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louche

Posted on July 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

I like the taste of louche, and I like a taste of the louche.

I don’t mean I actually like hanging out in shady, sketchy places. Genuine criminals lack charm for me. But I like the fantasy of infraction, of impropriety, of pulling at the seams on the underskirts of life. I like it some in movies – film noir, British thieves, American gangsters – and I like it in music.

When I tell you what music, you’ll see how I mean it’s a charming fantasy. I especially fancy two popular musical duos for their louche touch: the Pet Shop Boys and Steely Dan. Here, listen to the lush lashings of the louche, from the licks and the lips of Tennant and Lowe and Fagen and Becker.

Just listen to that music slouch, the sly undercuts like a low-slung deuce. I could have given you many Pet Shop Boys tunes and just about any Steely Dan song at all – I nearly picked “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Babylon Sister.” It’s all so loose and sly, looking at you sideways from a squinting eye. But of course those musicians aren’t gangsters at all. They’ve never hurt anyone or been shot at. It’s all an act.

But it’s still the opposite of spending the Sabbath at shul (literally the reverse: /luʃ/ – /ʃul/). No, this word doesn’t come from a reverse reading of the Yiddish word for ‘synagogue’. If you want a backwards echo, look at the word itself: louche – echuol. It can echo you well. It shows you not the mirror but the shadow you cast, and if you follow your shadow it will always lead you farther away from the light, always just ahead of you. Watch that it lead you not straight to ouch.

But you really need to squint to see this word. Or you need to be squinting: French louche, from Latin luscus ‘one-eyed’. Do you think of pirates with eye patches or criminals with ocular scars? You could also think of a wink, a flash of the lashes. A delicious pair of soft peepers, one of them open to look you over, the other closed just for a moment to signify an invitation to come over to the dark side. And then a lick of the lip – “l,” but so silent, so soft – a luscious exhalation of release and delight, “oo,” and a “sh” to silence you as you slip into something shadier… just a little role-playing, nothing dangerous…

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coryza

Posted on July 13, 2014 | 2 comments

I think this is a rather pretty word. It balances in the middle on that rakish funnel y, it has the chic and angular z, and it contrasts them at the sides with curls and just a little bit of straight line. It looks like it could be a name – a merging of Cory and Liza, perhaps. It’s a little crazy, strangely cozy, subtly racy. Spicy like a chorizo. It’s a word like a smart, sharp, small woman who wears careful but angular makeup, perhaps a piercing or tattoo – or perhaps the sweet-tartness comes entirely from a wicked wit.

Whatever it is, though, she has a cold. A runny nose. Hope she doesn’t have a nose ring; that would be uncomfortable when you have coryza.

Yeah, this word falls into the category of nice words for unpleasant things. Sorry. The common cold has a couple of those – the other is the mellifluous, or anyway something-fluous, rhinorrhea, so soft and pleasing, though admittedly with an echo of the unpleasant-meaning diarrhea.

If you want a less charming word for the common cold, use catarrh. Both words come to us from Greek via Latin; catarrh is a clipping of the Greek for ‘downward flow’ (that rrh is the same as in rhinorrhea and diarrhea, but the ea flowed away). Coryza is from the Greek κόρυζα, which a modern Anglophone might more likely transliterate as koruza (that letter υ is a little problematic due to historical sound changes; in modern Greek it’s pronounced “ee” and in Biblical times more like German ü). In the Greek it meant ‘runny nose’ (or, as some dictionaries put it, ‘running at the nose’, which technically isn’t exactly the same object, but in looser usage will come to be applied to the same condition).

You can, if you wish, insist on a distinction between coryza and catarrh – I mean aside from the feelings of the words themselves: to quote from the medieval Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum,

Si fluat ad pectus, dicatur rheuma catarrhus:
Ad fauces bronchus: ad nares esto coryza.

Which is to say, if the flow is in the chest, it’s catarrh; if in the nose, it’s coryza.

One more thing: because the word came from Latin into English by the 1600s, the y is pronounced as in “why.” So while you may want to say “co-ree-za,” to be correct to the established English standard you should say “co-rye-za” (with the o probably reduced to a schwa).

Having a cold is unpleasant. You want to get rid of it as soon as possible; drink lots of liquids and get lots of rest. But while you have it, you can at least – if you want – call it by a more chic, more erudite, name: “I am indisposed by a touch of coryza.”

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rim

Posted on July 10, 2014 | 3 comments

Pick up the crystal glass and hold it by the stem. Moisten your fingertip and run it in a ring around the lip at top. Its sound names it: “rim.”

The rim, the brim, the perimeter. A trim and prim ring, or a grim edge; the beginning of merriment, or an interim rest, or the end for a criminal. As Daniel Trujillo wrote to me, “A boundary, an insurmountable frontier that both denies passage and invites trespassing.” Transparent yet intransgressible like a scrim, or opaque yet surpassible. An edge that is at the heart of so many uses. Glasses, tires, oceans, coins: inside the rim is value, but use comes from touching the outside.

The word rim does not have such a taste of the edge; it is something found crimped in the middle of other words. It rings and hums, but its sounds are made with the heaping heft of the tongue and the closing of the lips. A word that made more of the edges in the mouth (tip of tongue, ridge, teeth, lips, back) would be loving. Or living. Or leaving. The contact points of our existence, the interface between the value within and the use without. But while these are our rims, our word is rim; it collects the rime and the rhymes.

The rimes, in fact. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge:

The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

The rim of consciousness, The Day-Dream of Tennyson:

And o’er the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, across the day,
Thro’ all the world she followed him.

The rim of an acquaintance, Parting at Morning by Robert Browning:

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun look’d over the mountain’s rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

On the rim of the air, The Skylark of James Hogg:

Over the cloudlet dim,
Over the rainbow’s rim,
Musical cherub, soar, singing, away!

The rims of flowers on the rim of a house, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed by Whitman:

As we wander’d together the solemn night (for something I know not what kept me from sleep),
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

The feeling you get on the rim of the west. At last, past the rim of the earth and the rim of consciousness, past sun, hills, mountains, rainbows, without recrimination, we touch the lip and enter the heart, or the heart enters us. Or both. We drain the cup, but then we are the cup, and we overflow. No: we are the rim, and the overflow is our living, loving, leaving.

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glint

Posted on July 9, 2014 | 2 comments

GLINT

You can see the glint on the wall, a tingle on your retina, a tongue of light vibrating like the long tine of a tuning fork – a simple toning luminescence alighting lonely, lasting only a moment, not lingering. A gleam, a glimmer, a glancing glow, just a glimpse on the glassy glazing. Something you think you see for a moment, a movement, a brief brightness, as semi-soft and sudden as [g] and as light and liquid as [l].

There are so many words to do with light and shining things that start with gl. They don’t all come from the same source; they just all shine with the same brief light, that verbal glint of the gl phonaestheme. We choose the words we prefer, and we shape the words we choose. Language is a performance, and sometimes we like to do a little dance of the tongue and the sound to give a more vivid sense of what we’re describing – and when we do, we may prefer known choreography. We lean towards a gl for light, perhaps, or a sw for rapid motion or a sn for the mouth or nose. Then we pitch the vowel for effect: big and blazing as in glare, soft and cool as in glow, dark as in gloom, bright and shining as in gleam, medium and flat and hard as in glass, light and short as in glint… The final [t] adds to the shortness, too.

This word glint actually came from an older word glent, which basically meant – and came from the same Germanic root as – glance as in both ‘look quickly’ and ‘quickly bounce or strike aside’. The verb glint was well in use by the 1700s, but the noun glint waited until the 1800s to be glimpsed, although it glitters in common usage now.

It’s a word I think of more often than some. Not that I am exceedingly prone to having a glint in my eye (or perhaps I am, I don’t know; I don’t look at my own eyes); I simply see the glint on the wall as I wait for the subway at Eglinton station, flashing half-noticed before my eyes and fading back into the covering illumination, gentle but shifting and lambent – no, glimmering, barely superliminal.

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smarmy

Posted on July 8, 2014 | 1 comment

That smooth, slightly smug smile, like being smeared with a small army of worms or swarmed by something squirmy and clammy. It’s the essence – the essential oil – of smarminess. The smarmy person is the opposite of a schoolmarm: no severe crispness for your betterment, just unctuousness in the service of cozening and deception. After talking to the smarmy person you feel you need a shower.

Who is smarmy? Politicians, maîtres d’hotel, funeral directors, used car salesmen, various con men… They are not all quite the same in manner, of course: some smarmy people are fawning and ingratiating, while others are simply slick and smug. The common element is oiliness. The word comes from smarm, a verb, meaning first to smear, as in put pomade on your hair, and from that meaning to behave in an oily, obsequious, flattering way. It in turn comes from smalm, a word for hair ointment – in British English, smalm and smarm (and smawm, another spelling) are pronounced the same way. Where did smalm come from? Just oozed up from somewhere, I guess. It sure sounds appropriate, though.

Surprisingly, it’s quite recent, as words go. Smalm showed up in the mid-1800s. Smarmy joined us by the early 1900s. And now there’s another variation: schmarmy, also spelled shmarmy. That joins in an assortment of sm- and sn- words (and perhaps some sl- ones as well) that are getting the s-to-sh phonaesthetic shift. The shm/shn phonaestheme tends to connote diminution, ridiculousness, derision, or occasionally cuteness (schnuggle), and it gets added especially to words that seem particularly informal to begin with. It borrows from Yiddish, which gave us words such as schmendrick, schmo, and schmuck as well as the dismissive schm- reduplication: “Poet schmoet. He scribbles.” “Cook schmook. I open a few cans.”

Does schmarmy have the same meaning as smarmy? The onset is a little mushier, the connotation a little shadier. Urban Dictionary, which is a great resource for finding out what 14-year-old boys think a word means or should mean but has a certain utility nonetheless, puts smarmy in the ‘slimy and smug’ bucket but shmarmy in the ‘creepy’ bucket.

And, hey, those 14-year-olds are the future adult users of the language. What they think words mean is going to have a real effect on what they are used to mean a quarter century from now, if not sooner. There’s also the vocabulary those future standard users are using now. So it’s worth a peek at what Urban Dictionary considers “related words” for smarmy. Leaving out the simple vulgarities, we get words in the same sphere such as slimy, sleazy, smug, fake, sarcastic, cheesy, cocky, and greedy, as well as the carbuncular smarmer, smarmite, smarmodon, and smarmosour. A regular sweet-and-bitter smarmelade of lexemes.

A sincere thanks to Iva Cheung for requesting smarmy and shmarmy.

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scapula

Posted on July 6, 2014 | 3 comments

What would it be like to have wings on your back?

Imagine. Like an angel, or at least like a sculpture of an angel. To collapse them under a cape when you’re at rest, and to spread them to escape, to fly high above the streets and fields and forests and waters. Or to shelter others under them.

I happened to be listening to CBC radio this morning when they played a setting by George Malcolm of the Lenten offertorium “Scapulis suis,” which uses text taken from Psalm 91. The opening line is translated into English as “With his wings the Lord will cover you and under his feathers you will be safe.” The Latin is Scapulis suis obumbrabit tibi Dominus et sub pennis ejus sperabis. In this, “wings” (or “with wings”) is scapulis. From scapula.

You know what your scapula is, don’t you? It’s your shoulder bone. You have two of them, on your back, like two little hard wings. See a shirtless person from behind and you can see where the wings would attach. Some people’s scapulae are positively beautiful, a smooth sculpted skin landscape, almost like capsules ready to open and unfold wings.

Scapula is not the normal Latin word for ‘wing’. The usual word is ala, although they could also use pennae, which more literally means ‘feathers’ – you see it in the text above as pennis.

So what is scapula normally Latin for? ‘Shoulder blade’.

It seems so prosaic, doesn’t it, as though in one moment you discover you have wings, and in the next you discover that they are just your shoulder blades. But look again at the word.

We here and now will find assorted echoes from our own language and cultural experience: scrape, escape, scrapple, copula, cupola, Dracula, spatula, cape, capsule. But in Latin the waving flag is the ula, which is a diminutive suffix. ‘Little scapa’.

What is scapa? Not a word in Latin, not one that survived. But it is probably related to a Greek word for ‘dig’. It is generally thought that scapula had the original meaning ‘little spades’ or ‘little shovels’.

The scapulae do look like digging implements. Indeed, if you had no tools but had a skeleton of some mammal with scapulae, and you needed to dig out some earth, the scapula would be your best available shovel.

From flying in the sky to digging in the earth. What a range. What a come-down. We are dust, and to dust we return? But we are made of star dust. Quite literally: our planet is an agglomeration of the dust that swirled around our star, the sun, in its formation. Our bodies are made from the physical materials present on our planet: star dust. When you dig into the earth you are digging into what was once star dust. And our planet is just a little ball of star dust swinging through the great sidereal blackness. Whether we flap our wings and fly or we dig our shovels into the earth, we are among the stars. We are always headed towards something and away from something else, but we are often headed towards what we are headed away from as well. And we return. And we do not leave the world, the solar system, the universe. We are made of it; we take it with us.

Your scapulae. Your wings, your shovels. As you wish. When you move your arms, you flap or dig.

Do this for me: it is summer, so you will see the bare backs of others at times. Look at their scapulae. Look at their scapulae and picture them digging into the rich, nourishing earth. Look at their scapulae and picture them as wings, ready to fly or to shelter. Look at their scapulae and just see them. They can be so lovely.

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iridescent

Posted on July 4, 2014 | 3 comments

Imagine an eyeshadow like the wing of a butterfly or the coruscating scales of a tropical fish, shimmering, sprinkling your eyes parallactically with a shower of the spectrum. When you look at it it looks back at you, into you, and you see it is a rainbow, and the pot of gold itself is the eye, the iris, the pupil, locking you in as it licks you lightly with the glittering mist. You are irrigated by it; it is the sprinkler and the rainbow, a light alighting under the eyebrows. It is eerie, almost indecent, but it is strangely becoming, this dissent from the stably perceptible; it irradiates you with a delicate psychedelic cycle, a descant on the clear colours of daily life.

It is iridescent.

It is like a fine wine’s bouquet on the nose, shifting from one thing to another: I ride scent, ride it like a dragon through the empyrean. I am the enticed sir.

It is instinct, a tincture of desire.

It is a riddle; it indicts as it indites.

It is intense, a sidereal incense or salitter for the occiput.

It is (Visual Thesaurus tells us) opaline, opalescent, nacreous, pearlescent; it is changeable, it is chatoyant.

It is not just the half-arc or a rainbow. It is the entire disc.

The disc of the iris. The disc of Iris.

Iris, the swift messenger of the gods, rider of rainbows. Iris, a rainbow, a ring for the irriguous. Iris, the rainbow of the eyes, the ring between limbus and limbo, the messenger that heralds and draws you into the singularity: the pupil that learns and teaches.

Iridescent, iri{s|d}-escent: becoming like an iris. Becoming like Iris. Shimmering with the many colours of the rainbow, bearer of infinitely mixed messages: a medium that massages and massacres. The eye.

And what becomes the eye. It may bow, or it may rain. Or both at the same time, as seen from separate eyes. It is whatever you discern in it, and always already also so much more.

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otter

Posted on July 1, 2014 | 4 comments

“We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we’re hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we’re victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck.” —Richard Bach, Illusions

I think Richard Bach is the person who came up with the phrase otter of the universe. It has gotten around some since.

When I first saw it, used by someone else, it struck me as a useful play on author of the universe. Many people want to know who the author of the universe is. They want to find out how everything got here. They want to understand the author’s intentions.

When children approach a playground, how many of them ask themselves what things the designer had in mind, and try to do only those things? The ones who do (there may be some) are the annoying ones who suck the fun out of it. They probably grow up to be grammatical prescriptivists or similar dogmatists. Or I should say fail to grow up, because while play is childlike, dogmatism is just plain callow.

Otters don’t show up and try to establish first causes. They just look at what can actually be done. And one thing that can be done is play. Otters reallyliketo play. They make good use of what’s around them. And by good I mean fun.

The first time I saw otter of the universe was actually about the first time I became aware of otters as playful animals. I had always thought of otters as just sleek aquatic animals with a name that sounded like a ruler when you hold one end of it against a desk near the edge, bend and release the free end, and pull the ruler back towards the desk: “ott-tot-tot-tt-tt-ttttrrrrrrrrr.” Wooden, rigid as a rudder, a hard sound at odds with the water in which the animals moved. I oughta have known better.

The word otter is easily played with, after all. It’s practically made for a Dr. Seuss treatment: If an otter bites the butter that a potter put on platter for his daughter, will the potter hit the otter with a putter or a rudder? Will the potter’s daughter titter at the otter’s pitter-patter? Will the bettered, battered otter battle bitterly for butter? Or do otters bite on potters’ pretty daughters’ butter patties just to put on pity parties when they’re battered by the potter with a butter-splattered putter as they skitter to the water?

There’s more than that, though. The word otter comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *udr-, ‘water’. This water has followed many courses: the hydro- root we get from Greek (and that multi-headed water serpent, the hydra); some of the words for ‘otter’ in some other languages (Slavic languages in general have something in the line of vidra; Latin had lutra, which has shown up variously changed in Romance languages); and of course various words for ‘water’, including water.

So this word has flowed around and frothed and leapt like water – and like otters in the water. Do the various flows and changes of words over time seem like utter madness? I’d say they’re more like otter happiness.

Language is my favourite sport. A word isn’t worth much in my world if it can only mean one thing at a time. Rules are made to serve communication, not the other way around, and sometimes what’s being communicated is first of all “Have some fun with this.” And sometimes that’s the best thing to do – whether or not the utterer thought of it, go with what the otterer will do with it. I want to frolic in the stream of consciousness. I want to push language play to the otter limits. And beyond!

And then, at the end of the day, we can rest like otters in the water, floating, holding hands, allowing ourselves even in sleep some play in the stream.

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limpid

Posted on June 25, 2014 | 1 comment

Eyes. Blue eyes. Eyes like pools. Eyes like pools you can dive into. No. Eyes like pools that dive into you. Eyes, blue eyes, deep, hypnotic. You can see to the bottom. No. You can see that there is no bottom. Look in these eyes and you are seven leagues deep and in the gathering darkness as the surface slips behind. So much. To see. You are impelled.

Is it clear? We know what things are limpid. Pools are limpid. And eyes are like limpid pools. Wide eyes are like limpid Olympic pools. But what does that mean?

Do they limp? Are they limp? Are they lambent? Impish? Implied? Dimpled? Simply liquid? A Spanish speaker will know that limpiar means to clean. But limpido means limpid. Or, as in Italian, clear. Right from Latin limpidus. Pellucid, free from turbidity.

But limpid is a word of turbulence: the emotions of poetry. It is a word that says “I want to look into your eyes, I want you to feel that I want to look into your eyes, and I am a poet.” It says this even when it is being used to describe something other than eyes.

Limpid is the feel of a blink held just a moment longer, springing then back open to reveal orbs with a hint of outward ripples as of a pool with a simple drop in the middle. It is a word that makes you the more turbid within as you use it and read it. Here, here are quotations from poems; see if after them you can even come to the surface.

He has no need to steal a sip
From Hafiz’ bowl, or bathe his lip
In honey pressed from Pindar’s comb,
Or taste of Bacchus’ philtered foam,
Or filch from Chaucer’s bounteous grace
Some liquid, limpid, purling phrase.
—“The Brook,” William Bull Wright

Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.
—Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river;
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
—“A Musical Instrument,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

O little shells, so curious-convolute! so limpid-cold and voiceless!
—Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
—“The Buried Life,” Matthew Arnold

Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb—love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching;
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice;
Bridegroom night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn;
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
—Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

and each, as soon as it felt the antennæ, immediately lifted up its abdomen and excreted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was eagerly devoured by the ant.
—The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

Limpid. All that is limpid is pure poetry and ecstasy and clarity. It is a lamp, but a lamp filled with the late-night oil of the quill-pen wielder. It infects. It sweetens.

All who say limpid thirst for clarity, the clarity that says nothing is clear. The word is shaped like a dream bed by a stream, l and d the posts, and i and i candles or heads; the m is a pillow or a pair of legs, and the p is an arm dipping into the stream. Dipping into the dream. Not dreamy eyes: eyes that you dream about. Not eyes that you see through: eyes that see through you. Limpid like the night sky when you see stars, millions of miles away and thousands of years ago: you see clearly that all is dark and unreachable, and all that you see is past. And you thirst for it and it enters you and breaks you. You limp into limpid eternity. And the eyes never stop looking, so cool and blue.

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pillock

Posted on June 24, 2014 | 2 comments

If you’re not from Britain, this term may not be all that familiar to you. Allow me to quote the synonyms given in Visual Thesaurus: dolt, stupid person, stupid, stupe, pudding head, pudden-head, poor fish, dullard. To these I think I could reasonably add a common term from Canada: dickhead.

I think that’s a viable synonym not just because of the resentfully abusive way in which the word pillock tends to be used – it carries implications of not just dullness but obnoxiousness too – but also because of its literal reference.

Oh, you don’t know what part of the body the pillock is? Would you care to make a guess? The Oxford English Dictionary reckons that it’s probably shortened from pillicock. The pill is Scots and northern English dialect, probably taken from Scandinavian influences (the Danes used to run that part of the country); it refers not to, say, a little blue pill such as Viagra but rather to that part of the body that the little blue pill is meant to affect. The rest of the word pillicock should be sufficiently obvious. As to the aphetic form pillock, I have to wonder whether it may not have been affected by bollock, a word usually seen in the plural (like its referent).

The word seems like what you get when you expect a pillow and get a rock. It has a taste of someone who gets in a mixed-up pickle, someone who brings ill luck. And at the same time the /p/ and /k/ with a liquid and /ɪ/ between have a bit of a taste of prick as well as bilk and a bit of an echo of kill.

Although the word has been in at least some versions of English since the 1500s, it hasn’t been very evident in print until the last third of the 20th century, when it started being used as a term of abuse. I can’t say whether there was one particular work that served as a primary vector for this, but the word evidently caught on like wildfire.

I like this definition of pillock from 1978 in Approach: The naval aviation safety review: “An idiot who, having gotten himself into the wrong lane, then expects everyone else to give way so that he can get to where only he knows he wants to go, with or without use of flashing indicators or consideration for traffic flow.” You can see where, with such images in mind, the word might have proven quite appealing for general use. And might seem a nearly exact synonym for dickhead.

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