Tag Archives: word tasting notes

ulu

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 1 comment

This word looks architectural, doesn’t it? Or, in a way, like an epergne. Or a post with a basin on either side. Or something, anyway, with a central stem and two cups on the side. But when you say it, the lips don’t show symmetry at all; they show a simple steady rounding all the way through, and the tongue, in its hiding place behind, manifests the symmetry: the tip starting behind the teeth, then flipping up to touch the palate, then dropping back, sort of like the motion with which you remove the skin from, say, a chicken breast or a dead seal.

Not that this word seems symmetrical to everyone. We in English tend to think of the spelling first, and if we have some linguistic knowledge or understanding, we may think in terms of phonemes or phonetics. But what if you think first in terms of syllables? Then you have two: [u] and [lu]. So if you spell this word with a syllabic orthography, you have two characters, one of which may be, say, a triangle pointing to the right, and the other of which may be, let us say, a fish hook lying on its side with the bottom of the hook to the right and the top of the stem to the left. Letter forms are, after all, arbitrary, as transparent as they may seem to the native speaker.

In either case, mind you, I would be able to point at a semicircle in a letter form and say, “Look! A resemblance!” Pure coincidence, but there it is. And what does a semicircle have to do with this word? Well, it’s like this. I have a pizza knife that has a semicircular blade and, attached to it at the diameter, a straight wooden handle. I tend to think of it as an ulu. This is not quite accurate, but there is a resemblance. And ulus are something I saw in pictures and/or videos in school long before I ever saw a pizza knife.

Why would I see ulus, or have seen them? Because I live in Canada and we are taught about the Inuit. For non-Canadians, the Inuit are the people formerly called Eskimos – calling them Eskimos is like calling the Deutsch Germans, or the Saami Laplanders, or calling Magyarország Hungary, or Zhongguo China: it’s using someone else’s term. Obviously we do that a lot, but it happens that we are increasingly tending towards calling people what they call themselves, and that is the case now in Canada with the Inuit.

Which reminds me: one Inu, two or more Inuit; one ulu, two or more uluit. I have been calling them ulus, going by English morphology, but since we now like to keep plural morphology on loan words where we can, we might as well call an ulu and another ulu together uluit.

So, oh, yes, what is it? A knife with a curved blade (now steel, formerly slate) and a handle made of wood, bone, or whatnot. The handle is, like with my pizza cutter, parallel with the tangent of the peak of the blade, but it is attached at one or two points, rather than at full width, as with mine. The curve of the blade is like the curve in your tongue, downward between tip and tail, when you say [ulu] (which does give a new meaning to “cutting remarks”). The ulu is used among the Inuit by women (at least traditionally) for skinning, cutting food, and trimming blocks of snow and ice for igloos (I won’t say igluit, though I could).

And what does the word taste like? I get halo and hula (as in hoop) and lulu and similar curved things, plus uhuru, the widely borrowed Swahili word for “freedom”. And perhaps yoohoo!

Oh, and the interior jungle portion of Malaysia. Which, as the OED tells me, has a word: ulu. We can assume that it’s not what the Inuit have in mind.

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epergne

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 2 comments

This word seems almost pregnant with possibility – especially, at least to my eyes, the possibility of food. Perhaps because it’s a French term, and in particular one that you don’t see every day, the assumption tends to the gastronomic. Of course, it could be some other stereotypically French thing – like an épée, say, or some diplomatic manoeuvre – but when I think of the land of Époisses and Bourgogne, my thoughts turn to cuisine.

I suppose this word isn’t obviously French to everyone. After all, epigone comes originally from Greek (via French, true), and we have a few cases of gn words from Greek as well (gnosis, for instance) – and Gnaeus was a Roman personal name (look as it might like the growling gruntings of Gnasher, the nasty little dog in the British strip called Dennis the Menace – no connection to Hank Ketcham’s American one of the same name). And in that light, the gn can look a bit gnarly. But if we can say lasagna and cologne, I think we can manage epergne.

Um, so how do we say it, by the way? Take it as a given that it’s not “ee-prrg-nee”; some will say it in the Anglicized way, sort of like “ippern”, and others will do the English rendition of the French pronunciation, like “eh pair’n”. If you know how to speak French, you know how it would be said in French; if not, never mind, just grab a cream puff and you won’t have to speak.

Cream puff? For what it’s worth, that’s what the three e’s in this remind me of. Of course, they could be serving bowls attached to a centrepiece or something like that. Serving bowls attached to a centrepiece? Who would have something like that? How about the sort of person who would have an epergne?

Yes, indeed. An epergne is a centrepiece, typically made of metal or sometimes glass or both, that has a larger central bowl with a number of smaller bowls (shallow or deep according to the design of the specific item) in orbit around it. The best way to get an idea of the thing is to look at lots of pictures of examples. For those of you who like to read classic fiction, you may recall it in a memorable scene in Great Expectations:

An epergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I also like this charming snip from Our Mutual Friend, also by Dickens:

‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce;—wouldn’t you like to melt me down?’ A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table.

Indeed, in general, epergnes seem to be associated with wealth and its display – hoi polloi may have lazy Susans, but voici une Susanne paresseuse. This is possibly a great irony, as, inasmuch as anyone has any idea what the etymology of the word is, it seems to come from épargne. Which is French for “saving”.

Oh, but above all, remember this: in French, it’s not even called an epergne (or épergne). It’s called a surtout.

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting epergne.

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quirt

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 1 comment

“It’s such a cute little word!” Elisa Lively chirped, looking at the piece of paper Ross Ewage had just handed her.

I raised an eyebrow. Cute is not exactly Ross’s usual métier. Elisa held up the slip. “Quirt.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “quite.”

“No,” Elisa said, “quirt! Not quite quite! It’s such a quick little chirp, like a small bird. Like… quirk. Or quart. Or maybe even quiet.”

“Don’t forget squirt,” Ross said.

“You know,” Elisa said, rotating the slip of paper, “I’d never really thought before of how qu rotates to nb.”

“Note that well,” I said.

“Of course, the rest of the word isn’t much to look at rotated,” she said. “But that q… What does it make me think of, shape-wise?”

“A little whip?” Ross offered. “Straight handle, the whip curled up, awaiting use…”

Elisa snorted. “A little squirt of whipped cream, maybe. Oh, this is such a cute, charming little word. Does it have anything to do with quarto?”

“Latin for fourth? Yes, by way of Spanish, it seems. Cuarto, which is the source for cuarta, which slipped into English and became quirt.”

“Noun or verb?” Elisa was champing at the bit.

“Noun, and a verb derived from it,” Ross said. “Here, let me read you some sentences using it cited in the OED.” He pulled another piece of paper from his pocket. “Here’s C. Winterfield in The American Review: ‘“Davis can tell,” said some one, in a loud voice. “Yes, he knows all about it,” said Fitz—“lets quirt him until he tells.”’ Here’s one from Hopalong Cassidy: ‘He says you did—an’ somebody quirted him.’”

“It sounds like tickling!” Elisa said.

“Here’s from Where the Wagon Led by R.D. Symons: ‘So I quirted that pony a couple of times.’”

Elisa pulled a little quizzical smile. “Really?”

“Teddy Roosevelt in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: ‘A first-class rider will sit throughout it all…quirting his horse all the time.’”

“Ooohh…” Elisa said. “For some reason that sounds kinda sick.”

“Here’s one with the noun, from The Look of the Old West by William Foster-Harris: ‘The cowboy’s quirt was ordinarily about 2 or 3 feet long, of plaited leather, though sometimes of stitched buckskin or woven horsehair.’” Ross smirked slightly.

“Oh, now, I really am all at sea,” Elisa said, beginning to look marginally queasy.

“If you were at sea,” Ross said, “you might be less likely to see a quirt or to be quirted with it. Depending on the kind of ship, I suppose.”

Elisa held the slip of paper in front of her gingerly now, as though ants might start crawling out of it. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

Ross shrugged. “It’s a braided whip with a short handle. It seems to be named after the length of its handle, since a cuarta was a unit of measurement.”

Elisa looked sad. “It’s such a cute, quaint word… Oh dear.”

“Sometimes a cute thing can really smart,” Ross said, and took the piece of paper from her, ready to spring it on another victim.

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hesher

Posted on February 29, 2012 | 9 comments

I was talking with my friend, colleague, and fellow word taster Amy Toffelmire today about the Oscar results, and how she had beaten me in the office Oscar pool by correctly picking the documentary (all the rest of our picks were identical). I had picked Paradise Lost 3. Amy commented that the characters in the movie were what she, growing up in Arkansas (where the movie is set) and California, had called heshers.

Now, if you know what hesher means, and you have read enough of my posts to know I have a certain liking for heavy metal music (many other kinds, too, have no fear), you will probably be surprised to learn that I was entirely unfamiliar with the term. Amy explained that they were metalheads, a particular breed thereof. She forwarded me the Urban Dictionary link.

I love Urban Dictionary. It shows very clearly that the way a lot of people approach semantics – trying to isolate abstract defining properties, and setting aside what they call “encyclopedic knowledge” – has real shortcomings. As a reliable dictionary, Urban Dictionary of course has its own shortcomings, but for a term like this one – a slang term used by just the sort of people who frequent the site – its assorted entries, which are contributed by whoever wants and voted on by site visitors, help to paint a pretty good picture of the way people picture the word’s object. I will quote several of its definitions at length, with vulgarities censored not because I have a problem with them but because I know they will unduly distract some readers:

Reebock-wearing, mulleted person in acid-washed jeans and a Judas Priest T-shirt who, at the age of 28, still lives in his/her parents’ basement and swears that he/she can really rock out on his/her Ibanez Stratocaster copy guitar and probably owns a Nova that hasn’t run in 5 years but you just wait, that ——er is gonna smoke those ——in Japanese rice burners once I put a new head gasket on it.

Long haired, usually mulleted person who listens and rocks out to Metal or Thrash music.Generally seen wearing acid-washed jeans, leather motorcycle or denim jacket covered with band and skull patches. Will often have a Molester Moustache

A grungy, long haired, plastic comb-brush in the back pocket stoner with an 80’s rock shirt. Sometimes, a little ‘off’ from the drug damage. Rides an adult sized BMX bike around town and knocks over trash cans by kicking out with his back tire.

By now you really have a pretty clear image, don’t you? It’s true that the definitions can be a little overly precise, but if you have the image, then you have the type, and you undoubtedly have seen that type of person. Not all metalheads are heshers. Not all stoners are heshers. Not all people with mullets (or similar hair) are heshers. Not all people who have a problem adapting to adult reality are heshers. But heshers exist as a subset in the intersection of those sets, and further characteristics are entailed as emergent or culturally determined properties.

To further define the type, a movie, Hesher, was made in 2010. The central character is actually named Hesher, but it’s after the type. The biggest-name actor in the movie was Natalie Portman. And yet you probably haven’t heard of it, let alone seen it. Neither have I. From what I’ve read, it sucked. Which seems oddly appropriate.

The term hesher itself has been around for somewhat longer than that. It seems to have come into being in the 1980s. The etymology is a little smoky, but of course there are plenty of ideas. The lamest one is one that I saw on Yahoo! Answers, suggesting that it’s from he+she+her in reference to the long hair. Other speculation is that it’s some kind of blend of headbanger or heavy metal and thrasher. Some think it was first a term for a drug user (possibly from a verb hesh, heshing), but aside from an obvious taste of hash there’s no particular account for this (nor any explanation for the necessary vowel shift). Certainly no one is attempting to say that the word comes from the sound and sensation of inhaling marijuana or the torrents of white noise you hear when too near a stage stack speaker, both of which hesher sounds a bit like.

Perhaps the most common theory attaches it to Hessian, which was a term that came into being in the 1980s, probably in self-reference first, for a certain aggressively masculine type of headbanger (metalhead), perhaps a specific subset who preferred German industrial metal and perhaps neo-Nazi imagery (metal in general is not a hotbed of racism), but Germanic and bellicose imagery are common currency in many metal circles. The reference is of course to the Teutonic mercenaries of the 18th century. Some references to Hessians (of the metal kind) use hesher as a shortened form. Given the frequency of -er words in reference to types of music fans (especially in these kinds of genres), as well as the palatalization of the /s/ before the /i/ in Hessian (and the frequent assimilation of the /i/ into that), the derivation is reasonable, though I do not have full proof for it.

Incidentally, the original Hessians were called Hessians because many of them were from Hesse, a state in Germany. It contains cities such as Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Offenbach. Hesse in turn gained its name from a Latin version of the original Germanic name of the inhabitants, the Chatti or Hassi. And there the trail runs cold. But it’s fair to imagine that the Chatti had long, greasy hair, wore leather jackets, smoked a lot of weed, listened to thrash metal, and drove burnt-out cars or BMX bikes. Not.

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tranche

Posted on February 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

If letters were legs, this word might be a truncated tarantula. But aside from the faint echo of arachnid (mainly in the spelling), to my eyes this word looks more like it is in need of truncation. Perhaps don’t take the t off; then you’re left with ranche, which is a somewhat hokey-seeming olde-style spelling of ranch. Rather, dispense with the e. Or, better yet, dig the a right out of the middle and drop the e in. After all, this word sounds like someone with a certain kind of accent saying trench.

But which accent? Some say it to rhyme with ranch. The more “proper” way has it more like “tronsh”. And some people hear it – and misspell it – as trunch. That’s not a fancy spelling for trunk; it rhymes with lunch, I guess. But trunch is found in dictionaries only as an adjective meaning “short and thick” (derived from Latin truncus, which refers to the trunk of a tree) and an obsolete noun referring to a post or stake – or a truncheon (truncheon also comes from truncus, which, incidentally, at origin means “broken off” or “lopped off”). However lopped off a truncheon may be, it’s not fit for doing any cutting itself, and it’s not really related to tranches, unless you use a truncheon to aid you in depriving someone of a tranche.

Now, if you did wield a truncheon to ill effect, it would surely be a trenchant moment, but if you then wished to make the victim disappear into a trench, you wouldn’t be able to dig the trench with a truncheon or a trunk. Fair enough: none of them are cutters; all three have been cut, and all three words come from the same Latin root – the source of truncus is in turn truncare, “cut”, and that gives us not just truncate but trench as well.

But never mind trench. Our word tranche looks French. Indeed, to my eyes, tranche is a slice – of pie or cake. Well, as Pink Floyd (specifically Roger Waters) sang, “Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie.” With or without the aid of a truncheon, and whether or not at a luncheon. But what is the pie that a tranche is a slice of in English? Typically stocks or bonds or perhaps a loan: if a block of money (or paper promises) is handed over not all at once but in bits over time or to several parties, those shares are tranches. And, yes, tranche comes from a French word that ultimately comes again from truncare. Are we counting how many legs this linguistic tarantula has – or how many shares it is divided into?

Of all these different words, we may make two broad groups (or tranches, shall we say): ones in which the Latin c has retained its original /k/ sound, and ones in which it has become a fricative or even an English affricate “ch” (/tʃ/). There is a distinct phonaesthetic difference between these two tranches – one may even say there is a trench between them. The trunk side lands with a hard clunk at the back of the mouth, like knocking against wood. The trench side seems to have more of a cutting feeling: what is “ch, ch, ch” but the sound of chipping away at something? Both endings come in for a softer landing with the nasal: the tree is soft wood, or the cutting is in the ground.

But also either way, it starts with tr, which in French and Latin is a simple stop and liquid but in English with its retroflex /r/ causes the stop to become an affricate – another “ch”. Indeed, trench sounds a bit like the act of digging a trench: “trench, trench, trench.” But tranche? Well, first you have to take stock of whether you’re going to say it like “tronsh” or like “tranch” (or “trunch”), and you have to get past any echoes of trance and trash – and any spare change (to say nothing of drudge and trudge and so on) that might be lingering. And then? Well, I’ll let you say your piece.

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stracotto

Posted on February 26, 2012 | 5 comments

With food, it’s well known that you can put something in a whole new light – even affect the way the taste is received – by giving it a different name. Preferably a foreign one.

To be fair, if you’re giving it a non-English name you’re usually also doing something at least a little different with it – gelato is not quite the same as ice cream. But sometimes, it’s just that, for instance, calamari sounds better to us than squid, or escargots sounds better to us than snails. I’m sure that that factor had a little influence, too, when the Frenchified English upper classes during the Middle Ages started calling the cows and pigs they ate by French names – beef (bœuf), veal (veau), pork (porc).

And it’s true, to look at it from the other side, that some of the things food can be called can seem rather unexciting. I was interested to learn, when touring the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, that one of the emperors of Austria (I can’t remember which) preferred boiled beef for dinner, reserving French food for formal occasions. Boiled beef! But of course it really matters what you boil it in and how you spice and what you serve it with. It doesn’t have to be boring.

Think of pörkölt, which is a Hungarian word meaning “singed” or “almost burnt”, and also the name of a meat dish that (with some noodles tossed in) is now known in English as goulash, which is mutated from a Hungarian word meaning “hunter”. It’s a flavourful dish, though the meaning of the name would mislead you. (As to the “hunter” name, consider the different catch you get from Italian for “hunter”: cacciatore. Chicken anyone?)

Now, look at stracotto. You can already guess that I’m going to tell you it’s something that sounds boring (you may even already know what stracotto is; if you do, ssshh, wait for it). But isn’t a lovely word? You may think of stracciatella, a name of both an egg-drop soup and a chocolate-chip flavour of gelato, or of ricotta, or some kind of frittata, or panna cotta, or, well, even terra cotta, I suppose.

Which leads us a little closer to this. Not just because cotta (and masculine cotto) means “cooked” but because terra cotta is ceramics (“cooked earth”), and when I made stracotto today I did it in a ceramic pot. Actually a slow cooker. Not a terra cotta one, but cut me some slack here.

So, now, what does stra mean if cotto means “cooked”? Here’s a hint: Latin ex, where it appeared, typically became Italian s. So, yes, extra cooked down, over time, to stra. “Extra cooked”? The English translation would actually be “overcooked”.

But we don’t call the dish “overcooked” in English. Even if, from the perspective of a lover of rare beef, it is. Say, I’m put in mind of something a friend of mine once told me. He was out for dinner with friends, and one of them ordered filet mignon. The waiter asked how he would like it done. The man said “Well done.” “Well done, sir?” “Yes.” As he walked away, the waiter was heard to mutter with disgust, “Might as well have ordered pot roast.”

I’m of the same mind as the waiter: filet mignon that’s not extra rare is overcooked. But not all cuts of beef are the same, and some cuts benefit from being incredibly overcooked. How incredibly? How about eight hours? Meet stracotto: Italian pot roast.

So here it is: This morning, I put five shallots cut in half and two chopped garlic cloves in the bottom of a slow cooker with two chopped sticks of celery, then put a 3-pound chunk of beef (with lots of nice fat) on top of it. Then I added about a quarter pound each of raisins and roasted plain almonds. I poured some tamari on the beef, and a bit more for good measure. (I don’t care that tamari isn’t Italian. My taste buds don’t care about “authenticity.” My kitchen is not in Italy, so that’s out the window already anyway. They only care about flavourful and interesting.) I poured a third of a bottle of Chianti over it all. And nestled four small potatoes around it for the sake of efficiency (in the time in which beef is cooked in a slow cooker to ultima ratio finis, or chicken to spreadability, potatoes are just past crunchy). And then set it on low and let it go for eight hours. (I did turn the beef a couple of times.)

Yes, there are usually more vegetables in with it. And maybe some other seasonings. Whatever. Faccio come voglio, io. The beef was splendid and juicy, the sauce flavourful but not oversweet (carrots might have pushed it over the top). I served it with celery fried in butter with more almonds and raisins. But does that sound like it should be called stracotto?

I mean, if you speak Italian, sure. Indeed, pot roast has a very similar level of crispness – stracotto has a voiceless fricative, a rolling liquid, and three voiceless stops (one of which, in Italian, is double-length), plus an /a/ and two /o/s; pot roast has a voiceless fricative, a rolling liquid, three voiceless stops, plus an /a/ and an /o/. But pot roast is ordinary to us, and rather demotic – of course, stracotto is about the same to Italians, but not to us: it’s Italian! We don’t know if they invented food and sex, but they sure have earned a reputation for both. Sometimes on the same plate. Eccolà: manzo a quel dio biondo!

And it reminds us of how crisp this word is, how spicy. Stracotto the dish is delicious, but in a distinctly different way than stracotto the word. Honestly, stracotto the word has a flavour that to my tongue is more like that of the dry sparkling shiraz from Australia that I’m drinking while watching the Oscars right now. Or maybe of the almonds and raisins if I had mixed them with the iced whipped cream I have in the freezer, and sprinkled some cinnamon on it all… hmmm… So, yes, I’ll have the stracotto first, and then the stracotto after. That seems like a good flavour progression. And in fact that’s just what I’ve just done.

Italian translations:
Faccio come voglio, io: “I do what I want.”
Eccolà: manzo a quel dio biondo! “Here it is: beef fit for a blonde god!” (a quel dio biondo is a stock Italian phrase of approbation)

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clerihew

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 4 comments

How would you like to be an eponym?

I suppose it would depend on how you came to be eponymous. Some people have diseases named after them because they identified them (Down, Parkinson, et al. ad naus.); others have diseases named after them because they had them (legionnaires, for instance). Some people have forms of humour named after them because they inspired them (Spooner); some have forms of humour named after them because they created them.

In this last set belongs a certain Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who, as a British schoolboy, penned a little loose-rhythm quatrain:

Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

(Was not fond of was later revised to Abominated.) He subsequently penned a number of others on the same model. Another example:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

I think you can see the model. The first line is someone’s name (typically someone famous). This sets a pattern of usually two stressed syllables per line, but that is very loosely handled. The poem has two rhyming couplets, and tosses in some biographical detail about the person (Bentley’s books of clerihews include Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929), and Baseless Biography (1939)). It is important that the poem be amusing!

We note that the poems are not called bentleys. That would sound rather posh, and in particular would associate them with expensive cars typically driven by old-money types of people. (Even in Toronto, where Jaguars are a common sight and Lamborghinis can be seen driving by on infrequent occasion – and of course BMWs are more common than dirt – I see only a few Bentleys a year.) They are also not called edmunds. That would have some echoes of Shakespearean characters and a few other literary presences, and at the same time would be too well-known a person name to be all that distinctive. And it can’t help that it’s a sort of blunt sound with a dull vowel in the middle.

No, they are Clerihews, the least common of his three names. Clerihew is actually a Scottish family name, and in fact I know someone who comes from that family. [See the comments below for more on its origin.] You probably do not, as it really is not a common family name (neither is Harbeck, but I must say Clerihew has a certain idiosyncrasy that Harbeck does not). It seems almost to be the name of a bird, something like a curlew or a whippoorwill or perhaps a heronshew, or some other thing such as a creature like a fitchew hiding in the greenhew. Or perhaps an architectural feature like a clerestory in some mews.

The opening cl has a crisp clarity and cleanliness, a touch of class, though perhaps clerkish. All the vowels are front vowels (although the last one moves into a /w/), so there is a brightness to it, and the wheeze or sigh of the /h/ in the middle adds a softness, as of a pale or pastel hue – or a person breathing whew or phew.

The word as a whole anagrams to whericle, which is not a word but really should be; may I suggest that we now christen it one and use it to name a clerihew-type poem featuring not a person but a place, and (since the order of the word is reversed in four pieces) with the place name at the end, not the beginning, and starting (naturally) with where:

Where is an immenser
Historical dispenser
Of cheese, stone, and hassle?
Caerphilly Castle.

Where will you traipse
Over hills of peaches and grapes,
But find no cranberry bog in?
The Okanagan.

Where did the English entrench
Use of, and resistance to, French
More than at claret tastings?
The Battle of Hastings.

Most of the other words you can find in clerihew are not particularly related: chew, while, rice, rile, where, crewel; I do think rich is semantically relevant, but it doesn’t have much of the flavour of clerihew.

The big challenge of clerihews, aside from being witty, is to find a rhyme for the name; this can be on the difficult side at times. I’ve written a few recently for friends’ names, and you can see the contortions sometimes necessary:

Arlene Prunkl
Knew a little spunk’ll
Serve you in writing
And all kinds of uniting.

Antonia Morton
Waits for men to come a-courtin’:
Be they clients, be they lovers,
She knows her way between the covers.

Paul Cipywnyk
Doesn’t settle for what he’s giv’n: ich-
thyologic or prosaic,
He’s reliably apotropaic.

Margaret Gibbs
Keeps dolls in cribs.
She sees no analogy
Between that and genealogy.

They make a fun little challenge. (I also do them on request.)

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hubbub

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 2 comments

“What’s the hubbub, Bub?” said Bugs Bunny. But, buddy, what is a hubbub? Is it the murmuring rhubarb and babble of a rubbernecking rabble, or the bawdy hubba-hubba of bad boys eyeballing a bobbysoxer, or the blubbering and bawling some lub who’s been robbed? Is it simply general hullaballoo? Or is it something more threatening? A band of barbarians? A howling, perhaps as of a haboob?

If you look in Visual Thesaurus, you see only one node: “loud confused noise from many sources”; synonyms are brouhaha, uproar, and katzenjammer. But the Oxford English Dictionary, with its historical perspective, gives a small set of definitions, at the softer end of which is the rumbling murmur I remember from the mobs in the Banff Hot Springs, where I often bathed as a child, but at the louder end of which is a general hue and cry, even the shouting of a war cry. Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, used it thus: “They heard a noyse of many bagpipes shrill, And shrieking Hububs them approching nere.” Shrieking hubbubs! They sound almost like banshees.

Well, hubbub does appear to have something in common with banshee: an Irish origin. It is, by old accounts, an Irish outcry, cognate perhaps with the Scots Gaelic interjection of aversion or contempt, ub! ub! ubub! This is not to say we know its source ab ovo, but earliest citations lead me to think this purported source is no booboo.

But does hubbub sound threatening enough? There’s a reason it has shifted to a more general crowd sound, and I’m inclined to think it has to do with its greater resemblance to muddled incoherent speech sounds. After all, our word barbarian comes from the Greeks’ impression of the speech sounds of foreign rabble: barbarbarbar.

Still, for the Celts, ubub was not simple urban rumble, nor even some exuberance. Indeed, the war cry of the ancient Irish was abu! (Compare this to the war cry of the juvenile Anglophone, leaping out from behind a piece of furniture: Boo!)

It’s not the noise of a thousand tongues, though, not if they’re all saying hubbub, because this is one of those few words one can say entirely without the use of the tongue. Orthographically it’s at least as odd: almost a palindrome, except the h is an incomplete or burst b; its repeating sequences look a bit like one of those 3-D smudgeeos that used to feature in newspaper funny pages. Rotate it 180˚ and you get something spelling about as opposite a sound sequence as you could want: qnqqny.

But it hasn’t always been spelled exactly that way, as the Spenser quote hints. Other forms the OED lists through its history are hooboube, hooboobe, hoeboube, whobub, hubub, hobub, whoo-bub, whoopubb, hoobub, howbub, how-bub, and hub hub. Put them together and they make a regular whoop-up, more like a frat-boy noise than some hot pool conversation. And you thought word tasting was a subdued hobby!

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting hubbub.

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carnival

Posted on February 22, 2012 | 2 comments

I grew up in Canada, so my first acquaintance with carnival was in reference to a travelling fair – merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels and so on are called carnival rides, and the archetypal sound of a carnival is that of a calliope. It all tastes and smells of candied popcorn, and has that air of dizziness and queasiness from grease and sugar and circular motion.

But outside of Canada and the United States, carnival has not really slid over to that meaning. No, it’s still the original: something else, much bigger, less like Disney and more like Dionysus. I imagine that we all, as adults aware of the world, know of the carnival in Rio de Janeiro and many other countries (notably in the Caribbean): a massive festival of music and dancing and masked parades, and an incredible spree of consumption. A real Mardi Gras.

Exactly a real Mardi Gras. Carnival is an event that takes place on, or leading up to, Mardi Gras, “fat Tuesday,” the last day before Lent: today. Shrove Tuesday (shrove is not an old word for “pancake”, by the way). Look, if you’re going to have to spend 40 days being lean and austere, you really want a blow-out beforehand. And so carnival is a time of unrivalled carnality, of craving and devilry, with more pyrotechnics than Cape Canaveral (and perhaps more pirates than old Cornwall). Never mind the calliope: here come the bands and drums. It’s like being on a cruise ship (a Carnival ship, to be precise) times a thousand.

And then you wave goodbye to the meat, all that fabulous fat and flesh, and put it away. Which is where carnival comes from. Not from carne vale, “farewell to meat”, as I (like many others) thought for a long time, but from Italian carne levare or Latin carnem levare, “putting away (or removing) flesh”. It passed through carnelevarium and carnelevale before trimming down to Latin carnevale. The word as we have it has a smorgasbord of consonants: voiceless stop, liquid, voiced fricative, liquid, dancing from the back to the tip of the tongue to the teeth and lips to the tongue tip again (with the tongue raising up at last in back like the massive feathers attached to many a carnival dancer’s backside).

And so people remove a lot of clothing (and put on some costumes that don’t even cover the navel) and put away a lot of flesh (i.e., eat a lot of meat) – and drink a lot, and eat fat, and so on – in a celebration that is named for what happens right after it. But first, the dizziness and queasiness from all the consumption and dancing!

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plump, steatopygian, zaftig, buxom

Posted on February 20, 2012 | 3 comments

“Last time I buy leather from him,” Marilyn Frack said. She was recounting with dissatisfaction the acquisition of her latest black leather jacket and skirt. “He called me plump.”

I sucked in my breath and raised an eyebrow. It’s true that Marilyn isn’t exactly a stick figure, but that did display poor judgement on the part of the salesman.

“Pleasingly plump,” Edgar Frack, her other half, said. “I do believe he misjudged.”

“It’s not that I think I’m skinny,” Marilyn said, “nor would I want to be, but plump is just not right. It suggests fat, round about the middle. Like a big plumped-up pillow. Or a purple plum. Or a pink lump. Someone who just plumps down on the couch. I get out and around, you know.”

Yes, you do, I thought, but said nothing. Maury, also sharing a bottle of wine with us around a high table at Domus Logogustationis, added a little lighter fluid to her flame. “Not that etymology is any guide to current usage,” he said, “but there is also the fact that plump comes from a Germanic root originally meaning ‘crude, clumsy, stupid’.”

“I think the salesman was plump!” Marilyn snorted. Then she snorted back the rest of her glass and refilled. “Then there was that guy – do you remember him, Edgar? – who thought it would be amusing to call me steatopygian.”

I remembered that guy. He was a guest at one of our word tasting events. He fancied himself witty, but he leaned a bit too far towards the rude in erudite. I seem to recall him having to leave early to remove a wine stain from his shirt.

“It doesn’t matter how expensive the word is,” Marilyn continued, “it still means ‘fat ass’.” True: from Greek στέαρ stear “fat” and πῡγή pugé “buttocks”.

“It sounds a bit like a dinosaur,” Edgar added. “Or an obese prehistoric bird.”

“Some people like large buttocks,” Maury offered. “Some cultures value them quite a bit. I’m not saying that you have a lot of ‘booty,’ but if you did, there would be fellows out there who would want it.”

Marilyn leaned close to Maury and purred into his ear, “Leave the booty for the pirates.” She lingered a moment or two longer, just to make sure he was beginning to feel nervous, and then settled back onto her stool. “They don’t call Dolly Parton plump or steatopygian.”

“That’s true,” I said. “They do call her zaftig.”

Marilyn pondered this for a moment. “Isn’t zaftig just a Yiddish way of saying ‘fat’?”

“Not really,” I said. “Nor even necessarily ‘Rubenesque’.”

“Rubenesque in Yiddish refers to a sandwich,” Maury interjected.

“Zaftig means ‘juicy’,” I said. “Dolly Parton, Gina Lollabrigida, Marilyn Monroe, all zaftig. You might recognize Saft from German – as in Orangensaft, ‘orange juice’.”

“Thus referring,” Edgar said, “to someone you would like to squeeze like an orange.”

“But that zed,” Marilyn said. “Zaftig seems a little too zany. Or like Ziegfeld of the follies. And it’s an anagram of fat zig. No, I know what I prefer. Buxom.”

We all nodded. This was the perfect word for her figure. “It occurs to me,” I said, “that if we pronounce the u as in rude and the x as in xenial, then b-u-x-o-m can be said like ‘bosom’.”

“I like the x,” Marilyn said. “It sits in the middle like in a cross-your-heart bra. And the /b/ is like breasts about to burst out of a bodice. It’s happy, smiling, pleasing.”

“Goes with wench,” Edgar added. Marilyn seemed to like this.

“The xo recalls a kiss and hug,” Edgar continued.

“And right in the middle of a bum,” Maury observed.

“Well, then,” Marilyn said, “kiss and hug my bum. Now, how did that limerick go… ‘I know of a lass who’s quite buxom; You should find her and go try your luck some. You won’t have to chase Her all over the place; Guys she likes, she just throws down and—’”

She was cut short by Maury having a sudden coughing fit from having aspirated some wine. She reached over and patted him on the back. “Dear Maurice,” she said, “surely you’ve heard naughty limericks before.”

“Yes,” Maury gasped, and cleared his throat. “I was just going to add that the limerick matches well with the etymology of buxom.”

Edgar pursed his lips and glanced upwards, pensive. “On the model of winsome, fearsome, noisome, bothersome, and so on, does it mean prone to bucking or to being bucked?”

“In fact,” Maury said, “the buck comes from Old English bugan, which has become bow. Someone who was buxom was easily bowed, and therefore compliant.”

“So the idea is the stereotype that chesty women are easy?” Marilyn said.

“No, actually,” Maury said, “from ‘compliant’ it came to mean ‘blithe’ and ‘gladsome’, and from that ‘healthy’, ‘comely’, and so on.”

“The perfect word,” Marilyn said, smiled, and sipped her wine. Then, just as Maury was in mid-sip, she leaned over, settling her chest into his shoulder, and purred into his ear, “Not that I’m not easy.” Maury gagged and coughed, spraying his wine over the environs, including his shirt and mine.

“You see,” Marilyn said, settling back onto her stool. “This is why Edgar and I wear black leather. It’s so easy to just wipe wine right off it.” She smiled pleasantly, raised her glass, and tossed the rest back.

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