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byrasa

Posted on August 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

This word came over a long time ago from Old Norse, and then we stopped using it. And then it came over again much more recently from Swedish, and it’s only beginning to catch on. And it may or may not be the same word, but yeah, I guess it is.

Well, you know, it’s like when things just somehow don’t make it from one department to another. There’s a communication breakdown. Someone in one office in your company has a great idea and has meetings and decides something should be done. And then… well, nothing actually gets done, because it never leaves there and goes to the people who could make it happen. And maybe later someone who can actually make it happen thinks of it, or something like it, and makes it happen. And you can bet the person who thought of it in the other part of the office will want some credit for it.

Sure, you could call it communication breakdown. But really it’s office breakdown. Swedish for ‘office’ is byrå, and the Swedish verb for ‘break down’ is rasa. Which, jammed together, has come to us.

Except that in Old Norse, byr meant ‘village’ or ‘farm’, and in modern Swedish, by means ‘village’. And as a real origin it makes more sense for byrasa first to have been village breakdown. You know, people who decide things decide things, and at some later time people who do things do things that at least somehow resemble the original decisions, so of course the people who decide things talk about how it was their decision, while the people who do things give them the stinkeye. Village breakdown.

In other words, byrasa is political or organizational breakdown, a communication and effect gap. Wheels spin independently of the driver. It gets to be a bit like that bit in the opening of The Simpsons where the baby appears to be driving the car. Now make that baby a boss – or a mayor or other seat-filler.

I don’t know if this word will get wings in English, though there’s certainly a use for it. It just looks a bit odd. Also, don’t ask any Swedes about it. What I said about the roots in Swedish and Old Norse is true, but I just made the word up from Scrabble tiles and backformed it. It’s a new old word. Well, someone had to do it. And someone else had to get credit for it.

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apotonia

Posted on August 6, 2018 | 1 comment

The thing about apotonia is that you feel like you’re not really there at the time but it’s a particularly vivid memory afterwards, much more vivid and lasting than if you had just felt normal.

Apotonia is obviously (to people familiar with the Meccano set of word parts) a word made of two Greek pieces: apo–, from ἀπο ‘off, away, from’, and –tonia, from τόνος ‘tone, condition’. There are plenty of words in English containing one or the other of these (often the –tonia shows up as –tonic, as in catatonic, pentatonic, and gin and tonic). In this word, they come together… to stand apart.

I hope that you all have experienced apotonia more than once in your lives. I’m not saying that it’s a wonderful experience, but not having experienced it is a sign of a life lived so far from the edges that when at last you do find yourself at an edge, it may destroy you utterly. Apotonia is a sign that you have gotten into a situation where you are… outside yourself. Not beside yourself; that just means you’re very upset. Apotonia is not upset. Upset is like thrusting your head into the swirl of a flushing toilet. Apotonia is like watching yourself on TV as you flush the toilet. Continue reading →

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froverly

Posted on July 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Walk down a busy street in a city new to you, alone, lonesome, and uncertain, and pass an open door in a stone arch. Walk in and see a broad and glowing floor, high daylight and low candles, silent streamers reaching into the heights, and a labyrinth marked on the floor for walking meditation. A spirit-soaked building embraces you, and with a turn of the prism loneliness is solitude and solace. You did not come for it, but you have comfort. Continue reading →

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sufting

Posted on July 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Every moment of every day, our senses sift input from our surroundings. Most of us assume the primacy of sight, organizing ourselves in our environment by what our eyes tell us. We tend to think of touch and taste as requiring contact. But sounds land on our ears, and scents wandering through the air enter our noses, and they fill out the dimensions around us… and at times it is almost as if we can touch and taste them.

The smell of fresh baking reaches you and you float on the scent towards its origin. You step into the fresh air after a rain and can taste the petrichor and greenery sprouting on your tongue. I remember once, sitting in a library while people nearby were having a whispered conversation, I lifted my hands lightly to let the soft ripples of their sound run over my fingertips. Ahhhh. Such is sufting: after the soft sifting of sensations, a sigh and a shiver and another sip or small extension to taste or feel what the free air carries. Continue reading →

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farlage

Posted on July 17, 2018 | 2 comments

I have my farlages.

I would like to think most of us do. Every so often we reach into the pockets or purses of our memories, pull one out, unwrap a corner, nibble on their half-stale sweetness, enjoy it for a few moments, rewrap it, and put it back.

I think of A—, who I helped study for a test, sitting facing her in her room, class notes spread on the bed between us. I told her the questions I thought would probably be on the test and what the answers would be to those. I had actually been to all the lectures; she was very smart but very busy. She was taking extra courses and rehearsing and performing in plays. When we sat down for the test the next day, she looked at it and, with her bright lips and braced teeth and surprised mascara, she gave me a jaw-dropped glance: I had nailed it. She got an A– on the test without having read any of the texts. I wrapped that look and put it in my pocket.

I think of R—, who I had taken a class with once and, a few months later, encountered in a theatre lobby while I was with my girlfriend of the time. R— and I chatted briefly and she moved on, but my girlfriend simply observed, “She likes you.” I was surprised, but I stopped and thought for a moment about the conversation, the look in her poster-girl eyes and her glossy half-smile. I wrapped them and put them in my pocket.

I think of – what was her name? I can’t even remember now. I’ll call her J—. We were in a drawing class together. She had a blonde bob and a lean and very smart face. On the last day the professor and the rest of us went to a cafeteria on campus and sat and drank tea and talked, and somehow I was sitting across from her in conversation. And somehow we kept locking eyes, each daring the other to look away first, neither acknowledging in any other way that we were doing that. As we were all finally getting up and going our separate ways, she accidentally said “Goodnight” instead of “Goodbye” to me although it was only a late afternoon in April. I wrapped those devious stares and put them in my pocket.

I didn’t take any more art classes, as it happens, and I might have seen J— half a block away on campus once, but I might not have. I never saw R— again, though I can see her eyes now in my mind. After the end of the semester, A— graduated and I have never had evidence of her again on this earth.

You could tell me these were all missed connections, and I could tell you that rain falls down and is wet when it lands on you, if we’re going to exchange obviousnesses. Of course I should have done something to stay in touch. If you’ve never had a paralyzing anxiety that prevents you from making an obvious social move, I don’t want your lectures, and if you have had one, you won’t be lecturing me anyway. But these memories are not burdens for me now. I’m happy. The missed connections are losses in their way, but the pocketed glances are all gains, gifts that I didn’t ask for or expect, each telling me in its little way that I had less to worry about than I felt. All three of them, and all the other givers of all the other farlages I have, have moved on in life and are no doubt doing well, as I am. That just makes the taste of the farlage sweeter.

Farlage was once defined – by at least one old author – as a wrapped piece of cake from the wedding of someone you were secretly in love with. More generally you could think of it as a treasured moment from an impossible – or at least unattained – emotional connection. But the cake is the clue.

A farlage was, before all the figurative talk, a share of cake or biscuit wrapped and kept in your pocket for a snack. It probably comes from farl, a small flour or oatmeal cake, from fardel, not the ‘burden’ sense known in Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy (although you could toss in a bit of that for measure if you must) but a sense meaning ‘fourth’ as in ‘quarter’ and referring to a quarter of a thin cake. I can’t help but think that another farl, a variant of furl, might help account for how it’s rolled up in the pocket.

I can’t help but think it because I decided it. I decided all of this. All these old farls are real, but farlage is in no dictionary and was not written until last night, when I saw its letters in a Scrabble rack and decided to make a lexical replicant of them. But the thing I have decided to name with farlage is real. As are the memories. And now you will always be able to come back to this new old word.

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aptuse

Posted on July 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

This is a word that means so much it means nothing at all. It’s so shallow it’s profound. It’s like that old (probably misattributed) Yogi-Berra-ism: “Nobody ever goes there anymore – it’s too crowded.”

It’s not just like that, though. It describes that. It’s a word for things that make perfect sense even though they’re prima facie senseless. They’re so obtuse they’re apt.

But it’s also a word for things that are so apt they’re obtuse – things that sound very clever and mind-expanding but are the toilet paper of wit, dissolving if you so much as wipe a tear or blow a nose with it. So aptuse also describes George Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The first kind of aptuseness uses loutish-seeming language to license sensible behaviour; the second-kind uses sensible-seeming language to license loutish behaviour.

Does it seem an inapt use of language to have a word that means two contrary things, senses that cleave apart even as they cleave together? Well, this word does not. It has two times two contrary senses, because each of its two contrary senses conveys a contradiction in sense between form and substance.

The etymology of this word is no puzzle, yet it is still an entertainment. Apt is from Latin aptus, ‘suitable, fitting’, from the past participle of an earlier conjectured verb apere, ‘attach, fasten’. The use is used from not use, of course, but obtuse, ‘blunt, of an angle greater than 90˚’, which comes from Latin obtusus, past participle of obtundere, ‘deaden, dull, beat against’. So the two words are attached while their senses beat against each other. They’re mashed in a portmanteau, overstuffed like a Vonnegut blivet.

You may not have seen it too often, but this is a word for our times, don’t you think? So many clever unclever and unclever clever things being said. It’s a good thing it spilled out of my Scrabble tiles tonight so I could confect it for you. It’s a new old word. Use it aptly.

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wect

Posted on July 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

…Then we were wect,
Riding on the moment-stream
As twoseafarers moonlight-wrecked
And gazing after fading steam,
Naked on an unknown shore
And walking in a waking dream
Unmoored from after and before…

I almost want to stop there, with those lines from Emily Saint Christopher’s “Late Diversion,” but a characteristic of being wect is that you keep on going, drawn forward as by an invisible thread or wafting on a thin streamer of smoke.

Wect is a word that appeared in English almost as if from a dream made real: it’s not quite clear where it came from, but it may be related to wake – if by ‘wake’ we mean the feeling you have after parting the curtains of a deep afternoon slumber and wandering sleep-stoned in the waning daylight. But really it is, as Emily Saint Christopher wrote, “Walking in a waking dream Unmoored from after and before”: a timeless state of mind, narcotized by the infinite moment. Awake but as if dreaming.

It is a word for the most magical summer evenings, when every passing light is a fairy and every nearby voice is trapped in an amber of warm sorcery: an hour lying on the grass in the slowly swirling dark, exploring the contours of the ground and grass and of the person twined with you; a walk along the beach in viscous air through passing strands of talk and music, the only shocks of light coming from sporadic fireworks or distant electric storms; a stroll through James Joyce’s Circean Nighttown, the dimmer corners in orbit of Harvard Square under the dog star, a swim through the night crowd on Church Street in Pride, or the tail end of an evening at EPCOT; a dip in a warm pool lit by stars and underwater glow; a walk alone or in a pair on the high empty deck of a Caribbean cruise ship at midnight and a half, staring at the rushing white creases trailing away in the borderless bottomless rippling blackness. You are holding a little detached swatch of reality, and you will pocket it in your memory to take out later and rub gently in your hand and dab at the corners of your eyes.

It’s a crisp-ending word for such a smooth thing, but such is language. Not everything is as you expect it; take what comes to you. This word came to me tonight, drawn from random letters; the poem and poet are my invention. It is a new old word. Cherish it and walk with it.

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giparon

Posted on June 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Toujours je fais le giparon.

As Rimbaud said. Or was it Baudelaire?

Every party, we all know, slides into the kitchen eventually. The dull polite people may stay in the living room; the hungry ones looking for crispier conversation find themselves leaning against the kitchen counters, opening the refrigerators of their personal discontents and desires and serving them like raided snack food to the surprisingly kindred spirits sharing the formica.

But every party also has its satellites. Give a balcony or a darker corner of the gardens or even an open window with a view and there will be one, then two or three, stepping away from the noise to watch it at a distance and reflect its light dimly, coolly, in the damp and petrichorean air seasoned with their night-blossoming thoughts. Those are the moments when you find yourself facing another and knowing you will kiss them or knowing you will never kiss them, retasting the cold leftovers of your shared histories or quickly flicking new ones on the flame.

And, always, there is a person or maybe two wandering ghost-like from room to room, sitting and facing, glimpsing sidelong and listening to three conversations at once. Perhaps they will end up in the kitchen, perhaps they will orbit on the balcony, or perhaps they will sit on a settee and soak in the local emotions, the music of voices. You may see them staring at the bookshelves, assessing the reading habits of the hosts. And at the end of the party, look for them to be there like starfish at low tide, but ready now to talk and to tie the knot and bow on the evening.

Some are satellites in space and some in time, but always there will be those who cannot blend in the thick heat of the social moment but have active valence in the more rarefied spaces. The giparons.

This word giparon has nothing to do with gipsy, be assured of that; nor are its designates peregrines per se, though they may wander as planets do. No, it is their spectatorial nature that seems to have given them the name. The word is a little peculiar; it fits the French form with the –on as in fanfaron, but it matches a Spanish conjugated verb, giparon, ‘they glimpse, they glance, they look at’. These are those who behold, those who like to watch, those whose eyes move in their orbits. But if at last they touch earth, they have had a view as from the moon.

And I, I am always a giparon. In fact, I am the first – the first to be called such. You see, this is a new old word. It came into being by random letter drawing just this evening. Please keep it.

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scotagon

Posted on June 18, 2018 | 1 comment

I am searching for a scotagon. I pull a book off my shelf. It’s in good condition for one dated 1907. The cover has gilt and relief: PEER GYNT and HENRIK IBSEN. I flip a bit, looking for something. Finally I find it, starting page 79:

(Peer Gynt höres at hugge og slå omkring sig med en stor gren).

Peer Gynt: Giv svar! Hvem er du?

En stemme i mörket: Mig selv.

Peer Gynt: Af vejen!

Stemmen: Gå udenom, Peer!

Is it not clear what that says? It may not be; when we struggle to understand a language we don’t know – which we all do at least once, as children, and many of us do again and again later in life – we are doing as Peer is doing, thrashing in the dark, wrestling to determine its shape. Hit something and see where the corners are, the angles we can grab onto. Peer is swinging and slashing with the branch of a tree. I’ll circumvent the learning process and give you a translation: Continue reading →

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soray

Posted on June 13, 2018 | 1 comment

She pulled her lips at last back from mine, her hand resting on my chest, and looked at me from a few inches away. “I’m going to miss you… when I go.”

Her parents’ family room was in gathered darkness behind her, old couches and upholstered chairs, coffee table, probably a television somewhere in it all. After a very long evening of chatting and playing games and other things I recall mostly by conjecture and probability, we’d run out of excuses for me not to leave, so at last I’d put my arm on her shoulder and leaned in to make the bold and long-expected move. Our first kiss was five or ten seconds that filled more hours in my mind than the whole evening before. It was then or never: she was leaving to take an opportunity to study overseas. A lucky break. Literally: she had given up ballet because of a stress fracture. I didn’t know then how successful she would be in her new career – the answer, as the intervening thirty years have played out, is “very” – but I wished the best for her as she left me behind.

I don’t remember exactly what I said. I’m sure it was commonplace words said with portentous feeling. I know didn’t say “Soray.” But I could have.

Soray. A word you can say in valediction when a parting makes you ache with sadness at the loss of the person and with joy at what they are going to. And a noun to name for the occasion. A soray may be when you release a captive animal into freedom, hopeful that it won’t meet one of the abrupt disasters that await the unprepared. So a soray happens myriad times every September as parents see their almost-adult children off to university for their first year, even though soray is not now a word most of them would say. A believer in heaven could say it to a dying beloved, but no one does.

What is this word, anyway? Conjecturally it looks like a blend of sorry and hooray but it is not; that’s just a backformation, and a clumsy one at that. It rhymes with foray but that just makes it suitable for poetry. It is tempting to trace soray to the same source as sorry and sorrow – Old English sarig and sorgian – but this is a sweet sorrow of parting, sweet not in hope for rejoining but just in rejoicing for hope.

But Scots Gaelic gives a more tempting clue: soraidh, meaning ‘farewell’ – the parting wish, but seen in soray with the sure belief that the person will fare well. “Ae fond kiss and then we sever,” Burns wrote, but his “warring sighs and groans” are replaced in a soray by tears of your own loss but also of your joy at the other’s gain: the most noble tears ever shed.

The truth of soray’s origin is known, though, and it’s none of the above, though they all have come to bear on it in its history. Take out a bag of Scrabble tiles; pull out five face down, and turn them over one by one: S, O, R, A, Y. That’s what I did an hour or so ago, and then I hit my reference shelf to see what history I could give it, what manufactured or borrowed memories I could endow this newborn lexeme with.

Sorry. Until just now, it was never a word. But now it is, and a word for something that deserves one. And now it is out of my hands, out into the world, sent hopefully. Soray!

This is but the first of a series of new old words: lexical replicants with invented or borrowed histories. I’ll still also be tasting words that have existed before. Personal anecdotes and other stories illustrating the new old words may or may not be true, and I won’t tell you whether they are.

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