Tag Archives: word tasting notes

apotropaic

Posted on February 16, 2013 | 1 comment

Creeping in a tropical crepuscule, you approach a portal. What epic will it open to? A paradise of rhapsodic terpsichore, or a pit to trap you in perpetuity? As you tiptoe to it you seek an apotropaic. What will protect you, what will send evil away so that you live, transposing as apo transposes to opa that you may say “I see” safely (apo tr opa i c) and escape captors?

A typical approach is to expect that spiritual raptors will be reflected and ejected by some particularly wretched complection: with ugly gargoyle or sheela na gig you can provoke apoplexy in spooks from poltergeist to perkele. Perhaps a hippopotamus? No – that would only endanger your life and limb (they’re not just porky and pug-ugly pachyderms; they’re exceptionally truculent), and you happen not to have a hippo in your pocket. You pick apart your anorak hoping to prestidigitate some unexpected amulet. In the peripheral aspidistras you glimpse a pair of eyes, a couple of fangs, perhaps an ear, all shaped like the word apotropaic. You step back and keep patting your pockets frantically.

But what provokes “Eureka!”? What little bit of plastic epitomizes the dactyl and trochee, or trochee and amphibrach, “ap-o-tro-pay-ic,” you happily exclaim? What has seen that you lived without devil, what will you set atop the portal for protection as you pick its lock? As ugly as any projectile that has traced an erratic hyperbole: a Poopatrooper. An apotropaic Poopatrooper.

You toss it up. It approaches apogee and pops its parachute, and drops loopily to the capstone of the portal, where it perches. You approach, trepid but expectant…

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turquoise

Posted on February 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

Can you look at this word without seeing a sort of robin’s-egg blue in your mind?

Colour words are evocative just because of the clear visual association. But do any other associations enter your consciousness with this word? Well, they will after we’ve tasted it, if not before.

The shape of this word is long; it has two u’s and a q, and somehow those letters seem blue-greenish to me, possibly under the influence of the sense. It has a descender in the middle, no loop on it, and a small ascender at the start and a dot near the end. You could picture it as being a segment of a dressy necklace made of carved semi-precious stones. The sound of it clicks on the tongue tip and knocks at the back, but then swings around open and closes into a buzz on the tip of the tongue. Your tongue describes a full lap around your mouth – perhaps a blue rondo à la turquoise.

What other words does it taste of? Tortoise, for certain. Turpentine and turnkeys and tourniquets? Maybe. Quarters? I think so. Could you picture a turquoise sasquatch? Only for fun, in a colouring book. It makes me think of a Caribbean territory – can you imagine buying cakes and turquoise in the Turks and Caicos?

Oh, yes, Turks. Does this word make you think of Turkey? Turkish delight? Have you ever stopped to look at turquoise long enough to wonder where it came from? If you have, you have probably guessed that the stone it names is associated with Turkey. And indeed it is – Turkey is not the only place it can be found, but that’s where it was first introduced to Europe from. It can actually be found in Saxony and Cornwall too, but somehow it was not associated with those places – they had less traffic with Greece and Rome than Turkey did at the time. It can also be found in China, Australia, India, Chile, and a few other places.

But wherever it may be found, history happened in such a way as to make this stone not chinoise or indienne or even cournouaillaise. Nope, it was from Turkey, and therefore it was Turkish. Turquoise, in the French of the time. (In modern French, it would just be turc or turque.) But actually our current spelling was layered over top of an existing English word: before about 1600 it was called turkeis or turkeys or any of a few other spellings of the same sound. An archaic form turkise still survives. But after the French spelling was adopted, the pronunciation modified to match the spelling – not as the French would say it, but as the eyes of Englishmen took it: “turkwoys” or “turkoys.” Remember, these are the same people who pronounced Beauchamp like Beecham.

Well, isn’t that nice? From a term associated now with dumb birds and asinine humans and hearty feasting food we have moved on to a term that seems exclusively lapidary, that hides its origin in plain sight with exotic spelling and endotic pronunciation. It’s sort of like taking something ordinary like aluminum and making a sought-after pretty gemstone from it.

Which is (you probably guessed where I was going with that) what turquoise is. It’s a hydrous phosphate of copper and aluminum. Or aluminium, if you’re British. Isn’t that delightful? Less utile than aluminum foil, but even if turquoise can’t keep your food, it may do something for your luck – and as a talisman and apotropaic it is meant to foil evil and preserve good fortune.

coup de grâce

Posted on February 12, 2013 | 1 comment

We decided to have a special Shrove Tuesday dinner this year at Domus Logogustationis, the clubhouse of the Order of Logogustation. Word tasting is a nonsectarian activity, but we felt a need to have a little carnival to say carnem vale (farewell to meat), as we were giving up our kitchen for lent.

Not for Lent. For lent. We were lending it out to a cook, Marty Graw, for a few weeks so he could run a private cooking class in it. Our arrangement was that, in lieu of rent, he would cook two meals for us all: one just before he started with the class, on Shrove Tuesday, and another after he was done with it, in March. Naturally, for Shrove Tuesday he decided to go with a pancake theme.

So we were all seated around our tables, eagerly awaiting the delights forthcoming. Marty came in with one plate, in the centre of which was his featured assemblage for the first course, and he held it forth to explain to us what it was he was about to serve to each of us when he brought in all our plates.

“At the bottom you will see a buckwheat blini. It is topped with butter whipped with maple syrup. Above that is blueberry caviar with a daydream of orange zest shreds. And, as a coup de gras, on top of all is a piece of flash-seared foie gras.”

He went back into the kitchen to fetch the plates. Maury and I and Philippe Entrecote exchanged glances with each other, eyebrows raised.

“He did say coup de gras, didn’t he?” said Philippe.

“Yes, that’s what I heard,” I said. He couldn’t have said coup de grâce; that has an audible /s/ on the end. “Do you suppose he intended it?”

“I know him,” Maury said. “He’s not the sort of person who says ‘vishy-swa’ for Vichyssoise. I don’t think he’s prone to hyperforeignisms.”

“Precious turns of phrase, perhaps,” Philippe said. “A daydream of orange zest shreds?”

“It’s not a bad pun, anyway,” I said. “The foie gras is, after all, a stroke of grease. Or fat.”

“Perhaps he meant ‘neck of fat’?” Philippe said. The French for that, cou de gras, sounds the same as coup de gras.

“Not unless the goose’s liver is in its neck,” Maury said. “I mean, they do force-feed the birds by massaging food down the neck, but… Perhaps it’s the elbow grease they use to force it down. Coude de gras.” He knew, and we knew that he knew, that coude de gras actually means ‘elbow of grease’, but we let it go.

“Isn’t gavage illegal?” I said.

“Foie gras is illegal in some places,” Maury said. “Because of gavage. The force-feeding of the birds is seen as inhumane.”

“In which case,” Philippe said, “after all that torture, putting the bird out of its misery – and onto our plates – might well be a coup de grâce.”

“Ah, yes,” said Maury, “there’s the point that arched my eyebrows. A coup de grâce is of course not just a nice finishing touch. It’s the bullet through the head of a mortally wounded man. It’s the sword blow to decapitate a samurai who is performing seppuku. The grâce is mercy. It’s a mercy stroke.”

“A handsome stroke of mercy,” I said. “Mercy beau coup.” Philippe sighed and rolled his eyes slightly, not because it was a pun but because it was poorly formed French. Beau does mean ‘handsome’ and coup ‘stroke’ or ‘blow’, but the mercy was out of place.

Just then Marty arrived with our plates. As he set them down, Philippe couldn’t keep himself from gesturing to the foie gras and asking, “Are the geese grâce-fed?”

Marty, not being quite an Olympic-level punster, simply heard it as “grass-fed.” “No,” he said, “grain-fed. Maize, I think, with vitamins.”

“Merci beaucoup,” I said, lifting my knife and fork as soon as my plate had landed in front of me. Philippe rolled his eyes slightly again. Marty went back to the kitchen to get more plates.

“After smelling this coming for the past couple of minutes,” Maury said, “I’m about to die of hunger.”

I took a bite of mine and my eyes nearly rolled back in my head. “Maury, old chap,” I said after swallowing, “put some coude de gras into it and get some gras down your cou. If you’re nearly dead, this will surely deliver the coup de grâce.”

Philippe, chewing with purse-lipped vigor, paused after a swallow to mutter, “That’s what my cardiologist would say.” And then, after a moment, he reached for the wine.

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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.

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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