Tag Archives: word tasting notes

chelp

Posted on February 4, 2013 | 2 comments

Visual: This word chelp is a short word with two arms stuck up and one foot stuck down. It has a bump sticking out at either side and a crossed circle (e) in the middle. It has an interesting trend towards – or away from – symmetry. Of course, the first thing you’re likely to see when you look at it is help.

In the mouth: It seems to stay at the front of the mouth: the voiceless affricate on the tip of the tongue, the mid-front vowel, the tongue-tip liquid, and then the stop on the lips to finish it. But rewind to that liquid: if you’re like most native English speakers, your tongue is actually shaped like a banana, the tip up but the middle down and the back curved back up. Oh, and yes, by the way, that ch is pronounced the usual way. This is not “kelp” or “c-help.”

Etymology: Probably a blend of chirp and yelp, but the word is not common or important enough to provoke much research, it seems, and it’s what Oxford calls “dialect” (as if all varieties of a language, even the most esteemed, weren’t dialects – which they are).

Collocations: This word is a verb, but there are citations with your chelp and thy chelp. One thing nearly all the citations have in common: the act of chelping is attributed to another person, most often (among the small sample Oxford gives) the person being addressed. Wordsworth: “Hold your chelp!” D.H. Lawrence: “I’ll stand no more of your chelp.” Keith Waterhouse: “Don’t go chelping back at her like you chelp at me.”

Overtones: It’s not a high-toned word; it seems to be something you put in the mouth of a country character – perhaps one of the help. It has echoes of chill and kelp and chip and maybe jilt, and (reasonably enough) chirp and yelp, and faint hints of such as Chelthenham and jalopy and djellaba. And of course there’s help.

Semantics: Of birds, it means ‘chirp or squeak’. Of people, it means ‘chatter or speak out of turn’; the Collins Dictionary helpfully adds, “esp of women or children.” In other words someone some crotchety guy doesn’t want to listen to while he’s trying to talk at them. But in more modern times it would be a term you could use with anyone to whom you might speak rudely and impatiently. Perhaps such as crotchety guys who are talking at you.

Serve with: You’re most likely to use this in fiction, to put it in the mouth of some rural English sort, and probably not a well-mannered one. But you could always use it in some poetry or some evocative expository text – as long as you put it in a reasonable context. It has a decent onomatopoeia; actually, it sounds like a bird making a doglike sound or a dog making a birdlike sound. The thing to watch out for is just that it doesn’t get inadvertently corrected to help.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

fisticuffs

Posted on January 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

What is the softest sound in English? The one most like a very fluffy feather duvet?

To my ears it’s /f/. Yes, /h/ is in some ways softer, but that’s the softness of a breeze. I’d rather lie on a fluffy duvet than a soft breeze.

Now, what do you associate with being hit with the hand, open or clenched? Anything soft?

Well, yes, perhaps there’s a scuffle, a brushing and grasping of clothing before the bruising and bone-bopping. Two bodies engaged in a physical confrontation may come into close contact like letters in ligature, fi or ff. But the swinging fists, cuffing each other’s heads? Hard like a voiceless stop – a knuckle tap like a /t/, a solid knock like a /k/.

Perhaps the fists swing through the air with a rustling of fabric, and the person hit falls back with further friction. Perhaps a pugilistic confrontation really can sound like “fisticuffs.”

But does it have to? Well, of course not. Onomatopoeia is not the sole basis of language. And it just happens that the word we have for a closed hand, claviform, is fist, a word of Germanic origin that comes by way of the Old English strong feminine noun fyst. And one word we have for striking a blow with the hand is cuff – we tend to think of this as a backhand now, the sort of thing that might actually make a “cuff” type of sound – a word that appears to come from Germanic but may have an ultimate Hebraic source, the OED says coyly. (Note that it’s not cuff as in ‘sleeve collar’ – and fist-to-cuffs, which I have seen, is just not it.)

And so we do the sort of handiwork to which we are often wont: we take two words and, playing on assonances, make a compound analogous to another one – such as handiwork. Handy work? Fisty cuff. (Fisticuff was at some earlier times spelled fisty cuff.)

You don’t normally see or hear reference to just one fisticuff. Somehow such a lengthy and scuffling word is not quite right for a single bop to the brainbox, is it? Instead we get a five-dollar word for a fistfight: “It now and then happened that the literary gladiators came to actual fisticuffs.” (J.A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy.) There is something of the Victorian waistcoated bare-knuckle boxer in this: it has a formal or old-fashioned edge, or anyway a certain detached erudition. I can picture Snagglepuss saying it: “Heavens to Murgatroyd! Fisticuffs even!”

And it does, after all, have a sonic infrastructure of physical stuff, sticks and staffs and fists and some selected expletives (stronger than “Suffering succotash!”). It is also a pleasure to say, cycling from bitten lip to hiss and tap on tongue tip to kick at the back and then again the opening fricative. It has rhythm, a dactyl time-step like a little soft shoe. It plays so effectively with words like confiscate and suffocate and even sycophant, plus stick shift and scoff at and so much more.

Give it a try: The sycophant was fixated on the efficacy of resorting to fisticuffs. Stephanie Escoffier can scoff at my fractured stick, but it effected sufficient deflection when I was engaged in fisticuffs. Not glorious prose styling, but an engaging oral exercise. And fair enough: a most common kind of fisticuffs now, it seems, is verbal fisticuffs.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

gobbet

Posted on January 30, 2013 | 5 comments

My taste of this word is likely different from that of at least some other people, thanks to the context in which I first saw it.

Gobbet is not a common word, so if you see it used a certain way, that usage can make itself pretty comfy before it has too many occasions for it to be revised. Its strong tastes of other related words can play a role in this too. So when I first saw the phrase “gobbet of phlegm,” it was easy to picture a big gob of a loogie the size of a gobstopper being disgorged via someone’s disgusting gob (mouth), perhaps into a goblet.

It happens that, even though this sense does not appear as such in the dictionaries I’ve looked in, the collocation gobbet of phlegm has a certain currency – Google lists “about 29,200 results” when I search the exact phrase. If you search it, you will find quite a number of hits of fiction – gobbet is one of those words a person is unlikely to use in ordinary conversation but may take the occasion to drop into fiction with the idea that it will contribute to a rich, evocative literary style. Whether that idea is accurate I leave it to you to judge in each case in which you read it – Google it yourself and judge from the gobbets that appear.

No, no, I’m not being disgusting. The thing is, gobbet does not have ‘gob of phlegm’ as a standard (dictionary-recorded) sense. The sense in which I have just used it is a sense that has come into use in the past century: ‘brief literary fragment presented for analysis, translation, or discussion’.

But that is not the base sense. Let’s get to the meat of the matter: a gobbet is a mouthful of meat, or anyway a chunk of food the size of a mouthful – an amount you could hold in your mouth while saying gob but not while saying the et. The word comes from French gobet, related to the verb gober ‘swallow’. It’s been in English since the 1300s.

There really is something stuffed-mouth about that gob, isn’t there? And it has a kind of ugliness to it, too, manifest in goblin (which is unrelated). Even goblet, which bespeaks rich ornamentation, is – I find, anyway – much more susceptible to images of ugliness and fugxury than, say, chalice. Add that little tail et, which gives it perhaps a slightly more literary and less common air and echoes an imperative, “Gob it,” and you have a lexical equivalent of a gross lump with a little bow on top.

Of course you can speak of gobbets without being disgusting or thinking disgusting things; you can draw on the higher-toned influences of goblet, for one thing, and write of gobbets of meat and goblets of wine and then you just have a feast with gobs of food in the positive sense – something you can gobble gladly. You don’t need to go down the gross road. But it is easy to do so.

As witness the only definition for gobbet in Urban Dictionary, a source you can always count on to go down roads congenial to the minds of 14-year-old boys: “A chunk of human remains that has drifted ashore after a shipwreck disaster. From the old days when piracy was common, as was sighting dead bodies on the banks of the oceans.” I’m thinking whoever wrote that probably saw the word in just that one context – evidently a book on pirates, and one that we may suspect played up the gore somewhat – and from that inferred a greater specificity than actual usage reflects.

I must admit I’m surprised that Urban Dictionary doesn’t have anything on the phlegm sense. I take this as just more evidence that this is an uncommon word. Of course the phlegm sense is not recorded in dictionaries and so is not really a “proper” usage – more of a grabbing and stuffing according to sound association. But it’s not altogether inappropriate, as long as the amounts referred to are mouth-sized.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

gambol

Posted on January 30, 2013 | 2 comments

Visual: A not-too-long word with a lot of curves and a few straight lines. The ol looks a bit like the b mirrored in a ripply lake, or vice versa. Depending on type face, there may or may not also be some echoes of shape between the g and the a.

In the mouth: Not a crisp word, nor an especially fluid one – aside from the ending liquid /l/. It’s more of a leaping or capering word: in saying /gæmbəl/ you start at the back of your mouth and immediately bounce off the front, landing at last on the tip of the tongue and holding. The voiced stops and nasal give it a padded, perhaps gummy feel, though that is of course affected or overshadowed by the sense of the word.

Etymology: From the French gambade ‘leap, spring’, which comes from Italian gambata, from gamba, leg. There was probably some confusion between the ade ending and an auld ending leading to the current English form. It is not apparently related to gamble, though there may have been some cross-influence.

Collocations: Gambol is not a word that has specific travelling companions (no, not even take a gambol), though it is known to be used more with children and animals than with adults. It is also not a feature of many quotations, though Hamlet does use it in an odd way, to mean something more like ‘leap’ or ‘flee’: “Bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word, which madness Would gambol from.” Elsewhere (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) Shakespeare uses it in the more expected sense.

Overtones: The resemblance to gamble is unmistakeable and the possible cause of mistakes. This makes gambol a better word for writing than for saying, and when saying it one may overpronounce the second syllable for clarity. This word also has tastes of gumbo, gable, amble, and the whole family of mble words, such as crumble, tumble, humble, resemble, grumble, et cetera, plus symbol.

Semantics: Leap, spring, cut a caper – in dance, in sport, or wherever. Both noun and verb gambol exist.

Serve with: This word shows up here and there in places where you will think, “Hmm, that’s a word I don’t see all that often but that seems to take a nice bounding turn on the page.” It’s a high-toned way to speak of frolicsome movement, and it reinforces a literati in-group because it’s the sort of word that will likely be taken by “those who don’t know better” to refer to something else (specifically betting). Using it has the same kind of effect as a subtle name-drop: “While I was talking to Chomsky after his lecture, there were dogs gamboling in the park beyond the window.” You might say, thus, that it is a stylistic gambol – and a stylistic gamble.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

wan

Posted on January 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight,
Red is grey and yellow white,
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion.

Thus runs the poem that bookends “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. The moon: that cold light that, like a magic wand, makes everything wan: its victory won, all is one, through the achromatopsia of dim light to the featurelessness of utter darkness. An object might, like a chameleon, change from colour to colour to colour, the shift passing imperceptibly.

But wait: the moon is wan, but the dark landscape is not, is it? Well, it depends on when that dark landscape is. Is it now… or is it half a millennium or more ago?

Pick up your copy of Beowulf and turn to line 702:

Com on wanre niht
scriðan sceadugenga.

‘Came in dark night to glide shadowgoer [or darkness-walker]’ – that’s a calque; a real translation is ‘He came gliding in dark night, shadowgoer.’ Well, never mind the syntactic weirdness of Old English. It’s that wanre – an inflected form of wan – that should not escape our vision. Grendel (that’s who) was not coming in pale or ashen or even leaden night. The Old English poets liked redundancy, repetition with variation, reinforcement of images (along with alliteration). The author was not saying that it was an uncharacteristically pale night. Ah-nope. The old definition of wan was, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it (in a definition that has a light taste of Old English alliterative reiterative verse), “lacking light or lustre; dark-hued, dusky, gloomy, dark.”

How, then, did this shadowgoer glide from oscuro to chiaro? How did it manage, under many moons, to shift its shade, its shape retaining?

It is not just that Beowulf was written in the Dark Ages and we have since passed through the Enlightenment. Nor, although wan may be related to wane, need we say the moon had waned and now has waxed. No: when we plumb the depths, we find a common element. We are led to lead. Plumbum. That dull grey element.

A wan thing is wanting in colour. It has the aspect of lead. If a thing is drained of colour, it takes on a leaden aspect. If a face is drained of colour by disease or death, it may be said to be of a leaden hue, perhaps: as observes Oxford, “Of an unhealthy, unwholesome colour; livid, leaden-hued.” That definition, which existed as an extension of the ‘dark colourless’ sense, is also obsolete – these dark and medium senses existed from the beginning of English to the 1600s. But by the 1300s, the ‘unhealthily pale’ sense had come into use. So we had a cross-fade of some two or three hundred years. Now wan is ‘pale’, or perhaps etiolated, bleached, lacking in colour or character: a wan smile.

By its brevity wan gains a myriad of associations. The most common collocation in the Corpus of Contemporary American English is wan na. Chinese? No, it’s just how they parse a colloquial compound – you wanna guess which one? But wan certainly shows in Mandarin: wàn, ‘ten thousand’, or wān, ‘crooked’, or wán, ‘whole’, or wăn, ‘gracious’, or wán, ‘stupid’, or wăn, ‘evening’.

In ten thousand evenings, with or without white satin, could you go from crooked to whole, from stupid to gracious? Oh, be wan – can no be? Come over to the dark side, the black’s wan. You will wander under moon-waxing welkin, beauty bleached by sky-swan burgeoning, greyed gules and white gold, illumination intending, deciding illusion.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

smorzando

Posted on January 21, 2013 | 1 comment

People who read sheet music are likely familiar with sforzando, the dynamic instruction usually marked on the page with sfz, which might look like a logo for some luxury item but to me resembles the mark and sound made when swatting or stifling a small insect – not an inapposite impression, since a sforzando is a sudden bit of loudness, a thing that could make the audience jump.

Well, this is not that. There is only one letter of difference in the word, but smorzando is more of a smothering counterpart to the firework of the sforzando.

The difference starts in what you see on the page. It’s not typically written out in full in a score, but it’s also not written as smz. Nope, it’s on the page as smorz. So the first thing you think is likely along the lines of “S’mores! Oh yes!” Ah, toasted marshmallows and melting chocolate between graham crackers. Things are going to get mighty gooey mighty quick around here! And, to reinforce that, there’s a s’mores-themed breakfast cereal called… oh, yes it is… Smorz. Imagine eating a whole box of those! Smorz stupebit indeed!

But there’s our cue. Just as the actual line that I just punned on from the requiem is mors stupebit, “death will be stunned,” the morz in smorzando refers to dying. Well, in this case, not dying the death of deaths, but dying away. S’mores may be moreish, but smorzando is decidedly lessish. Here’s your musical lesson: smorz means ‘lessen’. Or, more precisely, smorzando means ‘extinguishing’. The sound dies away, getting fainter and slower.

You can almost see it, can’t you? Someone smothering a fire with a wet blanket: smorz, smorz, smorz. (It helps to remember that in Italian, and in this loan from Italian, the z is [ts]. So it’s “smorts.” Or, to be more in line with the Italian pronunciation, “zmorts.”) If a smorzando is well accomplished, you may be snoring by the end, your wakefulness also extinguished (until the person next to you swats you after one of your snorts).

Know what else is extinguished? The beginning of the word. Have you noticed how Italian has an assortment of words that begin with s followed by another consonant that we wouldn’t put s before in English? Aside from sforzando you may (or may not) recognize sbarro, perhaps sbaglio, sfortunato, sdraiarsi, sdegnare, sfogato, sfumato, sveglia, svolgere, or any of quite a few others. What many of these have in common with smorzando is that the s is what’s left of a prefix that used to have a full syllable – often dis. The di has faded away.

In some cases this dis is a negator; in others, it’s an intensifier. In the case of smorzando it intensifies or supports. Smorzando is the present participle of smorzare, which comes from dis and morzare, which is related to morire, which means ‘die’. It’s more closely related to a causative form – i.e., ‘cause to die’. So ‘extinguish’. ‘Snuff out’. ‘Smother’. ‘Force to plotz’.

Out, out, brief candle. You flare up with a sfz and then, over your embers, we cook s’mores (obviously this is a biiiig candle) as you die away and are ultimately extinguished… deliciously, of course: it’s all about the musical effect, the beautiful slow deliquium.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: The long and short of it

Posted on January 20, 2013 | 2 comments

Today: the sixth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The long and short of it

There’s something you should know about long and short vowel pairs in English.

They’re not.

Oh, the short vowels are short. And they’re even slightly shorter before voiceless stops than before voiced ones (the [æ] in mat is a bit shorter than the one in mad, for instance).

And the long ones are longer. But not because they’re long versions of the short ones. “Long i” is not actually a long version of “short i,” nor is “long o” an extended version of “short o.” “Long a” doesn’t have any of the sound of “short a” in it at all. Same goes for “long” and “short” e. And u? Even worse.

Let me show you what I mean. Pretend you’re at the doctor and say “ah.” Say it quickly first. There’s your short a. OK, now say “aahhhh,” nice and long. There’s your long a: a long version of a short a. But it’s not your “long a” at all. You know what “long a” is: the sound in fate. But if it were really a long version of “short a,” you would say that word like “faat.”

So why don’t we do that?

Well, we used to. Then something changed.

English “long” vowels actually were long versions of the short ones centuries ago. But accents change over time, pronunciation of phonemes shifts, and there was a big change during the 15th and 16th centuries, a thing called the Great Vowel Shift. The long vowels all moved up in the mouth while the short ones stayed put. The vowels at the top couldn’t move any further up, so they became diphthongs starting lower in the mouth and moving up.

So the word we used to say as “baat” is the word bate. The word we used to say as “bate” is the word beet. The word we used to say as “beet” is the word bite.

Meanwhile, things went even nuttier in the back. The word we used to say like “boat” is the word boot (hence the oo spelling) and the word we used to say like “boot” is the word bout. But what we call “long o” is really the shifted version of a long version of the sound in bought. What we call “long u” is another thing that happened to that vowel: the sound we used to say as in “booty” is the sound in beauty.

Does that seem stupid? Consider that in some versions of English (much Canadian English, for instance), the word stupid – which because of the vowel shift became like “styoopid” – is now back to a pre-shifted “stoopid.”

Meanwhile, the short vowels pretty much stayed put, resulting in these mismatched socks. Watch the zigzag your tongue makes as you say the vowels in bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, in order. You might find it clearer if you say just the vowels and leave off the [b] and [t]. Now try them in the order of bat, bet, bit; bait, beet, bite.

Congratulations. You’ve had your tongue for how long? And you may just be getting to know its ways better now.

But why would this happen? Does it seem too strange for words? Well, in fact, changes to pronunciation keep on happening, everywhere, all the time. A language never stops changing as long as it’s in active use by people who speak it as their first language. The Great Vowel Shift is just the best-known vowel shift. There’s one in the United States called the Northern Cities shift that is in progress now and is responsible for the raised and fronted “short” vowels you hear from Buffalonians and others on and near the Great Lakes (why Ann can sound like “Ian” and gone can sound like “gan” to people from elsewhere). Think, too, about how people from the southern US often say their vowels – they’re different from the way Northerners say them even though way, way back in the mists of time all English speakers said them about the same way. Think about the “Canadian raising” I talked about in “Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes”: eyes versus ice, loud versus lout.

And listen around for some other changes that might be more evident in some groups of the population than others (younger people, for instance) – such as a lowering that makes test sound more like “tast.” Listen for changes to consonants too, and differences between different speakers. The one constant in language is change. And sometimes that change can get pretty weird.

Next: on to consonants.

2 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , ,

awesame

Posted on January 19, 2013 | 5 comments

Several years ago Aina and I visited Iceland. After several hours of driving through breathtaking treeless mountain after breathtaking treeless mountain, she summed it up: “Stunning but nondescript.”

I’m finding that a lot of the internet is getting that way too. There are so many incredible, stunning, moving, amazing, life-changing things to see or read about. There seems to be a culture of desperate thirst to be awestruck, or at least awestracted (awestruck as a form of distraction). Every little kid with a decent voice is “the most amazing incredible moving” etc. Every video that makes a halfway decent political point gets the hype “X schools Y,” “X totally owns Y,” “this is the one video you must watch if you care about X,” et cetera. Scenery is always “amazing.” A successful stunt is “incredible.” The number of “best X ever” videos defies probability. Any video of any person modestly injuring themselves through misadventure for any reason is an “epic fail.” It’s as if when you go to Facebook you say “Open sesame” and it turns out to be a Panderer’s Box of THE MOST AMAZING EVER!!!

And the thing is that a lot of the stuff actually is pretty awesome. But there’s so freaking much of it. And there seems to be an endless appetite for being awestruck. After a while it gets to be all the same. Awe the same. Awesame. Like open-and-say-awe-sesame.

I just happened to be looking at some published advertising and saw the word awesome on top of an image, and something behind the o made it look at first glance like awesame. I said to Aina, “I’m going to do a note on awesame today.” She said, “That’s not a word.” I said, “It is now.” We sure need it.

In truth, if you Google “awesame” you get a bunch of results. However, they’re pretty much all misspellings of awesome. You won’t find awesame in Urban Dictionary – yet. Wait for it. I can’t be the only person reaching the saturation point of “awesome.”

It’s phonetically telling that some people would misspell awesome as awesame. The vowel is actually a schwa, a reduced unstressed neutral central vowel, which we tend to think of as being written as a by default unless we know otherwise or have some pattern influencing us to think otherwise. This is why you see definately so often. There is also a tendency in at least some versions of current North American English to lower that sound to an [a] or [æ]. I know a kid whose name is Maksym whose mother often reduces the [mæksɪm] to [mæksəm] and when saying that in a more drawn-out way will say [mæksæm] – so from “maxim” to “maxum” to “maxam.” And she obviously knows perfectly well how his name is spelled. She’s not mispronouncing it; the reduced neutral vowel is just moving down and forward in her dialect. So imagine how readily people who are less aware of spelling may convert awesome to awesame.

But this isn’t about them. They’re not awesome. They’re not even awesame. They’re just people who are not very good at playing the rather wicked game of English spelling. And actually, I’m almost surprised they don’t write the word as ossum. (Some do.) After all, everyone knows that awesome rhymes with possum. (Or anyway everyone who lives where possums are a thing. Brits are another matter.) But we have mostly managed not to forget that there is awe in awesome. Something that is awesome provokes awe – that is, reverent wonder (or sometimes even holy dread). The some is the same as in handsome, winsome, lissome, bothersome, noisome, and even buxom, but we don’t really feel the connection to the word some, though there is one.

On the other hand, we also don’t necessarily feel the connection from that some to same. When I change the spelling to awesame the pronunciation changes too. And yet that some in awesome is actually from the same source as same. The old Germanic root referred to members of a group. Such members can be definite or indefinite in number – a threesome, a twelvesome, or some other sum – and they can be, as group members, the same as one another (fungible). Over time the different uses of this root diverged and so did their spelling and pronunciation.

So it’s the same, yet it’s different. It’s not some, it’s some other thing. OMG, it’s like you’re saying the same thing! Isn’t that incredible? Amazing? Awesome?

Yeah, right. Awesame.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

occult

Posted on January 17, 2013 | 1 comment

Lurking in the occluded corners of word country, hiding in the flocculent tufts, dripping off succulents and mixing with the dust in the desiccated plains, is something occult.

Occult! Dark claws sink into your flesh at the word. A penetrating darkness occupies your occipital lobe like a succubus. Concealed, yes, concealed, this is what occult means, but even though they come from the same Latin celare these two words concealed and occult carry completely distinct cultures. What is occult is not merely hiding, and in some ways is the opposite: a crack in the eggshell of common reality. The inculcation of secrets may occur in closed chambers, but the dark corners you fear are right in front of you and you do not see them. You seek the simplest explanation, but you get your neck cut with Occam’s razor.

We may imagine a scene in a dark copse, an assembled cohort awaiting, the accursed brought bound. What is the occasion? A sacrifice? Not quite. J’accuse, says one. A toccata plays its staccato. Are you culpable? says another. Are you guilty of seeing what you should not have – or of not seeing what you should have? A chilling cachinnation echoes from among the elect, then silence as soon ensues, sliced only by the unsheathing of knives. The shackled figure sobs, bent; at last, in hiccups of lachrymose paroxysm, the word comes: Peccavi. And then the cuts begin to be made… the fabric is shorn into ribbons… the eyes are unbound and opened. You who would see and not hear, hear and not see, are now exposed, condemned to see. Accept your fate.

Do we see through a glass darkly? Through occult glass, that frosted pane that hides your nakedness in the shower as it lets in the diffuse light of external day? Or is it that we overlook small cooccurrences as our eyes make their saccades: through an ocular malocclusion, we see but do not see again and so mis-see? In medicine occult blood is not the stain on the wicked altar; it is bleeding that is not perceptible to ordinary inspection, blood that is mixed in with other bodily output in amounts too small to be detected without a sensitive test. So perhaps with the occult of the world. You see it but do not see it. You are acculturated; you overlook it in the clutter of accumulated rudera, of stuff and stucco. Perhaps it is simply too small, like the staphylococcus that occupies every square centimetre of your skin. Or perhaps it just escapes notice.

Is there a cult occult in our culture, not hidden behind a façade but actually a pattern in the façade that you can only see once you have seen? Look not for some wicked kind of Wicca or eccentric church of Cthulhu; stow your imaginations and your prejudices and occident-centrism. They merely misdirect. Sometimes you accept a sameness where there is a difference; on other occasions you see more, not less, than is there. You hide these facts from yourself; your doppelganger is just you again, carbon-copied. You see curled claws lurking in cracks but they are in actuality the crescent antishadows of an eclipse, one partly hidden sun reflected in many multiples.

So too with words: see what slips onto the page in the slippage between lip and copperplate. You hear a crack in the back, [k], and a break, [ks], but everywhere you see cc. You are not accursed; you are just inaccurate.

1 Comment

Posted in Word Country, word tasting notes

Tagged ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: The vowel circle

Posted on January 16, 2013 | 2 comments

Today: the fifth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The vowel circle

Vowels are the blood of words. They’re what allow words to move, to project, to be sung.

As I’ve explained in “The world speaks in harmony,” what vowel you’re saying is determined by where your tongue constricts the airflow in your mouth. That can be anywhere in your mouth that allows air to pass through the middle. But, in practice, languages have typically between five and twelve sounds that are recognized as distinct vowel sounds, and as long as a sound is close enough to one of those, it will be interpreted as that sound. And the acceptable sounds – the phonemes – are, depending on the language, mostly or entirely in a somewhat circular arrangement around the mouth.

The single-sound vowel phonemes we have in English are these:

/u/ as in boot

/ʊ/ as in put

/o/ as in boat (actually a slight diphthong in most kinds of English – see below)

/ɔ/ as in bore

/ɑ/ as in bop

/a/ as in bar

/æ/ as in bat

/ɛ/ as in bet

/e/ as in bait (actually a slight diphthong in most kinds of English – see below)

/ɪ/ as in bit

/i/ as in beat

/ə/ as in but (when it’s said in a stressed syllable it’s a little different and is often written as /ʌ/) – our one vowel that’s right in the middle of the mouth

The letters in slashes like /e/ are the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols for the sounds. Slashes mean we’re talking about a phoneme – a sound that’s a recognized distinct sound in a language. When we’re talking about the actual sound that’s made, whether it’s the same as the phoneme or not, we use brackets, like [e].

Those single-sound vowels are called monophthongs by people who really want to or have to call them that. (Take a moment to taste that word, monophthong.) We also make a number of diphthongs – vowel sounds that move from one part of the mouth to another. They’re not two vowels, one said after another; a diphthong is a single phoneme, but it’s one that starts in one place and ends in another. You might call them vowel movements.

Here are diphthongs we make in standard Canadian English:

/ɔɪ/ as in boy

/aɪ/ as in by – Canadians often say it like [ʌɪ] before a voiceless consonant, as in bite

/eɪ/ as in bay (we tend to think of it as just /e/ – see above)

/aʊ/ as in how – Canadians often say it like [ʌʊ] before a voiceless consonant, as in bout

/ɪʊ/ as in hew (also said as /ju/ – j is the IPA symbol for the “y” sound)

/oʊ/ as in hoe (we tend to think of it as just /o/ – see above)

You’ll get some other diphthongs in some other dialects of English. Some even have triphthongs – a three-vowel movement, as in some southern US versions of words man: [aɪə]. But let’s not go crazy here just yet. You’re best off tasting words in your own dialect, so if that sound’s not in your dialect, let’s not worry too much about it now. (Oh, by the way: all versions of English are dialects, and everyone has an accent. Dialects are not just what other people speak, and accents are not just what other people have.)

OK, enough with the technical basics for a moment. Let’s do some more tasting. You already know, if you’re read “The world speaks in harmony,” that speech sounds are what they are because of harmonics. And you almost certainly know intuitively that some sounds seem higher or lighter and others seem lower or heavier. Those impressions have a lot to do with the second formant – the space in the mouth in front of the tongue. A sound like [o] or [u] tends more often to go with low, heavy, dark things; a sound like [i] goes more with high, light things. This doesn’t mean that all words with [o] and [u] must be for big things, et cetera, but if you’re using the sound for effect, that’s where you’re likely to head.

So… if I say I heard two things hit the floor and one went “plunk” and the other went “plink,” what do you assume about them?

If there are two characters in a children’s book and one is named Bobo and one is named Titi, what might your initial expectations be of them?

When you taste a word, you have to be aware of the vowels you’re using. But you also have to watch your impressions of the sound and feel and taste.

Let’s circle around your mouth with vowels. Start at [u] and move gradually and smoothly through [i], through [e], through [æ], through [a], through [o], to [u]. Then circle back in the other direction. Do it as smoothly as you can. Pay attention to what your tongue and your lips are doing.

Do you notice your lips rounding at [o] and [u] and unrounding as you go to the front? We do that in English. It’s a very normal contrast in languages the world over: round the back, unround the front. This heightens the contrast between the harmonics.

But it’s not a universal thing to round the back and unround the front. Many languages also have rounded front vowels and even unrounded back ones. (In fact, we have an unrounded low back vowel in English: /ɑ/.)

So now repeat the tongue circle exercise starting at [u], but this time keep your lips rounded as you move your tongue through the front vowels and back to [u]. Try both directions. It may help to pay more attention to what you’re doing and less to what you’re hearing. Unfocus, like when you’re watching fence posts go by on the highway and you go from counting them to watching them blur together.

Now start the loop at [i] and keep your lips unrounded all the way around, both directions.

Congratulations. You have, in the course of doing this, made several vowel sounds that never show up in English, including some that bedevil Anglophones trying to learn Turkish or Russian. You won’t need these sounds for tasting common English words, but the more you can do with your mouth, and the more you try to do with your mouth, the more fun you’re going to have. (I’m talking about language. Stop that.)

There are two other differences in vowel quality that you can make, neither of which makes a phonemic difference in English. One is what’s different between French beau and bon: whether the vowel is nasal or not – in other words, whether any air is passing through your nose while you’re saying it. In English, we do make some vowels nasal, but just when they’re before nasal consonants, as in some, sun, and sung. Sometimes the nasal consonant is dropped in casual speech and indicated just by the nasalization of the vowel, especially if there’s another consonant after the nasal – you might say [bõz] rather than [bonz] for bones, for instance.

The other difference is length. You can hold a vowel sound for a longer or shorter period of time. This is important in languages such as Finnish and Hindi. Contrary to what “everyone knows,” we don’t have an actual length distinction in English. We do not actually have long and short versions of vowels. We just have a distinction that we call long versus short. Read “The long and short of it,” next, for the low-down and dirty.

2 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , , ,