Tag Archives: word tasting notes

couture

Posted on February 9, 2014 | 1 comment

I have spent much time this weekend looking at Rosa Couture. Snowy white fabric stretching down for miles, crisp like crepe or soft like chiffon, smooth or rough, curves gentle or hard, borders of blue stripes, seams, various accoutrements – clothing sometimes skin-tight, sometimes loose. Always breathtaking, and it must be suffered for.

Oh, couture, such a word of culture: the great heights of haut couture, the champagne and real pain, the catwalks, the tour, the lights, the breathtaking cost. It cuts both ways, and can be quite a cult. But it can be such an art to say it with fashion.

Of course there is everyday couture too. I would be remiss if I did not address it. When you dress in a dress of whatever cut, you are in couture. Cut the pieces, trim them, stitch them together, add the label or not, and you have a dress, so you have couture. Just like making a word.

Consider how this word couture is made. It has a nice balance in the middle, utu, with asymmetry at the sides. It is made of bits that bring to mind so many other things. Is it out sewn into cure? Perhaps it is the cabbage of choucroute cut down and folded? What it brings to the etymological mind may be couteau, French for ‘knife’ (and thus cutting), and coûter, French for ‘cost’, and of course culture. But the great talent of a dressmaker or wordmaker is to take one thing and make it look like another. And what we have here, trimmed and sewn together, is a noun that the French made of Latin consutus, past participle of consuere, ‘sew together’. The same root as suture. But the n is gone, the vowels changed a little, a suffix added. And voilà, you have this marvellous confection that fits its surroundings just right and has looks of so many other things, in spite of what it is really made of.

But then there is Rosa Couture. That is where you really see what they’re made of. Out into the bright white, across the catwalk, through the gate and down, down, down the fabric of white, to make the raciest possible thing, leaving them breathless at the end, collapsed and gasping, waiting for their perfect number. Sometimes there are disasters. I can tell you I watched some noteworthy runs being stitched together.

Yes, I was watching downhill ski racing, moguls, and slopestyle snowboarding from the Olympics. They’re held at the moutain resort Rosa Khutor (Ро́за Ху́тор). Or, as some of the broadcasters keep pronouncing it, “Rosa Couture.” Well, that’s one fashion of saying it, I guess…

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esophagogastroduodenoscopy

Posted on February 8, 2014 | 3 comments

26 letters. Seriously, one for each letter of the alphabet, although this isn’t a pangram (though it is a synonym for panendoscopy). This is a long snake of a word. If you tried to swallow it, part of it would be in your stomach while part of it would still be sticking out of your mouth.

Which is just appropriate. Because this is a procedure where the doctor takes a snake with an eye on it – an endoscope – and runs it into your mouth, down your throat, into your stomach, and into the small intestine. That’s several stages. Let’s look at each of them.

Esophago refers to the esophagus. You may recognize the phag from other words to do with eating, such as macrophage, anthropophagy, and sarcophagus (‘flesh eater’ – how unpleasant). You may also see the eso as the ‘within’ root from words such as esoteric. But if you’re British you know that this is also spelled oesophagus and oesophagogastroduodenoscopy, which means it’s a different root – in fact, the Greek for esophagus is οἰσοϕάγος, which, if it hadn’t passed through Latin, would have given us oisophagos. So not ‘within’, but the actual root is unclear. Probably chewed too much before swallowing. Anyway, this segment, at first soft but then ending with a semi-hard voiced stop, refers to your gullet.

Gastro refers to your stomach. Not because you can get gas there, but just because of the Greek root that gives us gastrointestinal, gastronomy, gastropub, and so on: γαστήρ gastér ‘stomach’. This one starts with the semi-hard /g/ and then goes back to soft and crisp, with a bit of liquid /r/ too.

Duodeno refers to your duodenum, which is the first twelve inches of your small intestine, as you might already know. This word has just voiced stops and a nasal for consonants, and the vowels have suddenly become rounded (sort of like the tube of the duodenum). This part does not have a Greek root; it’s pure Latin, from the word for ‘twelve’ (referring to its length, twelve fingers long). So our word of today is mixed Latin and Greek. A word made of bits from different languages is called macaronic, because it’s mixed like macaroni (the original Italian dish, which is rather more than just some elbow noodles and cheese). So that’s what we’re digesting.

I’m sure you know the scopy already. Scop(e) is a root referring to looking; it comes from Greek, σκοπ skop, a variant of σκέπτεσθαι skeptesthai ‘look at’ (which you may recognize in skeptic). It’s visible in scopophilia but has nothing other than coincidence to do with copy.

Put them all together and you get a long word with a rhythm worthy of Stravinksy: a one-two-three one-two a-one-two-one-two-three. It’s worth a look, to be sure, though it may give you a sore throat. Which, incidentally, is a common aftereffect of having an esophagogastroduodenoscopy.

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limbus

Posted on February 6, 2014 | 1 comment

This is a word that lumbers, or has at best a combo sound, somewhere between nimble and bimbo. And yet if you look closely you may find that it borders on something sublime. It may not seem an edgy word, but it is imbued with a limber liminality.

Come, come see what I’m talking about. Look into my eye. Or yours, in a mirror. Or your lover’s. The pupil is the core, the trunk. Around it is the iris, like so many limbs. Or it may be a head, and the iris a halo – a nimbus. Do you see the line where the iris meets the white? This is the limbus.

To be more accurate, the limbus is the border between the cornea and the sclera (the sclera is the white, and the cornea is the front of the lens). It is a ring, and on some people there is a pronounced darker band at the edge of the iris – a limbal ring, a youthful mark often imitated in coloured contacts. But that is not all a limbus is.

No, think of the eye as a volcano, about to erupt: a limbus is also the edge of a volcano crater. Drink deep of the eye and be intoxicated: the limbus is the rim of a wine-bowl. Or is that iris the beautiful fluttering petal of a flower? Its edge is, again, a limbus.

Limbus is Latin for ‘border, edge, fringe’, you see. It has gained these English uses from that. But the Latin word also has an inflected form that has become a word in English: limbo, that border region of hell, where the innocent unbaptized are (so it has been said) sent – little babies taken too soon. Not condemned to eternal damnation, but not allowed into eternal bliss; simply held in between forever by words unspoken. Like a look into an eye that does not reveal what lies behind: is it rejection or acceptance, volcanic fury or intoxicating bliss, halo or ring of fire? It is forever unanswering. Can you, trapped by the limbal ring, dance a limbo and pass underneath it?

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erumpent

Posted on February 6, 2014 | 3 comments

Amy Toffelmire has brought to my attention a post on the Paris Review Daily blog containing the sentence, “Japanese scrolls from the Edo period depict—yes—erumpent, competitive flatulence.”

Erumpent. What a word! Truly le mot juste here, and would we expect any less of the Paris Review? (No, we would not.) It somehow has a sound simultaneously of trumpet and harrumph, with clear notes of erupt and rampant and a toasty little taste of crumpet. And, of course, rump.

So what, exactly, does erumpent mean? We will not need a lexical umpire to resolve this. It is a little-used word and holds true to its Latin roots. The e is the same as in evocative and e pluribus unum; it means ‘out of’. And the rump, of course, does not mean ‘rump’. No no no. Rump is a Germanic word, and this is Latin. In Latin, rumpere means (or meant) ‘burst forth’. In fact, the Latin erumpere, which produced the present participle erumpentem – the source of this word – also produced the past participle eruptus, which gave us our English erupt.

So something that that is erupting could be said to be erumpent. But, really, if you’ve just messily fired off the cork of a bottle of champagne and it’s hosing all over your drapery, would you choose the word erumpent for it? Would it matter how much you paid for the champagne? Or is this word simply too dominated by its sound associations to be fit for anything finer than flatulence?

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baleful

Posted on February 5, 2014 | 1 comment

Baleful eyes. A baleful look. A baleful stare, a baleful glare, a baleful glance. The baleful ocular blast of the basilisk.

This word may sound as though it bays like a wolf or mourns dolefully, but more than anything else, the eyes have it. Many things can be baleful, but the eyes are the windows of the soul. A baleful glare is something not merely baffling but beyond belief, the fanged eye that pulls the bottom from under you to betray you into the pit. When there is a knock on the door of your soul and the robe-and-bones bailiff comes to evict you, it will be his fixed red gaze that conveys what is befalling you.

It is not that baleful directly relates to the eyes. No, it is a derived form of the word bale, which is an old word from the dark dusty crypts of Germanic, a word for evil: not evil as a principle but evil as acting on you, either now or very soon. Damage, destruction, death: present or portended. Visual Thesaurus gives a set of close synonyms: forbidding, menacing, minacious, minatory, ominous, sinister, threatening – but none is closer in form and sense than baneful.

The form of baleful belies its viciousness, its mortality; it has little resemblance to most other words for harmful things, and more of an echo of hay and excess water and a ballistic actor. But it still has the bilabial and liquid pairing we see also in evil, and I can hear in it Baal, Belial, Beelzebub: demons, baleful forces.

We do not encounter this word every day, most of us, and most of us do not encounter what it names so often either. It is a low-frequency word, a costly word, a high word. Even in Old English it – I mean its form at the time, bealu – was used as a poetic form, combining with other words, as in bealuðonc ‘evil thought’. And it dropped largely out of sight for some centuries. But romantic poets in the 1800s brought it back.

So it is a poetic word. But can baleful be beautiful? Poetry does not speak only of beautiful things, of course. But I ask you: Is there anything that prevents the baleful from being beautiful? In your mind’s eye, paint a being of utter, ineffable beauty, beauty so bright and hot it burns your mind at the thought. The beauty of a destroying angel. A delicious, fragrant form, of soft and soul-rending colours, perfect touches, trenchant harmonies, bringing the most perfect death. But death nonetheless. And a pain as pure as spirits. This is what so much art strives for, when you gaze at it and it gazes back at you.

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physalis

Posted on February 3, 2014 | 1 comment

I was tasting a lovely recioto yesterday and I was trying to think of exactly what thing its flavour made me think of. Hmm, what is it? Ah, it’s one of those orange berries with the dry leaves attached that you often get on pretty tarts and in the centre of expensive fruit trays. You know, uh…

“Like Chinese lantern?” Ruth said. Ruth (who is not a fictional character) was doing the pouring at the Tasting Tower at the Summerhill LCBO store, which is where I was. She turned to the computer and Googled it. Yes, Chinese lantern, so called because the calyx – the conjoint sepals, not actually the leaves – make a papery angular cocoon around the berry, giving it a look like a paper lantern. But the formal name for it is physalis.

That’s an obviously Greek-derived word, with the ph and the y and the is ending. It came to us via Latin, as so many Greek words have. But beyond that, what does it taste like? It may not strongly make you think first of physical if you (as I do) think of the first syllable as pronounced like “fie,” but will if you start it with a “fis” – both are accepted pronunciations, and the stress can be on the first or second syllable. More than for many words, what this word gives you will depend on what you bring to it and make of it. You give it the breath, and then it breathes in your ear.

You’re likely to get some Phyllis from it no matter what you do. I find it has a bit of the wind of Wynton Marsalis. But recioto is not Marsala (rather closer in taste to a late harvest or almost an icewine), and Marsala doesn’t necessarily have taste notes of physalis. The ph has a sense of softness and breathiness without being as floppy as f. You could give the word a taste of a whispery fizzle, or you could come out with a sense of a fine slice on your tongue and a final Alice – or something more salient. If you replaced the ph with f, you would have an anagram of salsify, which is an edible plant entirely unlike this little fruit.

What is this little orange thing, anyway? It tastes like a cross between a tomato and a gooseberry. A kind of physalis related to the Chinese lantern (there are several kinds of physalis, all looking pretty lantern-like) is called a cape gooseberry. It’s not a kind of gooseberry actually, but it is indeed related to tomatoes, being a member of the nightshade family. But of course it’s not quite a night shade – more of a night light, or a lantern.

And it’s that lantern that gives it its Greek name. Well, the Greeks didn’t quite see it as we do. They called it a bladder: ϕυσαλλίς fusallis. But their word for ‘bladder’ came from something less wet. A bladder is an inflatable thing, after all, and the root of the word is ϕῦσα fusa ‘breath, wind, bellows’. That’s a little nicer – and also a bit ironic, since the paper on a lantern keeps the wind from blowing out the flame.

And so we have a word that comes from a word for bladder (which we think of as holding wet things) coming from a word that means ‘wind’ and sounds like a person blowing out a candle, and is a name for a plant that looks like a lantern with the little fruit as the flame, and it is a flavour I discerned in a liquid that I had in a glass and swirled and sniffed – not blew, sniffed – and sipped.

And now you have tasted the word. And, lucky you, since it is not wine and you are not a professional wine taster (as I am not either), you don’t have to spit it out; you can swallow it and enjoy it further.

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winningest

Posted on January 31, 2014 | 5 comments

Today’s word tasting note is a guest post by Vancouver editorial genius Iva Cheung.

“Oh yeah? Well you guys may have won this time, but my team’s still the winningest!”

That’s how I imagine the first utterance of winningest, and the fact that the speaker, in my mind, could just as well have been a four-year-old as a drunken sports fan in a pub is telling. Winningest has a decidedly juvenile and unsophisticated ring to it, and, judging by the comments on Merriam-Webster’s entry for the word, a lot of people hate it, calling it a “made-up word” and a “lazy degradation of modern language.”

So why is it so objectionable?

Well, first, It hasn’t been around for all that long. Although the Online Etymology Dictionary claims winningest appeared in the written record by 1804, without seeing a reliable example, I’m more inclined to believe the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, which both trace the word back to the early 1970s. According to Webster’s in 1974 it appeared in The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, which described the Maryland-Eastern Shore as the “winningest college basketball team in the nation.” Since the word was coined, it’s been used almost exclusively in (North) American sports pages.

Newness alone isn’t a good reason to find a word immature, though; after all, plenty of much newer words have seamlessly slipped into everyday usage. The resistance to accepting winningest as a “real word” probably comes from its weird morphology and incongruous semantics. We don’t usually slap the superlative -est morpheme onto the -ing morpheme—it seems like a mistake a young child might make—and winningest may be the only English word to feature this odd combination. Sure, present participle forms can serve beautifully as adjectives, but even words like charming and stunning—which we probably use more often as adjectives than as verbs—are compared using more and most rather than the -er and -est suffixes.

And speaking of which, if winningest exists, why doesn’t winninger? This lack of a comparative counterpart to winningest contributes to its oddness. What’s more, you could easily argue that the superlative doesn’t even make sense. We tend to think of winning as half of a dichotomy, not the end of a spectrum. Winning isn’t really a gradable adjective; if you’re not winning, you’re losing.

Yet this semantic mismatch is why winningest has found a niche as a functional word, despite the many reasons it shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t actually mean “most winning,” does it? To be the winningest means to have the most wins or victories, or to have the most success, typically in a sports context. And in that context, it’s unambiguous, succinct. You may wrinkle your nose at a phrase like “the winningest team in the league,” but you’re unlikely to be confused by it, and any other way of expressing the same concept would simply take more syllables.

Despite the objections to this “non-word,” it seems to be slowly seeping out from its sports confines into the rest of the world; even law firms are seizing the opportunity to declare themselves “the winningest.” The question is whether it’ll remain a one-off anomaly or spawn a new, productive way of affixing. Will we one day read about the eatingest competitor at the hot dog contest or the flyingest pilot in the air force?

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tiny, perfect

Posted on January 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

In one small corner of Word Country is a tiny, perfect garden. Yes, if good things come in small packages, it seems natural, doesn’t it, that tiny things may be perfect. This is a carefully pruned garden, each leaf just so, every frond so simply fond, everything so beautifully and precisely arrayed like a small jewel in the most exquisite setting on a little pendant hanging over the finest clavicle your eyes will ever merely glimpse. It is as neat as a pin, a pin with an infinity of angels dancing delicate quadrilles on its head simply to capture your interest.

And in this garden the flowers are passages, pieces from books and articles, and every one of them contains “tiny, perfect” or “tiny perfect” – comma or no comma; one is tinier and one is more perfect, but together they are homozygotic twins, between them tiny and perfect, the only difference a beauty spot.

Such an interesting pair of words, tiny and perfect. We know what perfect is and has been: it comes to us ultimately from Latin perfectus, ‘thoroughly made, entirely realized’; a thing is perfect if it has reached its pinnacle of… well, of perfection, of course. And grammatically the perfective aspect is an action that has been entirely completed: present perfect, “I have done it”; past perfect, “I had done it.” But tiny we are not so sure of. It may be related to a Scots word, tine; some people would trace it to plausible French or Latin etymons, but there is no trail of evidence. So perfect is fully formed and we know how it came to be, while tiny seems to have sprung into the world fully realized from the forehead of a faerie.

Let us lift some of these delicate leaves in our tiny, perfect garden and reveal the tiny, perfect blossoms that shelter beneath them. They come from many places and many times. There is a strong collection from Toronto, where there was a mayor in the 1970s, David Crombie, who was called the “tiny, perfect mayor”; the seeds of that plant have spread locally. But we see tiny, perfect in all sorts of places. I cannot begin to display all the little blossoms in this garden; the closer you look the more of them there are. But let us look at a tidy triad of recent appearances:

a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope and of those tiny, perfect days and nights we want to last for ever, important because they are so finite and so few
—Neil Gaiman on Lou Reed, The Guardian, October 28, 2013

We praise the tiny perfect Moles
That garden underground;
The Ant, the Worm, the Nematode,
Wherever they are found
—Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

Order quail and you receive exactly half the bird: one tiny, perfect breast, cooked swiftly in foie gras butter, and one tiny, perfect leg, simmered in stock and deep-fried.
—Ligaya Mishan, review of The Musket Room, New York Times, December 12, 2013

We have the sense, perhaps, that tiny is somehow not enough and tiny little is just too little and not perfect enough. Food reviewers seem to particularly like tiny, perfect, as in “tiny, perfect tea sandwiches,” “tiny, perfect canelé,” “tiny, perfect strawberries,” “tiny, perfect vegetarian hamburgers,” “tiny, perfect pizzas,” “tiny, perfect Melba toast rolls,” and on. I think food reviewers simply love to listen to themselves write; they want to write reviews as delicious as the food they fantasize of eating. But their reviews are often as self-conscious as a tiny, perfect dollop of the most exquisite finger-whipped cream scented with just a breath of lavender and perched delicately on top of your locally raised organic tempeh cheeseburger.

I do not wish to be too hard on food reviewers, although their reviews often leave me feeling as crusty as the slabs of perfectly golden toast on which they are forever munching. Art reviewers also like tiny, perfect, and anyone speaking of gardens and flowers runs a considerable chance of using the phrase. Certain other delicate things such as small birds can likewise be “tiny, perfect.” But really quite anyone wishing to call forth an air of the sensitive and exquisite and lexically sapid may be tempted by this saffron tendril of literary seasoning. Even when writing a eulogy of Lou Reed.

Let us wander into the oldest corner of the garden. I have been trying to find a mother plant, one whose seeds have blossomed into all these others, but I have not found a certain source, a tall poppy of tiny, perfect dispersing its tiny, perfect seeds over this tiny, perfect plot. All I can say with some certainty is that this collocation shows up first in my searches in the middle 1800s, and its usage has grown unevenly over the years but is now higher than ever before. Here is a gift set of three of the most time-tempered stock:

her tiny, perfect figure looks quite fairy-like when contrasted with his six feet of stature.
—Virginia De Forrest, “How Effie Hamilton Spent Christmas,” Godey’s Magazine, volume 55, 1857

As the bold Lomonds, bold to a Southern, and the little secluded den, and each tiny perfect leaf and flower and dim floating fleecy cloud were to Janet’s bodily vision, so was Shakespeare to her mental regard
—Henrietta Keddie, “Lady Strathmore’s Daughter,” Family Herald, volume 15, 1857

This last one I am fondest of. It recounts a plumber’s dream:

He is – so his fancy paints him to himself – crawling about upon a church roof, about to solder up a defect in it, when, by one of those unaccountable incidents which we take very quietly when they come to us in dreams, down goes the ladle of boiling metal into a pool in the street below. “Try again,” says old Honesty; and he descends to get his ladle and his lead. The former is there sure enough, but the latter is represented by a myriad of tiny, perfect spheres. With real material lead, and his eyes wide open, he goes through next morning the exact process he has noticed in his dream, and – inaugurates the manufacture of lead-shot!
—J. Coryton, “Accidental Inventions,” Macmillan’s Magazine, volume 4, 1861

Tiny, perfect spheres of lead, to load into your less-than-tiny gun. Perfect for massacring tiny, perfect birds and making confetti of tiny, perfect flowers. Even tiny, perfect things may be perfectly bad, and the angels dancing on the pinhead may after all be angels of death.

You may have deduced that I find this cute little collocation to be a bit twee at times. But I do like tiny, perfect things, mistake me not. Indeed, it is easier for things to be perfect if they are tiny; greatness leads to grossness, and in Brobdingnagian close-up one can see all sorts of defects. When we follow the florets of fractals down, we know that the small ones are simply the same as the larger, but in their tininess it is easier to see perfection, because the frayed ends are simply too small for our eyes to resolve. Kittens are more perfect than cats, even though they are less fully formed, just because they are tiny, and they fill our needs in just the right way – their downy hair and their wondering eyes, but also their innocuous but biting teeth and their little pin claws that hurt only just enough and not too much.

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gummy

Posted on January 29, 2014 | 1 comment

Could you chew gummy things if you were entirely gummy?

Elephants go through several sets of teeth in their lifetimes, and when the last ones are gone, they may starve to death, as they’re not able to chew the plants they eat on their gums. Would they be able to chew gum, I wonder?

Gums and gum may seem to have some things in common: they’re both soft, after all, and both are thought of as involved somehow in chewing. The word gummy is itself rather gummy: a voiced stop /g/ is softer than a voiceless one /k/ – somewhat as gums are to teeth – and the mm is surely soft and looks more than a little like teeth or gums. Granted, sticky has a certain sticky something that gummy doesn’t capture but that gum has, but gummy is gummier in every way than viscid, which is nonetheless a term one may apply to gum, though not to the gums.

But is the relation between gum and gums a gimme? Not at all. Although both are gummy, the etymology is gummed up. From Greek comes the word κόμμι kommi referring to the secretion of certain trees – sticky, chewy perhaps, and soluble, unlike resin. It moved into Latin as cummi and gummi, which became Italian gomma and French gomme. Meanwhile, from Germanic roots came the Old English góma to refer to soft tissues inside the mouth, and particularly the ones at the base of the teeth. So the two have gum together, I mean come together, in form in English since the Middle English period.

You may be interested to know that gummy referring to toothlessness has been in use in English for little over a century, as far as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, but gummy meaning chewy and sticky like gum from a tree has been in use in English since the 1300s at least. I must admit I wonder, though, whether both kinds of gummy aren’t intended in this quotation from 1520: “Her lewde lyppes twayne They slauer, men sayne, Lyke a ropye rayne, A gummy glayre.”

Speaking of lewd and lurid things, there is another sense of gummy, meaning ‘gummatous’. What does that mean? Of the nature of, or resembling, a gumma. What is a gumma? A syphilitic tumour so named due to the gummy nature of its contents. In other words, this gummy has gotten chewed up and blown into a bubble that, come full circle, pops.

So there is nothing elevated or lovely or lofty about gummy, then, is there? Hmmm. Poets and authors of literature have not always seemed to agree. Here is perhaps a bit more of gummy than you can bear:

Time the slant lightning, whose thwart flame, driven down,
Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine
—John Milton, Paradise Lost

Sing on! sing on! and Bacchus will be here
Astride upon his gorgeous Indian throne,
And over whimpering tigers shake the spear
With yellow ivy crowned and gummy cone,
While at his side the wanton Bassarid
Will throw the lion by the mane and catch the mountain kid!
—Oscar Wilde, “The Burden of Itys”

Now while the earth was drinking it, and while
Bay leaves were crackling in the fragrant pile,
And gummy frankincense was sparkling bright
’Neath smothering parsley, and a hazy light
Spread greyly eastward, thus a chorus sang
—John Keats, Endymion

They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.
—Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday

And whenever he emptied his tumbler of punch
He ’d not rest till he fill’d it full again.
The boozing, bruising Irishman,
The ’toxicated Irishman—
The whiskey, frisky, rummy, gummy, brandy, no dandy Irishman.
—William Maginn, “The Irishman and the Lady”

Hmm, well, yes, that last one is not so lofty, now, is it? Gummy may be vivid and viscid, thick and sticky and in a particular way poetic, but in the end it is, after all, gummy, with all that comes with that. It sticks to its origins.

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stenosis

Posted on January 27, 2014 | 5 comments

I would not say I had a narrow childhood, but, like everyone’s, it was bound to its particular time and place, and as I get older the memories thin out some too, to a sort of Reader’s Digest version or less. So the details, especially those of younger years, feature some things rather more prominently than others. I do not remember the record player that I apparently figured out the basic principles of when I was a toddler, nor the wastebasket I landed headfirst in around the same time, but I do remember the pushbutton light switches in the manse in the centre of Morley, and my dad’s mimeograph machine (including the smell), and snatches of cartoons I watched, and the word Watergate on the TV, and the metallic taste in the back of my mouth I got after sticking a piece of metal into an electric socket. Also the feeling I got from same.

I remember crawling into a cooler that was sitting open in the driveway and letting the lid close over me, and discovering that it wasn’t going to open again, and thumping until someone opened it. I remember dreaming of large spiders one afternoon napping on my parents’ bed, and running in circles through the rooms in the teacherage in Exshaw, and the taste of soap in my mouth after trying new words out on my parents. I remember the smell of the bathroom, and the sight of Reader’s Digests piled on a shelf near the toilet.

Before a certain age the memories are fewer and fewer. A balloon let go of and floating up in the air – was that in Ixmiquilpan or Grand Forks? I may have been three years old or so. And there is one memory that might be my earliest, or it might have been a later dream. I prefer to think it’s a real memory.

It goes like this: I am in a hallway, sitting on something. It’s moving, being pushed by people. They are wearing masks over their noses and mouths. One of them, a woman, leans over and asks me if I would like to wear a mask too. Then she puts the mask on me, and we go through a door.

That’s all I remember of that.

The thing is, there is only one real thing that happened to me that that could be a memory of. And at that time, I was less than a month old.

I developed, about a couple of weeks after being born, a nasty habit of projectile vomiting. Not good. Whatever I took in was just going right back out. My parents, naturally, were concerned. My mother recalls, “At the time, Dr. Spock’s paperback book was very popular with young parents. The word was that his liberal ideas on parenting weren’t the best, but that his medical advice was good. So we looked up projectile vomiting and found ‘pyloric stenosis.’” They took me to the nearest hospital, 70 miles away in Rocky Mountain House, and I was operated on. Yes, pyloric stenosis. I have the scar on my belly to this day.

So I owe my life to Dr. Spock. That’s Benjamin Spock. Not Mister Spock from Star Trek. Though that would be cool.

What is pyloric stenosis? It’s a stenosis of the pylorus. Which means it’s a narrowing (stenosis) of the passage between the stomach and the small intestine. How does that narrowing occur? When I was a kid, I thought it was a tumour. I subsequently got the idea that the walls of the pylorus were too thick and needed to be roto-rootered. But no, it’s a hypertrophy – overgrowth – of the muscle surrounding the pylorus. When the stomach tries to empty, the muscle spasms and forces everything back the other way.

Sort of like how some people react to perfectly normal linguistic features and processes. New words, or even words that aren’t new but they think are new. Or practically any real linguistic nourishment at all that would help them grow as people. They have a mental spasm and reject it. The readers fail to digest. But whereas a narrow pylorus is recognized as life threatening, many people try to present a narrow mind as a virtue. And somehow when these people projectile vomit linguistic changes, many others think it should be heeded. When what is really needed is a mental pyloromyotomy.

Oh, yeah, that’s the word for the operation whereby the pyloric muscle is cut so as to relieve the stenosis: pyloromyotomy. Just look at that beauty. Four o’s like cross-sections of the pylorus. Three y’s like the bottom of the stomach and the top of the intestine. Two m’s to make my my. Rhythmically two amphibrachs with an extra at the end.

But back to stenosis. Pyloric stenosis is not the only kind of stenosis. The body is full of tubes and valves and so on that can be narrowed. A common heart problem is mitral valve stenosis – narrowing of the mitral valve (which lets blood into the left ventricle of the heart) due to thickening of the tissue. Your airways, the channel your spinal cord passes through, everything that has any kind of fluid passing through it – all possibly subject to stenosis. In short, if it can be narrowed, it can have stenosis, though of course some kinds are more common.

And what effect can that have? Think of the passage of air through your mouth. Open your mouth and exhale. Now narrow that a little with the tip of your tongue. Narrow it some more. At a certain point you’ll be saying “ssss.” The sound you hear is caused by turbulence and speed, but you’ll notice that even with the increased pressure and speed of the air, much less passes through. And at a certain point that “sss” becomes a “t” – just like at the start of “stenosis.” Flow stops. Now, if there’s an alternate passageway, it’s like “n”; the air or whatever goes around and out another way. But generally that’s not so common in bodily channels. It’s one possible solution to a stenosis – but the better way is what follows the “n”: an “o” – a nice, open passage.

Where does this word come from? Greek, ultimately: στενός stenos ‘narrow’. People of older generations may recall hearing of stenographers (big offices would have a “steno pool,” i.e., a whole bunch of stenographers ready for use). What did they do? Take shorthand notes – dictation of letters, meeting notes, and so on. Since the 1600s, stenography has been a word for shorthand writing – because such writing is narrower, i.e., less space consuming. Coincidentally, Pitman shorthand – one of the two main types used in the 20th century – used the thickness of the stroke as a distinguishing feature between letter forms, adding another dimension of stenosis to the stenography.

Shorthand is little used these days. But I think people may still understand if I speak of memories as a shorthand of life – narrowed down, data compressed, but somehow not always decompressed very well thereafter. And old notes get discarded. I have no memory of what happened right after the operation for pyloric stenosis. But I know the short version: we want back to the Big Horn Stoney Indian Reserve, where we were living. From stenosis to Stoneys. From narrow digestive tract to big mountains and wide sky. And growing, and gradually building more memories. But nothing is still retained from that time so early in my life. Except that one scar.

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