Tag Archives: word tasting notes

jink

Posted on January 29, 2015 | 1 comment

Is this the singular of jinx? It is not. Jinx comes from the Greek name for a bird. Jink is sound symbolism, expressive language. A jink is a zig or a zag; in Canadian terms, it is a deke. (Deke has a certain expressive something, but to my knowledge it is originally shortened from decoy, whereas jink is – by the evidence – not shortened from anything.)

A jink is an instance of jinking. Jink, the verb, means ‘dart jerkily’ or ‘make a quick, evasive turn’ – so as to elude capture or attack, particularly in rugby or aeronautics. Both verb and noun have been around since at least the 1700s. The origin, as I said, seems to be sound symbolism.

Sound symbolism? You know, that thing we do whereby we associate certain sounds with real-world things or actions, even if there is no actual resemblance of sound. Surely you have a sense of the difference between actions described with, say, tek versus pek versus kek, and jek and chek and then shek and so on. The different onsets have different senses of action: light, firm, hard, supported, strong, sliding… not that any one word would describe the difference with full accuracy. Likewise, everything can turn abruptly with a new vowel and with a new coda (final consonant or combination of consonants). Compare jek with jenk, jeshk, jesh, jet (which has other associations too, of course), jev, and so on; now change to jank, junk (strong semantic effect there), jonk, jink. Only one of those would really do for a strong, sudden action that covers some space quickly before slotting neatly into a new position.

Of course, echoes of words with semantic associations will always have an important effect. Jink? How about junk, Jenkins, jonquil, jangle, jingle, drink, chink, juke, Jenga?

Or how about hijinks? Or should I write that high jinks? It turns out I should – if I want to go with the origins (which are of no matter to most English speakers, because they don’t know them, but once you know them…). As I said, the word starts with a reference to deking out in rugby or similar sport. From that comes dancing, and tricking, and winning a game of cards (of a certain kind – spoil-five or forty-five – according to Oxford). And a drinking game, whereby the person who got the high roll of the dice – the high jink – would have to do “some ludicrous task” (Oxford) or drink a large bowl of some alcoholic beverage or, failing at the one, do the other. Hence high jinks for rowdy revelry and miscellaneous mischief.

I do prefer the spelling hijinks, as it happens, because of the iji with its nice symmetry and its three dots. But I recognize that the fun of the spelling has hijacked (not high jacked) the original form. Well, so be it. I’d rather hijinks put me in hiding than have low jinks in my lodgings.

What are low jinks? I would have thought they would be as boring as hijinks are exciting, but according to dictionary.com, low jinks are “merrymaking or horseplay that is less than tasteful.” Which actually sounds just like hijinks to me – if hijinks were tasteful, they wouldn’t be hijinks, would they? It seems as though low jinks has somehow made an unexpected sharp turn in sense.

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yogurt

Posted on January 28, 2015 | 7 comments

Everyone knows: if you want to trim your girth, it won’t hurt to do some yoga and eat some yogurt (maybe in a yurt, just for the experience). Now, I’m more of a jogger (or runner) than a yogi (I can hardly bear it – instructors who assume that everyone can flop forward, and who treat downward dog as a resting position – but my wife does it with astonishing ease), but I do like yogurt.

But please, none of that low-fat over-sweetened rubbish. What a fraud. They take away something essential that makes it better tasting and more satisfying, and in compensation double up on something that is rather worse for your health. When I eat yogurt, I eat the full-fat kind. The kind I only need two spoonfuls of and I’m good.

I have said before that every word is one of Proust’s madeleines, a key to memories, and yogurt is certainly that for me. There are two particular things it brings to my mind. The first is visiting the University of Calgary campus when I was still in school and one of my parents (can’t remember which one at the time) was working on a graduate degree there. Yogurt was fairly newly faddish, its fame fed by tales of Balkan and Caucasian centenarians subsisting on it, and it seems to me that I was having it almost for the first time from this cafeteria in the Social Sciences building. Or was it the one in Science A that let out into the internal courtyard garden? Either way, I do still remember the flavour, tangier than it often is now, but also a bit rounder. Novel. I liked it. It seemed, as the university did, a harbinger of the future.

The other memory is of sitting at a sidewalk café in Brighton (the one in England) with Aina (my wife) and some of her friends from her time skating with Holiday on Ice. Our party happened to get chatting with some people at a neighbouring table, and I do recall that they were grumbling about the illiteracy of youth etc. One thing they couldn’t abide was mispronunciation of yogurt. But it became apparent that while people in our party and people in their party agreed it was terrible how it was mispronounced, in fact they differed on the proper pronunciation. “Yo-grt?” “Yog-rt?”

Well, as it happens, if you’re going to be fussy about it, they’re both wrong. I may say “yo-grt” and Oxford may lean to “yog-rt,” but really, it should always have been “yo-urt.”

Here’s the thing. Our source word is the Turkish yoğurt. Do you see that breve on the g, that half-halo that looks like a little bowl to put some dairy product in? In Turkish, that means that the g is basically not pronounced. Compare Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey: his last name is pronounced like “air-doe-on.” In order to convey this, some spellings of yogurt have used gh, as in dough: yoghurt.

The problem is that because this is not an English word, we assume that a gh we see is not to be treated as we would in English. So either way, g or gh, we lose the essential diacritical mark, and in its place we have an unnecessary extra sound, /g/, adding weight to it. Of course, without that sound we would quickly make it one syllable, if a long one, but at least it would be trim and smooth.

Not that the word was borrowed to English as recently as Turkish has been written in Roman letters, of course. It first showed up in English in the 1600s, at which time Turkish was written with an ill-fitting adaption of the Arabic alphabet. Yogurt then was exotic, a thing Levantines ate, not Englishmen. But by the 1930s – the decade after Turkey had officially switched to Roman writing – it was an accepted thing for domestic consumption in England, as mentioned, for example, by novelist Evelyn Waugh: “Mrs. Beaver stood with her back to the fire, eating her morning yoghourt.”

It is a lovely thing to have around the house, and delicious, especially if you get the kind that is made as it should be, without the fat decreased and the sweetener increased. But do spare me the ukulele-scored TV ads that push the idea that (a) yogurt is for young women and (b) young women must always want to eat things with low fat (and compensating sweetener added) because otherwise they can never feel good about themselves. Yogurt is too good to be a tool in the clutches of such abusive monsters. It’s even actually healthy, if you don’t try too hard to make it “healthy.”

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sputum

Posted on January 26, 2015 | 7 comments

Got on the bus. Got a nice seat at the front of the raised section at the back. Nice and warm there.

Someone else got on and sat behind me. Then coughed. And coughed. And then coughed again.

I got up and moved to the back of the back, so no one could be coughing on my neck.

By the time we got to the subway station, there were three people in front of me all coughing. And one over to the right. All coughing forwards, at least, but coughing and coughing and also coughing and occasionally coughing.

Covering their mouths? No. All adults and yet somehow they felt that it was just fine to decorate the ambient atmosphere with their sputum.

Sputum. This is a wet winter word. It’s as medical (and indelicate-sounding) as scrotum, and as phonaesthetically expressive as spit and sputter and spatter and spurt and spew and perhaps spoor (which doesn’t have to do with expectoration but boy does it sound like it). It makes me think of Aquascutum, which is a British luxury clothing brand well known for their rain coats. The name means ‘water shield’: scutum is Latin for ‘shield’, and I sure wish I could have a sputum scutum to protect me from the expectorated phlegm of my fellow travellers. (Did you know, by the way, that Sputnik is Russian for ‘fellow traveller’? Did you also know that I wish these open coughers could be sent up into orbit just like Sputnik? Except of course then these sputumniks would be showering us with their space phlegm.)

In case you’re not quite disgusted enough yet, I think I really must quote the Oxford English Dictionary definition of sputum: “Saliva or spittle mixed with mucus or purulent matter, and expectorated in certain diseased states of the lungs, chest, or throat; a mass or quantity of this.” Oh, sorry, has that put you off your nightcap or your morning toast and eggs? If not, should I point out that sputum can be anagrammed to upmust and put sum and tum’s up? I can ease the tum a bit by mentioning that sputum is taken straight across from Latin for spittle, and is derived from spuere ‘spit’. Or, OK, I guess that may not help either.

Look, sputum is disgusting. It should have a disgusting word for it. I mean, OK, sputum is a reasonably crisp word, no worse phonetically than teaspoon or stooping; it gets its grossness by association. And yes, sure, splutum would be even grosser, because messier. But splutum is not to be found, alas. Well, not so much alas. If it were to be found, it would probably be found on the back of my neck on the bus.

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Skoki

Posted on January 25, 2015 | 1 comment

This is a word that, for me, brings hiking, a backcountry lodge, a classmate, a cookbook, Will and Kate, a suburb of Chicago, and a figure skater.

I grew up in and near Banff, so for me Skoki is first of all a valley and a lodge. I knew of it and had read about it for years before we ever went there. You can’t get there by driving, oh no. You go to the trailhead, which is at Lake Louise ski area (the most scenic ski area in Canada, loaded with excellent and challenging terrain, and also the place I broke my leg when I was 12 – in one of the flattest and least scenic parts of the whole place). Then you hike almost 15 kilometres through the back country, over Boulder Pass, past Ptarmigan Lake, up and over Deception Pass and on down into Skoki Valley.

I love hiking. I really love hiking in the mountains. I love the scenery, the nature. I love seeing the pikas and the lichen and kinnikinnick and the great peaks and valleys. I love walking up and down. I need to have things well above sightline in order to be happy where I live, which is one reason I live in a downtown high-rise now. We went hiking many times when I was a kid, picnicking on Shake ’n’ Bake in Larch Valley and having strawberry tea at Lake Agnes. My high school grad class went on a weekend hike to Shadow Lake in the fall of our last year (thereby hang some tales! but I won’t digress now). Get me hiking and I’m happy.

But I hate camping. In my childhood and youth I spent many disgusting cold damp uncomfortable smoky mosquito-bitten wildlife-haunted nights in tents. Yuck. If I never sleep in a tent again I won’t mind.

Skoki Valley is a beautiful place, and a beautiful place to hike to. You shouldn’t try to do it there and back in one day; it will take you about five hours each way. You’re staying overnight.

But did I mention there’s a lodge?

Skoki Lodge is a beautiful log lodge. It’s two storeys and who knows how many stories – it holds an important place in the history of Banff National Park. It opened in 1931 and has expanded a little since then. It has no electricity or running water, but it has heat and they give you heated water and nice food and lamp light and all that. We finally went there when I was a teen. I enjoyed it very much.

It is now being run by one of my high school classmates, Leo Mitzel. Leo is from Lake Louise and has always been a backcountry kind of guy. (If you’re wondering what he looks like now, here’s a picture from our 30th reunion last fall. If I ever go into much detail about that reunion here, it will deserve its own post. It was every bit as hilarious as the hike, which I don’t think I will ever talk about in much detail on this blog.) It is also being run by Leo’s wife, Katie, who he met at Skoki. She has produced a lovely cookbook. I was very happy to receive it from my parents this past Christmas. It includes the menu they served to Will and Kate (i.e., the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge), who stayed there in 2011. I am also happy to report that they did not miss a chance to use Skoki in the name of a kind of cookie – not Skoki cookies, which would have been a perfect sound, but anyway Skoki warden cookies.

By the way, you don’t have to visit Skoki in the summer. It’s also open in the winter. It’s OK to ski there!

It happens that Skoki is an anagram of OK ski. That’s not where it comes from, of course. On the other hand, it’s clearly not an Anglo-Saxon word. It would probably be spelled scokie or scokey if it were. It’s the odd one out in its surrounds: Skoki Mountain, which sits above the valley, has neighbours named Fossil, Jericho, Ptarmigan, Brachiopod, Anthozoan, Redoubt, Richardson, and Pika. It has that nice crisp mix of voiceless fricative and stops that sound so, ah, “authentic” (I think of Kananaskis, and of Nakiska, a ski area with a name that was basically made up to sound authentic). It ends with an open i that’s pronounced /i/ (“ee”). And in fact (although it’s coincidentally a place name from Poland) it’s modified from a word for ‘marsh’ from a Native American language.

Which Native American language? Potawatomi.

A few of you may know where the Potawatomi live. I’ll tell the rest of you: in the central United States, west of the Great Lakes.

One of the first white people to visit the valley, in 1911, was James Foster Porter, who was from Illinois. The valley apparently reminded him of an area north of Chicago, the Skokie marsh, on which the town of Niles Center was built. He and his companions discussed names for the place and liked Skokie, and it stuck. The Banff version was later respelled as Skoki, probably because it seemed more appropriately non-English, but I don’t know really.

The people in Niles Center also liked the name Skokie. They liked it enough that in 1940 they voted to rename their town Skokie. Skokie is officially a village, although it has a population of 65,000. It’s right on the northern border of Chicago. North of it are the Skokie Lagoons. Near them is the Winnetka Ice Arena, which is the home rink of the Skokie Valley Skating Club.

That’s where Jason Brown is officially from. Who is Jason Brown? One of the best figure skaters in the US today (update: and 2015 US men’s figure skating champion). He grew up in Highland Park (another northern Chicago suburb, and coincidentally the name of a good brand of Scotch whisky). He lives in Colorado now, but his official home club is the Skokie Valley Skating Club. He’s why I thought of Skoki tonight: we were watching the US national championships.

But I have now put my wife on notice that we will be visiting Skoki Lodge some time in the future. She rolls her eyes at the lack of electricity and running water, but it was good enough for royalty, so I say it’s good enough for us. Plus the food looks delicious.

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rare

Posted on January 20, 2015 | 2 comments

I must say I like to have the odd duck. It can be quite nice. Uncommonly among birds, it can even be cooked rare.

I also like to be the odd duck. And to know the odd duck. An unusual person. A rara avis: a rare bird. Not necessarily sui generis – one of a kind – but infrequently seen. A paragon, not an epigone; perhaps also a paradox, an enigma. An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in bacon and glazed with an orange brandy sauce, and not overdone. Raring to go.

You can cook duck breast rare because ducks are tougher birds (have you ever tried to joint one?), less susceptible to infection; the meat is also better suited to it at least in part because it is better suited to flying. It can make it up to where the air is rarefied, and perhaps by consequence it can manage to be served rare. Indeed, if it is not rare I would rather say it is not well done. As it were.

Rare duck breast is not rare because it is hard to find but rather because it is like a soft-cooked egg. From Old English hrere, probably originally having a ‘shaken, agitated’ sense, we got a word rear that retained its old-style pronunciation, as bear has. It referred to the condition of a slightly undercooked egg. The sense transferred to meat by the 1700s, by which time it had been respelled rare.

A similar change took place later in the US (from the same people who gave us varmint from vermin and grits from groats): the verb rear, as in go up on the hind legs, became rare and is usually seen in raring, especially raring to go. To me it gives an image of a dragster peeling out from the start, the nose lifting up a little, because of the sound of it: “Rare. Rare! Rare rare rare rare rare!” This works better in North America, of course; the British pronunciation, as given by Oxford, is /rɛː/, which has lower air pressure.

But our rare for ‘uncommon’ is our rare for ‘sparse’. Rare soil is soil loosely packed; rare earths are minerals and elements that are sparsely distributed through the soil (specifically they are the lanthanide series of elements). Neither rare soil nor rare earth elements are actually all that uncommon; they are just not highly concentrated. Rare air is not uncommon, either; there’s quite a lot of it surrounding the whole planet – you just have to get up to a loftier level, high peaks and flight paths.

These rares come from the original Latin sense of rara (also rarus and rarum and so on depending on inflection): ‘loose, spaced, porous, sparse, few and far between, uncommon’… It all goes together. But with room between.

So, too, do my friends the rarae aves, the rare birds and odd ducks. They can be found in the loftier levels, sometimes up in the clouds and wanting in concentration, perhaps prone to ducking out of crowded occasions, but – like rare earth magnets – capable of exerting a powerful attraction, one that pulls over a long distance. They will not get or give a lot of rah-rah-rah, but they are always worth the effort to have for dinner – or drinks, or smart conversation, that rare art.

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dulse

Posted on January 20, 2015 | Leave a comment

The first time I recall hearing this word was in a recording of an Irishman (middle east coast, I think) that I was listening to for accent acquisition purposes. He talked about dulse, which the fisherman liked to eat because “it gave them a good thirst for their porter.”

What I recall most particularly about his pronunciation was the intrusive schwa. Irish accents, due to a feature of Irish phonotactics, militate against adjacency of /l/ and any of several other consonants. You will hear “fillum” for film, for instance. And so dulse in that accent sounds like Dulles, as in John Foster, as in the Saarinen-designed international airport near Washington DC.

But there’s a good reason for that: the word it comes from in Old Irish is duilesc (in Scots Gaelic, duileasg). There’s an actual e written there. In the English transcription, it was dropped – because they’ll say it anyway. (The e on the end is likely there to keep the s as /s/ and not /z/.) All the non-Irish Anglos, however, seeing the spelling, make it rhyme with pulse and Hulce (as in Tom, the actor). Which actually results in a different sound for the phoneme /l/: back of the tongue higher, tip tense and touching less (if at all). Readier to swallow.

What is dulse? A vegetable, but not a pulse. It’s a kind of seaweed, and yes, it does give you a good thirst for porter or whatever else may be to hand that is wet and copious and dulls the desire. I will say it’s not the dullest thing I’ve ever tasted, nor is it dolce. A bit more like salty licorice painted onto a dishwashing glove. Not the sort of delicacy one fights duels over. In fact, it’s not really a delicacy at all – it’s available in quantity, cheap, and is not actually disgusting.

The phonetically inclined may notice that dulse in the Irish pronunciation, /dʌləs/, is very nearly a rearrangement (anaphone?) of /sæləd/. (A closer anaphone of salad would be dull-ass.) Well enough: you could make a salad of dulse. Mind you, you would probably find yourself wishing you had just eaten it by hand out of a bag. It’s not the sort of seaweed you get on your sushi (which, it occurs to me, I ate at Dulles when we were waiting for our flight home). It’s about as thick as the schwa between /l/ and /s/ in that Irish pronunciation. I mean, it wouldn’t be a dull-ass salad. But it schwa could be intrusive. Better to keep one hand free for your porter.

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epigone

Posted on January 17, 2015 | 3 comments

I do not want to be an epigone.

I do not want to devote my life to explicating someone else’s epic after they’re gone. I do not want to be one of the little piggies trotting along chasing the big one. I do not want simply to imitate some idol. I don’t even understand people who would rather argue about, for instance, exactly what Kant did or didn’t say rather than about the viability of this or that idea Kant might have said – people for whom the world of facts and information is just a world of warring planets, and they have chosen one to be an asteroid of, hoping perhaps for a promotion to minor moon by the end. I simply don’t understand people who just want to devote their lives to the work of some other person. It doesn’t matter even if that other person is really just the hydrant they’re peeing on; while they’re peeing on it, someone’s peeing on them.

To be perfectly honest, even if someone tells me I’m just like this or that other person, or have said or done something that is so [person X], I try to be nice about it but it drives me crazy.

Maybe this is partly because I have a brother who is three years older than me who always preceded me to the next level of schooling. I hit high school wanting to establish myself among new potential friends (after my previous disasters) and I’m instantly “little Harbeck,” judged by what my brother has done and measured against him. I move on to university and I’m “little Harbeck” again, the anticipated duplicate nerd who turns out to be a loudmouth spazz with a temper and a deathly fear of saying actual nice things to people.

I’m sure it’s also partly because I have always had an unassailable belief in my own potential. Does that sound obnoxious? I won’t say it’s not. See above. I’m not so obnoxious now. But I still have an abiding desire to do things that are in some way singularly new.

It’s also because I’m built to follow and handle ideas, not people. I’m still learning about people. The one thing I can say for sure is that the truth value of a universal proposition does not depend on who states it. (The perceived truth value does.)

This all may seem a bit funny if you know that my doctoral thesis focused entirely on the life’s work of one person, Richard Schechner. I have an excuse: my advisor told me that would be the best topic to pursue. I was pragmatic enough to know I should do what would get me the degree efficiently. Plus it came with a five-week sojourn in Princeton. It was really fascinating learning about this guy. But mainly it taught me some things I would need to do and be if I wanted to be someone, not just an epigone of someone.

Well, no one else is doing word tastings. Ha. Speaking of which: epigone.

Nice word, uses all three stop locations in English – lips, tongue back tongue tip – and all three kinds – voiceless, voiced, nasal. I want to pronounce this word “e pig a nee,” /ɛˈpɪgəni/, because it’s evidently Greek and Greek words and names usually get that treatment in English – it would rhyme with Antigone, for instance. But this word is actually said /ˈɛpɪɡoʊn/, stress on the first syllable, the last syllable rhyming with cone. Why? Because it’s not actually a Greek word unchanged.

We got it as the plural epigones from French épigones, from Latin epigoni, from Greek ἐπίγονοι epigonoi, which was the plural of ἐπίγονος epigonos. Which meant ‘born afterward’ (the epi in this case meant ‘after’; in some other instances in English it means ‘around’). There were seven heroes who led the war against Thebes, you see, and their sons were the epigones – the less-distinguished inheritors. Nowadays in English it means, as dictionary.com puts it, “an undistinguished imitator, follower, or successor of an important writer, painter, etc.”

So not only are those scholars who dedicate their careers to some author epigones, and not only are those no-lifer fanboys who spend all their money aping this or that sci-fi show or movie epigones, but so are all the lesser abstract expressionists, all the splash painters after Pollock, all the uninventive atonalists of the later 20th century, all the movie scorers who set Glass-like scales, all the fanfic authors… for that matter, so was I in my late teens, trying to produce something like Finnegans Wake (the results were vomitrocious and soporific). I think one goes through excusable phases of epigonism in one’s youth; ideally, at length one learns to be “inspired by” and “drawing on” rather than slavishly imitating.

Unless one builds one’s entire career on being an epigone of some greater light, of course. Many comfortable, even “distinguished,” careers have been built on such. But do I want my mark in history to come after e.g. or i.e.? Nope.

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stertor, stertorous

Posted on January 14, 2015 | 3 comments

He got on the elevator just before the doors closed, that guy. Him again. An inch or two taller than me and probably 1.4 times my weight. A bit socially odd and hard to read; always seems like something is nettling him a bit.

It’s an elevator ride. Twenty-something floors. Stare at the door, the floor. Sometimes people talk. Fortunately not this time. But as soon as he exited the elevator, five floors before my floor, I pulled out my phone and made a note:

Stertorous

His most salient characteristic, you see, is that his breathing is very audible. Very. With occasional mouth noise, but mostly through the nose.

Usually if I’m in the elevator with someone who makes that kind of noise breathing, that someone is a dog. Probably a little bulldog.

More often when you hear a person breathing stertorously, you’re in their bedroom. Or near them on a bus or airplane. Or in church. Or maybe a meeting at work.

Stertor is loud breathing, one could almost even say stentorian breathing. Constricted breathing. Breathing as of one asleep. In particular, breathing like snoring, although it can be gentle snoring. Stertorous is the adjective. Of course.

The word stertorous does not have a gentle sound to it, does it? It sounds strained, terse, tense, tortured perhaps. There may be a stutter, but a restricted one, ingressive.

Here, do this: whisper “stertorous” as you inhale. Presto, stertor. Even better, move your tongue back a bit in your mouth, as though you’re about to clear your throat, and do the same thing again. Yeah. Like that. That’s some serious stertor. Not so much sonority as snority. Or just snorty.

That works particularly well if you’re a typical North American or someone else who uses the humped-up-tongue /r/. In that case, both syllables of stertor have no real vowels; the peak of each is a syllabic /r/: [stɹ̩ɾɹ̩]. (Doesn’t that transcription look like it could be a visual representation of snoring?)

The word stertor comes straight from Latin, of course. The Latin noun is formed from the verb stertere ‘snore’. That happens to be an anagram of resetter, as in resetting your sleep or your alarm, but I doubt the ancient Romans foresaw that fact. But of course stertorous is an anagram of sot rouster and rests or out and torture SOS and rots so true and to trousers and…

Well, anyway. It may be a sound often associated with sleep or coma on the part of the person (or dog) making it, but for those of us hearing it at close range, it is rarely ours to rest.

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propaedeutic

Posted on January 14, 2015 | 4 comments

Say you’re writing a text for an introductory course, something just to make sure students are prepared for higher education in the subject. You want to use a diction proper to the level, right? Maybe some eidetic imagery? You wouldn’t want to prop up your vocabulary with opaque sesquipedalian escapees from an encyclopaedia. That’s not the proper way to do it. Might make you look like a professor, but won’t make you look like a pro at preparatory communication.

But every so often you’ll get a text, or at least an opening section, that will declare itself propaedeutic. “This course is propaedeutic for the more advanced study,” perhaps – or, as a noun, as in John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, “We can pass from this simplified propaedeutic to the problems of the real world.” Simplified except for what you call it.

It’s a word for those who consider teaching to be a bit infra dig; they want to be paedagogical. This is a serious course of study you’re embarking on, as witness the lexically luxuriant luminary who will be Virgil to your Dante (and remember, Dante went through Hell first before getting to Heaven). Switch on your academic propeller beanie; this is just the warm-up act.

It’s an impressive and almost balanced-looking word, propaedeutic. The paed could rotate 180 degrees and look much the same – in fact, write it with the digraph, pæd, and it would look the same. You could spin it like a propeller, and in fact “propaedeutic” sounds a bit like an old prop plane starting up. The p at the very start of propaedeutic would do well to be matched with another d at the end to make the whole word spin, but we just get c, which is literally 1 short of d, so we miss the stem – preparation not finished, I guess.

The pro at the start is the pro that means ‘before’, from Greek προ, which also helps us know it’s proper to start this word with “pro” and not “prop.” The paed is the root you see in words relating to children (from paedagogy or pedagogy to rather less pleasant ones); here, it’s part of a word for ‘education’: παιδευτική paideutiké, whence the eutic as well.

Not a great start to an education to start with a word you need an education to know, though, is it?

Well, it could be worse. It could always call itself cataskeuastic.

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joss

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 4 comments

Up to today, this word would call forth four things for me:

  1. Joss Ackland, British actor, male, who’s been in a gazillion things but who I remember best from the 1987 movie White Mischief, a murder mystery based on a true happening among a particularly debauched set of people in colonial Kenya, the true story of which was recounted (among other things) in the fascinating book The Bolter.
  2. Joss Stone, British singer, female.
  3. Joss Whedon, American director, screenwriter, and actor, male.
  4. Joss sticks, a kind of incense.

Joss Ackland and Joss Whedon have in common that they are males, and actors. Joss Ackland and Joss Stone have in common that they are British and their names are both short for Jocelyn, which, like Vivian and Marion, used to be commonly borne by men. (Joss Whedon is Joseph.) They all have their spots in the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) pantheon, whether or not you would call any of them idols.

But then there are those joss sticks. I was never sure why they were called joss sticks. I was never in a position to look it up when the question occurred to me. The word just seems jaunty and maybe a bit exotic, in an Anglicized way. Was joss a word for something mystical? Was it borrowed from something to do with, say, horsemanship, or a sport like jousting or some kind of tossing, or something more functional? Or was it one of the ingredients?

Then, today, I was reading Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, an early collection of short stories, in an Oxford edition replete with explanatory notes. I read the story titled “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,” which is about an opium den in Lahore run by a Chinese expatriate. I read this: “In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching’s Joss – almost as ugly as Fung-Tching – and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick.”

There was no explanatory note. Apparently Oxford assumed all the readers would know what a joss was. Or else they were just relying on their figuring it out from context – the Joss gets a further passage about it from which it is easy to tell that it is a statue.

A statue of what? A Chinese deity, as it happens.

Joss is a Chinese word? It most certainly is not. I have yet to encounter a dialect of Chinese in which that is a plausible word phonologically; although there are many more dialects than I have met, word-final /s/ is quite out of play in the ones I’ve seen.

No, joss is a word from Chinese Pidgin English, a language used for trade in south China, with simple syntax based on Chinese and with words largely taken from English and other European traders’ languages and modified to fit Chinese phonotactics more or less. The word pidgin, for instance, comes from the word business.

The word joss is, as I mentioned, a word for a Chinese deity (or similar) or statue thereof. You may know that deity comes from the Latin word deus. Also from deus came Portuguese deos (that’s an old form). From Portuguese deos came Javanese dejos, which was used for Chinese religious statues. From dejos came Chinese Pidgin joss. And joss stuck, in English as well.

Joss sticks still. Well, joss sticks still sell, anyway, and burn, more often in home incense holders than in front of statues of deities. Joss isn’t a word you’re likely to see applied directly to a Chinese statue in ordinary usage now. But you do see it on some members of the IMDB pantheon. And now you can take it as emblematic of how some word forms burn down like incense, in sense and in form.

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