Tag Archives: word tasting notes

tolerance

Posted on November 10, 2013 | 13 comments

I don’t like tolerance.

I don’t mean I don’t like the word tolerance. The word is a nice snack-cookie of a word: the wafer crunch of the [t], the nice liquids in the middle, the marshmallow [n] and a final chocolatey coating [s]. It’s a nice word to say. You can feel good saying it. And that’s part of the problem.

Tolerance is an intrinsically opprobrious thing.

Consider four levels of response to another person’s presence: welcome, acceptance, tolerance, and rejection.

Welcome is greeting with open arms, a ready smile, a hug or warm handshake. It may even be going out and eagerly pulling the person in.

Acceptance is not necessarily as enthusiastic, but it’s at least a polite, easy handshake.

Tolerance is a little sigh and a roll of the eyes as you sit down. A resigned look. Tolerance is rejection that allows the rejecter to pretend to himself or herself that he or she is being a nice person. It’s not the acid-splash of overt rejection. It’s a steady little drip, drip, drip of acid on you as you sit at the table. If you don’t get the hint – and if the tolerance never improves at least to acceptance – you can sometimes end up more damaged than if you had just been openly rejected to begin with.

As you might guess, I have strong feelings about this because it’s personal for me. I might seem to have a pretty good social life, and that’s because I do… now. But for my childhood, adolescence, and younger adulthood, I was generally tolerated, often rejected, seldom welcomed.

Oh, it’s not because I was a member of some visible minority, or had some perceptible disability, or anything like that. It was just because I was a weird kid who told strange, incomprehensible jokes, could be kind of condescending, and didn’t know how to shut up. I know I wasn’t blameless in the matter. But let me explain.

I’m not an extravert. Some people think I am, but it’s just because I like attention. That’s not the same thing. I’m very comfortable in front of an audience of whatever size (as long as I’m prepared). But put me into the middle of a large social gathering and I’m wallpaper. On the other hand, if I can find some person or small set of people I know, I will happily chat with them. Maybe even too happily. Because I’m not such a hard-core introvert that I draw all my strength from within. I need social contact; I just have an upper limit. I value my friends and my social contacts very highly.

It’s that need for social contact that was really a root of my problems. I grew up out in the country. My social contact was mostly limited to school time, and that’s not really the same. So when I was in any sort of real social context with peers, it was like an intoxicant for me. I was very enthusiastic about it. Too enthusiastic. This manifested in an excessive talkativeness and boisterousness. On top of my basic weirdness.

So every time I came to a new social circle, at first I would usually be welcomed. Which made me very happy. Which made me very expressive. So my full weirdness came out, the incomprehensible jokes and the excessive talkativity and so on. And soon enough I had become the weird kid. The dork. I moved from being welcomed to being tolerated and avoided. I had blown it again. This happened over and over again. Of course, that hurt, so I developed the aforementioned condescension (even arrogance) as self-protection. But that didn’t make me any less needy. Just even less acceptable. And it was a vicious circle. The rejection and tolerance made me desperate, which led me to do things that made it worse.

I think of one time when I went to a party with my brother. They were his friends, but I was invited along. I had a lot of fun; I was intoxicated by the social welcome. They had some dry ice keeping beverages cool, and I discovered that inhaling the fog from it produced a pleasurable hypoxemic giddiness which induced in me gales of laughter and a frank garrulousness, especially since I was enjoying being at a party so much.

Some weeks later, my brother was heading out to some unspecified thing, and no one would tell me what, which obviously annoyed me. Finally one of my parents told me that he was going to a party with the same friends and I wasn’t invited. And they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, so they had been trying not to tell me.

Well, of course, I understood why I wasn’t invited, and I said so. I didn’t hold it against the hosts. I knew it was my own fault. I had blown it again. For the umpteenth time, and not the last time either. I didn’t blame the hosts. I just felt awful because I had blown it again, as I always did. But I also knew I would rather not be there than be tolerated, be the inappropriate person that no one wants around but no one will tell directly.

Which is what I was most of the time anyway. It took me a long time to be able to contain myself enough in social situations that I could manage, at least some of the time, not to be just tolerated. I still blow it sometimes, and I can never manage to notice it when I’m doing it.

So I thank all the people who had the nerve to tell me what I was doing that I shouldn’t be doing, because that’s the first step to welcome: it lets me know what I need to change, even if I don’t seem able to change it quickly. I may be smart, but that doesn’t mean I can figure out absolutely everything on my own.

I don’t thank those who tolerated me. I’m sure they thought they were being nice. Mainly they were letting themselves off the hook while being scarcely less cruel. Yes, everyone has their problems. I can’t expect them all to put out extra energy for someone who doesn’t know how to be a normal person. I don’t think they’re especially bad people for being tolerant. But I don’t thank them for it.

And this helps explain why I can seem cold or aloof at times. I don’t want to be where I’m not welcome. If I’m in a social gathering, I don’t want to horn in on a conversation and simply be a tolerated presence. I’d rather not be there at all. I wait to be invited to join people. If I’m not asked, I don’t invite myself unless I’m sure I’d be welcome. Because when I was younger, if I hadn’t been invited to join a group of people but I asked to and was allowed to, I would typically at best be tolerated. The tag-along nuisance. And I knew it, every acid drip drip drip of it. But I still wanted that contact.

Now I have friends and real social contact. I have a lovely, sweet wife, so I really never feel lonely, though of course I still need friends too. I’m better adjusted… somewhat. And so now I would rather be alone than be tolerated. There are few things that make me feel more awful than knowing, or even just suspecting, that people would rather I not be there.

Not so long ago, it was common for people to plead for tolerance: religious tolerance, tolerance of alternative lifestyles, et cetera. I really came to dislike that. It meant that you were still viewing the group as inferior and treating them with disdain, but you were doing it at closer range. Oh, you… people… sigh, eye roll… yes, OK, fine, you can sit there if you must… Now we talk of acceptance. I think we should talk about welcoming. And if we find we can’t welcome some particular group, we should have an honest discussion about why. Tolerance avoids that honest discussion.

The Latin source of tolerance and tolerate is tolerare, verb, ‘endure, bear, suffer’. The first use of tolerance in English referred to enduring pain or hardship. It hasn’t really moved very far from that. In forestry, it means the ability of a tree to exist in shade rather than sunlight. In biology, it means the ability to survive and thrive when you have a parasite or other infection. In medicine, it means being able to take increasing doses of something without responding. In mechanics, it means the amount of deviation you can get away with from the exactly desired dimensions – just how much not-quite-right can be endured. And socially, it means enduring someone (or some set of people) who is… well, not quite right. A shadow on the occasion. A bit too much, but you can ignore them. A parasite. Or who at least seems so to you.

So no, I don’t like tolerance.

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stupor

Posted on November 7, 2013 | 3 comments

The mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, recently made the news pretty much everywhere by admitting that he had smoked crack, but excusing it as having been “in one of my drunken stupors.”

The question that’s on everyone’s mind now is, of course, “Is stupor related to stupid or is that just a sweet coincidence?” An additional question that is apparently on the minds of many Canadians is “Shouldn’t that be stupour in Canada?”

Yes and no. I mean yes, it’s related, and no, it shouldn’t be stupour. The etymology answers both questions. The words stupor and stupid originate in the Latin verb stupere, ‘be stunned or benumbed’. (Incidentally, in some parts of Canada, and perhaps elsewhere, stunned is also a common colloqual word for ‘stupid’.) That became, still in Latin, the past tense form stupidus ‘stunned, numb’ and the noun stupor. So stupid is to stupor as torpid is to torpor (and, originally, horrid was to horror). And I suppose you could say stupid is as stupor does…

You will see that the noun has not changed spelling from its Latin original. Some other words that have come from Latin -or words (such as color) have passed through a French influence long ago and come out with an added u (subsequently lost in American English). But stupor never did. Well, not never – up to the 1600s (it was borrowed in the 1300s) it was sometimes also spelled stupour. But that was finally dropped. Perhaps it seemed stupid.

Good word, stupid. It’s well formed for describing and decrying a disdained mental insufficiency. It starts with a combination that pretty much spits, [st], and has an additional puff of disdain in the middle with [p], then ends with the [ɪd] that also starts idiot. The stressed vowel adds something extra special: your choice between the pinched, almost hissing [ju] diphthong (which, in [stju], practically forces the face into a moue of disdain as though sniffing a turd) and the stripped-down (Canadian-style) plain [u], which, aside from sounding duller, is itself disdained as stupid by snobs with palatalized pronunciations.

Stupor has most of the same characteristics (plus – in a British accent – the sound of a Buddhist monument (stupa) around which one may circumambulate), but it is not usually used for insults. Not that it is used with approbation; a stupor is not a thing one generally wants to be in. And yet somehow it is a thing people get themselves into. And usually the same way: you drink yourself into a stupor; you are then in a drunken stupor. Most modern uses of stupor refer to being stupid drunk. You know, like someone you see stopped and stooped over on a stoop, unable to take another step, stumbling and mumbling, perhaps trying to circumambulate their residence in search of a door (or their forsaken sobriety). The language has many, many terms for various states of inebriation, and this expresses one of the most severe.

How severe? Severe enough that you might get your letters mixed up, perhaps, and go looking for a p for support (or vice versa), or drop an r and get upsot, or, more likely, become like Proust and find yourself À la recherche du temps perdu – not, as the English title of the book would suggest, remembering things past (as if!), but actually in search of lost time. Ha, good luck with that. If you’re anything like Rob Ford, you’ll discover what you did when someone releases a video of it.

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omphalos, omphaloskepsis

Posted on November 7, 2013 | 4 comments

Today’s tasting is a guest tasting by Anthony Shore, who writes about brand naming at operativewords.com.

Contemplate the navel: The locus of life, button of our underbellies. The place from which every placental mammal was nourished in utero. Students of meditation, enrollees of the navel academy, look within themselves and contemplate their navels to gain an introspective perspective.

Taking shape as innies and outies, the omphalos – ὀμφαλός to the Hellenically-incined, and umbilicus to the medically-inclined –  is our most visible (and sexy!) scar: the belly button.  Ambient squealing peals are the soundtrack as our umbilical cord is cut, leaving us with a resounding, adorable mark. And despite being a marker of life itself, 90% of navels are depressed. The other 10% are happy outies.

Is it any wonder navels are centers of attention? They lie at the very center of our bodies – and, some say, the center of the world. The Vitruvian Man pinpoints the center of human geometry at the tummy button, equidistant from the periphery of the great circle formed by da Vinci’s sepia-toned, spread-eagle snow angel.

Considering the body further, the Latin word for a place of observation was templum, and so when we contemplate our navels, our bedimpled bodies are a temple, etymologically speaking.

Among the erudites, navel-gazing is called omphaloskepsis, a mouthful of chewy consonant clusters cooked up by classical Greek phonology.

Inspecting skeptics might wonder, how is it that this is even a word, this omphaloskepsis? The first syllable is a chomp and an exclamation: oomph! They do not belong together, these zounds, but somehow, like a flounder genetically entwined with a tomato, it kinda works. Other Greek-derived words that begin with this kind of -mph– include amphetamine, amphitheater and emphatic. As far as Greek goes, MPH must stand for More Phonetic Hutzpah.

The latter and more familiar half of omphaloskepsis looks like skeptic, one who inquires or doubts. The philosophical school of skeptics was founded by Pyrrho of Ellis, who himself was schooled by the gymnosophists, those naked lovers of wisdom native to India. Early followers pursued a special brand of skepticism called Pyrrhonism, which, though bearing resemblance to Pyrrhus (known for qualified victory), actually shares no common etymon. Only Greek, which has taken so many hubristic liberties with phonology – sphere, pterodactyl, mnemonic, acne, iatric, phthisis, pyknic – binds Pyrrho and Pyrrhic by origin.

Omphaloskepsis takes us on a long, strange trip through sonority. We set out with our mouths agape, saying “aaah,” as if to afford an attentive physician a better view of our tonsils. Next comes the nasal-fricative [mf] like a one-two punch. It is guttural and visceral and entirely satisfying. We flow into a liquid [l], smooth and fluid, but then are greeted with a skidding, stoccatic fricative-stop-stop-fricative-fricative washboarded stretch of heavy, beclustered syllables.

Omphalos and omphaloskepsis offer what any great vacation should offer: Something exotic, adventurous, and an opportunity, in looking outside of ourselves, to learn more about what lies within.

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zarf

Posted on November 6, 2013 | 4 comments

Here’s a word that I think could see its use extended a bit. Although in its strictest sense most people don’t use a zarf very often, in a slightly expanded sense a great many North Americans get their hands on one every day.

What is a zarf? Aside from a word useful in crosswords and Scrabble, I mean. Is it one of those little half-barks that dogs make when dreaming? No. Is it some faddish new item of apparel, the last word in a scarf, perhaps? Nope, although it does wrap around something. Is it the beginning of frazzle backwards? N— well, yes, it is that too, but who uses it for that? Is it like zaftig? If by “like” you mean it starts with the same two letters and has a third letter in common, then yes; otherwise, not really.

If you have every consumed a hot liquid from a cup (probably glass or porcelain) that was held in a (usually) metal holder with a handle, usually a pretty and ornate thing that goes about halfway up the cup, then you have touched a zarf. This is most likely in the context of Middle Eastern (especially Lebanese) food, although I have had Italian-style beverages from such cups too. Actually, somewhere in my apartment we have a set of them. I think I know where.

But how about those corrugated paper sleeves, those little tube-tops for coffee cups, that are used for holding the paper cups at Starbucks and other such places? Tell me, what do you call them? And if other people started calling them zarfs, would you? I would. Actually, I already do. They’re not metal, true, and they don’t have a handle, but they serve the same function: to wrap around a cup of hot liquid to enable easier holding without burning fingers, staying in place due to the fact that the cup is wider at the top than at the bottom. I think those are the most essential qualities; the material and the protruding handle are less central to the semantic construct.

Well, so say I. I also just like saying “zarf”; it sounds like a sound effect for a Van de Graaff generator. And it has a fun look, with the angular z at one end and the tall, floppy f at the other. The original looks quite different, since it’s an Arabic word (ظرف), and it sounds a little different too. But, then, it also originally meant ‘container’ or ‘envelope’, so that pretty much settles it. Wikipedia agrees, too: “Coffee in disposable cups is often served by fast-food restaurants in holders of stiff paper. These too are zarfs.” Or, if you feel like using the Arabic plural (which, since we’re speaking English, I don’t encourage), zuruuf.

Well, there it is. An eye-catching form that serves to ease the handling of something fluid; a container borrowed from one place to serve a purpose in another. Such is zarf the word. And zarf the thing.

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oasis

Posted on October 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

What is an oasis? An interruption, a place in the middle of a sameness where you will find nothing the same – zero (0) as-is. In a desert, a great expanse of sand and dust with no trees and no water, an oasis is a pause for refreshment, an interruption of a spring and vegetation.

So what would an oasis be in the middle of a sea? When there is water, water, everywhere, an oasis of the sea could be a bit of land, but that would be just an island. Interrupt all that you expect about the sea, and in the interruption put metal, a shopping concourse, trees, people, dry surface, and few views of the surrounding water, and you have an oasis of the sea – indeed, an Oasis of the Seas, which is the largest cruise ship in the world.

As I type this I am sitting on the Oasis of the Seas in a park surrounded by a half-dozen storeys of balcony suites. There are trees and other plants, real ones; there is an open view above of the night sky. There is no sound or smell or sight of the sea, and barely even any motion to make you think there may not be bedrock beneath you. If I go to my cabin and lean over the balcony railing, I can see a long high wall of balconies, an enormous hotel, and where it should meet the ground it instead meets the sea. A building is simply cruising around, and a very large building at that. And while we find ourselves in the middle of water now, whenever we stop we head to a sandy beach: all these people, all this water, and they all seek that bit of desert that sits between forest and ocean.

Well, why not. A vacation is a liminal experience; why not seek the limen? Or perhaps not so much a limen – a transition between one state and another – as an excursion, a digression, an interruption, an epicycle. A getaway, an explosion of something-elseness into the constancy of your quotidian existence. This ship certainly is that. If you want a getaway, get Oasis for your getaway system. For a week you can live like royalty. Royal Caribbean? Well, yes, but also Cleopatra. She was an burst of Greek into Egypt; oasis is (as far as we know) as burst of Egyptian into Greek. And now a burst of Greek into English, but really, English has quite a lot of Greek in it.

It’s getting a little busy here in Central Park on the Oasis of the Seas. After I write this and post it, perhaps I’ll go up top and survey the surrounding dark ocean. And how will I post it from in the middle of the Caribbean? Oh, there’s internet here. Lately, you’re only away from the internet if you want to be. And even then its electromagnetic waves flow through you, just as the common flow of humanity is always there like space-time, even though you may except yourself from its immediate presence.

No man is an island, as John Donne said. But perhaps one may be an oasis. Here on this ship, I am among six thousand people. I like having all those people around; I get lonely if there are no people. But I don’t like having to be in the immediate presence of all of them, and deal with their noise, and walk slowly behind them because they are walking in a wide group at a very leisurely pace and I can’t get past. If there were only 20 people on this ship, it would be problematic, because you would very quickly get to know each other and have to acknowledge each other. With five hundred dozen, I can have all the people to ignore I could possibly want. I have enough people to be anonymous, and I can still find a place to get away from them in the middle of them: I can sit in this quiet park with a half-dozen people in sight at a time, while three decks down or a hundred metres away there are great masses of noisy people all being together. I want them there; I simply want to be in an oasis in the midst of them.

It’s just like the kind of party I like: lots of people all gathered together, and a place or two to get away from them, by myself or with one other person, a quiet corner or outlook with the roar of the party offstage. You can’t do that at a small party, and it’s not the same if there’s no one else. I want to have people to get away from, to ignore, to be an exception to. I want to be an oasis.

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Perm

Posted on October 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Language goes through many permutations and permanent mutations. It can be rather like hair: styles come in, styles go out, but sometimes the style changes the form quite a bit, permanently.

When you see the name Perm, you will likely think first of a perm, a thing one can do for styling hair. Chemicals break down the inner structure of the hairs, making them more susceptible to reshaping; heat and physical devices reshape them. This perm is short for permanent wave, and has been in the language as such from the 1920s. Permanent comes from Latin per ‘through’ and manere ‘stay’; we can see that in perm most of the manere has not remained. Fashion led to the curtailing of the word form, and that curtailing seems to be enduring, although the memory of the original is not altogether lost.

But there is another Perm, a capitalized one (well capitalized with industry – except, oops, industry built up during communist times), a city of a million people in Russia, in the Ural area, straddling the Kama river, suturing it with bridges. It was founded in the 1500s and renamed in 1780 as Perm. My Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names declares that this came from Finnish perya ‘rear’ and maa ‘land’, because to the Vep people who had moved to the area from closer to Finland it was really the back of beyond.

So this Perm is also styled, cut down from peryamaa. But it has grown out to a new form: Permian, which is the name of a geologic period, the last period of the Paleozoic Era, ending some 252 million years ago with a rather massive extinction episode. At the time, all the land masses of Earth were one big Pangaea, which subsequently broke up and left formerly contiguous bits widely separated. And, anent that, in parallel with the Vep displacement and the dislocation of the back half of perm, deposits from the Permian Period have come to be found in widely separated places. Near Perm is one such place, of course (hence the name), but another is in northwest Texas, an area commonly called the Permian Basin, a source of much oil production (i.e., reusing old stuff for new ends) and home of towns such as Marfan and Odessa (another far-removed place name duplication). From cold and communist to hot and capitalist – such a split.

There’s also a split in pronunciation. You know how perm is pronounced: three phonemes, thanks to a syllabic /r/ in the middle – like “purr” with “mm” added at the end. Soft, lazy, comfortable. You might suspect that Perm would be said a little differently, and you would be right. In perm the tongue may curl comfy like a cat in the mouth, but in Perm, the end is palatalized due to the source, and the beginning is palatalized due to Russian phonemics. This word begins and ends in bilabials that physically cannot palatalize, but the tongue twists for them anyway because they are nonetheless phonemically “palatalized.” And so is the /r/, which actually can be, but maybe don’t hurt yourself trying. The tongue doesn’t loll its body lazily near the palate; it presses its blade parlously close to the alveolar ridge, as if curled unnaturally – though the sounds are natural enough to Russian speakers.

Imagine actually seeing the tongue doing that. Imagine, say, taking an ultrasound wand and putting it under your chin and looking at the screen-borne phantom of the tongue twerking away in the interests of phonological fashion. As it happens, I had the chance to see just that sort of thing this afternoon, in a linguistics talk called “Tracking and Imaging the Tongue: New insights into language-particular phonetic variability,” presented by Alexei Kochetov – now of the University of Toronto, but originally from Perm.

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chalastic

Posted on October 23, 2013 | 3 comments

Now, here’s a scholastic word for an elastic vocabulary. First thing to know about it is that we pronounce the ch as /k/. The rest of the pronunciation should be obvious (stress on the middle syllable, please). The sense is perhaps less so. Is there a savour of challah, or something cataskeuastic about it, or perhaps choleric, pyroclastic, or even cataclysmic? Hmm, rather not. Does it seems like a word that could be chic? Alas! That does not suit it to a t.

But if on the other hand it makes you cataplectic or acts as a laxative, well, congratulations: you have divined it. The word comes from Greek χαλᾶν khalan ‘relax’, from which issued χαλαστικός khalastikos ‘laxative’. So, yup, that Dulcolax you have in the cabinet is a chalastic – never mind the hard stops at front and back of the word /k/ /k/ that would seem to contain the liquid /l/ in the middle. But the other sense of it relates not to intestinal relaxation but to full-body loss of tone: cataplexy or sleep paralysis – in fact, sleep paralysis is sometimes called a post-dormitial chalastic fit. Which, honestly, is a bit of terminology that may induce its object.

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enchiridion

Posted on October 23, 2013 | 6 comments

This is a big word for a small thing, a fancy word for a thing that may well be plain. It has an air of encyclopedic enquiry, but if you are enriched by an enchiridion it is because it is condensed, information-rich. The word may look a little out of hand, but it is all about keeping things well in hand – literally: its Greek source is a word made of ἐν en ‘in’ plus χείρ cheir ‘hand’ (you see this also in words such as chiropractic) plus a diminutive suffix ιδιον idion. It names a handbook, a little manual, a concise treatise on something. Rather than hacking through the dense bush of an encyclopedic disquisition for the birds of enlightenment, an enchiridion gives you a bird in the hand.

The word pushes off with a kick from the back and then dances on the tip of the tongue; the chi rhymes with “sky” and the the stress is on the rid. The printed form looks a bit like a stretched-out accordion, but in the meaning, as with accordions, it is the compression that produces the effect.

There are several books of note that call themselves enchiridions. Perhaps the most noted of these is the Enchiridion of Epictetus, written by a Roman philosopher who had been a slave but was freed when his master was executed. It expounds stoic philosophy – a philosophy perhaps best expressed in the modern time by the prayer, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The Enchiridion is actually condensed notes by a student of Epictetus, and it cuts to the chase, starting off by telling us that we can change the things that are within our power, and can’t change the things that aren’t within our power, and if something is not in our power, we have no reason to attach our happiness or unhappiness to it, and if it is in our power, we should simply do what will achieve our goals. Do not desire; simply act, or be detached. It seems at first like good, practical philosophy, and is in line with insights offered by Buddhism, among other lines of inquiry, but it does run into the problem of discernment of what is and is not within our control – and there is also the fact that sometimes we enjoy our attachments to things beyond our control, even if we risk negative feelings should we lose them. Most people will find stoicism is very useful much of the time – but sometimes you just want to let things get a little out of hand, just as you sometimes want to use a fancier word than you need to.

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bibelot

Posted on October 21, 2013 | 3 comments

Ah, those loveable liquids and bilabials, blubbering their inimitable obligato over and under the laborious lumbering blather, belonging to and yet abnegating the rebarbative obnubilating rhubarb. They are like little bibelots, perhaps those imbibible bibelots brought by a bibulous libertine: presentable bottles in inimitable shapes, bulbs of ablutions and oblique solutions, little flasks of liquor convertible into baubles. How the /b/ and /l/ sounds bubble the language, lapping and bursting, burbling like a jabberwock, or jubilating like the balls and bits on a tannenbaum! Bibelots? Indubitably.

Of course, one could make a case for any lapidary phoneme to be a bit of a bibelot. Language is a toybox, a knick-knack shelf full of geegaws and tchotchkes, but exceedingly useful ones. Even if you imbibe a lot of vocabulary, you will still find the individual sounds to be as rubies and berylliums. Or at least as loveable as, say, a collection of souvenir bells or stoppered bottles. And of course they assemble into words that have even more collectible amiability.

Take bibelot. Yes, here, take it. Keep it; there’s lots to go around. It’s borrowed from French, which is why we are meant to say it as “bib-lo” or, in the French manner, like English “be below.” It comes from Old French bel ‘pretty’ (also seen in archaic English bellibone, a pretty and nice girl, from belle et bonne), reduplicated playfully to belbel, and thence to beubelet, and finally into the modern form, borrowed into English less than a sesquicentury ago. It is a collectible, a curio, a trinket, a small souvenir, a little talisman or fetish, perhaps. And, as it happens, that is also what it means. So it is a lovely little bauble to bestow on an amiable bibliophile bellibone lingually and bilabially (with your tongue and lips).

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elute

Posted on October 20, 2013 | 3 comments

“For every problem,” Maury said, raising his glass, “there is a solution.”

“Of, in this case, twelve percent ethanol,” I said. I was examining the bottle from which Maury had filled his glass. I did not recognize the winery. The label had a convoluted, tie-dyed-looking design. “Where did you get this?”

“A loot bag,” Maury said. “Some conference thing.” He swirled the wine and sniffed for a moment and winced slightly.

“When was the last conference you went to?” The label was cagey about the exact year the wine was made.

“Er… a few years ago. I happened on this while cleaning out a closet.” He held it up to the light. It appeared opaque.

“That’s pretty dark, even for Zinfandel.”

“Even for Coca-Cola.”

“I wonder if it could elute the rust from a nail.” Coke can supposedly do that – elute means ‘remove by dissolution’: something is adsorbed (coated) onto something else, an a solvent picks it up and takes it away, or else binds better to the surface and displaces it. From Latin e ‘away’ and luere, combining form of lavere ‘wash’.

“Well…” Maury shrugged. He took a large sip from the glass. For a split second he attempted to swish it in his mouth, but reflex took over and he did a perfect spit take: he blew an aerosol of the wine all over the front of his refrigerator. I stepped back automatically, but by good luck I was out of the spray cone anyway.

“Aghl,” Maury said as he emptied his glass into the sink and filled it with water. He swished some water in his mouth and spat it into the sink. And again. He turned to me. “I think that would elute the enamel from my teeth.”

“Which conference was it you got this at?”

“Um… that eludes me. It doesn’t seem to have been an elite event.”

“Well. You found a bottle of wine. At first you were elated, but you turn out to have been deluded.” I turned to look at his fridge. “And your refrigerator… may soon be denuded.” The wine, as it dripped down the front, appeared to be making streaks in the paint.

“Good grief, it is eluting enamel,” Maury said. He leaned closer to look, then grabbed a paper towel and started to wipe, which almost seemed to aggravate the damage.

“And epoxy,” I said. “Appliance paint.”

I looked at the effect on the fridge for a moment, then reached over and held up the wine bottle. “I think I know where they got their label design.”

“Cork that and set it someplace safe,” Maury said, still wiping. “I’m going to keep it. I’m all out of drain clearing fluid. …What, by the way, were the tasting notes on the back of the bottle?”

I looked at the bottle. A drip from Maury’s pouring of it had made its way down across the back label and obliterated the centre of it. I held it out to him. “I’m afraid it elutes description.”

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