Tag Archives: word tasting notes

lamprey

Posted on November 19, 2013 | 2 comments

Think of what this word could be a name for. If we keep bells in a belfry, could not the lamp part of a lighthouse be a lamprey? Or perhaps it could be a smaller lit tabernacle whereat one may pray before the rays of a lambent flame… The tongue licks so softly at the start of saying it, and in the middle the lips make a little kiss (try it; it’s hard not do it – the lips meet for the [mp] and then have to round forward for the [ɹ]). So sweet, whether you say the final vowel as [i] (the dictionary’s official way) or [eɪ] (a spelling pronunciation).

But the actual thing it names… the actual creature named by this word… is the stuff of nightmares. Oh, sure, it’s basically an eel, a kind of sucker-fish, yeah, like a large marine leech. Sure. Have you seen a picture of this thing?

I’m not going to include a picture here, for one thing because I don’t have the rights to one and for another because I don’t want to ambush people with something like that. Never mind that it’s ugly, ugly, ugly (tubular, mottled, and scaleless). Its mouth is a ring with rows of teeth. It’s like a small version of the sandworms from Dune or the mouth of the sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. Or, more sensibly, they’re probably inspired by it. If your nerves are strong, Google it. Honestly, it’s a kind of Freudian nightmare, a phallus with a vagina dentata at the end. Gurkh.

It’s also a plague in the Great Lakes. Sea lampreys are native to the Atlantic coast but have invaded inland waters, and they can deplete native fish stocks quite rapidly. These things are basically aquatic vampires: they latch onto fish and suck the blood out of them. It is a fitting coincidence that Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler, and lamprey anagrams to ympaler – so close. But of course they don’t impale. They puncture and suck.

Enough of that. How did this nasty sea vampire come to have such a pleasant name? It traces back through Old French to medieval Latin lampreda, which appears to have been a mutation of the synonymous lampetra, from lambere ‘lick’ and petra ‘stone’ – because they attached themselves to rocks. It happens that this is also the source of limpet. It’s not a hundred percent sure that it’s the true source for this word, though.

So what do you do with lampreys? In the Great Lakes, they’ve reduced them by 90% (the state regulating successful entrepreneurs out of business! Lampreys just happen to have a good business model! It’s shameful to interfere with the wisdom of the free market! err…). I’m not sure what the preferred method of catching and killing them is, but I do know what is a popular thing to do with them once they’re dead: eat them.

Yep. Especially in England (perhaps more in the past than now), lamprey pie is quite a thing. (Also in Game of Thrones.) A big one was served at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and another at her golden jubilee. King Henry I was said to have died of eating a surfeit of lampreys. They have, apparently, a deliciously meaty flavour. I suppose a diet of blood will do that. Mmm, sea vampire pie. Well, I’d try it. After all, it has such a lovely name…

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taikonaut

Posted on November 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

A taikonaut, we are told, is a Chinese astronaut.

Do you know what we call a Chinese baker? A baker. Do you know what we call a Chinese pilot? A pilot. Do you know what we call a Chinese physicist? A physicist. Do you know why? Because we’re speaking English. Of course if we were speaking Chinese we could call them mianbao shifu, linggangyuan, and wulixuejia.

And if we were speaking Chinese, we would call an astronaut yuhangyuan or hangtianyuan or, if we were from Taiwan or Hong Kong, perhaps taikongren.

So where the heck is this taikonaut from?

Well, in taikongren, ren means ‘person’ and taikong means ‘outer space’, from tai ‘greatest, farthest’ and kong ‘empty space’. Take taikong and add the Greek naut ‘sailor’ suffix by analogy with astronaut and cosmonaut, dropping the ng for ease of pronunciation and to make the ending onaut like the others, and you get taikonaut. The Xinhua News Agency has, since China started sending astronauts up, used this modified term (not invented by them but seen on the web variously since at least the late ’90s).

So why wouldn’t they use astronaut?

Well, why wouldn’t they use cosmonaut, for that matter?

You know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut, right? One is American (or at least is with the American space program) and the other is Russian (or at least is with the Russian space program). Both words come from Greek roots – ‘star sailor’ and ‘universe sailor’ respectively; astronaut is the older of the two, around since at least the 1930s. But the Russians were the first to send a person actually into space, and a space program is a big thing to have – only the greatest world powers have them, and the space race was a big big thing – so they went with their own branding, космонавт kosmonavt, anglicized as cosmonaut.

So a pattern was established. Each different space program has to have its own naut! Otherwise you’re sending out your product, your pride, with someone else’s branding! Your marketing would be all for naught! Better for it to be for naut.

Or not?

Frankly, I can’t make myself not see it as silly. But, yes, there are historical political reasons for the difference in word choice. Obviously we make an exception to the usual “call someone what you call them regardless of where they’re from” rule here, a rule usually infringed only by job roles that are culture-specific (e.g., chai wallah for a tea delivery person in India). And the naut suffix has become a handy identifier. If some other country develops its own space program, their astronauts will get their own naut word too, I guess. India’s astronauts, for instance, will apparently (as per the Indian Space Research Organization) be called vyomanauts, from a Sanskrit root for ‘space’ plus the naut (although the echo of vomit presents an uncomfortable overtone).

So the Chinese march to the beat of their own drum. Cue pun on taiko drummers. Oh, wait, taiko drummers are Japanese. Well, if we want to go with Mandarin, taiko really sounds like tai ‘too much’ and kou ‘mouth’ to me. Or, on the brighter side, it could make me think of Tycho as in Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer of the 16th century (they’re all astronomers no matter where they’re from) who made some good steps forward in understanding the planets and their motions (and their non-fixity), steps towards having a space program in the first place.

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kabocha

Posted on November 17, 2013 | 1 comment

I had this for supper tonight. To be precise, I had a soup made of kabocha and turkey stock with curry seasoning. As it bubbled on the stove like saffron-coloured magma, it almost made sounds like “kabocha.” But really, I think “kabocha” sounds something like one of these hitting the ground after being dropped from a high window. The word puts me in mind of the favourite book of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes: Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie. No doubt that’s a reason I thought for a long time that this big squash was called kablocha with an l.

Oh, yes, that’s what a kabocha is: a big squash. In the Latin, it’s a Curcubita maxima. Don’t confuse it with kombucha, which is a kind of fermented tea the health benefits of which are controversial. A kabocha is a big, rustic-looking green or orange winter squash with grainy, sweet orange flesh. It looks a bit like a small pumpkin as conceived by a late-20th-century ceramic artist.

I like the squash well enough, but I like its name much more. Yes, because of the percussive, even explosive sound of it – a kaboom from the bouche, kicking from the back, bursting from the lips, echoing off the tongue tip. But not just that. Its origin is quite the treat.

The immediate origin of kabocha is – did you guess it? – Japanese. You probably don’t think of great big gourds as something Japanese. And fair enough: this squash isn’t from there originally; it was brought in by Portuguese merchants. It’s used quite a bit in Japanese cooking now, though. But the Japanese name comes from the Portuguese name for it.

The Portuguese name is Cambodia abóbora. The Portuguese sailors called it that because they got it from Cambodia. The Japanese adapted that to their phonotactics. So your kabocha is Cambodia just as your cashmere is Kashmir and your cravat is Croat.

But where did Cambodia come from? You may know that in Khmer (the language of the land) the name of the country is Kampuchea. But its name was originally Sanskrit, Kambuja (possibly named after a purported founding king, but it’s not certain). And so my use of curry in the soup gains a little extra justification.

But wait, there’s more. This squash is not the only thing named (mutatedly) after Cambodia. There’s also the gamboge tree and its resin, a resin used to produce a yellow dye – which is used to colour the robes of Theravada Buddhist monks, which are about the same hue as the soup I had for supper tonight.

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snarf

Posted on November 16, 2013 | 1 comment

This really seems to be a word that changes with the generations. Its superficial resemblance to scarf and arf and Nerf doesn’t really play in all that much (well, depending on the scarf you have in mind); the sn onset gives a general sense of having to the do with the nose, which may or may not be relevant, depending on the sense you go with. The sound of sniff has had some effect at times.

Among the set of people I generally hang with, snarf usually means “have liquid that you are drinking come out your nose because you suddenly laugh.” As in “I just about snarfed my beer when I saw that clip of the mayor on the Daily Show.”

However, that is not the definition you will find in Merriam-Webster or The American Heritage Dictionary; it is not one of the several definitions you will find in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is one of the definitions you will find on Urban Dictionary (this one with 781 up votes and 514 down votes). But back to that in a moment.

The normal dictionary definition is ‘eat quickly, voraciously, greedily’ – as in, for instance, “I was a little peckish. I snarfed down a whole box of marshmallow cookies.” And indeed this also gets used. As does another definition you will see in the OED (and, in other wording, on Urban Dictionary, with 392 up votes and 353 down votes – all of these are on Urban Dictionary), “To grab or snatch, esp. without permission; to take or use greedily or rapidly.” As in, “Hey, who snarfed all my cookies?” or “I saw that plate of cookies there, and though I knew it wasn’t for me, I couldn’t help snarfing it down in 20 seconds flat.” Both of these are mid-20th-century definitions, as far as the citations show (this word seems to have appeared in the late 1950s to early 1960s, if we go by the citations). So it has meanings rather like snaffle and the rapid-eating sense of scarf, which is also related to the rapid-eating sense of scoff.

But then there’s the meaning I encountered in my youth when reading Kurt Vonnegut (yes, I was one of those kids who read Vonnegut in high school; I’m sure that tells you a fair bit right there). Vonnegut, in an interview originally published in The Paris Review, recalled his time in high school working on the school newspaper:

…one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles.

So the sniffing of armpits lent itself readily enough to this word, which was at the time entirely in the unregulated domain of teenage slang. But there was, at least in Vonnegut’s mind, from having been told by someone, an official definition: “a person who [goes] around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles.”

And yes, that definition, too, is in Urban Dictionary. Or, to be precise, the definition there is “a person who gets off smelling bicycle seats.” It has 70 up votes and 61 down votes.

Notice, by the way, that Vonnegut graduated nearly 20 years before the first citation in the OED, and yet the word was current slang among his set then. The printed evidence does take time to catch up. Especially with teenagers.

And it seems reasonable enough to think that this word originated with teenagers. They like coming up with new words to solidify their sense of being part of an in-group, and they also have a liking for terms that name some particular thing (real or imagined) they find amusing but unnamed.

So, naturally, they are heavy readers of and contributors to Urban Dictionary. You will often find references that make sense only to a barely pubescent set, and usually some made-up definition that just seems like a fun thing but that has never actually been used in real life. And the votes up and down have as much to do with what’s cool or funny as with what’s accurate.

So we see that the first and third definitions (of 7) on Urban Dictionary for snarf relate to a character of that name on the TV show ThunderCats. These definitions have between them more up votes and a better up-to-down ratio than any other definition. And stuffed in with definition 1 is an unrelated second definition as an adjective meaning “sexy and/or stylish.” Odds of seeing or hearing that in real life: not high unless you hang with just the right set of pimply-faced dweebs. And perhaps not even then.

But among adults who have had time to calm down with and about this word? Just the food-related senses, it seems. The dictionaries speculate that snarf is related to scarf (as in ‘eat quickly’), which comes from scoff (same sense), which comes from or is related to scaff (same sense), which comes from Mars for all anyone knows. But clearly the word had to have emerged from somewhere into the adolescent world of the 1930s, to land on Kurt Vonnegut, and the sense it had at the time was not the sense it has now. There may have been some change between now and then due to sound similarities; the normal course of semantic shift can lead from fetishism to famishment to farcical snafu.

And we should remember that Vonnegut, having been an adolescent at the time, would not necessarily be the most reliable informant for standard usages of the then and there… Read his definition of twerp, immediately following the one for snarf in the same article, and judge for yourself. But maybe snarf down your food and bev first, lest you snarf while reading it.

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huh

Posted on November 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

I like the look of this word, that’s for sure: could be shrugging shoulders, perhaps with an upturned hand in the middle; could be two upside-down cups and one rightside-up, perhaps awaiting a fill or perhaps revealing that the little ball is not where you thought it was and five dollars please, want to try again?

I like the sound, too. It’s about the only word in English that you can really say actually ends in [h] – at least some of the time. It comes in on a breath, pops out that shortest and most neutral of vowels, and then drops off to breath again. It makes me think of “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson, a song full of unanswered questions, misty cultural references, and non sequiturs – and huh (o, do watch it on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIqA3i2zQw).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word huh is “A natural utterance, expressing some suppressed feeling. Also as an expression of interrogation.”

Huh? A natural utterance? What’s that?

Well, according to Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick Enfield, huh is a sort of universal word.

That doesn’t mean it’s the exact same in every language. Indeed, the vowels vary over a sort of fan between the mid central [ə], the mid front [e], and the low central [a], and may be nasalized and/or move into a diphthong that ends high front (as in “hi”); there may or may not be an opening consonant, though it’s [h] or a glottal stop if there is one. Read more at “Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?”

It also doesn’t mean it’s innate. Babies don’t make the sound, as Dingemanse, Torreira, and Enfield point out. It’s learned. You need it once you have speech that you may not hear or understand clearly. It’s part of what linguists call a repair strategy: there has been a disruption in the flow of communication due to someone speaking unclearly or saying something difficult to process, and so it quickly requests a reiteration or clarification. And it seems that it’s similar between languages because of convergent evolution: it just happens to be the best kind of sound for that purpose.

Huh. Whaddya know. Mind you, DT&E don’t talk about that other function of huh in English, or whether it is paralleled in other languages: that bit that the OED calls “expressing some suppressed feeling.” Typically it expresses the act of assimilation of unexpected information – an expression of wonder or a shrug or shake of the head. A quick repair of a rip in reality. An equivalent (at least in the English I know on a daily basis) is “Hm!” – which is more convenient if your lips happen to be closed.

That non-questioning (or perhaps rhetorically questioning) huh is actually the one I use more. If I haven’t heard something clearly, I will more likely – as my wife will attest – say “What?” Which is the other common repair strategy. But somehow we still have huh. Huh, it must be useful. Uh-huh.

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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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