Tag Archives: word tasting notes

craic

Posted on May 19, 2013 | 5 comments

I first encountered this word in Brian Friel’s play Translations, which was produced at the University of Calgary when I was a drama student there. There’s a scene where a character rushes in to report some goings-on; he introduces his narration with “You’re missing the crack!” In this case, crack is the English spelling of the Gaelic word craic.

The word was not defined anywhere in the play, and the context was a bit ambiguous, but we generally got the drift that it meant wild goings-on, or a cracking good time, or something hilarious going down, or or or. The director, Pat Benedict, spoke Irish Gaelic, so she was able to tell anyone who needed to know and didn’t seem to know.

I can now see this word in its Irish spelling whenever I pass by a particular pub here in Toronto, which has a sign proclaiming “Ceol, Caint agus Craic” – meaning ‘music, chat, and fun’. The phrase, it seems, was popularized by an Irish-language TV show of the ’70s and ’80s, SBB ina Shuí, which proclaimed “beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn” – ‘we will have music, chat, and fun’ (how to pronounce the Irish: kind of like “bay kyol, contch oggus crac a-ging”).

So this word really just means ‘fun’. Some people will tell you that it means specifically an Irish style of fun. Well, yes, when an Irish person is speaking Irish and speaking of fun, he or she will be speaking of the kind of fun Irish people have, and you may or may not find that they have fun differently in Ireland from how you are used to having it. Certainly if you’re using an Irish word in English you’re making a reference to Irish culture. But if you’re speaking in Irish about people in some other country having fun in their own way, you’ll still use the word craic. You just have no particular reason to refer to, say, Somali fun as craic if you’re speaking English.

Actually, lately, you’re probably well advised to be careful of the context in which you speak of having craic. If your audience knows you’re making an Irish reference, you can get away with saying “That was an evening filled with craic.” But you do have to recognize even then that crack, which the hearers may take it for, can refer to a range of quite other things. And any time you use this word, you’re going to get the full taste of all those kinds of crack. There’s the whipcrack and crackerjack kind of flavour, which gives a sharpness lacking in the word fun, but some of those different cracks may leave a bad taste in the mouth.

And if you’re a public figure, such as a politician, you certainly need to be wise about where and how you get your craic and how you speak of it. If you should happen to be getting crack for your craic, or even be thought to be getting it, it may leave quite the bad taste in your mouth and may cloud your reputation. You will become a new story – and, on Twitter and elsewhere, you will be the craic of the day, the target of many a wisecrack.

Thanks to Paul Jara for suggesting today’s word.

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schrol

Posted on May 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

I downloaded an app to track my downhill skiing a little while ago. Good app; tells me how many runs I did, how far, maximum speed, maximum pitch, maps it all out. It had a bonus hidden in it, too, a little gem: in the user instructions, it had the word schrol.

I bet you’ve never seen that word before. Wonder what it’s doing in the user guide for a skiing app? Well, here it is in context: “select the device and then select the Apps tab and schrol down until you see the File Sharing section…”

Got it now?

“Aw,” you may be saying. “It’s just a misspelling of scroll.” Yes, that’s true. But tell me: if you speak any languages other than English, in how many of them are you likely to get a misspelling that is less phonetic than the correct spelling?

English spelling isn’t so much a system as a bricolage. It’s like making a picture not by drawing or painting lines, not by taking basic pieces and putting them together, but by clipping bits from magazines and books and pasting them together. And because it’s so weird, we often come to assume that the less phonetic spelling is the correct one if we’re not sure. That’s how kneck has come to be seen as a spelling of neck.

Admit it: if they spelled scroll as skrol or scrol, you might wonder where they went to school, even though those are more phonetic. But if you see schrol you can tell they went to school – not the place, the word: just swap in an r for the first o.

It’s not that there are any English words with schr pronounced [skr]. The sch in all those cases goes the other way, the German way, the “sh” sound. But words like scherzo (Italian) and schizophrenia (from Greek roots) and the occasional Dutch name have given us a chance to make a [sk] with sch, and so there it is: extra letter, less obvious spelling, must be better. At the same time, to make it schrol, they went with a single l, which is actually more phonetic. Why would they do that?

Well, there’s school, yes. Anything else? If you Google schrol, you’ll get some pictures of shiny black tourmaline, even some ebay listings selling pieces of this semi-precious stone. There’s a variety of it called schrol, you see.

Well, called schrol by people who misspell it, I should say. It’s actually schorl. And it’s pronounced like “shorl.” The word comes from German schörl, and it’s not clear where German got it from, but it’s probably after a village (and then we have to wonder where the village got its name).

It’s a fitting stone to go with this lapidary misspelling. The chemical formula of schorl is NaFe²⁺₃Al₆Si₆O₁₈(BO₃)₃(OH)₃OH.

Isn’t it nice how that ends with “OH OH”? What you say when you see this. It’s about as complicated as… well, English spelling. You have accumulated bits and dirt and so on all hardened together, and embedded in the middle of it as you dig on down, the result of many obscure elements combining to produce something expected, is this dark gem. Exactly the same sort of thing happens with schorl tourmaline.

Fine, you don’t have to like it; you don’t have to be a nerd about schrol. But it scrolls my nurd. (Not that I’m going to use it. I’ll just put it in my gem box.)

psoas

Posted on May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Does this word look like it wants to be in some other order? Or perhaps as though it’s shorter than it should be – maybe cut down from psoriasis?

Well, if you spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, your psoas might be out of order – by being shorter than it should be.

It? Yes, psoas is singular. It’s sort of like biceps, but also in a way opposite. Biceps is a singular word that looks like a plural and is often taken for one. Psoas is a singular word that was originally a plural word but got taken for a singular. It comes from Greek, psoa, which had an accusative plural of psoas and a nominative plural of psoai. So now the plural of psoas my be rendered as psoai, even though psoas was originally as plural as psoai: it’s getting pulled sideways instead of up or down. But since it passed through Latin on its way to English, you can also see psoae.

Naturally, we pronounce it without the p – so it sounds like “so us.” Or you could say it like “so ass,” I suppose. Try not to say “so as.”

But what is the psoas? It’s the thing my wife was stretching this morning when she put one foot in a skate and held it over her head, pulling it up from the back (not the side) – while standing on the other foot, of course. It’s also the thing that’s probably at the root of some back problems I’m having, even though it’s not in the back.

It’s a muscle that attaches to your spine and the top of your femur, coming around the front way. It’s much involved when you walk or run: you contract and release it with every one of your steps (pasos in Spanish, just incidentally). (Learn more about it and how to stretch it at stronglifts.com and runnersworld.com.) You stretch it when you twist, and since there are two of it, you can – if you want – see them represented with the s and s in this word.

And if you’re sitting too much of the time, it can get shortened and start making trouble for your back. Since it opposes the gluteus maximus, it can ultimately lead to overstrain on that part of your body (not to mention the back compression it can cause, which can make further trouble). Thus any pronunciation that sounds like “sore ass” is not so far off the mark. Ah, the heartbreak of sore asses, thanks to an overshort psoas.

by

Posted on May 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

A word such as by is really too basic and multifarious to do a tasting of the usual sort on it. Instead, I present a poem – another from Songs of Love and Grammar.

Joined by fate by April

Last fall I was hit by a stop sign
by a truck that failed to stop;
the driver was caught by a red light
and sent off to jail by a cop.
I was taken away by an ambulance
and laid by a nurse in a bed
in a hospital built by a river
and by morning was back from the dead.
I was kept in a room by the river
by the nurse to heal and stay.
I was seen by my bed by the window
by the nurse twice every day.
I was healed by the power of beauty:
I was struck by the nurse’s face
and blown away by her lovely lips
by the time I left that place.
The nurse was known by April
by friends and by people about
and, by George, she was called by the next month
by me to ask her out.
By April she had been courted
by me for half a year
and by then it was time for a ring
to be given by me to my dear.
We were wed by a tree by a lake
by a hill by the moon by a priest
and the joining by God was feted
by the stars by our friends by a feast.
Now I’m joined in my life by April
and by fate we will never be parted,
and my wall is bedecked by the stop sign
by which this all was started.
By the wall a cradle’s been placed,
and by April all will know why:
by and large, my April’s grown pregnant,
and we’ll have a child by and by.

delice

Posted on May 12, 2013 | 3 comments

My dinner this evening was a delice.

What?

Oh, come on. Something that’s capricious is a caprice. The cause of anything malicious is malice. So my dinner was a delice. It…

How do I pronounce it? OK, OK, caprice and malice don’t rhyme. Which does delice go with? I’m going with the rhyme with caprice. Really, otherwise it sounds too much like jealous. Which you would be, by the way, if you knew how good my supper was. It was at this place called…

Yes, true, it could rhyme with vice, since vice is what – originally – is vicious. But I’m still going with the French-style pronunciation. After all, if you’re in Montreal, which is where I am today, you –

In Lachine. I was in Lachine for dinner, and then a dance performance. That counts. It’s now officially part of Montreal. But OK, yeah, it didn’t use to be, and it’s a ways out of the centre. Anyway, the restaurant is called Shangrila, and it serves Nepali, Indian, and Italian food.

No, I’m not making that up! Look it up for yourself. It’s an unprepossessing place, but I enjoyed the heck out of my dinner, which was “chatpate au poulet” (that’s how it was spelled on the menu) and two bottles of Cheetah beer. What’s with the suspicion here?

Mm-hmm, yes, I suppose we could say delicion instead of delice, given that suspicious has suspicion. But we could also say deliciosity. Which, however, is hardly shorter than deliciousness, which is not quite the same as delice, because something can be a delice but not really a deliciousness.

Why? Because I’m not making this up. Look, there really is an English word delice. It’s just not used anymore. Don’t ask me why. They still use the word delice in French.

Well, that’s where English got it from, of course. As I was about to say before. French made delice from Latin delicium, and English just plain old took it. The first meaning was ‘delight, pleasure, joy, enjoyment’, according to the OED. After that came the countable: a thing that causes the sensation of delice. But both senses are out of use now. I don’t know why.

I’ll tell you this: anyone who has what I had for dinner tonight ought surely to be motivated to bring delice back. Deliciousness just takes too long to say when you’re busy eating.

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to wit

Posted on May 10, 2013 | 5 comments

The owl of word country is a wise bird. It speaks of the two most important things: knowledge and love. I came to it to know.

“To wit?” it asked.

“To wit,” I confirmed. This is how it speaks: using the old verb wit rather than the one more common now, know. To wit – that means ‘to know’ or, more loosely, ‘just so you know’.

“To who?” it asked.

“To you, of course,” I said.

“To it,” it said. Meaning go to it: ask the question.

“I want to know of love,” I said.

“To woo,” it said.

“Yes. Is that all there is?”

“To it?”

“Yes. What is the best way to make my love known?”

“To who?” it asked.

“To the object of my affection,” I said. “There must be a best way to make my desires known.”

“To wit: to woo,” it said. I suppose a more Latinate bird might have said “videlicet” rather than “to wit,” but this is an Anglo-Saxon owl.

“But I lack the nerve,” I said.

“Twit,” it said. Abusive creature, this bird.

“You’re telling me that having nerve is its own justification?”

“True,” it said. Or at least I think that’s what it said.

“But do you think she’ll care even one whit what I think?”

“Two whits,” it said. Great. Not sure how to take that. Two very small bits. Not a lot, God wot. (Oh, hey: God wot – there’s another form of the verb wit.)

“Well, OK, but surely she might turn her affections to someone else.”

“To who?” This owl doesn’t really go for formal inflections, I notice. Never to whom.

“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Who else indeed. A-wooing I will go.”

“Do it,” it said.

“Thanks. Thanks for the encouragement.”

“To-whoo,” it said. I think it was just being owlish. As if to confirm that, it added, “Tu-whit, tu-whoo.”

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infra dig

Posted on May 8, 2013 | 2 comments

This little epithet is a favourite of mine. It has such mixed overtones, and its actual use embodies those contrasts: a slangy, casual clipping of a formal term, used by the confident, vaguely slumming elite to refer to something that is as beneath them as the term sounds like it is.

Let’s start with the echoes. Infra probably makes you think of infra-red (actually properly spelled infrared as one word, but for years in my youth I thought that this rhymed with impaired and did not connect it with the light of longer wavelength than red). Dig is what you do to go further into the ground, but it can also be what you do to something that’s groovy. I think infra dig sounds like the name of some late-’60s psychedelic music group, pumping out singles you can frug to.

But what it actually is is a clipping of infra dignitatem, Latin, ‘below dignity’. It belongs to that set of loose Latin usages characteristic of the rich educated set – the sort of toffee-nosed idle rich nobility who bounded around in the Edwardian era wearing whites during the day and always dressing for dinner. People of untold riches and status who always managed to have nicknames such as Binky and Chirps. Imagine P.G. Wodehouse. Or, better, think of any of several movies or series featuring Maggie Smith. You can just hear it: “Oh, but don’t you think that’s rather infra dig, dear?” You wouldn’t want to do something that would dig below you – which is to say undermine you – would you?

This is a term, then, that really speaks mainly of its user. The person speaking it is presenting himself or herself as familiar with Latin to the point of casualness, and not really pedantic about it – a person to whom things come easily, a person who is used to trailing off intonations in a croaky drawl, a person who is not accustomed to questioning his or her superiority. Perhaps these days toffs don’t use it so much; I don’t know. But at least some members of the intellectual elite do: the well-educated, erudite, learnèd and not ashamed to let it be known.

So of course I use this term. I may not be idle rich, but you will seldom find a person more secure in his self-location in the intellectual empyrean. What do I use it in reference to? Rhyming dictionaries, mainly. And anagram finders. To my mind, such things are as utterly infra dig as training wheels on a bicycle. Never mind the old toff idea that associating with the “lower classes” is infra dig. I don’t care about proving I’m rich or high-class – indeed, scorning people on the basis of income is quite beneath me (and not just because I’m not rich). But I simply don’t want to act like someone who, you know, needs help with words. You dig?

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coolth

Posted on May 4, 2013 | 11 comments

He switched on the air, and a pleasing coolth pervaded the room.

What?

I can write that he switched on the heat and a pleasing warmth pervaded the room, right?

So what’s wrong with coolth? Why would we treat it as uncouth?

Don’t bother saying it’s a non-word made up on analogy with warmth. They both come from the same formation, the one that also gave us truth from true, depth from deep, strength from strong (with a vowel alteration), length from long (ditto), sloth from slow, and a few others. And coolth has been in the language since the 1500s at least. It just happens that it has fallen out of favour in recent times and is now used mainly for humour or cuteness. You can still find it in the dictionary.

What are the alternatives? There is coolness. That, like coolth, adds a suffix. It looks perhaps more normal to us now; new words are still being made with ness. But it’s a longer word, and it lacks the minty fresh final sound of coolth. And would we brook warmness? Our alternative is just cool: “In the cool of the evening,” for instance. That uses an adjective as a substantive – in other words, it’s a conversion of an adjective to a noun. We do it with cold: “Come in from the cold.” But we don’t usually do it with warm or hot: “In the warm of the room”? “I have come to appreciate her hot” (rather than hotness)?

And what would the harm be of keeping forms parallel, and having a distinct and concise and soft cold word for the condition of being cool? Why must it now be just a funny form, a word-that-doesn’t-exist-but-should? I really can’t tell you why it has fallen out of fashion and become uncool.

But what we certainly see is that English does not hew much to logic and elegance and all that. No, it goes by what is cool and couth, what we are habituated to and what we have learned. Here is a rule; here are exceptions. Here is a word you see all the time; here is a word you would expect to see quite often but it just doesn’t show up. You infer that the words that should be there but aren’t are somehow, for some reason, uncool. Lacking in coolth, and therefore received without warmth – except the warmth of mirth. Words that match patterns but aren’t used are taken as signs of poor language understanding (we learn early that small children and illiterates use words like goed). And so, though they are cut from the same cloth, they are considered uncouth.

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U-ie

Posted on May 3, 2013 | 2 comments

There are some colloquial words that you might say casually every so often for your entire life and never have a good idea of how to spell, even if you’re highly literate. Today’s word may be about the chiefest among them.

You may not even recognize it on sight. What is it? It’s a colloquial term for a U-turn, as seen in phrases such as He pulled a U-ie, He did a U-ie, He made a U-ie, et cetera. It simply takes the U of the usual term and adds the ie suffix, a diminutive or derivative suffix (as in wheelie, meaning to rear up a vehicle on its hind wheel(s)). The suffix is normally spelled ie, so that’s why I spell it that way here; you can also see the word as U-y. And also Uy and Uie, and the same with a lower-case u. And every single one of them looks like a Dutch family name.

Or the stage name of a Korean pop star. Well, that would be Uee or Uie. Or Yui. She acts, she sings, she looks very, very pretty. I suggest looking her up. Especially if you like pictures of pretty Korean pop stars.

The awkwardness of the spelling of this word is just what we get for having such a slippage between the spelling of words and how they are pronounced. If we wrote everything in the International Phonetic Alphabet to reflect how it’s said, this word would be /ju i/. But, then, if we did that, we wouldn’t call it that, because the turn is shaped like U, not like ju.

I hope that you don’t mind that I put serifs on that U. Older Editions of the Chicago Manual of style specified that, for instances such as T-shirt and U-turn, where the letter described the shape of something, serifs should not be used on the letter as it may carry an implication that somehow the course of action has little flares on the ends. I always found that fatuous. People are not that stupid, and for that matter no one expects a T-shirt to be shaped exactly like a T even sans serif. So more recently the advice has made a 180˚ turn and now it allows the shape-descriptive letter to stay in the same font as the other letters.

The turn is also shaped like how this word moves in your mouth, though. Say these letters a few times in a row: U E U E U E. See how at one point the tongue is constricted towards the front, then it pulls back as the lips round, then the lips pull wide and the tongue is forward again, and on it goes, back and front and back and front, every time a boomerang – a U-turn.

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mammothrept

Posted on May 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Visual: This word seems a strange syncretism: the smooth mass of mammo exploding into the ripped mess of thrept. It’s like a string of firecrackers half exploded. Smooth bumps to the left; torn thorns to the right. Overall, long.

In the mouth: There’s little depth to this word: the consonants are almost all on the lips, except for a trip of the tip of the tongue across the teeth and ridge. The vowels are towards the front, going no farther back than the neutral reduced vowel in the middle. The word starts off soft and humming but then, as if a snare has been tripped, turns to the voiceless. And while the first two syllables are simple consonant-vowel, the last is a thick cluster of four consonants nesting just one vowel.

Echoes: You can’t avoid the mammoth. But also think of mammal and mammogram. And then, at the other end of the size scale from a mammoth, you have thrip, along with trip and rep and ripped and stripped perhaps threat. And maybe even strep throat. I suppose if you think about it you could find stripling, but that’s faint at best (mama’s stripling? hmmm). The ending also makes me think of bankrupt.

Etymology: This comes from Greek μαμμόθρεπτος mammóthreptos ‘brought up by grandmother’ (‘grandmother’ being μάμμη), by way of Latin mammothreptus ‘kept at the breast too long’. It has no relation to mammoth, which comes, somewhat modified, from Russian.

Semantics: A mammothrept, in English, is a spoiled child, or someone of immature judgement. This word is a silver salver version of twerp or douchebag.

Overtones: This word is obviously a very erudite insult. The odds are quite good that your hearer will not know its meaning until you explain it, but as long as you say it with the right intonation and in the right context, the general sense is likely to be clear. It has a sound of a muttering and a spitting, and it has about that taste, too, but coming from not an urchin but a dowager duchess.

Where to find it: You’ll find it in a play by Ben Jonson and a novel by Patrick O’Brian, and not much in between. But once you show this word to your friends, you’re sure to see it here and there in their writings.

How to use it: This word isn’t like an ace in the card game of conversation. It’s like slapping down an odd stone as your bet – a stone that could be priceless or worthless, but no one at the table probably knows which. It’s a big woolly mammoth ripping through the grass of verbiage. Use it in writing when you know your readers will look it up. Use it in speech when you can say it with about the same sound and tone as “Mmm, I’m’a throw up.” Make sure you say it so that it clearly starts with a “mamma” and not a “mammoth.”

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