Tag Archives: word tasting notes

guys

Posted on March 28, 2012 | 2 comments

I was sitting in the usual coffee spot with Margot and Jess when Arlene Chu, one of our newer student members, walked in with some friends. She spotted us and turned to her friends. “Hang on, guys, I’m just going to say hi over here.”

Margot was her usual charming self. “Your friends are guys?” she said as Arlene approached.

“Huh? No, they’re all female.”

“That’s what I thought,” Margot said, “but you called them guys. I thought perhaps they were in dis-guys.” Yes, she said it so as to highlight the pun.

“I’d say,” said Jess, “it’s just because they’re anonymous.”

“Anonymity does not confer a sex change,” Margot said primly.

“I think you’ve been out-Fawksed,” I said to Margot. Jess gave me a thumbs-up.

“Wait,” said Arlene. “You’re referring to how members of the hacker group Anonymous wear Guy Fawkes masks.”

“Very good!” Jess said. “Yes, as inspired by the movie V for Vendetta.”

“But all those Guys are guys,” Margot said.

“A woman may wear a mask,” Arlene said. “And words can mask gender too.”

“Interestingly,” I said, “though words can be evocative, this word, in the vocative – the plural vocative – is less specific than in its other senses. It is indeed a guise. A group of females are not guys, and are unlikely to be called the guys, but they can still be addressed as guys or you guys.”

“Our tongue is losing its specificity,” Margot said.

“Not always a bad thing,” Jess said. “One’s sex is not necessarily pertinent in all occasions. But I think this one has its roots in loss of number specificity a longer time ago. Once we started using you for all second persons and dropped the singular familiar thou altogether, we lost a good way of making it clear whether we were addressing one or many.”

“And you all sounds a little too Southern for many people’s tastes,” I added.

“We got along fine until just recently,” Margot said.

“How recent is recent?” I said. “When I was a kid in the ’70s, there was a magazine and TV show called The Electric Company – for kids who had outgrown Sesame Street. On it, there was a character, Millie the Helper, played by Rita Moreno, who would shout to a group of no-matter-what sex, ‘Hey you guys!’”

“For mixed-sex groups, perhaps,” said Margot, “consistent with the use of the male for any case where sex is not known…” Jess, Arlene, and I all rolled our eyes.

“It’s useful and it’s entrenched now,” Jess said, “at least in casual usage. After Legally Blonde and the sorority girls saying things like ‘Oh my God, you guys’ to each other, it’s a done deal. Women, especially young women, tend to be the cynosures of linguistic change.”

“So anyway,” Arlene said, “to make sure I have this straight: this old Anglo-Norman name happened to be the name of a guy – ha, literally a Guy – who tried to blow up parliament, and was hanged for real and then ever thereafter in effigy, and from those effigies Guy came to be a term for a grotesque or frightful or odd-looking man, and from that it transferred to a general term for a male. And now, just when you’re using it to address a group in the plural, it can refer to males or females.”

“Semantic bleaching,” Margot said with some asperity.

“Well,” Arlene said, “at least Fawkes’s first name wasn’t Dick.”

“Couldn’t be worse than Guy, could it?” Margot said.

Arlene’s friends had reached the front of the line and were calling to her for her order. She started to walk away. “OK, well, ’bye, you guys, nice chatting.” She paused and said to Margot, “’Bye, you dick.” And stuck her tongue out and went on her way.

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psychedelic

Posted on March 25, 2012 | 1 comment

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday for the first time in a number of years. I remember first seeing it in the 1970s (although it came out in 1968). I didn’t entirely follow it then. (Now I know why.) But there were certainly things I remembered. Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, of course, and the Kyrie by György Ligeti, which – when we played the soundtrack record at night in our big house in the country – made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and had me closing the drapes and looking over my shoulder. Music like that can really awaken things from the basement of your mind that seem to lurk in wait for you.

But also, and perhaps even primarily so, I remembered the ending. I didn’t understand the ending – again, no big surprise, given that even now I can think about it and discuss it with others at length and inconclusively, each interpretation reflecting something about the interpreter – but I remembered the vivid colours swirling past. To quote the Mad magazine parody (“201 Min. of a Space Idiocy”): Bowman (Bowtie, as they call him) says, “WOW! What a fantastic psychedelic display!!” and the monolith responds, “What did you expect . . . ?! You just crashed through the brand new 105-story ‘Jupiter Museum of Op Art’!”

Yes, psychedelic. A word that has a strong taste of the late 1960s, with its acid trips and intense colour choices. I almost feel as though the word should be represented in wildly contrasting colours: psychedelic. Doesn’t that look right? After all, what is psychedelic about but colours, wild, swirling, vivid colours? In my youth I had the idea that if psychedelic meant “psycho colours”, then something that had all colours must be pandelic. That’s how indelible the association was for me.

But the delic, as delicious and indelible (and perhaps inedible) as it may be, is not related to colours. It calls not so much for pompous pageantry of paint as for a psychopomp (as befits the circumstance). It is not that psychedelic drugs are so named because of the psychedelic colours they are associated with; it is rather the converse. The word is from ψυχή psyché “breath, life, soul, spirit” and δηλοῦν déloun “make manifest, reveal”.

The idea with psychedelics is thus not that your psyche is a delenda (thing to be destroyed) but rather that it is to be displayed so you can deal with it. If you’re going to blow your mind, you’re going to blow it wide open.

This is not mere food for thought; it is a transmogrified smorgasbord, a psycho deli. It takes what lies down in the root cellar of your mind, like the descenders on p and y, and sprouts it into shoots reaching heavenward h d l, and finally detaching i – yes, and at the end you say “i c.” Your eyes go from merely open c to half-closed e e to fully open at last c. But beware of the snake lurking s.

You can even hear it hiss, that snake: /s/ as you slide into the word. But then you shoot to the back and knock hard /k/, bounce back and against the front /d/ and /l/, and finally again to the back /k/ again. It’s like Bowman blasting into the airlock to get back into the ship: he flies in to the back, bounces again to the door, and finally ends at the back. (But that scene is before he gets to Jupiter.)

And what words does psychedelic most often modify? What you would expect: drugs, music, colors, rock. It truly is part and parcel of an era. But we must acknowledge that the word was actually confected in 1956 – by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley. Huxley did more to popularize it. But Timothy Leary et al. did somewhat more to spread the actual experience.

Which reminds me of one of my favourite albums of rock from that era, the more literally than just stylistically psychedelic In Search of the Lost Chord by the Moody Blues, which includes a song, “Legend of a Mind,” about Timothy Leary. I suggest giving it a listen with stereo headphones on to get the full psychedelic experience – you can get the rather trippy stereophonic version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSFuEOA9wc.

You may want to follow that with the possibly even trippier “The Best Way to Travel,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=UItRRh9Cfiw. “Speeding through the universe,” they proclaim, “thinking is the best way to travel.” Perhaps 2001’s Bowman should have travelled by thinking instead of by spaceship. Perhaps, in the end, he did…

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surreptitious

Posted on March 25, 2012 | 3 comments

I was out for brunch with a couple of friends and their young daughter today. At the daughter’s request, some syrup was poured on the little pieces of toast she had cut. Several minutes later, she noticed that the syrup seemed no longer to be on the plate. Her mother explained that it had soaked into the toast. I added that it was syrup-titious.

Har, har, har. Of course surreptitious is really something that requires conscious agency of the actor – it refers to an undertaking, specifically one that the undertaker hopes will be overlooked. It is not typically thought of as pertaining to syrup dishes, the echoes notwithstanding; it is, on the other hand, easily associated with susurrus and slurpy whispering – sshhh! one must preserve the reputation!

It’s not a matter of being superstitious; this word has a history of real misrepresentation – at first not simply a sly sneakiness (as is the more common meaning now), but deliberate concealment of facts with an aim to obtaining something, for instance a dispensation or ordination. It is derived from subreption, which refers to fudging facts by leaving things unsaid; it is a partner to obreption, which is saying things that are overtly false.

Ah, but this is a double-tongued word if ever there was one. It starts with su but by the end has turned it around to us; in between you have the rr tracks and a tiny-voiced titi to try and keep everything small. But keep your eye on those tracks: you noticed, didn’t you, that surreptitious comes from subreption? Indeed, there is an in-between form, subreptitious.

So what happened? Did the b just not want to be obstreperous? Well, it was a matter of assimilation. But through that going with the flow and taking on a resemblance, it came to dissemble. Tell me: what does sur mean? You probably think “on” or “over”, as in French. Actually, in Latin, that would be super. But sub means “under”, as I imagine you know. So the “under” passes under, and lets what goes over be taken for “over”.

Taken for it? Those who take it will be taken, as will what there is to take from them. The reption that goes with the sub is no mere subtle insurrection; its reptilian form hides a raptor – rapere, “seize, snatch, take”. And so in the subtle slide of the surreptitious you may see that you have been overtaken by the undertaker. But it goes both ways – your own surreptitious activities may land you in a sticky situation, and then you’re toast.

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bakkushan

Posted on March 22, 2012 | 2 comments

I love people-watching about as much as I love word-watching. I take transit to and from work every day, and at assorted other times too; it’s a great place for watching people come and go. And of course the sidewalks of downtown Toronto are a veritable museum of human form and behaviour.

An experience I often have is seeing someone from behind and wondering what the face looks like. Sometimes I get to see; sometimes I don’t. I have found that backsides do not always correlate with front sides. First impressions can indeed be misleading.

Well. Of course what you see is what you see; if someone has an appealing dorsal aspect, it is appealing regardless of their ventral aspect. Any given person is likely to have some parts that are comelier than others. Or at least more intriguing, more inviting. Some people look quite exotic from one side and quite ordinary from another; some are a mixed bag of assorted visual flavours, just as words may be. I had a friend in graduate school whose voice and speech manners were actually quite strikingly at odds with her appearance; I didn’t realize how much so this was until the first time I phoned her. She was short and lean and had short red hair and never wore makeup. Someone answered the phone who sounded like a curvy blonde party girl from California who wore heavy lip gloss. I asked to speak to Julie. “This is Julie,” the voice said, and I realized it was.

Usually the impressions of different aspects may be varied but are not necessarily strikingly contrasting in attractiveness. But sometimes they are, at least to a given person’s eyes. I don’t know whether, in English, we have a term for a guy who looks good from one angle but bad from another (we should – let me know if you know one), but we do have a term sometimes used for a woman who appears good from behind: butterface, as in “nice backside, butterface…” I am also put in mind of the song by the Monks, “Nice Legs Shame About Her Face” – in which, I must say, the narrator gets put in his place in the end.

There is a rather appealing word in Japanese for a woman who looks nice from the back but not from the front: bakkushan. The main stress, I should tell you, is on the first syllable; the second syllable is very reduced. The word thus has a sound resemblance to ricochet – or baccarat, or Yucatan. You may get a kick out of the shapes of the letters: the b like a nice bum, the kk perhaps like legs in high heels; the bakku ends in u while the shan ends in n, a sort of reversal, from thumbs-up to thumbs-down. You get a sense of the exotic from this word, with its kk, and the sh in the middle rather than at one end or another; it has nine letters and yet nary a hint of European morphology.

But appearances can be deceptive. This word is not only a loan from Japanese but, before that, a loan to Japanese – actually, two loans: bakku, from English back or perhaps German Backe “cheek” (also used in reference to the buttocks, as in English), and shan, from German schön “fine, beautiful”. Yes, that’s right, it’s a Germanic word in disguise. It looked so exotic!

But, you know, sometimes to see something as exciting and new you have to see it as – well, as something exciting and new. Several years ago I published a paper on how intercultural encounter can serve as a catalyst for us to reintegrate things of our own that we had excluded: “The Transcendent Function of Interculturalism.” It’s a bit dry, but an interesting topic.

It’s a similar thing: gazing at something exotic and interesting, only to see that the other side is not what was expected. But in this case the face turns out to be your own. And how do you like it? Does it put you in your place?

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pell-mell

Posted on March 21, 2012 | 2 comments

“Riot in London” has taken on a bit of a different air of late. Time was when it might have led me to imagine a multiplicity of pale males (pommies all) going pell-mell in Pall Mall with pall-mall balls and mallets to pelt and maul opponents – publicans, perhaps? – before pulling back to mill about and drink Pimm’s.

Last year, of course, the reality of rioting left London (though perhaps not Pall Mall per se) in an appalling mess, and both punks and police were running pell-mell. But now, in the land of peameal and tall maples, we have had a riot in that other London, the one west of Toronto that people are impressed to hear you’re going to until they realize it’s not London London. Some students of Fanshawe College got drunk on St. Pat’s and had a riotous time involving burning furniture and cars and throwing things at police (I believe this is what in Australia is called a party). It became quite the melee. Some of them were dumb enough to tape themselves doing it and to talk about having done it. But most of the rest were caught on video anyway.

And Dianne Fowlie tells me that this morning she heard someone from Fanshawe College on CBC use the term pell-mell in regard to the happening. That might seem a low-frequency word, perhaps a touch on the erudite or British side, but, then, we should remember that this is a college with a very British name – Fanshawe derives originally from Featherstonehaugh, a name which some people still bear in that spelling, though they pronounce it the same as Fanshawe – and it has a student newspaper called the Interrobang, a typographical reference usually known only to geeks (it’s a combination question mark and exclamation mark).

Well, those students who sent off St. Pat’s with a bang will soon be interrogated, and they will have some explaining and appealing to do to with their parts in it. But all I need do now is explain this appealing term pell-mell.

And first: has it to do with Pall Mall? In fact, etymologically, no. The cigarette brand is named after the street in London (home to an assortment of gentlemen’s clubs), and the street – which runs west of Trafalgar Square and is pronounced “pal mal” – is so called because people used to play pall-mall on it, a game that is played with balls and mallets (indeed, pall is cognate with ball and mall is cognate with mallet), and the name of which is pronounced variously as “pel mel,” “pal mal,” and “pol mol.” Pell-mell, on the other hand, is cognate with melee. It comes to us from French; its Old French source was pesle-mesle, and that seems to have been a modified version of mesle-mesle, which was a reduplication of a word meaning “mix” or “mingle”, used in a military reference to a battle free-for-all.

So pell-mell retains its origin meaning, of a mad mixing of manic militants (adverb first, but also adjective and noun), but it also has a longstanding slightly shifted sense of “rushing headlong” – that is, one person going like a bat out of hell can also be said to be going pell-mell.

And hell’s bells, what a thrill – with risk of spill. Pedal to the metal, pell-mell – why, I declare, pell-mell seems to pedal to the metal about as Fanshawe to Featherstonehaugh, phonologically at least. But what is it about these ll words that gives them motion lines on the end? And would pill-mill seem even faster, if less out of control, than pell-mell?

Either way, our word of the day pops out of the mouth with the opening /p/ and cycles between embouchure and tongue tip like a four-stroke piston engine. That might seem orderly, but do this for me: get a few friends together and stand somewhere and each say pell-mell over and over again. I dare say it will make quite the hurly-burly. And probably someone will peer in and say “What the hell is going on here?”

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euphuism

Posted on March 21, 2012 | 7 comments

There appear betimes in printed books, in many magazines, on several sites of the world-wide web, passages of prose that bear a mark of calculated lucubration: not the wanton wit and spontaneous sparks of perverse paronomasia that flourish as flowers in the window-box of webby blogs, but lapidary parallelpipeds, nay, casques of Croesus, that, opened, produce pandiculations of Pandoran prose. As dogs must dig, starlings must swirl, seagulls must soar, and maniacs must murder, so too the wanton wordsmith willfully writes sesquipedalian sentences that stretch similitude and cloy close readers: Brummagem’s florins, Barmecide’s feasts, Tantalus’s nibbles, and ’t Audrey’s needlework – mental efforts meretricious in form and illusory in sense. None but the author believe them of value; the remainder wade through, as a treasure-hunter in a barnyard like as Hercules in the Augean stables, hoping that by perseverance they may find some diadem mired in the muck.

But no such luck. In the end, wipe you your lips and say you “Phooey.” One person’s idea of a well-built piece of prose is another’s complete waste of time. There was, it is true, a brief vogue in the Elizabethan court for euphuism, but the rest of the time we have only referred to it by euphemism – if we wish to be polite.

For, yes, euphuism is the word we use to refer to self-consciously erudite and overly flowery prose. And some people do write it. I won’t be so mean as to link to a recent example I’ve read, but it’s entertaining in its sick way to see a bloke in his twenties try through euphuism to sound pompous and established – while, in the next article on the same site, a bloke in his seventies who is well-established writes with the liveliness of a young man.

And where does this word come from, euphuism? It certainly has an air of emphatic enthusiasm about it, replacing as it seems to the demure phem of euphemism with a spouting phu. You can hear through it the author thinking “Yoo-hoo! Look over here!” But you know that it comes from Greek – the eu is a prefix meaning “good” or “pleasant” (as in euthanasia and eulogy, the first of which should happen to euphuisms and the second of which would be a good send-off for them only if brief), and the ph in European words is a reliable flag of Greek via Latin (you may also see it, standing for /p/ plus aspiration, in loans from Sanskrit, Thai, and a few other tongues).

Specifically, though, euphuism is an eponym. It is named after the main character of a couple of works written by John Lyly in 1578 and 1580: Euphues. His prose style was not simply florid willy-nilly but according to some specific principles – as the OED elucidates, “the continual recurrence of antithetic clauses in which the antithesis is emphasized by means of alliteration; the frequent introduction of a long string of similes all relating to the same subject, often drawn from the fabulous qualities ascribed to plants, minerals, and animals; and the constant endeavour after subtle refinement of expression.” But any kind of excessively affected prose may earn the monicker now.

Euphues in turn got his name from Greek εὐϕυής euphués “well-endowed by nature”. And indeed we see that the writers of euphuism, wanting to show themselves and their prose well endowed, resort to artificial expanders. Their goal is to show themselves, as it were, damn well hung; I rather think they should be damn well hanged.

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mojo

Posted on March 19, 2012 | 1 comment

This short little word looks to me a bit like one of Robert Motherwell’s series of paintings called Elegy to the Spanish Republic. But that has no relation to the sense of this word. I would do better to say that the j looks reminiscent of the strips of bois bandé bark I saw on sale in copious quantity in St. Lucia, purported to do some good juju for your mojo or some good mojo for your juju or, anyway, to boost your sexual prowess.

Which leads us to the sexual connotations one may get from the m and ojo shapes in this word. But I’m sure your imagination is working just as fine as you want it to in that regard.

But what does this word make me think of first?

My first encounter with mojo was as the name of little chewy fruit-flavoured candies (wax-paper-wrapped parallelepipeds) I used to eat when I was a kid. The name seemed reasonable enough; it’s a little, chewy kind of word. In my youth, if I’d heard “bad mojo,” I would have assumed it was a candy that had a nasty flavour or was so hard it cracked your teeth.

More recently, I – and no doubt many others – would likely think first of Austin Powers, the comic spy played by Mike Myers; in The Spy Who Shagged Me, he loses his mojo (actually, it’s stolen from him). And that doesn’t mean his hard candy. Or, well, it does, but not literally, knowhatimean, nudge nudge, wink wink.

But there are plenty of other things mojo might make you think of. Doors fans will think of Mr Mojo Risin, an anagram of Jim Morrison; they and other music fans might think of Mojo magazine, which includes a clever CD of old tracks or tribute remakes every month; Mojo is also the name of an album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; “Got My Mojo Workin’” is a great blues song by Muddy Waters. There are radio stations, bands, singers, and record labels with mojo in their names. There are sports figures who have it as a nickname (for example Maurice Jones-Drew, an NFL running back). There are companies and food products (but don’t confuse it with the Cuban sauce mojo, which is not said the same way) and clubs and agencies. There are also a board game and a video game called Mojo, and the progressive magazine Mother Jones is often called MoJo.

Mojo is working for sure! And get my mojo working is one of the common phrases that use the word. Get your mojo back and lose your mojo are also popular.

It’s not always to do with sex, either. Sometimes it’s just that mysterious magic. There’s a website called Box Office Mojo that tracks how well movies are doing, for instance.

Pause now and notice how magic and mojo sound similar. What mysterious conjuring does this word work in the imagination, and how much of that secret sauce is a function of its sounds? Impossible to know for sure. But this word has that sort of mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes it some wonderful mumbo-jumbo. It’s exotic, but you can put it in your pocket. It’s that voodoo that you do – or it casts a spell on you.

Where does it come from? It seems to be of a creole origin – a word taken from a West African language (perhaps Fulani) and modified in the framework of a creole, a mixed contact language, one that has a structure from a European language but is full of words borrowed from elsewhere and massaged to fit. Gullah, perhaps. But also, of course, finally, English – a language with lots of mojo of its own.

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pretzel

Posted on March 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

This word makes me think of the Ontario Science Centre.

Is the Ontario Science Centre somehow pretzel-like? Nope. Nor do they make or sell pretzels there as far as I know (perhaps they have them in the cafeteria.) No, I think of it because my wife twisted herself into a pretzel there.

I don’t mean she got bent out of shape metaphorically, nor that she got confused. No, there was an exhibit about, um, circus things, as I recall, and they had a little cube that people could see if they could fit themselves into from the side (not the top!). Each side of it was about the length of an adult’s leg from heel to knee: about a half a metre, I guess.

My wife is very flexible.

Yes, she fit in easily. In spite of the fact that she’s five-foot-six. She fit into a place so small I would have been praying for mercy if I’d even tried to be in it (or been forced into it). A leg, her torso, her head, arms folded, the other leg. No prob. Into a space the size of one of those little cubes you set snacks on in your living room. Just twisted into a pretzel.

Which, by the way, is the most common phrase for the word pretzel. Although pretzels aren’t really the absolute twistiest things anyone has ever seen (indeed, the word pretzel is rather twistier in a way, and almost looks like an inventory of the body parts Aina slipped into that box), they’re twistier than the average piece of bread.

Do you think of pretzels as bread? This probably depends rather much on your individual experience. They’re made with flour and so on, sure, but the ones I grew up with were crunchy. Crunchy little things that stick in your molars after you chew on them. When you bite into them, they make a cracking sound that’s rather similar to the sound of the word pretzel. They’re very salty and go great with beer. They’re twisted together, sure (though some of them are straight sticks – “salty” is a more essential characteristic of pretzels than “twisted” in my experience), but they’re not soft like bread – or like my wife.

So, when in 1983 I saw David Brenner’s book Soft Pretzels with Mustard, I thought, “What?” Soft and pretzels did not go together in my world. And where do you put the mustard on those little things?

Obviously I had not yet been to New York, where sidewalk vendors sell nice, big, soft pretzels that you can – and should – squeeze mustard on. (I’ve enjoyed them many times since.) Real bread, covered with big crystals of salt. As though those little things I had always eaten had been click-dragged bigger – and gotten softer in the process.

Did I say big? Aw, heck, you can still hold those things in your hands. One person can easily eat one. Today I had part of a pretzel that would be rather too much for one person – it was a big, soft, lovely thing, and it had a diameter of, um, well, not a half a metre, but more than a foot.

Of course more than a foot. Two arms! Every pretzel has two arms, folded together. (Admittedly, they look to me a bit more like Aina when she puts her legs behind her head, but most people can’t pretzel themselves that way.) The origin of the word pretzel is somewhat disputed, but it’s commonly thought that it likely comes from a reference to arms: Latin bracchium, by way of modified and diminutive versions, such as bracellus. A competing origin – though without any support other than a medieval assertion – is pretiola, “little rewards.” But since the English word comes from the German, and the German starts (and has always started) with /b/, that source /p/ would have had to become a /b/ and then go back to /p/ – not impossible, though it would be a pretzel-like round-and-back. Otherwise, it would just be a matter of the /b/ becoming a /p/, which is sort of like how the soft pretzels became hard ones by the time they got to Alberta (and many other places).

And why crossed arms? The heart-warming story is that they are in emulation of a child’s prayer pose (the “little rewards” were for saying their prayers). It’s pretty reasonable to imagine that they were used overtly with that in mind for a long time – and, by some people, still are. Was that where they originally came from? Perhaps. There is possible evidence of older breads with crossed-arm (and other twisted) shapes. But, though the opening /pr/ shared with prayer is just a coincidence, their history for the past several centuries starts with prayers. And with fasting.

Fasting? Yup. They’re food for Lent. You may associate them with beer and hot dogs and things like that (or, on the other hand, with “low-fat snack food,” which makes them seem more penitential), but they gained their great popularity during Lent. After all, they’re made with just water and flour – and salt and perhaps some sugar. No eggs, no lard, no dairy.

Not that beer has any of those in it, of course…

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bar

Posted on March 17, 2012 | 5 comments

A word taster walks into a bar…

But which bar? To say bar is crowded doesn’t begin to cover it. Once you unbar the door on this word, the murmuring rhubarb and baragouin of rabble from barbarians to barristers presents at the very least an embarrassment of riches and at most becomes a rebarbative barrier. You get far more than you bargained for.

For not only does the basic word bar, from Latin barra, “long and narrow piece of material such as wood”, have an assortment of extended senses through association with shape and with occasions of use (the barrier marking off the judge’s seat in a courtroom, or the one over which food and drink are served in a tavern, for instance), but there are a few other words bar (a kind of fish for one, and for another a unit of pressure – from Greek βάρος baros “weight”), and there are hundreds of places where bar shows up in unrelated words. We may look beyond the dictionary, too, into the bargeload of quotes at Bartleby.com.

So let’s force our way into this bar and see what bodies pack it. It could be a cocktail bar or a biker bar or a singles bar, but it’s not just a snack bar; it’s as crowded and festive as a durbar. As we embark, we barge into Barney, a barrister from Barbados, in a Barcalounger with a bargello pattern; he is eating a plate of barbecued barramundi with Hubbard squash. He is celebrating a plea bargain.

There is Barbara from Barcelona, who was never called to the bar because she was once behind bars (something to do with barbiturates – phenobarbital, pentobarbital, secobarbital); there is a barfly in a Babar T-shirt who used to work with Barnum and Bailey but had lumbar problems and, after bariatric surgery, became a barber; there is a bard named Barkley (who can’t read a bar of music) who is calling a barn dance in a baritone over a barrage of barking – someone’s having an argy-bargy – they want twelve-bar blues; there’s some barmy barnacle trying to barter a barbell and a barometer for a bit of the barley, but all he can bargain for is a barmecidal barberry pie. A baroness (bar sinister?) who was barred from a bar-mitzvah on a sandbar is barfing into a barrel.

Under a Barbizon-style painting we talk with a candy-bar-munching Lombard who’s studying the effects of cinnabar (or is it barium) on Epstein-Barr virus (or was that Guillain-Barré syndrome) in Malabar (or Nicobar or Zanzibar); the results are still embargoed. He is embarrassed by the syllabary we pull out of our scabbard and bombard him with.

And then, in the midst of this sybaritic scene, someone knocks out the power bar and everything goes fubar. They try to bar the door but we push the safety bar and escape to the barren exterior, where everything comes to a voiced stop and a diminishing liquid – with a low-central vowel in between.

Go raibh míle maith ag Laurie Miller for suggesting bar on the bar day of bar days, St. Patrick’s.

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irregardless

Posted on March 16, 2012 | 8 comments

Language usage can be rather like religion and politics: people get irritated and computer screens get irrigated. It tends to illustrate of what’s called Sayre’s law, after Wallace Stanley Sayre: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.… That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

Tell me, now: how do you feel about this word, irregardless?

Why?

Yes, yes, obviously it’s morphologically redundant. In this case the apparent analysis is accurate (unlike with, say, inflammable or internecine, where the in and inter are actually intensifiers in the original). Give yourself a pat on the back. You nailed that one. When people use it, they are using a word that says something twice. So, now, tell me: why get irritated by it?

If you say “It’s not a word,” I’m just going to wave you over to Annie Wei-Yu Kan’s gastronomic dismantling of that argument at The Nasty Guide to Nice Writing. (I recommend you peruse the table of contents and read all the articles there. You are unlikely to have seen grammar addressed that way before. Warning: She shares the blog with her ex-husband, Dirk E. Oldman, who thinks about sex all the time. Their divorce was not amicable.) Given that irregardless is in various dictionaries, including the Scrabble dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s pretty hard to say it’s not a word.

Is it a stupid, illogical word? Perhaps, though I’m not sure why you should set the bar so high for this word when we have plenty of other stupid, illogical words and usages in English, and some of them are happily accepted in at least some contexts. But let’s say it’s stupid and illogical. How is that cause for people to get so upset about it?

We know they get upset about it. Google to find out if for some reason you don’t already know this. But does it cause harm? Don’t bother saying it causes harm to the reputation of the speaker. It does so only because people get upset about it, so getting upset about it because it causes harm because people get upset about it is a bit of logical bind.

More likely, people get upset about it because they like getting upset about stupidity and this word is for them emblematic of stupidity. But I rather think using this word is different from, say, confusing gallons and litres when filling an airplane, or not knowing that a bit of rubber that is to be exposed to freezing temperatures – and is crucial for keeping a spacecraft from exploding – warps when it is exposed to freezing temperatures, or being in charge of major budgetary decisions but being unable to do simple math.

Does that mean I’m saying it’s OK to use it? Not in most contexts. After all, it’s not generally accepted, to say the least. It’s a mark of a foggy-headedness. It’s actually likely a blend of irrespective and regardless, the sort of thing people confect on the go, proving that the mental lexicon really can be a grab-bag of bits. It’s rather like misunderestimate. Except that, rather than being seen as an inane usage by a particular person, it’s perceived as a disgusting infiltrator into the purity of our language.

Bit of a joke, that, the purity of our language. As James Nicoll said, “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” Not to mention the appallingly messy ways our words come to being. Those who read my word tasting notes regularly will have noticed this.

So, to this word, then. Obviously it carries for many people a very strong taste of indignation and disgust. But leaving that aside, is it really an ugly word? It brings to mind such words as irrigate and regalia and garden and perhaps even ragged. It has three liquids in it, /r/ and /r/ and /l/, and two voiced stops, /g/ and /d/, and a voiceless fricative at the end, /s/. It has much in common with loggerheads, but also with regularities and even to some extent doggerel and arugula and rugalach and sigillography.

At its heart is regard. We manage not to think that that means “gard again”. Nor do we think, on the pattern of recuse and resign, that it means “unguard”. No, the re passes without remark just as in remark. But the gard is in fact cognate with guard. Regard has a history of meaning “inspect, mind, consider”; we know that with regard to means “with consideration of” or “with respect to”. From this regardless means, well, “irrespective”.

But just as we often take words as whole chunks irrespective of origin, and mix them and match them regardless of morphological origins (blends often make use of such pseudomorphemes as copter and oholic), we sometimes grab for a word and get bits of two, and cram them together into our mouths, irregardless of the more standard and respected usage. The word irregardless has managed to appear in print attestations for an even century now, and is almost always presented disingenuously, as an emulation of a less learnèd, less mindful style of usage. As such, it can at times be useful. It brings to mind quite clearly a heedless style. The risk is simply that the reader will think you don’t know it’s “sloppy” usage – so it’s often put in quotes.

Many people pay quite a lot of mind to pruning the hedges of our language and tidying its flowerbeds. We ought to remember that in order for it to grow or even simply to thrive, it needs not just irrigation but manure.

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