Tag Archives: word tasting notes

faldstool

Posted on February 10, 2013 | 4 comments

First impressions: This word brings to mind Falstaff, toadstool, fad, fall, tool, folds, failed, field, fault, perhaps old fool. It seems to have a floppy, soft feeling from the /f/ and /l/ and it carries at its end a taste of every word that ends in ool, including fool, stool, snool, drool, cool, chacmool, pool, and of course tool (not so much wool).

Visual: It has the oo eyes looking out at you, and it has no shortage of ascenders – four out of eight letters lift their arms. It’s a modestly unwieldy-looking word. It doesn’t look like something you could easily collapse and carry away.

In the mouth: The front of the mouth seems most used, but there are three cases where both front and back are involved: in the vowel /u/, the tongue is up at the back but the lips are also rounded; and in the two consonants /l/, at the ends of their respective syllables, the tongue is up at back as well as touching at the tip (in some versions of English it doesn’t touch). So for about half the time the articulatory area has a sort of U shape to it.

Etymology: This word has traced a vaguely U-shaped etymological path. It comes originally from Old High German faldstuol, from faldan ‘fold’ and stuol ‘stool, chair’; that was borrowed into medieval Latin as faldistolium, and from there it came back into Germanic – in this case English ­– as faldstool. It also made its way into French, where it ultimately became fauteuil ‘armchair’ (I find fauteuil a much more impressive-seeming word than suits such a homely meaning).

Semantics: A faldstool was originally a folding chair, but not necessarily just any folding chair. It has become a term for a chair that a bishop (or the Pope) sits on when visiting locales away from his cathedral (a cathedral is where you find the bishop’s chair – cathedra means ‘chair’), or a portable altar made the same way. What way? It looks like a U sitting mirrored on a sheet of glass – or like an X made from U’s. Some faldstools don’t look especially foldable, but that was the origin of the design, anyway. (Do a Google image search on faldstool to see what I mean.) It looks very much like a curule chair, for those few who have any idea what that is – indeed, sometimes this term and that one name the same object.

Where to find it: Under a bishop’s butt, or anyway on a dais and ready to receive the episcopal posterior. But only when the bishop is on the road. Also sometimes with a bishop kneeling in front of it. That bishop may be the Pope.

OK, well, that’s where to find its object, anyway. Where to find the word? In writings about Catholic or Anglican liturgy, especially high ceremonial. My mother, who suggested this word, saw it in an article about the ordination of a Catholic priest – presumably done by a bishop who had a faldstool for the occasion.

I don’t know about you, but I find this word feels curiously undignified for what it means and where it’s used. A stool now is a very homey thing generally, and at least for my tastes the fald does nothing to add dignity. Oh well – language is arbitrary; it’s not the word’s fault. And if you happen to love in-group arcana such as the words for liturgical ceremonial appurtenances, from narthex to baldachin including every alb, cope, ciborium, mitre, crosier, and whatever else you can spot, well, here’s another one – and a very Germanic-looking one indeed, in spite of its Latin detour.

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foist

Posted on February 9, 2013 | 1 comment

Say you’re drinking with a friend over a game of cards, having a few glasses of wine and a few hands of poker, perhaps even in the cellar (that used to be a sketchy place; now a wine cellar is top dollar), and as you raise your glass to sniff you catch a whiff of something so utterly musty, fusty, you have to gasp and look away, and as you at last turn back the first thing you can say is, “What are you trying to foist on me?”

And it’s a very apposite turn of words in so many ways. Oh, we know how we normally use foist. You foist something on someone – you impose it on them in some manner such that you hope not to be held accountable. The word sounds so much like hoist that it’s easily amenable to an image of heaving something up and dumping it on someone – a dump and run, perhaps. “My jerk neighbour just foisted a whole pile of garbage on my lawn!” And the response of the recipient? Something like “Oy!” – a sound also slipped in when you say foist.

Foist what on people? Things such as religion, change, ideas, values, stuff. Along with foist on we also see occasional foist off, usually in foist off on, which looks curiously bidirectional. Foist off what? Opinions, ideas, expenses, dodgy artworks, such like, if we are to go by usage citations. Either way, it’s like sticking them with it, only it’s dodgier. One – two – three – foist! Go! Run away!

Well, that’s the first thing you might think of. But that’s not the first thing foist meant. And even still it’s not the only thing it means.

Where does foist come from? Actually, there’s more than one foist. The best-known one probably comes from a Dutch word cognate with fist, and refers to slipping in (from your fist) a cheating die in a game of dice – or, by extension, a card in a card game. From that we get the same extensions as the semantically mostly equivalent palm off (which comes from prestidigitation). “What are you trying to palm off on me?” can refer to the same sorts of things as “What are you trying to foist on me?” (Oh, yes, trying – quite often one is trying to foist.) But the sense is different, isn’t it? Palm off feels much smoother and more surreptitious.

Along with this foist there are also other foists, mainly coming from Old French fust (the modern is fût), ‘cask for wine’; the sense refers mainly to mustiness or fustiness – note the fust in fustiness: same root. That sense shows up as noun, verb, and adjective.

And then there’s the one that amuses the juvenile part of my mind (a rather large part): an obsolete sense, not really used since the 1600s, meaning ‘break wind silently’. Oh, that’s a perfect foist, isn’t it? It slips one in, like the first sense, and is musty, like the second sense. But actually it comes from a third root, related to feist, which is a more current rendition of the root (it is used on odd occasion to refer to farting hounds). I really do think that foisting one could yet catch on again to refer to passing a silent-but-deadly one. It works so neatly.

It also has something of the right sound, with the soft hisses of the /f/ and /s/. The vowel is [ɔɪ], as in “oy.” But it also has the sound of a stereotypical lower-class New York (Brooklyn/Queens) accent saying first. Or does it?

Well, you will certainly get people trying to foist that on you. The problem is with the first part of that diphthong. It’s not quite right to say “boid” for bird and “foist” for first. Have a listen to Carroll O’Connor’s rendition of it in his role as Archie Bunker (a dialect he O’Connor grew up with): in the clip at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fqCS7Y_kME, he says works and turning. Be careful to avoid categorical perception – don’t channel the sounds into the closest phoneme in your dialect. He doesn’t say it as [ɔɪ], not quite; that opening sound does not have the lips rounded. Try saying “oy” without rounding your lips at any point – pull on the corners of your mouth with your fingers if you have to. That’s the sound you’re hearing.

What has happened is that the /r/ after the vowel, which is changed into an extension of the vowel in many British and northeastern US accents, has become a narrowing of the vowel, and the mid-central vowel before it has been moved back in the mouth. Not [fɜɜst] but [fʌɪst]. So that is how they slip that in on you – and the fact that, with a little rounding, [ʌɪ] becomes [ɔɪ] is how your brain foists a foist on that first.

But you won’t hear that outside of TV and YouTube now, really. Not too many people in the New York area still say those sounds that way. Go to the International Dialects of English Archive at www.dialectsarchive.com and you’ll find that none of the New York–area speech samples have that feature. So now it’s more something that popular entertainments foist on you. Don’t be surprised – it’s hardly the first time.

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if and when

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 2 comments

Dear word sommelier: I have heard that “if and when” is an unnecessary phrase, and that “if” or “when” individually should be sufficient. I read somewhere that using it is a sign of insecurity in a writer, like taking two swords to a fight. But I still see it, and I have to admit I kind of like it in some places. Can you help me?

If is a common enough word. Very common, indeed. It’s a slender word, like the slip betwixt cup and lip, like the narrow chance of something happening, like the gap between train and platform, or between door and frame. It’s like a ligature of fi that has had a falling out or is dancing a reel. But unlike of, it has not experienced any sound changes; we do not say it “iv” or drop the consonant altogether. This is because it is not a preposition, a substitute for noun inflection, leading into a noun phrase; it is a conjunction, leading into a finite verb phrase, which is a weightier thing. It is small, but so much swings on it – between door and frame indeed: it is a hinge.

When is also a common enough word. It, too, expresses contingency, although it does not necessarily express doubt. It is a bit like the wind – partly because it sounds like “wind” and, if you say the wh the old formal way, it whistles hoarsely as an icy gust out of your mouth, but also partly because there will always be wind, it’s just a question of when: if not now, then soon enough.

Either one introduces a subordinate, and generally either one is sufficient, with a different shade in meaning:

If the rooster crows, get up.

When the rooster crows, get up.

If you make coffee, bring me some.

When you make coffee, bring me some.

But then there is this other phrase, if and when:

If and when the rooster crows, get up.

If and when you make coffee, bring me some.

The wind of when bangs the hinged door of if. Banging doors can be annoying. But sometimes they can also be effective.

There is a small argument to be made in its favour logically:

If the rooster crows, get up. (Does not specify that you must get up at that time, just that you must get up at some point.)

If you make coffee, bring me some. (Does not require you to bring me some right when you make it.)

When the rooster crows, get up. (May imply that you should get up at the time the rooster usually crows, even if it doesn’t this time.)

When you make coffee, bring me some. (May be taken as a general directive without implication that you will be making coffee at any particular point in time.)

If and when the rooster crows, get up. (There is some doubt as to whether the rooster will crow, but get up at the occasion, provided it occurs.)

If and when you make coffee, bring me some. (Your making coffee is not a given, but should you do so, bring me some at the time when you do make it.)

There’s no doubt, though, that the real value of the expression is not its logical quality but its emphatic quality and the implications it carries. It doubly specifies, and thus has the insistence and intensity of reiteration. It means there is some doubt as to the eventuality, and perhaps some impatience regarding it. Here are some possible actual paraphrases:

If and when the rooster crows, get up = That bird sure takes its time about crowing and sometimes I don’t think it even does, but make a point of getting out of bed when it finally does. If it doesn’t, well, whatever.

If and when you make coffee, bring me some = At such time as your royal frickin’ highness chooses to put the pot on, don’t forget to bring me a cup before it’s cold.

So you see it adds some extra huff and puff, not just through the f and wh but through the arms-akimbo attitude it expresses. Use it with care. Sometimes you need two swords, but more often you’ll just hurt yourself.

Those who want a bonus round can use the more emphatic and heavily specified expression when, as, and if. The three contingencies really nail it down, and a triad always packs a punch, in rhetoric as in jokes. It’s so strong it is more likely to come after the main clause rather than ahead of it.

It does have a logical justification; the addition of as means ‘do it in the same time span rather than simply starting at that time’. But what it really means is that there is a possibility the occasion will arise, and the act discussed is strongly and imperatively attached to the occasion. So:

Get up when, as, and if the rooster crows = Provided that dumb bird shoots off its beak, take its crowing as a signal to arise, and be on your feet by the time it’s done its racket.

I would not recommend telling someone to bring you coffee when, as, and if they make some, because you don’t really want them to bring it to you as they’re making it.

The real punch of this phrase, though, is captured in this quote from The Rainmaker, by N. Richard Nash, which is where I first encountered it:

She always wears this little red hat. And last night, Dumbo Hopkinson says to her: “Snookie, you gonna wear that little red hat all your life?” And she giggles and says: “Well, I hope not, Dumbo! I’m gonna give it to some handsome fella – when, as and if!”

In other words, only when, not just on the possibility; only as, not just on the promise (and also not any later); and only if, which means it might not happen at all… take that as a challenge.

So keep that in mind – when, as, and if you ever use it.

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pingle

Posted on February 4, 2013 | 1 comment

The work of word country, the careful crop-tending, extracting the fruits of the fertile soil of language, is not all large-scale operations for production in the millions or myriads or even thousands. Off in little patches here and there, small enclosures, window gardens and dooryards and suburban corners and rural nooks, dedicated individuals cultivate heirloom words, lexemes odd and quaint – to our eyes – but bearing flavours that make the tongue tingle afresh, ways of seeing and saying and hearing that many a logophile pines for.

Consider this one here: she has a little plot in which she keeps alive, for her enjoyment and in the hopes of repropagation, a few quaint and curious fruits of the English tongue, now found – when at all – in places peripheral and rural and mainly in books that already have the dusty-honey smell of aging paper. Today she has just added a new word, chelp, to the plot, next to her cherished crop of pingle.

Pingle! Such a fantastic fruit! It has conflicting tastes, of tingly-scented pines and kindling in inglenooks and of pinguid piglets and processed potato chips (Pringles, to be precise) and perhaps a soft pickle. Is pingle one word? Two? Three? Four? Five? When you taste it on your tongue, do you know what its place in your menu will be? It is a noun – it is three nouns: one is a struggle; one is a small enclosed piece of land; one is a small, long-handled pan or pot – and it is a verb, no, two verbs: one, used by Scots, is for exerting, struggling, contending; the other, used by Englishmen, is for picking at one’s food. So has it ever been, if you ask a Scot.

What do you do when you have a crop of words that look the same but have such different senses? They cleave together with the form; would you cleave them apart? The source is uncertain and may be multiple, but the sound and letters are all the same; drop it one place and it carries one savour, drop it another and it carries another. And it has such a hearty feel on the tongue – the old-home crisp pop of aspirated /p/, a quick high front vowel, then it sticks softly in the back, hardens next, and rolls off the tip of the tongue in a liquid syllable.

Our gardener loves this taste. She faces the challenge of keeping the word alive: it is a struggle, an exertion, a contention with nature in her little gated patch. If it bears fruit, it may be handed over to a careful cook who will give it a delicate turn in a little long-handled pan and serve it to give a special relish to a plate of language, only hoping that the diner will not pick at it and leave half behind. Oh, to pingle this pingle of pingle in her pingle, that it may pass through the pingle and not be pingled!

Thank you to Kathleen Lynch, word gardener, for mentioning pingle yesterday.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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