I was going to taste a different word, but I couldn’t find a way not to make it distractingly political (O tempora! O mores!). I have a longstanding moratorium on politics here, so I am demurring. That’s not to say I won’t get to it, but, when topics political come up, no matter how consequential they are, sooner or later one must give it a rest.
Which is what demurring is. We may think of “I demur” in Bartleby-the-Scrivener terms, “I prefer not to” meaning “not between now and the end of time,” but the point is it’s not a stop; it’s a delay, however indefinite. It’s for something you don’t deem urgent. Perhaps you’re being coy – may we say demure? – and it’s just a decoy. The matter at hand may yet find its redeemer. But probably not. Demur may be (to quote one definition) “to make scruples,” but sometimes it is done unscrupulously. It may be to let the subject mature – to the point of senescence or even obsolescence – but it may be to leave it in the mortuary. Which would be, as they say, a rum thing.
There’s little question of what demur meant in earlier times. It comes from the same origin as French demeurer, which means ‘remain, stay, stop, persist’. That origin is Latin demorari, which – pun notwithstanding – has nothing to do with Demerara (which comes from an Arawak name for a tree). But, like Demerara rum, it has to do with an alternative to stress: the heart of demorari is mora, which means ‘delay’ or ‘wait’ or ‘duration of time’ and has come into English as a unit of phonological weight, an alternative to the syllable.
In English, we measure our words in syllables, and each word of more than one syllable has a stressed syllable. In a language such as Japanese, however, there are not syllables but morae, and there is not stress but pitch accent. It’s all sounds, of course, but it comes down to how you think about it (just like stress). The simple 5+7+5 addition of a haiku is made for morae – like in this one by Kobayashi Issa:
hatsu uri wo
hittoramaete
neta ko kana
Notice that hittoramaete is seven morae: hit-t-to-ra-ma-e-te. When you impose the haiku form on the bump and jump of syllables, as in this English translation of the above, it’s always a bit less or more, eh:
the first ripe melon
holding tightly close to her
my child rests asleep
This mora shows up elsewhere in our language, too: in moratorium. That may sound like a mortuary, but it’s not related. Demure is also not related; it’s from the same root as mature, and as the French word for ‘ripe’, mûr or mûre. French for ‘blackberry’ is also mûre, but the two are not related, even if the blackberries are ripe; the blackberry mûre is from Greek μόρον móron, which is not related to English moron, which is from μωρός mōrós (note the longer ω: in Classical Greek prosody, it has two morae, whereas ο has one), which is not related to morose, which is related to mores, as in morals, those things that forbid murder, which is related only distantly (through Proto-Indo-European) to mortal and to mortuary – a place where mortal remains demur indefinitely.
What? You murmur “no more”? Then I’ll let it rest.
Sesquiotica 