Hmm. Is this word pristine, or is it spry for such an old thing? Is it the very spring of printemps, or does it prick with brisk, crisp cold? Does it carry spirit or risk?
Yes.
Age has spirit, and it has risks. This is surely a new word – to you, as it was lately to me – and yet it is actually pulled out from Oxford’s lexical cold storage. It has spring and vigour, like a name of a cold drink for hot days, and yet it is not new, and what it names is not new. It is pristine in its glittering appearance – and in the old ‘ancient’ sense of pristine.
Prisk is a rare, archaic Scots English word formed directly from Latin priscus. It means ‘old, ancient, old-fashioned, primitive’. Oxford’s only modern citation for it is from Forked Tongue by W.N. Herbert: “Sandy Hole Gaelic’s pirn’s unspoolan i thi prisk guschet o aa thocht’s birth’s biforrows.” If that sounds to you like old-style dialect from an ancient Scotsman who is pissed as an ewt, well, me too.
But it really is such a crisp word. Can’t we keep it? We could call Angela Lansbury “pretty, prisk, and spry”; we could refer to a coelacanth as a “prisk piscis” or just a “prisk fish.” There are, it’s true, other words with much the same sense, including two more descended from priscus: priscan and priscal. But neither of those is so brisk.
And why would we think we must limit ourselves to one word for any given semantic field? English is not a programming language. English is a collector’s language. No one with the collector spirit says “I have a camera; why would I need another?” or “I have one recording of Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé; aren’t they fungible?” or “I’ve tasted a red Bordeaux; aren’t they all the same?” No, no, every word, even of ostensibly the same sense, has an at least slightly different flavour. A word is a performance; a word is a craftsman’s output. You can keep collecting them, from the prisk to the praecox, words without end.
A bit over two years ago, my wife and I went to a Leonard Cohen concert. The various band members walked onto the stage, one at a time, got set up. Then some guy came bounding onto the stage. We thought it was one of the techies bringing on something for someone. Then he took the microphone and started to sing.
Leonard Cohen, 78 at the time, had just jogged onto the stage like a 24-year-old.
Throughout the concert, he was here, he was there; now he was on his knees, now back up, now on his knees again. Not quite a sprinter, but sprightly. A spring in his step.
Leonard Cohen, after 8 decades of life, is pretty spry.
Last week we saw Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit, live on stage. Angela Lansbury is 89½ years old. Angela Lansbury was up pacing around, dancing in a trance, flopping onto a sofa.
I described her on the phone to my parents as “pretty spry.”
Obviously spry is a relative word. A person in their prime has to be frankly gymnastic to earn the term. A nonagenarian can earn it by dancing. And not landing sprawled as a result.
Spry showed up in English by the later 1700s, meaning (as it still does) “Active, nimble, smart, brisk; full of health and spirits” (Oxford). It has also sometimes been used to mean ‘spruce’ (as in spruced up). But it’s not clear just where it came from. The best guesses trace it to sprightly or to an Old Norse word meaning ‘brisk, active’. But there’s no clear trail. Somehow it just sprang into the language. And sounded right.
Right? Let’s see common words that start with spr: sprain, sprat, sprawl, spray, spread, spree, sprig, spright, spring, springe, sprinkle, sprint, sprit, sprite, spritz, sprout, spruce, sprue, spruik. Most of them have to do with spreading or distributing motion, or with things that move quickly or grow forth. There’s an accumulated association of that general sense with this sound, even though the words aren’t all related. It’s what is sometimes called a phonaestheme.
And the vowel, the diphthong /aɪ/ (spelled y)? That’s not as concentrated, to be sure. But there can be a sense of movement away: fly, try, sigh, die, hie. There’s also the sound of wry embedded in spry. And of course there’s the unfinished sprightly and sprite, and there’s pry and almost prize and prime. Associations between words and sounds may in general be arbitrary, but people automatically look for patterns and make associations on the basis of resemblance. Word meanings can shift because a word sounds like another word. Language is sometimes a nimble thing.
Nimble? That’s a rough synonym for spry. But tell me what you feel the difference to be. I find that nimble is like agile with a particular sense of quick and sure feet and ability to negotiate tricky situations (it commonly shows up with fingers and feet), while spry focuses more on the athletic vigor and youthful sinew, still with a sense of indefeasibility. And it’s commonly used to refer to older people – the most frequent modifier for it (by far) is still. It’s relatively more easily attainable in greater age, and it connotes retention of a youthful vigour.
Come to think of it, it sounds like a word Sean Connery might use, doesn’t it? He’s still spry, too, you know… at 84 years old.
Outside, the temperature is brisk, but the air boils: snow rolls and roils, billows and piles into soft pure pillows. When the storm is past and all is settled and halcyon, the world takes on a pure, primeval aspect: crystalline white, untrodden, a fantasy. This is the moment just after the fall. The sheet white of the land is a page yet to be written on, new, immaculate, not bearing the trace of any conception: no stripe, nor even the prints of a sprinter. Clean and glowing like spirit. Pristine.
Not only snow can be pristine. Forests, beaches, lakes, wilderness, but especially – in the words of today’s writers – anything clean, pure, and white: teeth, china, clothing, clouds… What is pristine is printless, priceless, primeval, like a clear running stream fed by snows from the dawn of time. It is not some passing pretty interest or painting to be pinned on your Pinterest; it is the epitome of ideals of purity. Time and tide have not happened to it yet.
Pristine puts me in mind of Seneca. I don’t mean the Seneca Nation of American Indians, although fantasies about the natural natives and unexplored wilderness could come into play. I mean the Roman author and statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, playwright, stoic, advisor to Nero. His plays feature dark and brutal happenings, but they also feature a yearning for times that were not so dark and brutal. In Phaedra, Hippolytus, soon to be dragged to death by horses (though he doesn’t know it), rhapsodizes about the life in the forests primeval: “There is no life so free and innocent, none which better cherishes the ancient ways, than that which, forsaking cities, loves the woods.” He goes on to say that people in the primal age lived thus, in communion with the gods, without cities and civilization and greed, tools and towers. This is Seneca’s presentation of the pristine.
But where he uses the word pristine – its Latin etymon, to be precise – is in another play, Agamemnon: Clytaemnestra says “Surgit residuus pristinæ mentis pudor – quid obstrepis?” Which can be translated as “The remnant of my old time chastity revives; why dost thou cry against it?”
So pristinæ (an inflected form of pristina, feminine of pristinus) translates to chastity? No; that translates pudor (or mentis pudor; I think modesty would really be a closer translation, though). Pristinæ translates to old time.
Yes. Prior. Prime. The opposite of procrastinated (crastinus means ‘later’). Originally, even in English, what was pristine was, to quote Oxford, “Of or relating to the earliest period or state; original, former; primitive, ancient.” From this came a sense of “unspoilt by human interference,” as witness this quote from the 1910 Encyclopædia Britannica: “This presence of the pure, the pristine, the virginal in the verse, this luminousness, spaciousness, serenity in the land.” And from that we came to general freshness, spotlessness, newness.
Obviously this word pristine is not quite pristine, then; use has shifted its sense. Some would insist that it be reserved for things in an ancient and unspoiled state, either preserved or atavistic; one could not in this sense speak of pristine lines of modernist architecture. But languages changes all the time; rare indeed is the word that has not shifted form, sense, or both in the past millennium. This is not despoilment. This is simply change, which always happens. Do you see that new snow? Each pretty crystal is made of water that has passed through the cycle countless times since the world was new. It has been drunk, passed, watered on roots, transpired to the air, rained down from the clouds, swum in, frozen, thawed, boiled, made into snow and packed and shovelled and melted, and it will go back and do it all again. Everything does that. Every bit of matter in your body was once matter in some other animal’s body, and will in future times be matter in others still. Pristine is a fantasy. But on a fresh, snowy day, it is a pleasing one.
Pristina, on the other hand, is the capital of Kosovo. It is not a new place; people have been living thereabouts for a hundred centuries – a literal myriad of years – and it has had its name for at least seven centuries. It is not untouched; a war was fought there even not so long ago. And yet it has a lovely name, a name that brings to mind the printemps of time, prior to imprints. Its name does not come from the Latin, though. It sounds like Serbian for ‘boil’, but more likely it comes from a personal name, much changed over the ages.
Thanks to Benjamin Dreyer, @BCDreyer, who mentioned a month ago his appreciation for this word and so, without intending to, provoked this tasting.
You know what lurve is, don’t you, baby? Yeah, baby, you do. You want to feel my lurve. You want to know my lurrrrve. Yeah, baby, you know. You know my lurvature. I know you’re lurvaceous. We need to relieve, baby, relieve with verve. And make lurve. Lurve is a butterfly… and we are its lurvae.
Aw, come on, baby, you know I’m not some kind of lurvert. I’m the man with the velvet voice and the velvet glurve. I just want to give you what you desurve. Yeah, baby, you deserve my lurve. Because you’re lurvely. You’re sent from heaven aburve.
Baby? Baby?
Aw, baby, you know what lurve is. Aw, come on, don’t make me say it. It’s that word… that worrrd without the purr… if you take away the purr, it’s naked. It’s unpurrtected. It’s…
But lurve isn’t a new word. No, baby, no. It’s in Oxfurrd. They quote the Daily Mirror from 1936: “Which means..that (a) you’re in Lurve, but (b) you’re not sure he’s in Lurve with you.” But you’re sure, baby. You can be sure of my lurve.
What’s the definition? Oh, baby, come on, you know. Okay, be cool, baby, this is what it says: “Romantic infatuation; sex; love. Freq. when regarded as being treated (esp. in films, pop music, fiction, etc.) in a hackneyed or clichéd manner.”
No, baby, that’s just those British people, baby. No, oh come on, baby. I say lurve is love with a purr. It’s like a one-word aphurdisiac.
That’s what, baby? Where’s it come from? Oh, lurk, baby, I mean look… Yeah, baby, yeah, okay, here’s what it says: “Sometimes specifically parodying the slow, smooth, crooning pronunciation of love in romantic popular songs. In some cases perhaps also reflecting British perceptions of the U.S. pronunciation of love n.1”
Well, look, baby, what do they know about lurve? They’re British, baby. They don’t make lurve. They make awkward half-hinting proposals. Or they sing songs about, you know, well, “wouldn’t it be lurvely.”
Baby, baby, you know I said it: you’re lurvaceous. Between us we can make a beautiful smooth lurvature. Lurve, lurve me do, baby, you know I lurve you… Oh yeah… you want a whole lotta lurve…
A word bursts on the scene, fresh, faddish, perhaps consciously classical or rebellious or hip. It has its Warhol-appointed quarter-hour or its full Shakespearean hour on the stage, and then it slips back, retreats into the thin pages of the dictionary, eventually dies with a dagger through its heart and has its grave condition marked with an obelisk. Such is life; vanity may be glorious, but all glory is vain.
But just because this too shall pass doesn’t mean we should despise it. Indeed, the very evanescence of life’s delights enjoins us to enjoy them: if not now, when? Every moment is a new opportunity. Take it. Just don’t become attached to it. Relish it and relinquish it. Spend the moment well; just don’t give it meaning beyond its worth. Don’t think your first-class upgrade makes you a first-class person. Take the meretricious for its merry tricks, knowing you will be rapt one moment but unwrapped the next, and discard the rapper when it is empty.
Take this word, kenodoxy. Is it not glittery like a cut diamond, or at least like glass costume jewelry? The two hard velar stops are represented with sharp angular strokes in k and x; the third set of angles are a tail, a vowel y. It touches at the back, tip, tip, back and tip of the tongue. It sounds crisp and detailed and looks stylish in an expensive-watch sort of way: a beautiful machine so exquisitely made, you will pay much for it even if it doesn’t perform its ostensible function as accurately as a cheaper one may do. It glitters like a lottery winner; it has the meretrix’s merry tricks.
Lottery? How about keno? There’s a fun game, involving drawing numbers to match pre-selected numbers – originally five, hence the name keno, from Latin quinque. And meretrix? That’s an old word for a lady who has the oldest profession, one who will share her glories for a price and a limited time – ah, such is life. Another (perhaps less nice) word for the same is doxy. So. Keno and doxy? Free money and pricey love, twin impermanent luxuries? Perhaps you would not appreciate something so much like a diamond-studded balloon that will, when optimally filled, pop from the diamonds’ sharp points. But perhaps others would. And perhaps we all engage in a little kenodoxy.
Kenodoxy is not from keno the game plus doxy the gamer. Actually, it’s from Greek κενοδοξία kenodoxia, from κενός kenos ‘empty’ (whence kenosis) and δόξα doxa ‘glory’. (My, doesn’t that xi – ξ – look like a snake coiled and ready to bite?) Kenodoxy is, according to Oxford, an obsolete rare word meaning “The love, study, or desire of vain-glory.”
O vainglory, how can we not be captivated by you? Here is a little bit of kenodoxy from Old Goriot by Balzac:
Love in Paris is a thing distinct and apart; for in Paris neither men nor women are the dupes of the commonplaces by which people seek to throw a veil over their motives, or to parade a fine affectation of disinterestedness in their sentiments. In this country within a country, it is not merely required of a woman that she should satisfy the senses and the soul; she knows perfectly well that she has still greater obligations to discharge, that she must fulfill the countless demands of a vanity that enters into every fiber of that living organism called society. Love, for her, is above all things, and by its very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, thriftless charlatan.
The vainglory of love, the love of vainglory, the vainglory of the love of vainglory.
We do not have to engage ingenuously in vainglory. We can always stand apart, observing ourselves bouncing in the ballroom of the world, delivering keynotes and savouring the finest things. This aesthetic appreciation that leads to insight, what the Sanskrit philosophers called rasadhvani, can also be applied to vainglory. Take your kenodoxy out from your lexical jewel-box and wear this rock on your ring finger. Be engaged in it. Just know that all vainglory is a jilt, and in the end you will be disengaged, whether you want or not.
Yes, this is a neologism. I made it up just the other day. It’s a word that’s needed, because what it names has existed for some time. It’s the tourist equivalent of hate-watching.
What is hate-watching? It’s watching something that you loathe, precisely because you loathe it. It’s indulging in irritainment (entertainment that irritates you). It seems rather popular these days. People can download whole series on Netflix and sit there loathing every second and making snarky comments from the comfort of their couches or beds.
Well, you can’t do spiteseeing from home.
It’s not too likely that someone would plan a whole trip just to see something they despised. It’s not inconceivable; indeed, I think A.A. Gill has made a minor practice of it just to fuel his entertaining subgenre of slasher travel writing. But usually if you go spiteseeing it will be an excursion or stopover on an otherwise enjoyable trip.
The example that came to my mind first was going to the Champs-Élysées while on a trip to Paris. It’s infested with tourists and high-end chain stores; it’s about the only place in Paris to find a Starbucks, and that Starbucks typically has a huge lineup. In Paris! The city of boulevard cafés where you can drink a grande crème and eat a croissant and watch the world walk by! Yes, spiteseeing is what you do, in the middle of a nice trip, to remind yourself that people are stupid and that you’re vastly superior to them. You take a break from looking up at things to look down on things …and people.
Your choice of spiteseeing excursions will depend on your tastes. If you like high art, a famous tourist trap amusement park may be worth a day. If you like fine wine, some demotic jug-winery that tours people around in open-topped train-like bus-wagons may be worth a snicker with your swirl and spit (you may also enjoy hearing the people at the tasting bar next to you compliment the disgusting swill, which you are tasting just to remind yourself of how good the other wineries are). If you are skeptical of organized religion, a trip to Rome will not be complete without a visit to the Vatican (although, honestly, most of the grand attractions of Rome will have some spiteseeing potential for the truly dedicated anti-religionist). If you like fine dining, you could go to the McDonald’s at the Spanish Steps in Rome, or, to really crank it up, if you’re in Paris you could do what A.A. Gill did (him again!) and stop by L’Ami Louis. And wherever you are, if nothing else presents itself, you can find the nearest shopping mall. Unless you like shopping malls, of course.
Now, we may think of spite as referring to resentment, cultivated ill-will, and grudge; that is the most common sense today. In spite of that, however, it is still suitable for use anent sights with which you have no personal history. Spite, after all, is shortened from despite (the noun, from which our preposition today came), which in turn is from the Latin verb despicere, which gave us despise; despicere is de plus spicere, and means ‘look down’. Not as in literally look down, of course, as for instance from the top of the Eiffel Tower; you may as readily look down on the Eiffel Tower, in the figurative sense, while standing level with its base (and some distance away, muttering to yourself about how long the lines are to get up).
Etymology does not determine present meaning, of course. But we still have the nice phrase in spite of, as in seeing it in spite of yourself, and viable usages in phrases such as just for spite. And it makes a nice play on words in spiteseeing.
Spite has an interesting mix of flavours. It can be refreshing and lively with its overtones of sprite, and it can be disgusting and disgusted in its taste of spit. It also calls to mind site, of course, which in this case may be unfortunate. Why unfortunate? Because it will reinforce the common reanalysis of sightseeing as site-seeing.
We use site now so often that many people assume that site-seeing is the word they have heard. But really it’s originally sightseeing, as in seeing the sights; while that may seem tautological (“Is it possible to see sight?”), in this case a sight is something to be seen, something worth seeing, as in a sight for sore eyes and a sight to behold and so on. The sense of sight as something striking or remarkable dates from before AD 1000, although sight-seeing dates from only the early 1800s (when touring became a big thing). Site-seeing showed up first in the mid-1900s.
Now, of course, language changes and all that, and who knows but I may not be able to stem the tide of site-seeing (although it’s still far less common), but to me a site is the plot of land that the sight I want to see is located on. Unless it’s a gravesite, you know, or other historic site (e.g., “On the 15th of June, 1215, on this site was signed the Magna Carta”) – in the latter case, it’s the plot of land where something happened that’s no longer there happening, it’s just crowds of twits wandering around on the site looking for a sight that’s not to be seen… it’s not that there’s no there there, it’s that there’s nothing but there there, and there’s nothing there on the there, just dirt or concrete and gum someone happened to spit. So it’s the sort of place you wander through out of pure spite, to look down on.
Does this word have a familiar ring to it? A tale come round once again?
It’s a riverrun of a word, a liquid motion. The four rings rolling past o o o o make me think of the Lazy River, a waterpark feature that runs in a never-ending ring; you grab an inner tube and hop in and ride it, around and back to where you started and, if you so wish, around and around again, like an Escher staircase. Everything is downstream from everything else, and upstream from it too.
Well, yes, I’m referring as much to the sense as to the form. The word does seem as though it could start and end in other places – souroboro, osourobor, rosourobo, orosourob, borosouro, oborosour, roborosou, uroboroso – and it would be equally inscrutable, but it is the endless, self-feeding ring that it names that truly comes to mind: the Greek source is οὐροβόρος, ‘devouring its tail’, and it refers to a serpent that eats its own tail.
But this is no omphaloskepsis. This is not stasis but a self-contained universe. Yes, yes, in the real world a snake that devours its tail cinches up smaller and smaller as the tail goes farther and farther in until it’s looped around several times inside itself and too tightly to go any farther. Shut up. This isn’t a real snake, OK? It’s the universe an’ stuff. OK, it’s just the universe, no additional stuff, because there is no additional stuff. That’s the point. It feeds itself. It is a closed system, eternally returning. It is the hand that grasps itself. It is the beginning and the end together.
Beginning and end? Alpha and omega then, no? Well, let’s see: the small alpha is α, like a rope (or snake) with the ends crossed. A closed circuit but with dangling ends. A large omega (omega actually means ‘large o’, but I mean the capital form of it) is Ω, which is like the same thing only turned 90 degrees and with the crossed ends broken away so they don’t cross anymore: the end, turned off. (The small omega is ω, which is like someone grabbed the ends of the rotated α and pulled till it spronged. The large alpha is A, which is like some clever architect’s conception of a new way of making people see α, though actually the small came from the large.)
Anyway, the point of the ouroboros is really that the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end. The big crunch is the big bang and vice versa; the conclusion of every phase is the opening of another; it’s the never-ending story.
Never-ending story? A familiar tale? A tail told by a madman, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Well, what’s nothing? 0, of course, or O if you wish. There we go. The shape of a halo, the shape of a ring – on a planet, on a finger, on a space shuttle, of an onion or squid – or a button or a hole or the shape of some people’s sense of logic. It’s always something, but nothing compares to it, and it has an empty heart. It’s that familiar ring, going round and round and round and round again. The experience of being buttonholed by a never-ending tale-teller is suggested by the old-style English spelling (by way of Latin, as opposed to the more directly Greek version we prefer now): uroboros, “you’re a bore us.”
Oh, sorry, no, the accent is on the second syllable. “You rob or us.” Really? What roborant has so empowered the antepenult to rob the rhythm? Even the ou version is said by the dictionaries to be “oo rob or us.” This in spite of the accent you can clearly see on οὐροβόρος: the long syllable is the third one. (The mark over the ὐ simply means “no heavy breathing.”) We seem to be ringing the prosodic changes; perhaps in future ages they will put the stress on the first syllable, and then on the last (which would match the motif of the opening movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony).
But all of this doesn’t happen of its own little lonesome. The reason anything happens is that there are things to happen with and by and to, a multiplicity of things, differences. Countless atoms with their little ring-like systems cooperating to make molecules that make organelles that make cells that make organs that make bodies and so on. Just as we have time so everything doesn’t happen at once, we have difference so everything’s not the same. We need cooperation; we can’t have stories unless there is a hearer as well as a teller, and we can’t have truth unless two people corroborate each other’s tale.
Corroborate? Co-ouroboros. Couroboration.
Couroboroation. Based on a character outline in the (PostScript Type 1) “Fnord Hodge-Podge Discordian fonts version 2” by toa267
Thanks to @mededitor for getting this started. As it were.
I work on the fourth floor of a building owned by an insurance company. It’s something over 20 storeys tall; it was built in the late 1960s. It’s one of those buildings where every floor has a mail slot in the wall in the hallway. If you trust the mail chute, you can drop a letter into it and it will land in a bin in the mail room on the ground floor.
If you walk past the mail slot, you will next reach the entrance to the men’s room. If you continue slightly farther, towards one of the back doors of my company’s office suite, you will pass a door with a metal plate on it that says Lamson Room.
For nearly a decade, I walked past that door and idly thought, “I wonder what that is,” but by the time I was in a position to look it up, I had forgotten about it. Lamson. Obviously someone’s name, but presumably an eponym? In a hotel, the Lamson Room could be a conference room or a dining room. My knowledge of the floor layout in the building told me that there wasn’t enough room for anything of that sort. Plus it was well inside and away from any windows.
No, clearly a Lamson was some kind of piece of equipment. But what? Some electric thing? What would a large building need? Was it even still functioning? Who or what had been on our floor before we moved in? It gave me a sense of something that radiated somehow. Perhaps because of LORAN or lambent? Or was it a laminating machine? The /læm/ gives such a feel of a soft hum. And of course it’s soft like a lamb – indeed, it may come from lamb, or it may come from Lambert, which originally meant ‘famous land’ (the lam is the part that means ‘land’). But the door was closed, and hard. It had just that metal nameplate on it. Lamson was a name of some forever opaque and obscure bit of equipment.
Yesterday the door was open.
The men’s room has been under renovation for a week, and perhaps the guys working on that had reason to go into the Lamson Room. I don’t know. But the door was slightly ajar. So I opened it and looked in.
The room was small, less than two metres square. It had another door on the left side of the back wall, a narrow one, with a NO ENTRY Authorized Personnel Only sign on it, and another sign declaring that it led to a Confined Space, with a reference to a regulation regarding that. Most of the rest of the wall at around waist height was occupied by two metal doors, about 50 cm square each, with a black panel in between with a knob, a button, and Operating Instructions. There were flat metal surfaces with rollers on them extending out from the doors, the one on the right farther than the one on the left. The metal doors were closed. They had fixed small knobs at bottom centre that suggested that they slid up.
On the left of the two doors was a sign telling people that if they were doing any work on the Lamson, it had to adhere to an SOP for hazardous work. Above that door was a handwritten sign listing FLOOR CHANGES, with four department names and their new floors.
That’s all.
I did not attempt to open any of the doors. I would be a lousy movie character.
But afterward, I finally looked up what a Lamson is.
It’s something that used to be a staple of large companies that needed to move papers or goods around rapidly within a building. Insurance companies probably don’t need them for moving papers around quickly anymore. No one was using this Lamson Room, anyway. Hospitals and similar places still often use them for getting things such as blood samples from one place to another quickly.
It’s a pneumatic tube system.
You put your documents or other material in a cylinder with bumpers on it and put it in a tube. The system sucks and blows the cylinder through the tube to the intended destination, where it drops out and slams on some surface. It’s not a simple gravity-feed chute. Papers put in on the fourth floor might swim upstream like Lamson salmon to the 20th.
Lamson is not the name of the person who invented it. Pneumatic tube systems were invented by William Murdoch in 1836. William Stickney Lamson opened a store in Massachusetts in 1879 and patented a system for moving cash across the premises using balls on tracks in 1881. In 1899 he bought up a company that made pneumatic tubes. This became his company’s main stock in trade. That soft name Lamson became synonymous with something hard and percussive and fast. (Well, slam is a soft word in the same way, and means something hard, too.) The company was bought up in 1976 and now the name – and product line – is owned by Quirepace.
You may not have known what a Lamson is. If you did, you may have thought they were a thing of the past. Well, the one in my building seems disused now, but businesses still have plenty of use for them. Just like another thing that insurance companies – including the one that owns the building I work in – have and use, that many people think are relics of the past: mainframes.
We just spent a weekend in Ottawa. There were some parts of it that could have been worth a redo. It wasn’t horrid, but we were glad to draw a curtain on a few bits. Some of it was worth a laugh, and some just gave us new wrinkles. And some of it was splendid. If a bit cold.
Ice, yes. There was plenty of ice.
Running through it was Rideau.
Throughout the French-speaking world, rideau means ‘curtain’. But in Canada, it’s a word of national significance. It carries some weight, some history, some patriotic connection. It gives images of an important building in Canadian government, and of an important waterway in the capital – which, in winter, becomes a very long ice rink.
It also gives an echo of Trudeau, the name of one of our most prominent prime ministers – and of his son, who will be running for his shot at the job this fall. (Well, technically, his party will be running for its shot at forming the government, and if it succeeds he will be prime minister. Such is parliamentary democracy.) It is occasionally joked that Trudeau sounds much like trou d’eau, which means ‘water hole’. What, then, would rideau mean? Rire means ‘laugh’ – is rideau from ‘laughing water’? No, it has a different wrinkle. Literally. Ride in French is ‘wrinkle’ or ‘fold’, and rider is the associated verb; from it comes rideau, a wavy, wrinkly sheet of fabric – a curtain.
It happens that there is a river that waterfalls into the Ottawa river a couple of kilometres downstream from Canada’s parliament building. The waterfall looks like a curtain. The falls, and from them the river, thereby gained the name Rideau. (Just think: If the locals had been more Anglophone at the time, all that I’m talking about would be called Curtain.)
After the War of 1812, when misguided Americans thought they could roll into Canada and be greeted with open arms as liberators (so glad the US doesn’t try to do that anymore), the Canadian government became aware that the St. Lawrence river was vulnerable to an invasion and if it were cut off, commerce and supply shipments would be severely hampered. So they determined to build a canal from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. The canal took its name from the river it parallelled and partially used: it became the Rideau Canal.
The main contractor building the Rideau Canal was a Scotsman named Thomas McKay. He bought a decent piece of land near the confluence of the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers and built a nice country pile on it, which came to be called Rideau Hall. When Ottawa became the capital of Upper Canada in, they needed a place for the viceroy (the queen’s local representative) to live and for state functions to be held. They leased Rideau Hall from the McKay family, not intending for it to be permanent. But after Canada became its own country in 1867, the government bought Rideau Hall from the McKays and started adding onto it; over the years it has gotten quite a bit larger.
And, as with residences of governors general throughout the Commonwealth, its official name is Government House, although no one calls it that. It’s still Rideau Hall. Even on its own official site. It’s where all sorts of official government receptions and so forth are held. The governor general lives in a small part of it (well, OK, a few thousand square feet, but just a fraction of the whole thing). The person who is really the executive head of government – as opposed to the ceremonial head – lives across the street in a decent stone house, nice enough but not at all suited to receptions and other large functions. That’s 24 Sussex Drive, the home of the prime minister. I suspect there’s a tunnel a few hundred metres long between 24 Sussex and Rideau Hall, but I don’t actually know.
So, then, to this past weekend. Aina and I were in Ottawa for the weekend. The excuse was a reunion for skaters from the Ice Capades (Aina was one of the last Ice Capaders; they got bought up by Dorothy Hamill, putting Aina and others out of work, and then they folded up altogether. They had a revival a few years later – with Aina’s best friend and roommate from Holiday on Ice as show director; he even put the show curtain on his credit card – but then the Ice Capades slipped under the waves altogether). But aside from that, it was a chance to do Winterlude in Ottawa, and skate on the Rideau Canal – and at Rideau Hall.
Did you know that Ottawa is the second coldest national capital in the world (going by average temperature year round)? Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is the coldest. So you have to experience Canadian temperatures to have the complete experience. We were in luck. It was –15˚C on Saturday and –19˚C (just below 0˚F for the Americans) on Sunday. How do you stay warm? Keep moving.
Which we did. We skated all the way to the southern end of the skatable part of the Rideau Canal – 7.8 km one way – and back. Aina skates fast without any trouble; I have to put in real effort to keep up with her, and I worked up a sweat. By the time we were nearly back to where we started, we were actually a little tired. The ice isn’t exactly rink smooth, after all, and it has a lot of snow on it – shaved ice, actually, from all the skates. There are bumps and pits. Aina is used to rink ice, which is smooth. And we were both wearing figure skates, which have toe picks. We were riding the frozen eau nicely at around 4 minutes per kilometre when Aina hit a snow-covered wrinkle – fold, ride – in the ice and her toe pick stuck in the upslope, and she went flying, hit on her left knee, and sprawled forward.
I of course stopped immediately. No, I tried to stop, and the ice conditions and my conditioning were such that I ended up falling too (but with no noticeable injury). The upshot is that Aina ended up with a massive goose egg on her knee. The guys in the first aid tent obligingly let her ice it a bit and gave a bunch of overcautious advice (one of them was sure it was broken, in spite of her being able to walk and skate and its not producing massive pain or crunching noises). But Aina just wanted to go back to the hotel and ice the knee some more – after stopping to buy some flan at the ByWard Market, of course.
Well, she wanted to run a nice hot bath is what she really wanted to do. But when we got back to the room, she turned on the bathroom light, opened the bathroom door, and started to laugh. Why was she rident? It turns out the Novotel in Ottawa has shower stalls in the rooms, not bathtubs. (And their pool and hot tub were closed for maintenance this past weekend. This is the third or fourth time we have checked into a hotel and learned only then that their pool facilities are closed. I do believe it should be a requirement by law to let people know at time of booking that such facilities will be closed, if the hotel knows it at the time. It makes a difference in where we stay. Tell us when you get rid of the eau!)
But the knee was fit enough for walking on. And the next day we made the half-hour walk to Rideau Hall to go skating there, on their little rink just down a short hill from the building itself.
Ottawa is a very cozy city; nearly everything you would want to see is really quite close together. The farthest important building from it all is Rideau Hall. In the US, the president’s house is an intensely important symbolic building at one of the foci of the street system. American presidents are accorded the status of demigods (at least). In Canada, the prime minister lives in a nice, well-appointed house, but there are many people in rich neighbourhoods across the country who live in bigger; the governor general occupies the ceremonially important building across the street, but it’s nowhere near the centre. All of Ottawa focuses on the parliament, where democracy actually happens. So anyway, Rideau Hall is a bit more than 3 kilometres away, and on Sundays the bus service is infrequent. So we walked.
And when you get to Rideau Hall, you simply walk past the lowered gate on the entry road, and a fellow in uniform strolling around says, “Nice day for a skate!” and tells you to continue past the main building and over to the left and down the hill. Try doing that in Washington, DC; the security around the buildings there is rather more intense. You don’t have the sense that anyone expects anyone to want to attack Rideau Hall. At least not on a freezing Sunday.
And was Aina’s knee better? I would say so. She was skating beautifully, as usual. The ice was wrinkle-free. She got her redo from the Rideau at Rideau.
This word names a condition that makes it difficult to say this word.
OK, sure, fine, most people find it difficult to say this word, especially at first while your eyes and mind are still untangling it. Really, it’s like last year’s strands of Christmas lights pulled out of the closet, isn’t it? But once you pull apart the bits, you can string it out and trip it off your tongue. Here are the parts, all from Greek: δυς dus ‘bad’; διάδοχος diadokhos ‘succeeding, alternating’ (from διά dia ‘through’ plus δοχή dokhé ‘receptacle’); κίνησις kinésis ‘movement’; with the ia ending that we use to indicate a state. So dys, dia, docho, kinesia. Almost looks like a magic spell, doesn’t it?
Well, if it is, it’s an evil one. Dysdiadochokinesia is difficulty making repeating movements, such as tapping a foot, finger, or tongue tip. If you have it, when you try to say something such as “da da da” you vary the pronunciation and/or say it with excess volume and/or don’t move your tongue and mouth as one normally would in doing so. There are quite a few conditions that can cause dysdiadochokinesia, involving lesions on the cerebellum or frontal lobe or other nervous system damage (as in multiple sclerosis and Friedreich’s ataxia).
So, clearly, this word would be a challenge: /dɪs daɪ ə dɒ ko kɪ ni ʒə/. It taps the tongue tip three times in rapid succession – one on the stressed beat of each of the first three metrical feet – (/d sd d/), then the back of the tongue twice – both on off-beats, so faster – (/k k/), then two more different sounds with the tip (/n ʒ/). It does, admittedly, have an admirable alternation of vowels; between the consonants it makes a bit of a tour of the mouth. But the consonants beat like a drumstick, or the repeating note in flamenco guitar, as for instance in “Asturias” by Isaac Albeniz. Which dysdiadochokinesia – or any of several other kinds of dyskinesia – would render prohibitively difficult to play.
Of course, flamenco guitar is prohibitively difficult for most people anyway, because they haven’t developed the skill. Just like reading dysdiadochokinesia isn’t going to be easy for anyone on first try. (Man to doctor before surgery on his hands: “Will I be able to play the piano?” Doctor: “Oh, yes, not to worry.” Man: “That’s fantastic! I’ve never been able to play the piano before.”) The difference with this disorder is that it makes it difficult even if you know how and would otherwise be able to do it. Even the common abbreviation – DDK – would present a little challenge. How cruelly ironic.
Thanks to docsterx, commenting on my post on sputum, for suggesting this word and a few others I may yet get to.
Sesquiotica 