Tag Archives: word tasting notes

simper, simpering

Posted on December 19, 2023 | 2 comments

You’re a highly literate person, ever so widely versed in the ways of the word, so of course you can picture what these quotes from hits in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (with its cited sources) are describing:

  • a simpering, whimpering child (The Nanny)
  • that simpering, doe-eyed ex-housewife (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)
  • you simpering twit (Batman: The Animated Series)
  • simpering at me over the meatloaf (Confrontation)
  • not posing or simpering, but doing something useful (Paradise Found)
  • am I not simpering hard enough (Miss Sloane)

If you see someone described as “simpering,” you will undoubtedly have a good sense of what the mood and attitude are, and what kind of person and relationship is involved.

But can you define it? 

If I asked you to simper, what would you do?

Should I have asked something simpler? It can’t be a very complex act, can it, simpering? But I asked the question “Without looking it up, how do you define or describe simpering?” on a couple of social media platforms and got varied responses:

  • fake obsequiousness to manipulate
  • self-pitying, self-serving whining
  • way over-the-top fanboying
  • obsequious, performatively unassertive, and gratingly ingratiating
  • affected sweetness/cutesiness; fake attempt to charm
  • coy and falsely shy
  • something like having a silly (embarrassed? self-conscious?) smile
  • smilingly whimpering

It spreads over a saccharine spectrum from sucking up to smiling fatuously. Quotes from literature give an at least equal range – let me turn again to the Corpus of Contemporary American English for simper:

  • learning to simper in that charming southern way (The Adventuress Lady)
  • we also like our heroines to have less simper and more personality (Entertainment Weekly)
  • and the way they simper like starstruck teenage girls (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
  • learn to handle things with a resounding bang, not a girlish simper (Atlanta Journal Constitution)

But in some cases, the author seems to have a different sense of the word:

  • Peter’s expression turned into a mocking simper (Ender in Exile)
  • his lips curled into a simper (Ploughshares)
  • a mean little simper accompanied her statement (Hudson Review)
  • a bored, cruel simper lifts the scar on his lower lip (Harper’s Magazine)

So… what’s going on here? This doesn’t quite seem like simper fidelis.

Let’s have a look at what dictionaries actually give for the meaning of simper.

Merriam-Webster is concise – verb, intransitive: “to smile in a silly, affected, or ingratiating manner”; noun: “a silly, affected, or ingratiating smile.” Smile? No sound or anything like that? Just smile? Not quite; there’s also a transitive form of the verb: “to say with a simper.” Smile plus words.

Wiktionary is also brief – verb: “to smile in a foolish, frivolous, self-conscious, coy, obsequious, or smug manner”; noun: “a foolish, frivolous, self-conscious, or affected smile; a smirk.” OK, but smug is different from the other manners, and a smirk is different from the other kinds of smile. The others are deliberately inferior, status-wise, while smug and smirk are pointedly superior. This needs a bit more thought.

The Oxford English Dictionary is more replete, as is its wont, but in essence it’s in agreement with Merriam-Webster. The intransitive verb is “to smile in a silly, self-conscious, or affectedly coy or bashful manner, or in a way that is expressive of or is intended to convey guileless pleasure, childlike innocence, or the like”; the transitive verb is “to say, utter, or express (something) with a simper, or in a simpering manner”; the noun is “an affectedly coy or bashful smile; a smile expressive of, or intended to convey, guileless pleasure, childlike innocence, or the like; a smirk; an act of simpering.”

That was going well – including the “in a simpering manner” loophole – but there’s that smirk again. So let’s look at the OED’s definition of smirk: “an affected or simpering smile; a silly, conceited, smiling look.” 

Hmm… circularity of definition aside, that’s not how I use smirk – how about you? I go more with Wiktionary’s definition: “an uneven, often crooked smile that is insolent, self-satisfied, conceited or scornful” or “a forced or affected smile.” But then Wiktionary gives simper as a synonym of smirk. 

I’m sure I’m just missing something here. Facial expressions convey attitudes and negotiate relationships, and perhaps you could tell me how something that conveys “affectedly coy or bashful” can equally convey “insolent or conceited.” The looks might be similar in the broad strokes, but it’s like sugar and salt: you can say they’re both granular and white, but when you put them into use there’s no confusion as to which is which.

But all these writers quoted are such fine writers, really quite respected, and they’re all published and paid and widely read; I guess there’s just something new I’ve learned from them today. 

But, then, the other question: Is simpering really a matter of a kind of smile above all? Couldn’t you simper without smiling? Say, by some other gesture, or by words alone? Gosh, I don’t know, I couldn’t possibly say…

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

dollop

Posted on December 12, 2023 | 1 comment

OK, how much is a dollop?

Does it matter what it’s a dollop of? Is a dollop of mashed potatoes more than a dollop of whipped cream?

Don’t tell me to look in a dictionary. I’m asking you what you think without looking at the book. Anyway, I have looked in a dictionary. Several, in fact. Here are the definitions of dollop in Merriam-Webster:

  1. chiefly British : an indefinite often large quantity especially of something liquid
  2. a lump or glob of something soft or mushy
  3. an amount given, spooned, or ladled out : portion
  4. a small lump, portion, or amount
  5. something added or served as if in dollops

So. Is it a large amount (1), a small amount (4), or just a portion (3) or glob (2)? An 1819 definition quoted by Oxford says “a dollop is a large quantity of any thing,” but current usage suggests that a dollop doesn’t go as far as it used to.

If you do an image search for dollop on Google, you will mainly find images of a dollop of whipped cream, which is that amount of whipped cream that fits on a piece of pie and rises to a peak. It’s larger than, say, a Hershey’s Kiss, but it’s surely less than the amount of whipped cream I put on a piece of pie when using the canned sort: hold can upside down and dispense for at least three seconds while laughing maniacally.

And yet my Marge-Simpson’s-hair-shaped pile of whipped cream is still less by volume than the amount of mashed potatoes that would be described as a dollop. Why? In part because a serving of mashed potatoes is by habit, custom, and good sense much more than a serving of whipped cream. And also, and relatedly, in part because we use a bigger spoon for the mashed potatoes.

I don’t know about you, but for me, “dollop” expresses the singular gesture of splopping one good serving of some heapable mass off a serving spoon onto a plate or other surface, such that it might plausibly make the sound “dollop.” It doesn’t have to be food – I suppose one could talk of a dollop of oil paint or mortar or wet cement – but it typically is food.

Of course, that’s entirely an impressionistic personal sense; there’s no reason to think that’s where dollop comes from. We don’t know exactly where it does come from – its origins are lost in the mists of time – but, starting in the 1500s, the oldest senses of dollop (often spelled dallop) meant ‘patch, tuft, or clump of grass or weeds’: for instance, “Dallop, rank tufts of growing corn where heaps of manure have lain” (R. Forby, Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary).

I’m tempted to say that the sense transferred from the vegetation to the manure, but I don’t know that. Indeed, there’s nothing to say with absolute certainty that the modern dollop comes right from that. It could be mere coincidence. By 1830, dollop was already being used to mean ‘large quantity’ or ‘big shapeless lump’. And over the intervening years… well, you know. The sense has become ever more formless and impressionistic. As Lenie (Midge) Johansen’s Dinkum Dictionary puts it, a dollop is a “shapeless and messy lump of food” – and I don’t think that’s an exclusively Australian definition.

But if I’m going to ask you how you use dollop, I should really ask, do you use it? Is it a part of your active vocabulary? You may have an aunt or grandmother who uses the term, but would you say “Give me dollop of mashed potatoes”? Or is it more a word that you just expect to hear or see in certain contexts – such as recipes and food reviews?

Magazines, newspapers, and websites, in that order, are the top three places you’ll see dollop, if the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English are indicative. It’s not quite a tawny-gourd-ism like pontiff or temblor, but it seems to be used by the kind of people who write things like “munching thick crusty slabs” and other slightly self-conscious feature article stylings. 

And what do they say comes in dollops? As I look through some of the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find that dollops can be of yogurt, ice cream, mascarpone, pesto, mayonnaise, packaged coleslaw (really, People magazine?), cornbread mixture, hot sauce (really really, People magazine? hot sauces are too runny to dollop in my world), and other things that go into recipes (and in Country Living magazine, a dollop of peppermint filling is about 1.5 tablespoons, a dollop of orange cream filling is about 1.5 teaspoons, and a dollop of preserves is about 1 teaspoon), along with hair mousse, shaving cream, shampoo, moisturizing foot cream, and such manners of thing; also, in extended senses, of melting snow, tritium, and land (a small island); but then also, and fairly often, you can have “a dollop of” such abstract things as cuteness, comedy, drama, fun, government intervention, and “old-fashioned sex-and-violence soap opera” (thanks, Newsweek).

So, in other words, a dollop is, generally, a nonspecific quantity that can be added all at once (in one gesture) of something that can be seen as a thick but fluid mass. You can’t have a dollop of steak (oh, I hope not), and you can’t have a dollop of wind (can you?), and not everyone would say you can have a dollop of soup. You can usually fit a dollop into your mouth, but that’s not the defining characteristic. And a dollop is not precisely shaped: it looks about the same from any angle. Which is one more way the word dollop is apposite… rotate the word 180 degrees and it still looks about the same.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

gloom

Posted on December 8, 2023 | 1 comment

Do you have a dim view of gloom, or a gloomy view of dimness? Many people do; the gathering or already gathered dark is not everyone’s favourite. But I like the rise of the gloaming, the crepuscular turning from the sun, and the tenebrous hours that follow; it makes it so much easier to find the sources of light near you, and to delight in contrasts.

Gloom is a useful good old Anglo-Saxon word, descended from the Old English verb glumian ‘be gloomy’ – and yes, glum is related. But where glum is dull and dumpy, gloom looms and booms. It plays well for its sense: it has that gl- phonaestheme associated with visual things (more often gleaming and glittering, though), and it has several rhyme partners – the top three most used can all be found in George Santayana’s “Sonnet XXV”:

As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
As gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth
Spied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom;
As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb
The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:
So in this great disaster of our birth
We can be happy, and forget our doom.

Occasionally a few other rhymes show up:

O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Ave Atque Vale”

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
—Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”

Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
The pale high-altar.
—Edith Wharton, “Chartres”

You can see how often it is used for contrast, juxtaposed with something bright or pretty. It’s sometimes paired with gleams, as for instance in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth”:

I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the school-boy’s brain

And Algernon Charles Swinburne really goes to town in “Nephelidia”:

Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?

But even without the rhymes, it seems to beg for something far less sombre to contrast with it:

In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
—Rabindranath Tagore, (“Keep me fully glad…”)

Into the gloom of the deep, dark night,
With panting breath and a startled scream;
Swift as a bird in sudden flight
Darts this creature of steel and steam.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Engine”

And, at last, it partakes in playtime, as with T.S. Eliot in “Whispers of Immortality”:

The sleek Brazilian jaguar
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

Gloom, we see, is not simply an absence of light; it is an invitation of light. You know that the gloom will at some time, in some way, be relieved, be it by candle, or lamp, or lambent moon, or the dawn’s early light. Or by simply making light, as Edna St. Vincent Millay found in “The Penitent,” which (by grace of the sunsetting of copyright) I will present in full:

I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning—
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My Little Sorrow would not weep,
My Little Sin would go to sleep—
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad.
And, “One thing there’s no getting by—
I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

dreary

Posted on December 5, 2023 | 1 comment

We are in the season of dreary weather now, and shall remain largely in it for some months. There will be breaks of sun, yes, and festive decorations for a time, but by and large it will be dreadfully bleary and drab and uncheery as we drudge, weary, through the grey rain and dull snow, longing even for the quick red break of a brake light.

Dreary is a word that seems well suited to its sense, and it is readily used as a clear brushstroke in poetry. It is a word of winter, often, and of wintry places:

Be left more desolate, more dreary cold
Than a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow
’Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—
Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.
—William Wordsworth, “Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant”

Let the wind moan through the pine-trees
With a dreary, dirge-like whistle,
Sweep the dead leaves on its bosom,—
Moaning, sobbing through the branches,
Where the summer laughed so gayly.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Below”

All day the gusty north-wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicëd elements,
The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
—John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl”

Ae dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light
—Robert Burns, “Address to the Devil”

I’m on my way to Canada,
That cold and dreary land;
The dire effects of slavery,
I can no longer stand.
—Joshua McCarter Simpson, “Away to Canada”

But it is perhaps even better known and loved in poetry for rhyming with weary:

He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light,
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
—Ethel Lynn Beers, “The Picket-Guard”

She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Mariana”

“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary;”
“Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak!”
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—
Our grave-rest is very far to seek!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”

Of the mother I think, by her sick baby’s bed,
Away in her cabin as lonesome and dreary,
And little and low as the flax-breaker’s shed;
Of her patience so sweet, and her silence so weary,
With cries of the hungry wolf hid in the prairie.
—Alice Cary, “The Window Just Over the Street”

But of thee it shall be said,
This dog watched beside a bed
Day and night unweary, —
Watched within a curtained room,
Where no sunbeam brake the gloom
Round the sick and dreary.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To Flush, My Dog”

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary;
Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
—Rupert Brooke, “Peace”

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.
—Edward Thomas, “Roads”

All the world is sad and dreary
Everywhere I roam.
O dear ones, how my heart grows weary,
Far from the old folks at home.
—Stephen Foster, “Old Folks at Home” (revised version)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

And sometimes we get both winter and weary:

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
While the snow falls on me colder and colder.
—Christina Rossetti, “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary”

Thick throng the snow-flakes, the evening is dreary,
Glad rings the music in yonder gay hall;
On her who listens here, friendless and weary,
Heavier chill than the winter’s doth fall.
—Julia Ward Howe, “Lyrics of the Street”

Dreary is, in fact, seldom rhymed with anything other than weary. Oddly (or not), no one seems to rhyme it with dearie or teary or even bleary, let alone query or cheery. But Longfellow did (a bit dodgily) rhyme it with Miserere:

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere
Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Arsenal at Springfield”

But dreary was not always a word of dullness. Its sense of ‘dull, drab’ came from a sense of ‘doleful, melancholy, sad’, which descended from the Old English dreorig, which meant ‘grievous, horrid, gory, bloody, sad’ – senses that seem still to have been present in the mind of Edmund Spenser in 1590:

The messenger of death, the ghastly Owle
With drery shriekes did also her bewray
—The Faerie-Queene, book 1, xxx

So fiersly, when these knights had breathed once,
They gan to fight returne, increasing more
Their puissant force, and cruell rage attonce.
With heaped strokes more hugely then before,
That with their drerie wounds and bloudy gore
They both deformed, scarsely could be known.
—The Faerie-Queene, book 1, xlv

The Proto-Germanic origin of dreorig, *dreuzagaz, meant ‘bloody’, too. But in its other modern Germanic descendants the redness has also receded, perhaps under the cross-influence of *drūsijaną (‘look down, mourn’): Dutch treurig means ‘sad, gloomy’ and German traurig is ‘sad, sorrowful’.

Still, a lingering spatter of bellicose blood may be discerned in a few places:

Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms:
These many crowded about me,
With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts
—Ezra Pound, “Three Cantos”

Is it really there? You can hear it if you put your ear close, as to a seashell. Or perhaps you’re hearing only the roaring of a dull and dreary wind.

Well. Close the door, light the fire, let winter be wearisome beyond the window, and open a book of poetry. Life will never be fully dreary if one can always do verse.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

blither

Posted on November 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,” Maurice Switzer wrote (I have no idea who he was, but I can attribute it to him). In other words, keep your mouth shut and you won’t let the cat out of the box. 

But we also know that ignorance is bliss. From which it follows that the more nonsense you let pass your lips the happier you will famously be – you will be nice and silly. To be blither, blither. The more you blither, the blither you are.

Whaddya mean, that makes no sense? I’m saying you are blither when you blither.

Ahem.

The more blather you emit, the more blithe you become.

What was so hard about that?

OK, do you want to know how we come to have two words, blither and blither, which are not said the same (in case it’s not obvious, blither rhymes with wither, while blither sounds like er tacked onto blithe, which rhymes with writhe and tithe), and which do not mean the same (the one means ‘talk foolishly, babble’ and the other means ‘happier, more carefree’)? Do you want to know how it has happened that, with a little vowel movement, you can make such a quantum leap in sense? It begins with two Old Germanic words, one of which entered Middle English from Old Norse and the other of which came up from Anglo-Saxon.

For the one blither, Old Norse blaðra ‘talk stupidly’ was a verbing of Old Norse blaðr ‘nonsense’. It became Middle English blather, which, in the north of England and in Scotland, shifted up and forward in the mouth to become blether. And then blether shifted even farther up to become blither, which still meant the same thing. All three vowels, a, e, and i, are short, so it’s like when can gets pronounced “ken” and “kin” – kin ya see thet? 

And all three words stayed in usage, though blether is generally seen as a Scottish version, and blither is used mainly in the adjectival participle blithering, which is now (and since at least the late 1800s) mostly used to modify idiot (or a similar word). Indeed, when one speaks of “a blithering idiot” or of “blithering incompetence,” there isn’t even necessarily an image of babbling incoherently; it’s just a withering criticism of dithering – it means more ‘utter fool’ than ‘uttering fool’. But you can still use blither as a verb, and it will carry with it that stronger association with personal inanity: “Stop blathering” conveys “Stop talking senselessly” while “Stop blithering” conveys “Stop talking like a senseless person.”

For the other blither, Anglo-Saxon blīþe ‘happy, gentle’ – which in its turn came from earlier words meaning pretty much the same thing – became Middle English blithe. That became Modern English blithe, which has the comparative form blither and the superlative form blithest. Thanks to uses like “blithe spirit” and “blithe indifference,” it now carries a tone not so much of ecstatic bliss as of ignorant bliss, or at least lack of care.

But it’s only because of the vagaries of historical phonology that blither has come to look like blither but not quite to sound like it. There are two things that brought blīþe towards blaðra. (Well, three, but the final e that disappeared in the pronunciation of the adjective is restored in the comparative.)

First, you may notice that both ð in blaðra and þ in blīþe became th, which is in fact what always happened – those two letters weren’t in use in French or Dutch or other languages exerting influence on Middle English. You may also remember from your Icelandic lessons that ð is voiced like in this while þ is voiceless like in thin. Well, in Old English, phonology intervened and caused voicing changes, so because there was a vowel on either side of the þ in blīþe, it also became voiced. 

Second, you may notice from the macron that the I in blīþe is long (they didn’t write it with a macron at the time, but it’s a modern scholarly practice to aid those of us who don’t speak the language on a daily basis). What that means is that it was actually said for a longer duration, and also a bit higher in the mouth – so instead of like in shin, it was like in machine, only maybe more as your nephew says it when talking about his car: machiiine.

But then what happened is, over a stretch of time in later Middle English, English’s long vowels became English’s long vowels, by which I mean they went from being actually long to being what we now think of as “long,” which with vowels means a whole different vowel, or rather a diphthong. Long a, which was once as in “stick out your tongue and say aa,” became basically short e leading into short i. Long e moved up into i-land. And long I became more like short a leading into short i. (Look up “Great Vowel Shift” for more details.)

But of course we didn’t change how we wrote it. That would make too much sense. And making sense is not what English’s sound and spelling are about. But we love it for its chaos. And we use it as a filter for who knows and who doesn’t. If you want to be thought of sound mind, you must mind the sound.

So, in the matter of blither and blither, a closed mouth is like Schrödinger’s box. As long as you have no sound (or adequate context), you can’t tell which side you’re on of the equation “ignorance is bliss” (or, more precisely, “evidence of ignorance is increase of bliss”). As long as the cat’s got your tongue, the two are in quantum superposition. But once you open your mouth, it’s like opening Schrödinger’s box and looking in on the cat.

So now you know. Happy?

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

enervated, restive

Posted on November 16, 2023 | 1 comment

Maury flopped down on an armchair in Domus Logogustationis and, uncharacteristically, opened a beer and drank straight from the can for several seconds. Elisa Lively, who was at a table entertaining a glass of crémant de Loire and vice versa, looked up. “Thirsty?”

Maury paused his refreshment. “I was feeling restive, so I decided to emulate the example of our friend here” – he nodded in my direction – “and get some exercise.” He hoisted the can for another second and a half, then lowered it and added, “Specifically, I went for a run.”

“And how do you feel now?” Elisa said.

“Enervated.” Maury drank another swallow, then paused to look at the label. It was an English-style ale from Great Lakes Brewery named Pompous Ass. He raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, I brought it,” I said, and gestured with my parallel can.

“Cannibal,” Maury muttered.

“Oh, it’s great that you’re discovering the benefits of exercise,” Elisa said. “I try to do it at least once a year.” She did a quick biceps curl to lift her glass to her mouth again.

“Benefits?” Maury said. “I suppose they will reveal themselves at length.”

“Well, you just said you felt energized and motivated.”

Maury coughed and I almost spat my ale. “Enervated,” Maury said.

“Right,” Elisa said.

Maury cleared his throat. “It comes from Latin enervatus, literally ‘having the nerves taken out of’. It means weakened or, notwithstanding how it sounds, de-energized.”

“Oh,” Elisa said. “Huh. …But at least you’re well rested.”

“I suppose I will be, if my muscles don’t find new ways to cramp.”

“You said you were feeling rested before,” Elisa said.

Maury paused, blinked twice, and then said, “Restive.”

“Which,” I volunteered, “means restless. Of course.” I drank some beer so as not to giggle.

“Well,” Maury said, turning in my direction. “You know it’s not quite that.”

“These days,” I said, “it’s very often used to mean antsy, champing at the bit, feeling cooped up and wanting to break loose.” I added a musical quote from Queen: “I want to break free…”

Elisa, inspired, chimed in with a line from Loverboy: “Why don’t you turn me loose!”

“And yet,” Maury shouted to make us stop, “ironically, it first referred not to an animal that wanted to move but to one that didn’t want to move. A stubborn creature that would not budge.” Maury switched pointedly to French: “Il veut rester.”

“Oh, yeah,” Elisa said. “Funny. Rester in French means ‘stay’.”

“So it was first a stubborn animal that wanted to stay instead of go,” I said, “and then more broadly one that was disobedient, and the sense has now sloshed over generally to refer to wanting to go instead of stay.”

Elisa sang “Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da” to the tune of the guitar riff from The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

“And all the rest,” Maury said to rein her in. “And all of it from the same Latin resto that gives us rest.”

“Speaking of which,” Elisa said, “does either of you guys want to go to a restaurant?”

“Which, resto notwithstanding, is not related to rest,” I said.

“Really?” Elisa said.

“It’s from the same Latin source as restoration,” Maury said. “Because good food and beverage is restorative.”

“So then you’re coming with me, right?” Elisa said, smiling and standing. “You said you were enervated. So come get your nerves back.” She tossed back the last of her glass. “Let’s go, sport!”

Maury looked momentarily bemused and nonplussed, but then terminated the rest of his beer and stood. “She has a point.” He looked around. “And I feel a bit… cooped up in here.”

“James?” Elisa said, looking at me expectantly.

“Sorry,” I said, looking at my watch and knowing I would soon be expected at home. “Gotta run.”

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

minuscule

Posted on November 14, 2023 | 3 comments

Sometimes the smallest things can make the difference. A jot. A tittle. An iota. The difference between “you” and “I.” No, not between you and me – between the letter u and the letter i.

If you are the type to pay attention to type, you probably know this little detail already. If I am to typecast you, you are a person of letters, not extraverted (and certainly not extroverted), and so not disposed to make room for someone who only has i’s for u. They may be inclined to minis, but for you they are merely a minus. Oh, you are absolutely down to the letters. Specifically the lower-case letters.

Back in the early 1700s in English – and earlier than that in French – the distinction was clear enough. It was all about character, specifically the character on the page: was it an uncial or a half-uncial, a large or small letter, capital or not, majuscule or minuscule? Is it I or is it merely i?

The words majuscule and minuscule came from Latin maiusculus and minusculus, adding to maior and minor (in modified form) the diminutive suffix -culus, which in this case made them mean not actually ‘small capital’ and ‘really little letter’ but just ‘somewhat larger’ and ‘somewhat smaller’ – specifically referring to letters. For added distinction, the stress on minuscule in English was on the second syllable: /mɪˈnʌskjuːl/. No one was likely to alter the spelling when it was said that way. And so it stayed until the later 1800s.

And then some writers started using minuscule to mean ‘small, insignificant’ in general. No one has ever (as far as I know) referred to houses or persons or paycheques as “majuscule” however capital-intensive they may have been, but all of those and many other things have been called “minuscule” when diminutive, miniature, minimal.

And, no doubt under the influence of the other min words, the pronunciation shifted. It may have started shifting sooner – after all, the stress on majuscule is also on the first syllable, so there’s a certain tidiness to matching that – but it was only in the 1960s that dictionaries started giving their imprimatur to putting the stress on the min.

One reason we know the stress was likely sometimes put on the first syllable before that, dictionaries be damned, is that the spelling miniscule first shows up in the late 1800s, around the same time as the word was coming into use as a general adjective. That spelling grew over the course of the 1900s, even catching up to minuscule by 1980 if we can believe Google Ngrams, but then subsiding before surging anew – though it still lags behind minuscule, for which we probably have spell checkers to thank.

I mean, really, though. Minus, as we say it, has a “long i”; minuscule sounds the same, until the last syllable, as minister. The power of analogy in language change is absolutely majuscule. And another way it affects this word is that we know that min means ‘small’ and we are used to added length being an intensification – if teeny-weeny is smaller than teeny and a thingumajig is fussier than a thing and longer strings of swearwords convey more asperity than shorter ones, why should not minuscule (which, by the way, has a distinct air of molecule about it) mean something extra small?

You could argue, certainly, that minuscule could be even smaller if it had, instead of that u, an i, classically the smallest letter in the alphabet (taken from the Greek iota, which also gives us jot as in jot and tittle). And you could also argue that since minuscule really means ‘somewhat small’ and refers to lower-case letters, the form miniscule could be the one that means ‘super-duper small’ – a useful distinction. But, even though dictionaries now accept both spellings, if you are the fussy type, you probably won’t. And that’s an important difference between u and i.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

deliquesce

Posted on November 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

The trick is not to deliquesce.

Some people will tell you to keep your powder dry, by which they mean keep your firearms available for a fight. Others will keep their face powder dry by holding back their tears. Some people will not stay dry; they will melt – or rather, since we’re mostly liquid, they will lose the solids that are holding them together. They may give off a little liquid, and that’s OK, in fact it can be good; but they may melt altogether, and that is not good. And on the other hand, some people will help others keep dry: they are nature’s desiccants; they absorb the moisture. It’s a good role to play in the world, but it, too, can be taken too far. Either way, whether you melt into your own tears or melt into someone else’s, if you deliquesce, you are lost.

A quick etymological excursus here. If you deliquesce, you are deliquescent, which, I need you to know, is not delinquent. And on the other hand, deliquescence is not deliquium either – not any more (at one time they could be synonyms). You will see something liquid in this word, and not just the /l/ (or the susurration of the /s/); the liqu is the same one as in liquid and means the same thing. But while liquid is in the middle of the word, a deliquescent thing is quickly in the middle of liquid. The esce is the same as in coalesce and somnolescence and adolescent: it refers to becoming. Becoming liquid, in this case.

There are two ways for a thing to deliquesce. One is for it simply to melt and drain away. The other is more chemically devious. Here’s how it is: substances that draw moisture from the air are hygroscopic. They can serve as desiccants, drying out things around them, and as they collect that moisture, they of course become less dry themselves, going from powder to paste, perhaps. But some things – such as sodium hydroxide and calcium chloride – don’t stop there. Given the chance, they keep drawing moisture until they are dissolved in it. And even then, that solution will continue to draw more moisture. Look at this time lapse, 22 minutes compressed into 12 seconds:

The calcium chloride readily bewitches to itself all the water from a neighbouring vessel, until it is lost in it.

We all know people like this. People who take on so much from others that they lose themselves in it, and still they take more. People whose very existence is just to keep taking others’ tears – or sweat, their worries or fears or stress or work overload. They are the people who always have a solution, but the solution is their own dissolution. They are still in there somewhere, but can you see them? No – they didn’t keep their powder dry. You can only see their effect.

And we all know people who deliquesce the other way: they may seem solid, but if there is any heat or pressure, when you try to grasp them, they will run through your fingers and drain away.

It’s a lovely-sounding word, deliquesce, and deliquescence is a useful property of some substances at some times and in some ways, and it is human to melt a little and human to want to help others be a bit drier, but excess humanity and excess humidity can make the solution the problem.

Thanks to Chris L. on Patreon for suggesting deliquesce.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

diapason

Posted on November 8, 2023 | 2 comments

The first thing I learned about diapason is that it’s a stop.

The second thing I learned is that it doesn’t stop.

Somewhere after that I learned how to pronounce it.

About that last thing first: dia as in dialogue or diagram (not as in diagonal, though that is also the same dia etymologically); pason with a stressed “long a” and with the s as either [s] or [z] – so “pay son” or “pays ’n.” So, in full, like “die a-pacin’,” or the same with a [z] for the [s].

The dia is from the Greek διὰ ‘through’ and the pason is from πασῶν ‘all’; it’s short for ἡ διὰ πασῶν χορδῶν συμφωνία, hē dia pasōn chordōn symphōnia, ‘the concord through all the notes of the scale’. Originally in English we used it to mean an octave – not all the notes in an octave, but just the interval of an octave, say middle C and high C. But then it came to mean all the notes – the whole gamut – and then the whole range of a voice or an instrument and then, just, you know, everything, but in harmony. The nonstop harmony of the spheres, even. The eternal cycle of life and death and rebirth: be born, live, die and pass on, and then the next octave of existence…

And in the middle of all that it also came to be a name for the main range of organ pipes: in a pipe organ, with all its different kinds of pipes, the diapason is the set of pipes that sound like organ pipes (as opposed to emulating flutes, strings, or reeds), extending over the whole range of notes, from the one-foot pitch to the 32-foot pitch. So on a pipe organ console, in the English-speaking world, there will be one or more stops labelled Diapason. Which is where I first saw it – not on an actual church pipe organ but on a home organ.

I am put in mind of diapason once again as I’m listening to In Search of the Lost Chord, the 1968 album by The Moody Blues. I’m playing it because I’ve been editing an academic book on psychedelic drugs, which reminded me of this classic album, which I first heard in my childhood; my vinyl copy was stamped with our home address circa 1970 by my dad, from whose library I souvenired it and who himself received it from another family member. As I type this, “Legend of a Mind” with its refrain “Timothy Leary!” is playing, but it’s Graeme Edge’s spoken poem “The Word” that I have most in mind:

Two notes of the chord, that’s our full scope
But to reach the chord is our life’s hope
And to name the chord is important to some
So they give it a word, and the word is ōm

And what a swell chord it is. This celestial choir has often been presented as available only through organ-ized religion, full stop, but the psychonautical spirit of The Moody Blues seeks an unlimited direct encounter with the diapason of the mind, of the soul, of all humanity: the whole human race, all walks of life, with one accord, to follow the road before us one foot after another and die a-pacing – and then, unstoppable, continue on ōm.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

snooze

Posted on October 31, 2023 | 1 comment

Oops, sorry, took a little long to write this one. I guess I was snoozing… Well, I snoozed, I losed. No, wait: I snost, I lost. No, that doesn’t work either…

Funny—we’ve had the expression “You snooze, you lose” (at first more often seen as “If you snooze, you lose” or “When you snooze, you lose”) since the early 20th century, especially gaining in popularity starting in the 1960s and ’70s, but no one ever seems to want to look back at past occasions of snoozing and losing. Couldn’t English have been good enough to give us a strong past tense form of snooze?

It would help if we could sniff out where the word came from. It seems to have just snuck into the language while we were all sleeping. Its first known use in print is from the 1700s; Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists a 1753 entry from a glossary of cant (thieves’ lingo): “The Cull is at Snoos; The Man is asleep.” The snooze spelling showed up 30 years later. Etymology? The Oxford English Dictionary shrugs and says “apparently a cant or slang word of obscure origin.” Merriam-Webster says simply “origin unknown.” Green’s offers “[? SE snore + doze].”

Wiktionary seems just slightly more helpful: “Unknown. Compare Dutch snoezelen (‘to snooze’) or snusa (‘to snore lightly’).” Hmm… if I look at the entry for snoezelen it says “Blend of snuffelen (‘to sniff’) +‎ doezelen (‘to doze’)” but gives no indication there of how old the word is. And a bit of searching seems to indicate that the word was first seen in the early 1980s, and is associated mainly with a kind of sensory therapy. So it’s not the source of the word snooze… quite possibly the reverse.

Well, fine. We have snooze. And we like snooze. It has a certain snugness and a sound of snoring, doesn’t it? And that comfy buzz of dozing (perhaps with the aid of booze). Sometimes of dozing through a buzzer, too – thanks to the Snooze button on your clock radio (or similar device). I wouldn’t say it oozes comfort, but only because oozing is kind of a gross image – more like one you would choose for some loser schmoozing on a cruise.

There’s nothing so louche about snoozing; it’s simply somnolent. It’s true, it axiomatically entails missing opportunities – if you zone out, you get zoned out – but it doesn’t get you into trouble, either… or into any other indulgence. As my brother once said, “Try the sleep diet: you snooze, you lose. No pain, no gain!” Well, verily did I snooze, and yea, I did lose… time, anyway.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,