Tag Archives: word tasting notes

phase

Posted on January 26, 2014 | 1 comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus revealing the full moon.

A phase indeed.

Thanks to Hal Davis for suggesting phase.

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tercel

Posted on January 25, 2014 | 2 comments

This word has a certain taste of celerity and accelerator, but’s it’s terser. It almost seems a more select word, but it has a sound of a brand name that’s made to sell… After all, it is the name of a car.

That’s not all it’s the name of, mind you, and not the first thing it was the name of, either. Before it was used for hawking cars, it was – as it still is – a name for a male goshawk or falcon. It comes via French, somewhat changed from the Latin tertiolus, diminutive of tertius ‘third’. The bird word is also spelled tiercel.

Oh, and in either spelling, the accent is on the first syllable: tercel is “terse’ll” and tiercel is “tier s’ll.” Funny thing in English: we used to leave final -el syllables unstressed, sometimes even spelling them -ell as in names such as Winchell, Twitchell, Meynell, but nowadays we tend by default to stress them, repronouncing names – and restressing tercel in the brand name as “ter-sell”… good for selling, of course.

So why was a male falcon a third? There are two lines of thought: it’s either because the male is a third smaller than the female, or because about one in three falcon eggs is a male.

So why was a Toyota Tercel so named? Because, like the male falcon, it’s smaller than its counterpart. What is the corollary counterpart? The Toyota Corolla – so named because corolla is Latin for ‘small crown’ or ‘chaplet’ and it is modelled on the larger Toyota Crown. (There’s also the Toyota Corona – corona is Latin for ‘crown’ – and the Toyota Camry, which gets its name from Japanese kanmuri, ‘little crown’.)

So it wasn’t named for the flash and dash of the raptor? Its celerity, perhaps? Well, a Toyota Tercel’s speedometer tops out at 185 km/h (about 115 mph), and I have seen a YouTube video of someone’s dashboard as they manage to get one up to that on a flat straightaway. The top speed of a falcon in a dive, on the other hand, is about 320 km/h (200 mph).

So, um, advantage bird. Unless you can show me that a Toyota Tercel dropped from a great height achieves a higher terminal velocity. But even if it does, the bird still wins – because it survives.

Thanks to Roberto de Vido for suggesting today’s word.

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ethereal

Posted on January 23, 2014 | 1 comment

Is this a dream? Has he drunk a draught of absinthe or inhaled a breath of ether? Nothing is either/or; everything is always already other than itself, the ever-changing static of television ghosts.

The fog giveth, the fog taketh ere all can be seen. His eyes tell him he may pass in, go there; the reality is that he may be there already; but when he looks again it is something passing, other, ethereal, ready to shift sense in the interstices of the senses. He does not know if he has seen an angel or a sylph or a simple wisp of phantasy. It is sketchy, but it draws him. It is a theory: not solid but so persuasive.

He has entered the highest realm, above the clouds: the empyrean, above the realm of the empirical, where there is ether. And he sees what he could not have expected to meet here: a lady, on a stairway. What runs in this figure’s veins is surely not blood but plasma. But this figure runs in his veins. It is a thrill to be held in its thrall.

Who is this pale, wispy, beautiful, delicate creature, this shimmering figure? Something sidereal or a serial killer? A witch, a Wiccan, a wick for the flame that will immolate him? Is this a form of Morpheus, or is he Orpheus and this Eurydice? It is light and fantastic, sliding between the blinds of the scene like cold felid smoke.

He follows. He hears celestial hymns now from this siren siffling through the heather of the heavens, Poe’s poetry:

And all my days are trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances
By what eternal streams.

She leads him hither and thither, far from hearth and home, and by misdirection to the margin of the river Alethea. She is a soft dream of mist and gossamer hair and lace. And yet when he looks away and looks back, he is confused: Does he see leather? How does he feel this sting?

How can he relate this? Does he hear telegnostically? He senses her only through ESP, and often sees her only with averted vision, like a distant star not to be looked at directly. He has crossed the celestial pons asinorum to find what Oxford describes: “A substance of great elasticity and subtilty, formerly believed to permeate the whole of planetary and stellar space, not only filling the interplanetary spaces, but also the interstices between the particles of air and other matter on the earth; the medium through which the waves of light are propagated.” And he realizes now that this is no light matter; this is dark matter.

But she fills him so completely, although there is nothing there he can find. She holds him together, and he yearns to hold her, ungraspable though she is. If she will slide in and out of his eyes and seduce as a siren this sailor at sea, let her. She has touched the softest part of his heart elementally, and once more all is in order. If this is a pale, beautiful dream, he will sleep softly so as not to wake the real.

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galosh

Posted on January 21, 2014 | 4 comments

I may have grown up with Canadian winters, but I’m not going to gush about sloshy, splashy mess that is Toronto sidewalks in the sloppy season. All that water that in summer makes the region so lush, in winter turns to slush. If it happens to freeze, it is assaulted with salt and turns into a shoe-staining muck, and the gutters are galling gulches of sole destruction.

What to do, though? Either trudge in heavy boots – which you may have to keep on inside too unless you carry a spare pair of lighter shoes – or wear comfortable shoes that will soon be soaked through and thereafter caked with baleful salt stains. You’re stuck between a marsh and a wet place. With every step you push through the slush and ask if there is a better way.

And as you swish through it it answers, “Galosh. Galosh. Galosh. Galosh.”

But are you listening? Do you have galoshes? Have you ever had galoshes? Do you know where to get galoshes? Or are you at a losh? I mean a loss?

Surely you’ve heard of them. The word galosh is, granted, also used at times as a simple synonym for a rubber boot. But really galoshes are boots made to go over shoes. They were originally strap-on clogs that could elevate the feet above the muck. The word may come ultimately via Latin from Greek κᾱλόπους kalopous ‘wooden foot’, or perhaps from Latin gallicae ‘Gaulish shoes’, shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers. We’re not sure; we only know we got it from French galoche. But we do know that the wood was put aside once vulcanized rubber was available and Goodyear made the wet season a betterseason.

What we don’t know now – I don’t, anyway – is where we can get galoshes now. You can’t get them at Canadian Tire. You can’t get them at the Hudson’s Bay Company. You can’t get them at Mark’s Work Wearhouse. You can’t get them at Sears. You can’t get them at Holt Renfrew. I’m at a bit of a loss. My mother, who suggested this word (no doubt in hopes that I am keeping my feet warm and dry), says she’s heard you can get them somewhere. But they’re no longer a common item.

Maybe this is because leather shoes are not such a universal thing anymore. Those who do wear them generally have the means to keep their shoes dry: along with better sidewalk drainage and paved streets, we have built a society where it can be possible to spend nearly all your time inside if you want – inside buildings, inside parking garages, inside your car. Canadians, who like to make much of their hardiness, are really mostly urban cave dwellers. You can get across downtown Toronto – or downtown Calgary or Edmonton or Montreal – without stepping outside.

But of course many of us still do step outside. I walk four blocks to catch the streetcar every morning, and cross badly drained corners on my way in to work, and I walk around the city on weekends too, trudging through the salty sludge and gutter pools of slush. My lack of galoshes is my loss.

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duodenojejunal

Posted on January 20, 2014 | 3 comments

Damn, this word looks hard to digest, doesn’t it? But it appears to have two parts. The first part has two d’s sticking up, and the second part has two j’s sticking down. Both halves have u and n, making them look like they could be rotated, but both have e, which resists rotation unless you’re using phonetic symbols. And the first half has the two o’s, while the second half has an a and an l. So maybe the beginning is really a oupəonp that’s been turned upside down, but the second half, if it’s something upside down, has already been partly digested. Was it punfef? So hard to say.

Well, so is this word, until you get your mouth around it. It’s not really made for taking down in one gulp. Its rhythm is like something from Dave Brubeck – duh-da-DAH-da-de-DAH-da – or (there are two ways to say it) a Mexican hat dance – da-DAH-da-DAH-da-DAHda. But if you say it a few times you will notice that, except for the final /l/, the consonant patterns for each half are practically identical: /d…d…n/ versus /dʒ…dʒ…n/. Again, the second half seems more digested: the tongue, rather than tapping hard and smooth against the ridge, flexes in and releases a bit more gradually.

Fair enough. The first half refers to the duodenum, the first twelve inches of the small intestine after the stomach (the name comes from Latin for ‘twelve’ because it was thought of as twelve finger-breadths). That’s where most of the chemical digestion takes place. The second half refers to the jejunum, the middle part of the small intestine, where a lot of the absorption of digested food takes place. It got its name from Latin for ‘fasting’ because at autopsy it was usually empty – because food passes through it quickly on its way to the ileum and the large intestine. And the place they join is the duodenojejunal flexure (if you say that really quickly, it sounds like it could be some rude dismissal, especially the flexure).

The duodenojejunal flexure hangs below the stomach, a smart little bend. The two parts are continuous but distinct, just like the two parts of this word: the duodenum is up, and the jejunum hangs down – and around and around. Between them they help you be nourished. But the word is better tasting.

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owl

Posted on January 18, 2014 | 9 comments

The story may have a familiar ring. A boy is told by someone he has never met before that he has special abilities, that he is different from the other children, remarkably different, and that all the abuse he has suffered is not in fact because he is inferior but because he is something special and others have tried to keep that from him. He is told he must go to a special school, one that is a long trip away. It has a select student body, he is told, and they all wear special uniforms and life is very different there. And yet when he gets there he finds that in many ways children are the same everywhere, and that even among these select children he is uncommon.

The school’s name? Strathcona-Tweedsmuir.

Oh, were you expecting Hogwarts? Well, I have to tell you, the IQ test I got in grade 4 was my Harry Potter moment. But the news-bearer wasn’t Hagrid, it was a psychologist. And I only stayed one year at the school, because it was expensive and didn’t altogether seem worth the money. Also, my brother went too. And instead of a train trip at the beginning of the school year, I got a long bus trip from northwest Calgary down to south of the city every morning, and back every afternoon. And my offer of admission was not delivered by owl.

Owls are a big thing in Harry Potter. They deliver messages; they are friends and companions. Harry has a snowy owl called Hedwig. Why owls? I think it is that they are associated with wisdom. The owl was the symbol of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, the patroness of Athens; the standard coin of the region in classical times, the drachma, had an owl stamped on it and so was sometimes called an ‘owl’ (στρίγξ, strinx). An owl seems always to be watching, aware, circumspect. The Dutch renaissance painter Jan den Uyl, whose last name means ‘the owl’, always worked an image or two of an owl into his still-life paintings, often quite subtly. If you look and look, you will finally see one looking back at you, and once you have seen it, you can always see it. You have become wise to the owl.

So an owl would seem to be a good thing to associate with gifted children, too, no? Not just children gifted with the ability to perform magic, but children gifted with intellectual ability. Wise beyond their years…

…they are not. Intelligence and wisdom are not exactly the same thing. Intelligence involves knowing facts and being able to figure things out, but wisdom involves knowing how to use that intelligence and generally how the world actually behaves, and how you really tick as a person. You gain wisdom by having had many occasions in your life to say “Ow!” So the ow! converts to owl.

Harry had great adventures, became an ace quidditch player and a leader and a symbol for all the wizards. With help from his friends, he passed his Ordinary Wizarding Level exams – that’s OWL. I, on the other hand, left STS after one year because it wasn’t worth it (too many owls to pay, not enough wisdom), and ended up going to high school in Banff, where I got six scholarships when I graduated – but one of my classmates went on to win two bronze medals at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and another was already touring as a concert cellist in high school. So whoop-de-doo for me; I might be owled over, but no one was bowled over by me. Somehow discovering I was a boy genius with the highest IQ the psychologist had ever tested didn’t end up making me a hero. Or wise. Any owl I had was in my head. I was an intellectually smart, socially dumb, generally lazy kid. That was owl. I mean all. I had pulled the owl over my own eyes. I was a bit mixed up; I thought owl but felt low.

And the owl isn’t the symbol of wisdom everywhere. Among the Stoney Indians, on whose reserve I spent much of my growing years and for whom my parents worked, the owl is a symbol of fear. Its call (which the word owl may ultimately be descended from an imitation of) can be haunting, lonely: not quite a howl, but still a sound more from frozen hell than from warm heaven. One time when I was young I had a dream in which an owl ate one of my cats. I loved my cats more than Harry loved his owl.

Harry had a magic wand. I do not, although I still have my school tie. Harry was a natural leader and made great friends. I was a lonely dweeb, although I made great friends once I’d grown up. Harry had an owl named Hedwig. I just had an owl in my head. And it wasn’t the owl of wisdom.

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Mondrian

Posted on January 16, 2014 | Leave a comment

I went to an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario this past weekend: “The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910–1918.” It’s a period of art that I happen to find quite engaging. Many things were changing, and many artists were changing and growing even in that brief period (only as long as the concert career of The Beatles). You can go and play “spot the Picasso” – which painting that looks totally unlike the Picasso in the last room is the Picasso in this room? But even better is “spot the Mondrian.”

If you know the work of Piet Mondrian, you probably know his most famous works, painted mainly in the 1930s. An example is Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue. These paintings are white fields with rectilinear black lines dividing them into rectangles of various sizes, and rectangles of primary colours in some of the spaces between them. It seems pure abstraction, but in it Mondrian aimed to create a “direct expression of universal beauty”: not something unreal but in fact a new realism engaging the underlying universal, as opposed to the particular individual experience presented by “the aesthetic expression of oneself” – i.e., “of that which one thinks one experiences,” but which unavoidably “veils the pure representation of beauty.”

But before Mondrian arrived at this, he moved through phases starting with figurative representation in flat colours, through increased abstraction and via cubism to what might seem a gradual disintegration of form but to him was a stripping away of limiting particularities. You must watch this video, simply a chronological morphing of his paintings one into the next, or you really won’t see:

What has this to do with language? What has this to do with the word Mondrian?

Let us begin with the meandering of the name Mondrian over time. An ancestor of Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondrian was Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan. Mondrian himself was born Mondriaan. Consider the metamorphosis of the back half of that name, deryan to driaan to drian, where the tongue has simplified the wave pattern of articulation into a simpler single lap, and then – under French influence, likely – the artist has trimmed the spelling further, which also means a change of sound in the Dutch pronunciation.

Now think of those sounds, of the bits they are made of, how they could be composed further. The consonants are like lines, the vowels like coloured areas. Imagine the lines crossing, spreading, compressing, the colours shifting around: Mondrian, marinade, moderate reminder, ruminate, endure, endear, determine, maunder, meander in dunes of Midian midday until you summon damnation’s andirons or innumerable numinous noumens.

No. Those are all words, words of our modern language, words that have particular pictures and meanings. They are shapes that have been arrived at by the erosion of time and the deliberate simplifications and complications of scribes and lexicographers, but they are figures, and figures in the comparatively complex phonetic repertoire of English. Languages may have simpler vowel sets. Many have five; the simplest have three, and those three are close to the three in Mondrian, with only the rounded back one higher: u i a. The primary colours of vowels. Let us strip the consonants down to a basic set as well: m p n d l s k y w. Now use those to produce phonetic patterns. Sing them in an animated monody of modernity: music is abstracted speech tones, after all. Produce the most basic of phonotactic patterns, the canonic syllable, consonant-vowel. Here is your new universal language:

mu na di li ya nu ka la si mu la ku wi na da pi li sa ku ka ma su ta ya na ya lu si la pu li ka yu da ni ya la sa na pi ya lu ma ka ki ti su ni la ma ti na pi la da ka su la pi ka su mi wa na du pu la pi ta mu nu da li ya nu

Signifying? Ah, but where is the signification? Why? Signification is individual. Significance is individual. Meaning comes at the interface of the person and the form. These patterns, these sounds, will not tell you to close a door, to kiss a face, to bake a loaf of bread. But they may yet bring echoes of patterns of sounds that have meant something to you; they may give a feeling from the arrangements of highs and lows, of stops and nasals, of soft and hard and smooth and spiky. It will be a feeling you know from how you were made, but it will be a feeling you know by what you have come to be. Beauty is an individual experience, infinitely multifarious, an expression of change and variety, no sameness, each individual in each moment in each place creating a new universe from a singularity that as instantly becomes another. What is universal is individuality in its infinite increments of difference.

Mondrian’s paintings, too, are Mondrian’s paintings. The style is individual, instantly recognizable: the aesthetic expression of Mondrian’s self, of who he was, when he was, the world of art and philosophy and politics that he came through, the person he was, even the a he excised from his name. The course of his paintings’ development is like the watercourse of language rolling over the pebble-bed of a billion tongues and itself being smoothed but enriched in the process. And then things happen, a waterfall, rapids, shallows or shoals or trees’ twigs, a sunburst on the surface: a glittering riffle. The man who began with dunes and trees before reaching for the purity of the basic forms at last burst forth with a vibrant explosion, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, lines but with blood or ants thrumming through them, and the incomplete yet deathless Victory Boogie-Woogie, for a war that he would not live to see the end of. Mondrian was mortal but his mind’s meanders are enduring, and in his separation from the body he has made his name.

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heist

Posted on January 13, 2014 | 2 comments

What’s the difference between a theft and a heist?

A heist is a kind of theft, sure. But not just any kind. You have three big kinds of heists that people talk of: a bank heist, an art heist, and a jewel heist.

So a heist is a theft of something highly valuable. Or, more to the point, it’s a theft of something with a huge symbolic or socially ordained value. Money is just paper, after all; it just happens to be paper issued by the right people with the right printing on it, thereby signifying a promise of exchange of value. Art is the fruit of labours, but the value of a given piece of art can change hugely over its lifetime based on tastes and perceptions, and a painting or sculpture does not have the same kind of functional value as food does. Jewelry has value because of social norms and rarity – diamonds don’t actually have to be as expensive as they are; their value is substantially inflated because of their social significance (abetted by marketing campaigns and careful control of availability).

So a heist is a theft of something at the heights of value – socially determined, non-intrinsic value. And it’s big. I’m tempted to say a heist is a theft of something big enough that you have to hoist it, but a jewel heist might be no more than one person can carry and yet still be worth millions.

The real reason I’m tempted to say a heist is a hoist is that, actually, it is. Heist is just a dialectal variant of hoist – a nonstandard US pronunciation. Hoist, in this sense, doesn’t require the aid of a hoist; any kind of lifting is sufficient, including shoplifting (though no one would now talk in full seriousness of heisting a pack of Twinkies from the dépanneur or T-shirt from The Gap). That is all hoist was in the first place – in Shakespeare’s time, if you were blown into the air by your own short-fused mine, you were hoist with your own petard.

But look at just one thing here: the spelling. The pronunciation is [haɪst]. But when we spell it, we use the German-style ei for the diphthong. Oddly, that’s the least ambiguous option, even though it’s not exactly phonetic spelling: haist could be misread, and hyst likewise. Highst just looks like a typo. We find ourselves, due to socially determined habits of spelling, having to hew to the arbitrary combination of letters that simple seems most likely. We choose the spelling heist because of a socially determined value similar to the sort that will help us to decide exactly which pieces of paper, shiny rocks, or painted canvases we are planning to heist.

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scribble

Posted on January 12, 2014 | Leave a comment

What is a scribble? And indescribable scribal dribbling, perhaps: linear babbling. If calligraphy is architecture, a scribble is rubble. The word itself is made to be scribbled: all those loops, with a few lines and a dot; it could look like the cloud of dust surrounding Pigpen from Peanuts.

It comes from the Latin scribillare, diminutive form of scribere ‘write’ – inferior writing. A scribbler is a poetaster, a hack, a prosaic disaster.

But scribbles can also be part of art. Sure, sure, you might say they’re squiggles, or strokes of some other description, but I say things that look like scribbling can be called scribbles, and Oxford agrees with me. I thought of this word when I was looking at some drawings I did for an art class back in my first year of university. I liked putting writing and scribbling into my drawings, and my writing looked like scribbling anyway. So here: art by the 16-year-old me. You be the judge. What, in your semantic ambit of ‘scribble’, is a scribble and what is not?

party
scribble_woman
scribble_man

 

See more, and larger sizes, at flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/

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bespoke

Posted on January 9, 2014 | 2 comments

Among my fellow members of the Order of Logogustation, it has always been my old friend Philippe who has been the suave dresser, even back to our collegiate days when he was winning girls away from me and Maury. Apart from certain other members I won’t name right now who are known for wearing skin-tight black leather, most dress as though words are all that matter to them. Maury has a liking for bowties and jackets but manages to come across more professorial than dashing.

So eyebrows were raised to the ceiling when Maury strode in on a recent evening wearing a very sharp grey suit that somehow turned his figure from spud to stud. Even Jess and Arlene looked twice. Elisa Lively squealed lightly.

“Good gravy, old sport,” I said. “This bespeaks an unprecedented level of sartorial technique for you.”

“Or, more to the point,” Philippe said, walking up and pinching a bit of Maury’s jacket cuff between thumb and forefinger, “a new level of sartorial technique is bespoke.” Philippe tilted his head this way and that as he surveyed the seams.

“Shouldn’t that be bespoken?” Elisa asked.

“That depends on the context in which it happens to be spoken,” I said.

“Bespeak uses that old English be prefix that really means ‘about’ or ‘for’ or is an intensifier,” Jess said, also surveying Maury’s attire. “For bespeak it turned an intransitive verb, speak, into a transitive. ‘Speak of, speak about, proclaim, speak for, speak in the arrangement of’. So on.”

Maury, for his part, had so far not spoken a single word. Which was also atypical.

“Right,” said Elisa, “so, speak, spoken, bespeak, bespoken. No?”

“I’ve always felt as though it should be,” I said, “but in this case it’s not.” I shrugged. “When you’re talking about tailoring, suits, and such other things as may be made to specific order and custom fitted, it is definitely bespoke.”

“Even I know that,” said Arlene, our young university student. She was leaning against a table, dressed in Marlene Dietrich pinstripes. I bet she knew.

“The word has been cut to fit,” Jess said.

“They’ve trimmed off the excess n and left it in the pile of ends,” I said.

“So, Maury,” Philippe said, “who made this for you?”

Maury held open his jacket to display a label on the pocket with some sort of little rebus.

“It’s not custom tailored?” Elisa said, leaning forward to look.

“It is,” Maury said. “They have their own label they sew on.”

Elisa scrutinized it. “Bug and bicycle tire?”

Philippe smiled wryly. “Bee. Spokes.”

“A new outfit,” Maury said. “Friends. And I, as a man of words and man of the world, happen to bee… their new spokesperson.”

“I’m sure that role suits you well,” I said.

Elisa stroked the sleeve and tweaked his pocket kerchief. “Doing anything later, handsome?”

Maury raised one eyebrow in as close to a Bond style as he could muster. “Sorry. I happen to bespoken for.”

Thanks to my mother for suggesting today’s word.

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