
What medicine was that? Let me give you a hint, in the form of the King James Version translation of Revelation 8:11:
And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
Yes. Wormwood. That is in fact what English translations of the Bible pretty much all say in that passage. Wermut is German for wormwood as well as for vermouth, the wine-based beverage that originally contained wormwood.‡
Let’s leave aside for the moment that these people were dying of the bitterness; there are in fact several plants called wormwood, and the species that was probably being referred to by John of Patmos, Artemisia herba-alba, was not actually the same as the one used in vermouth. To be fair, even the one named in Revelation was commonly used for medicinal purposes; I guess the thing is just that it was bitter, and, you know, some people really would rather die than have that. But the Artemisia that our vermouth was made from and named after is claimed to have, to quote Wikipedia, “antifungal, neuroprotective, insecticidal, antimicrobial, anthelmintic, acaricidal, antimalarial, antidepressant, and hepatoprotective properties.”
The Latin name of the genus is Artemisia after Artemis, the goddess of childbirth, because of its use for gynecological conditions. But you might have noticed that wormwood has “anthelmintic” properties. That means it’s good for treating parasitic worms. And that is… not why it’s called wormwood. Ha, sorry.
I had indeed long thought that vermouth was a French interpretation of English wormwood. That’s linguistically plausible, but, as I have mentioned, vermouth is in fact an older French rendition of German Wermut (the modern French is vermout without the h). And German Wermut comes not from modern English wormwood but from the source of the modern English word: Proto-West Germanic *warjamōdā, which arrived in Old English as wermode. Which, by the 1400s, had been reinterpreted as wormewode, which made modern English wormwood.
Yes, wormwood is an eggcorn, a reconstrual based on folk etymology, like sparrowgrass for asparagus. But what does *warjamōdā mean? We’re not sure, but it might be from *warjan (‘defend against’) and *mōd (‘mind’) – that is, mental defense: the “neuroprotective” and “antidepressant” properties.
Which is kinda funny if you know the reputation of wormwood for its effects on the mind. And if you don’t, let me give you a clue in the form of a French translation of Revelation 8:11 – this is from the Nouvelle Édition de Genève:
Le nom de cette étoile est Absinthe; le tiers des eaux fut changé en absinthe, et beaucoup d’hommes moururent par les eaux, parce qu’elles étaient devenues amères.
Absinthe. Yes, absinthe names the exact same plant as wormwood (and Wermut). The Latin name of the species of wormwood used in vermouth is Artemisia absinthium. Here’s Revelation 8:11 in the Tyndale version of the Koine Greek Bible:
You see that Ἄψινθος? That’s Apsinthos, which (via Latin) is the source of the word absinthe.
Perhaps you know about absinthe. The Green Fairy. Renowned as a mild hallucinogen; maligned (perhaps unjustly) as the cause of mental breakdowns among artists of the Belle Époque. It has the anise flavour you find also in pastis and ouzo, but with the strong bitter presence of – obviously – wormwood.
So is absinthe the same as vermouth? The same herb, yes. The words also have in common a th that in French is said “t” but has been taken in English as “th.”§ But the beverages are starkly different (though neither of them today contains any appreciable amount of thujone, the psychoactive ingredient of wormwood): vermouth is based on wine (with many other flavouring agents added as well), while absinthe is a distilled spirit (with flavouring). Vermouth is 15% to 17% alcohol; the absinthe I currently have is 62%, and I’ve had stronger. Vermouth can be used in cooking where wine is indicated; absinthe can only be used where you want absinthe! Vermouth is consumed straight and used in many cocktails; you can drink absinthe neat, but things may get messy – and when it is used in cocktails, is often just sprayed or rinsed in, as in a Sazerac.
And while both beverages may (temporarily) lift the mood,¶ absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.∞
* In the beginning, too, for me; Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth was the very first alcoholic beverage I ever tasted.
† Leave it to the French to take the sweetness out. The first pale dry vermouth was made by Joseph Noilly in the early 1800s. Kinds of vermouth have proliferated in many places in recent years, but nearly all of them are sweet.
‡ Many countries prohibited the use of wormwood in beverages in the early 1900s, so your vermouth may not contain any now. And so once again a name peels away from its origin.
§ The one in absinthe does come from a “th” in the Greek original, but the one in vermouth is entirely under the influence of orthography transmogrified.
¶ Yes, mood comes from the same Old English mōd that meant ‘mind’.
Why do colonel and kernel sound the same? It’s because of a minor coronal peregrination.
I don’t mean colonization – it’s not that somewhere has been invaded by order of the crown. It’s just… well, it’s on the tip of my tongue.
And yours too. Coronal (not said like colonel or kernel; it’s “co-ro-nal”) refers, in phonetics, to sounds involving the tip of the tongue. In other places and ways it involves other high points too, of course – as in other crowns, but we’ll circle back to that. The point here is that the /r/ and /l/ phonemes are both made with the tip of the tongue, and not only that, they’re both “liquids”: they don’t stop or even seriously impede the airflow through the mouth. And they’re not dissimilar; in fact, in some languages, they’re not considered different sounds. But in other languages, they can be subject to dissimilation.
Take, for instance, the word peregrine and the word pilgrim. Both trace back to Latin peregrinus. But in some varieties of some languages, notably some descended from Latin, it is (or was) dispreferred to have two identical liquids too close together. So the first /r/ became /l/ and peregrinus became Old French pelegrinus, which became modern French pèlerin and modern English pilgrim. But we also grabbed the unaltered Latin and made peregrine and peregrination.
But let me not wander too far. The point is the tongue – specifically, the point of the column of the tongue, which is circling back. And I don’t mean circling back just because coronal comes from Latin corona, which refers to a crown (and from that the top of something) but comes ultimately from the circlet shape of a wreath (consider a corona in a solar eclipse), from Ancient Greek κορώνη(korṓnē), which referred first to the shape and then to the object.
No – although there is a kernel of truth in that, it’s that colonel traces to Old Italian colonello, from Latin columna, referring to the column of men that the officer was at the head of. The first l was pronounced /l/, as it was written. But in early French, the column retreated – that is, it circled back, by which I mean it dissimilated: rather than have two /l/ sounds too close together, the first one became /r/, in a sort of photo negative of the dissimilation in pelegrinus. And the resemblance to corona reinforced the effect: a coronel would have been one at the crown, meaning the head, yes?
And indeed in English for some time we wrote it coronel, but then in the 1500s a fascination with the vaunted classical etymology of words took hold. The same affectation that led the o to be stuffed into peple to make people to show its root in populus, and the b to be stuffed into det to make debt to show its origin as debitum, and several other similar instances, led the spelling to become colonel. And for a time a spelling pronunciation (“col-o-nel”) was also current. But ultimately we have kept the changed sound and the reverted spelling. And over time the vowels reduced and merged into the liquid, so “coronel” came to sound like “kernel.”
But what, then, about kernel? This is a word for a grain of corn, one of the columns of grains that grow on the column of the cob. Is that where it comes from?
Not at all. The kern in kernel is none other than corn in a slightly turned form, and corn is originally just an old Germanic word for ‘seed’ or ‘grain’; the -el is a diminutive, and so a kernel is a little grain or the soft seed at the centre of something. The Old English word was cyrnel; the front vowel of -el led the back vowel in corn to assimilate forward. Which is the same movement as happened in colonel, and rather the opposite of the consonant dissimilation between /l/ and /r/. And so, like opposing columns, colonel and kernel have marched towards each other. Or, rather, we might say that the two have slowly sidled towards each other, until they have attained kernel knowledge.*
* Sorry for the corny joke. Oh, and neither colonial nor carnal is related to either colonel or kernel.
Sesquiotica 