Tag Archives: word tasting notes

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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hackneyed

Posted on October 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

Are the Rolling Stones hackneyed?

They just came out with a new album, Hackney Diamonds, almost 60 years after their first album! Are hackneyed diamonds tired old gems? At this point, are the Stones just a bunch of hacks flogging a dead horse? Do they keep at it for lack of a better choice? After all, Mick’s 80 years old. It gives kind of a new edge on being “shattered, shattered”… but with an unexpected facet.

You see, Hackney diamonds is a slang term for the shattered glass of a window that’s been broken for burglary. (“Whole Wide World,” the fifth track on the album, starts with “The streets I used to walk on are full of broken glass” – but doesn’t mention Hackney.) Hackney is a district on the north side of the East End of London, and it’s historically… not posh. But nowadays, it’s hip and full of hidden gems. None of the Stones are actually from there, though (and, although part of Hackney is called Clapton, Eric Clapton isn’t from there either).

The exact origin of the name Hackney is unclear, but it has nothing to do with knees. The -ey suggests that in Old English it referred to an island, probably in the marshland between two streams. The Hackn- part… well, that hasn’t been hacked decisively. By the way, while hack as in ‘chop’ or ‘break into’ isn’t related to Hackney, hack as in ‘writer for hire’ is. It’s taken from the sense ‘horse for hire’, which is shortened from Hackney, as in the place. 

It seems there were meadows in or near Hackney where such horses were pastured. The thing about horses for hire is that they got worn out over time. Ridden too hard, too long, too often. Before you’re flogging a dead horse, you’re already dealing with something that’s gotten hackneyed – used up like a tired old jade, long since broken. Hackney doesn’t have much in the way of horse pastures now, but hackney was a byword for hired horses by the 1400s; by the 1500s it was applied to hired persons (not in a positive tone), and before 1600s it was applied to idioms tired from overuse. Hackneyed (past participle) appeared a few decades after that. Which means that it’s been ridden hard and long too. But still it perseveres, like a diamond (I’d say unbroken, but it has also been cracked down to hack)… 

As a side note, one stable keeper (though not in Hackney) dealt with the problem of people wanting to take out just his best horses – wearing them down quickly – and not wanting to take out his tired horses by offering them a simple choice: take the horse closest to the door, or don’t take a horse. The stable owner was named Hobson, and now we call something a Hobson’s choice if it’s not really a choice, is it.

But did the Rolling Stones face a Hobson’s choice?

I mean, come on, they don’t need the money. They don’t need the fame. They don’t walk on streets full of broken glass. But on the other hand, the album doesn’t sound tired and trite. I guess the thing is that a rolling stone doesn’t get to choose whether it keeps rolling.

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yclept

Posted on October 20, 2023 | 2 comments

This is a word that says “please clap.” Or should I say, it claps for itself. It is one bowtie-wearing word. But it’s like wearing a bowtie on the beach. 

No, no, that’s not even it; a bowtie on the beach would be like saying “Methinks the lady doth protest too much” or perhaps even “Methinketh thou dosteth forgetteth to whomst thou art speakinge.” It plays to the groundlings. Yclept is, hmm, maybe like serving Kool-Aid at a picnic in a Shreve, Crump & Low gurgling cod pitcher, or pouring it through an antique silver port funnel to get the sand out. Yclept is a word that on the one hand is an absolute cod, but on the other hand is a filter: the very ability to recognize that it is a real word and not a typo or keysmash bespeaks a relatively rarefied education. Yclept is not a word for people who use a pseudo-calligraphic font to signify fanciness; it is one for those who use a font that emulates the rough type sets of half a millennium ago. It says “ha, ha, look at me, I’m fancy, ha ha, no but actually I am, ha ha.”

Yclept, I will say for those who have never had it inflicted on them, means ‘called, named’, as in “The old and tenantless dwelling yclept Fieldhead,” but it’s not for street use. It is “occasionally used as an adjective or verb for humorous or archaic effect,” as Wiktionary says – or, as Oxford more repletely explains, “much affected as a literary archaism by Elizabethan and subsequent poets; in less dignified writing often used for the sake of quaintness or with serio-comic intention.” It is a word that Shakespeare used, and Milton, but only once each; it is a word Charlotte Brontë used for archaism (“yclept Fieldhead,” in Shirley), as Henry Fielding did a neat century before her (“thoſe fair River Nymphs, ycleped of old the Napææ,” in Tom Jones), and James Joyce did fourscore years after (“a young learning knight yclept Dixon,” in Ulysses). It is a word that Kurt Vonnegut definitively wiped his butt with in Bluebeard: “When I saw them, they were painted the palest rose-orange, not unlike the Sateen Dura-Luxe shade yclept ‘Maui Eventide.’”

So now, if you were (as my friend Iva Cheung suggests) to jokingly refer to A Streetcar Yclept Desire, it would get chuckles just from the same set who would be amused by a cartoon of Marlon Brando shouting “Ave, Stella!” And if you were to try to use yclept in earnest in an essay, any teacher who didn’t circle it with a red pen would probably have to take a week of sick leave after rolling their eyes too hard.

You might want to know how you’re supposed to say this word, inasmuch as you’re supposed to say it at all. It’s two syllables; you say it like “eclipse” except with “ept” in place of “ipse.” And you can – if you fancy being extra fancy – say it to rhyme with “leaped” rather than with “kept,” or even – if you want to spell it ycleped – like “ecleepid.”

You might also want to know what the yheck that y is doing there. Well, it was a kind of a fad in Middle English; past participles got it added to the front of them willy-nilly. There are various among them that are supposedly not obsolete yet, but I doubt you will see any of them, perhaps with the exception of ybounden in the song “Adam Lay Ybounden” (which you might hear during Advent – here’s a rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626Nrbtwtao). And where did Middle English get the y- from? Old English ge-, which was a productive prefix for past participles. That in turn came from the same Germanic origins as the modern German prefix ge-, which is used in exactly the same way (Das habe ich gedacht). In yclept, it makes matching cufflinks with the -t, which forms clept from clepe the same way we form slept from sleep.

OK, and what is clepe? I already told you: a verb meaning ‘call, name’. But it also had other meanings – ‘call out, shout, summon, hail’ – and it comes from an old Germanic klip- stem meaning ‘make a sound, make a loud noise’, which, apparently, is another form of the klap- stem, from which we get ‘clap’.

So, as I said, yclept claps for itself. Take a bow… tie.

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whoa

Posted on October 16, 2023 | 3 comments

I’m gonna tell you something that’ll make you say “Whoa!” …or maybe “Woah!”

If you’re fussy about spelling, you probably winced at seeing woah. If you’re very unfussy about spelling, you might have blinked at seeing whoa. But here’s the thing: among those who nitpick at spelling, one of them is considered absolutely right and the other is considered absolutely wrong, but both spellings have been around for centuries. Either could have prevailed. And neither is the original spelling.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about what you say to make a horse stop, or to make a person stop, or to react to something that is a lot to take. I am not talking about sorrow – that’s woe, as in Woe is me (and no, it is absolutely not Woe is I, it’s the same impersonal verb plus dative that you see in methinks). And, on the other hand, we are not talking about a word John Travolta used in Saturday Night Fever to refer to a sexual professional (you could spell that who-a, but of course usually that -a is written re).

This word, whoa, pronounced the same as “woe” (these days), has been spelled as whoa since about the year 1800, though there do seem to be a few cases of that spelling from earlier. The spelling woah, which seems increasingly popular today (no doubt a sign of the abject failure of modern education, an abject failure that, if we’re to go by the complaints of people who complain about such things, has been ongoing since the 1600s), first shows up in texts in the, uh, 1790s.

Which is not to say they were equally popular the whole time. No, whoa did prevail. But during that time, various published sources also had it as woa, woh, woo, wooh, whoh, and wo. And before either spelling showed up, it was also spelled as whoe, whoo, and who. But before that, there was the earlier word ho, also spelled hoo, hoa, and hoe (speaking of that word Travolta used).

So what the heck? Noah Webster helps us just a little here. In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, he put an entry for ho with the definition “a word used by teamsters in stopping their teams” and the note “This word is pronounced also whō, or hwō.” So, you know, with that “hw” sound that English speakers generally don’t make at all anymore, except occasionally when emphatically saying “What?!” – like you might have done when I said that you could spell this word either way.

OK, OK, I know, if you’re a big ol’ word nerd (as I am, and I have socks that say so), you might find this disturbing. We have spelling for a reason! Yes, yes we do; in fact, we have it for several reasons, and one of those reasons is to help us distinguish who is “properly educated” (socially acceptable) and who is not (socially inferior in a certain way): people write what instead of wut because they know what’s what, and the biggest reason we write who as who even though we’ve said it like “hoo” for ages is to show who’s who.

Look. If spelling were just for purely phonetic purposes, to transcribe what you say, whoa and woah would both be bad. If it were for etymological reasons – to show where the word came from, and believe me, that’s an important influence in English spelling – both spellings would still be bad. If it were both of the preceding but also to help distinguish words that could be spelled the same (from woe on the phonetic side and from hoe and who on the etymological side), we’d still do better with, say, woa. No, spelling is also for the very conservative purpose of displaying tradition, and when you’re displaying tradition, you’re choosing whose tradition is worth displaying, and you’re keeping up the tradition of putting people into a social order, one in which people who write whoa, for instance, are in some way better than people who write woah.

I have never found that spelling is a useful indicator of a person’s worth. But I’m not saying that anything goes or that anything should go. Even if I wanted anything to go, it’s not up to me. And it behooves everyone who writes this word to know what the intended readership will think of the different spellings. Words, like horses, tend to come with riders (sometimes more than one), and when you take the horses you take the riders too – in this case, the social significance. Might as well; social navigation is one of the main reasons we use language. It’s not just for fun that we have many ways of saying the same thing – your choice of “Hello,” “Hi,” or “Hey” depends on who you are, who you’re speaking to (or to whom you are speaking), your relationship, and the context. And “gonna” is pointedly more casual and engaging than the basic “going to.”

Anyway, whoa is still very well entrenched. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, published instances of whoa outnumber instances of woah by more than 100 to 1. On the other hand, in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, instances of whoa outnumber instances of woah by less than 3 to 1. So, uh, change in progress? Might be. But before you whoa the language on this…

What? Whoa isn’t a verb? Huh. Actually, it’s been used as a verb since the later 1800s, but this raises an important point: in the main, this word is an exclamation, a phatic usage, a sound people make not as part of a sentence but as a whole utterance issuing forth on a wave of feeling. It’s in the same class as the British phwoar (also spelled a whole bunch of other ways), which expresses a surge of sexual desire in response to seeing someone, and the North American whoo (also spelled woo and wooh and wooooooo), which expresses “Partyyyyyyyy!” When you’re in the throes of a crucial instant, not only is spelling not the most essential thing, infractions of spelling are a good way to signify the intensity of the moment (see also teh, pwn, and hodl!!111!!1!).

Taken that way, whoa is something a staid, genteel person can say and write. But woah means you mean it – and to hell with pedantry!

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nice, silly

Posted on October 12, 2023 | 2 comments

Etymology is great sport, especially when it’s nice and silly, and I have a couple of words for you today that really are nice and silly.

I insist on accuracy in etymology, partly because just-so stories fill people’s heads with asinine ideas about words and humans in general (people are asinine enough without the assistance of fabrication), but partly because the truth is often weirder than anything some twit could invent. Today, though, I’m giving you a story of why being ignorant can be nice, and why being good can be silly. And it shows the hazards of being too fixated on what a word originally meant.

We all know and love the word nice. Some of us use it about 69 times a day. We know that it means ‘agreeable’ or ‘virtuous’ or ‘pleasant’ or ‘inoffensive’ or ‘absolutely not naughty’. But like many a nice person or thing, it has a shady history.

Nice is a pretty bland word now, but we still see uses like “a nice distinction” that show an earlier sense of ‘accurate, attentive to details, even finicky’, and we might notice that some older uses of “nice” also mean ‘dainty’ and ‘delicate’. But wait—there’s more.

Nice went through a phase of often being used to mean ‘skillful’ and ‘meticulous’, and that came from a sense meaning ‘minute, subtle’, which could also shade into ‘obscure’ or ‘trivial’ or even ‘coy’. That sense came from a sense meaning ‘delicate’ or ‘fragile’ or ‘timid’. But there was also a usage, in the same general time period (which, at this point, was before Shakespeare), of ‘lascivious’ or ‘wanton’ or ‘ostentatious’. Sometimes in historical examples it’s kind of hard to know exactly which sense of “nice” the writer had in mind. Which is pretty… nice. 

But when you go all the way back, the earliest sense comes directly from the Latin that evolved, through French, into nice: nescius… which meant ‘ignorant’. From ne (‘not’) and scius (from scio ‘I know’). So nice, when it first showed up in English in the 1300s, meant ‘ignorant’ or ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’.

Except, at the time, silly didn’t mean ‘silly’.

Now, I should say that silly didn’t show up in English until the 1400s. So it didn’t exist when nice came in. But that’s just because before silly was silly it was, since the 1200s, seely (or sely). However, it didn’t mean ‘giddy, inane, foolish’ until the mid-1500s. Silly came to that sense from a sense meaning ‘simple, rustic, unsophisticated’, but that sense also appeared in the 1500s. Before that, it meant ‘weak, innocent, defenceless’. And that’s about how it was when it was first silly rather than seely. But seely, now… 

Well, at the time that nice (or nyce or nys or however those silly people wanted to write it) first landed in English, seely meant ‘insignificant’ or ‘poor’ or ‘weak’, and that in turn came from ‘pitiable, miserable’, which came from ‘innocent, harmless’. And that came from a sense of ‘pious’ or ‘holy’ or ‘blissful’ or ‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’, which came from Proto-West Germanic *sālīg, the descendants of which have generally kept that sense in other languages: German selig, Dutch zalig, Swedish and Danish salig, Scots seelie. 

So, to put it loosely, silly originally meant a very nice state of being, and nice originally meant a very silly state of being.

Fortunately, some of us think it’s nice to be silly (though it’s not at all silly to be nice). But you can also see that etymology is not destiny; the origins of words—and other things—are not proper guides to their current state. So when someone tells you that a certain word has to mean exactly what its origins or distant historical use reveal, just tell them they’re very silly and not at all nice. If they’re offended, they’ve proved your point; if they’re not, well, you meant it the modern way anyway.

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twig

Posted on October 10, 2023 | 1 comment

I twigged to it after reading Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow.

In act two, Crimmin, a warder in an Irish prison, is slipping a few cigarettes to a prisoner who – unlike most in the play – speaks Irish first and foremost. He says, “Seo, cúpla toitín. Táim fhéin is an screw eile ag dul isteach san ospidéal, nóiméad. Roinn amach na toitíní siúd, is glacfhaidh sibh gal. Ma thagann an Governor nó’n Chief nó an Principal, na bíodh in bhur mbéil agaibh iad. A’ tuigeann tú?” And the prisoner replies, “Tuigim, a Thómais, go raibh maith agat.” 

The text helpfully gives a translation note: “Here, a couple of cigarettes. Myself and the other screw are going into the hospital for a moment. Divide these cigarettes and let you take a smoke. If the Governor or the Chief or the Principal come, let you not have them in your mouths. Do you understand?” And the reply: “I understand, Thomas, thanks.”

I first read this shortly before I started to study Irish, but at the time – and later, as I learned some of the language – I couldn’t help but notice that tuigeann tu means ‘you understand’ and tuigim means ‘I understand’. Which meant that the root for ‘understand’ is tuig-. Which is not pronounced exactly as “twig” – it involves a velarization of the t and a palatalization of the g that English phonology has no grasp of – but the closest English sound to it is “twig.”

Most of the time in English when we say twig we mean sense number one in the dictionary, noun, ‘little branch’ – it comes from an old Germanic and ultimately Proto-Indo-European root that is related to the root for two (because it splits in two). Now, sometimes, if a word gains a new sense or nuance, we might say it’s been tweaked, which traces to Old English twiccian ‘pluck’, which is a thing you can do to a twig, though the two are unrelated etymologically. But if instead of plucking you grasp – figuratively, as in you gain insight into something such as the development of a word – you twig, in sense number two, verb. And guess what. Guess where this twig comes from.

Well, if you ask the Oxford English Dictionary, it says “Of unknown origin.” But if you ask Merriam-Webster, it says “perhaps from Irish & Scottish Gaelic tuig- understand.” And if you ask Wiktionary, it declares, “From Irish and Scottish Gaelic tuig (“to understand”).” Incidentally, this word tuig is not etymologically related to English twig; it seems to come from a Proto-Indo-European root relating to understanding. But these twigs have twined together in the thicket of the English lexicon.

Sometimes, in etymology, when you grasp at twigs, they do not support you and you fall – as linguists like to say, etymology by sound is not sound etymology. But suggestive resemblances can sometimes lead you to a true root: something tweaks your ear, and you twig. A’ tuigeann tú?

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