phase

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Posted on January 26, 2014 | 1 comment

Since Maury became the spokesperson for the Bee Spokes tailoring outfit, he has been almost unrecognizable. It’s not that he never paid attention to his appearance before; it’s just that he formerly kept his own counsel, which was not always the same counsel others would give. But the transformation from rumply bowtied bookish Don Juanna-be to dapper man-about-town has been so striking that it’s hard not to wonder if it’s just a phase he’s going through.

Now, Maury is generally more prone to going through phrases than phases, but he has certainly gone through something of a phase shift – or, more to the point, many women (and some so-inclined men) have gone through a phase shift in his regard, from frozen to liquid… and sometimes heading towards steamy. Maury has always been out of phase with the fashion of the times, but somehow instead of being a half-cycle behind and cancelling out, he is now ahead slightly, which produces some interesting results.

Take, for instance, his effect on Margot, the ever-prickly. Normally the presence of nearly any potential object of attraction leaves her quite unfazed. (By the way, fazed comes from feeze, a Germanic word meaning ‘disturb’, and is not related to phase.) And she has never been affected much one way or the other by Maury. But when he swanned into the room and she saw his transformation for the first time, she was left speechless – as Jess put it, “I think it’s aphasia going through.” Daryl added drily, “She looks like he set his phaser to stun.”

We could say that in one archaic sense he is no longer in Phase: Phase is a now-unused word for Passover (taken from a Latin adaptation of Hebrew pesah), and Maury used to be regularly passed over, but not so much now. Which is a bit of an irony for him, since just as all these objects of attraction are taken with him, he is himself taken – he has a steady love interest, he assures us, and he is not available. I’m sure he’ll introduce us to his new warm fuzzy sometime.

So Maury the schlemiel has become Maury who bespeaks the pompetus of love (though he stops short of becoming Maurice). I trust you can understand, then, that any momentary discomfiture on his part might give rise to a brief bit of schadenfreude on our part. I thus relate with some enjoyment the recent proof that this must be a phase for Maury.

Allow me first to explain that phase comes via French phase via Latin phasis from Greek ϕάσις phasis, which referred to an aspect of the moon, as we still refer to phases of the moon. That is the basis for all other uses of phase, which refer to cyclic things (allowing the idea that the states of matter – solid, liquid, gas, plasma – are cyclic).

So, now, picture Maury wearing a spiffy suit and riding a cycle – I mean a bicycle, on the one day recently when it was even close to zero Celsius. He pulls up and hops off his bike and bends over to chain it up. And that is when I see it: he has a rip in the seat of his pants – the seam has pulled apart.

Thus revealing the full moon.

A phase indeed.

Thanks to Hal Davis for suggesting phase.

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Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged phase, word tasting notes

faze

Posted on June 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of my early encounters with Shakespeare was sitting down and trying to read the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew. I was young enough that I didn’t know what the heck a shrew was, so you can imagine my state of comprehension when I read the first words: “I’ll feeze you, in faith.”

Feeze. Well, that beat me. I was fazed.

Right on both counts, in fact. I’ll feeze you at that time could mean “I’ll beat you”; it could also mean more generally “I’ll settle your hash.” Before that, it meant “frighten”; before that, “impel, drive”. It’s a good old Germanic word, attested all the way back to the 9th century.

And feeze appeared in the American dialect, by the 19th century, as faze, meaning “disturb” or “discompose”. We generally use it now in the negative sense: “It didn’t faze him”; “He was unfazed.” By a long measure the most common morpheme immediately preceding faze is n’t – as in didn’t, wasn’t, doesn’t, and so on. Sometimes between the negative and faze will come seem to or seems to: “Nothing seems to faze him” – or, more guardedly, “Hardly anything seems to faze him.”

However, this phrasing is often fazed by misconjecture that puts it out of phase, or should I say puts phase into it. Many people think that this faze is phase (and undoubtedly at least a few think faze is an uneducated misspelling of phase). But phase actually comes from Greek (the ph is a bit of a clue), from phasis meaning “phase of the moon” or, more generally, “appearance”, in turn derived from the verb phanein “show, cause to appear”, which is the root of epiphany as well.

And indeed I wouldn’t mind if those who rendered faze as phase had an epiphany and phased out their misconstrual. But it is true that faze can look, ironically, a little foreign. It puts me in mind of Fhazisi, a Georgian (as in the Caucasus) singing group; it also tickles my sense a little as like a dialectal Italian word, with a distinct taste of Fazi Battaglia, an Italian winemaker best known for their green amphora-shaped bottles of verdicchio. It does have a taste of fuzz, and even, it occurs, slightly of furze (which means “gorse”, of course). It has the hotness of blaze and (in a looser burn sense) raze. But mainly it has that electric razor buzz [z] – and that static hiss [f].

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple voicing of the fricative – [z] rather than [s] – and a difference between a curved c and an angular z can make two words seem so different. Perhaps it’s because when you’re fazed you can lose face. You can be tamed, like a shrew: left to wheeze and perhaps to freeze. And that’s nothing to shake a spear at.

Thanks to “Upstater,” a commenter on this blog, for suggesting faze.