Tag Archives: word tasting notes

retiarius

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 6 comments

In a fight between a heavily armoured guy with a sword and a guy without armour (more of an air-suiter) but carrying a net, a long trident, and a dagger, who would you favour?

This was once a viable real-life question, and you could ask which of each: which secutor and which retiarius? In the Roman circus, such match-ups were common. The retiarius, with his net and trident, would face off against a secutor, or even two of them. Secutor meant “follower”, and mayhem would typically follow; retiarius meant “net user”, and he would try to retain the secutor in order to retire him and hope to return, as there was no retreat. Nor any retrial – nor trial at all: no judge, jury, or prosecutor, just one pro secutor. Ready or not, ready your net. And try to retain it and use it on your adversary – don’t be reticent.

The retiarius would actually do the damage with the trident or the dagger, but it was the net he was associated with – that’s what the arius is about, often showing up in English as ary: actuary, apothecary, secretary, adversary. Or, of course, in the original in Aquarius, the sign of the water-carrier. And the ret? That’s the net. It’s not made of flax – ret may mean “soak flax”, but that’s unrelated, Germanic. This ret is from Latin rete, “net”. As in reticulated. There are numerous other English words that start with ret, but pretty much none of them are derived from rete.

This word has that pleasant tongue-tip effect that Latin often gives: the consonants are /r/ /t/ /r/ /s/ – a trill, a stop, a tap, a hiss, but all at the tip of the tongue. In form it has little resemblance to a net; its most salient visual trait is the two i’s sticking up. Actually, what makes me think more of a net – or specifically a web – is the trident. After all, the w in world wide web has the three upward points.

And today’s net user is not a gladiatorial contestant, not exactly. No, the net user is you – and me. And I cast my net on the web, the www – a triple trident – by my blog and via Twitter. Which is where I hope to ensnare followers. Who will, I hope, retweet.

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monoubiquitination

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 3 comments

Oh, you do see some of the most eye-grabbing words in the pages of journals such as Nature. In the last issue of 2011, I was snagged by this article title: “GlcNAcylation of histone H2B facilitates its monoubiquitination.”

What a smorgasbord of dishes bigger than your head! I won’t even dive into GlcNAcylation other than to say that it is addition of GlcNAc, which is O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine, to an organic molecule in a cell, and, really, if you want to know what that’s all about, it’s more space than I can reasonably take here. But in spite of its long and arcane name, it happens a lot.

Now, histone is in a way an easier thing. It may seem like it’s a man’s note (his tone), or an elevated rock (hi stone), but it’s actually the name of a kind of protein found in cell nuclei. And, speaking of things that take more space than is reasonable, or taking long things and making them shorter, one thing that histones do is act as spools for winding DNA around them. This may sound like a nice bit of tidiness, but you don’t know the half of it. You may not even know the ten-millionth of it, which is the ratio of a DNA strand’s width to its length. Yes, the DNA in each one of your – or my – cells would, if stretched straight, be about as long as I am tall, and I’m six feet when standing straight. That’s quite the spool job.

But the word that caught my eye in particular was monoubiquitination. It’s made of such clear Latin parts (and so many of them), but the sense of it is not immediately certain from its parts. What are the parts? We start with mono, “one”; then ubiquit, “everywhere”, from ubi “where” and que “and” (so it’s literally “and where” – que tacks onto the end of a word but means “and [that word]”); the in is a suffix used for naming certain organic molecules; ation is a normal English suffix (based on Latin) that typically refers to making something into something or adding something to something. So, really, is this a one-word expression of the joke, “A Buddhist monk goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, ‘Make me one with everything’”? Or is it some three-musketeerish thing, “all for one and one for all”?

In fact, ubiquitin is a small protein – small is relative, of course; it’s made of 76 amino acids and can be represented in one-letter code as MQIFVKTLTGKTITLEVEPSDTIENVKAKIQDKEGIPPDQQRLIFAGKQLEDGRTLSDYNIQKESTLHLVLRLRGG (seriously, James Joyce would have stuffed that one into Finnegans Wake if he could have – take the time to look and see how many English words just happen to show up in it). It’s called ubiquitin because it’s sort of like the Tim Hortons of the body: you find it everywhere. (That’s a Canadian reference, for all my international readers.) And what does it do? A whole bunch of different things, but a key one is marking certain kids of proteins for recycling.

What does that mean? Well, you could think of it as being like when parks department guys go around spraypainting X onto trees that are to be cut down and mulched: having a ubiquitin attached is like having that X. Or you could think of the old Steve Martin routine where he plays a “wild and crazy guy” from Czechoslovakia talking about their way of breaking up: “You say to the woman, ‘I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee,’ and then you throw dog poop on her shoes. Then me and my cousin, we go looking for women who have dog poop on their shoes.” Ubiquitin would be the dog poop on the protein’s shoes.

So what’s with the mono? Well, you can add one ubiquitin, or you can add more. If you add more, it can flag other things to happen. When you’ve added just one, it’s monoubiquitination. When you add more, the word becomes macaronic: it mixes Greek and Latin – polyubiquitination.

But monoubiquitination is enough as it is: one a, two u’s, three o’s, four i’s, three n’s, two t’s, plus m b q. That’s classically sesquipedalian. Actually, sesquipedalian means “foot and a half long”; that would be 18 inches, and this word is 18 letters – but three metrical feet: two dactyls and a trochee, da-da-da da-da-da da-da, like the chorus of “I Like It Here in America” (from West Side Story) but missing the last syllable. Try singing it if you know the tune (if some guy near you has perfect pitch, follow his tone):

Monoubiquitination: it
Flags things for recirculation; it
Causes a word nerd elation; it
Leaves you unclear where to station it.

I defy you to facilitate that with GlcNAcylation!

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groceries

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 3 comments

My friend and co-worker Scott Bradley asked me yesterday about the origin of the word groceries. I had to admit I wasn’t sure. “It has the word gross in it,” he said. This is true – in the sound. But it’s not spelled that way. What are the odds that it has any connection?

Look at the form of this word, after all. Where does it come from? It’s true that groceries include a series of things you may grow, especially if you’re Ceres – from rice to cores to, well, ices I suppose (Roger that), plus partially eaten cress and eggs. We will overlook the ogre and orgies hiding in this word, and will not try to score some corgis. But where are the etymological hints in this word?

We know the English derivation, to be sure: groceries is the plural of grocery (rarely used as a singular noun except in the attributive – you go to the grocery store but you don’t buy a grocery); grocery comes from grocer. And a grocer is? Aside from someone who is famously bad with apostrophe use, that is (grocer’s apostrophe being a name for an apostrophe used on a plural, e.g., twelve egg’s). I’ll tell you: a person who buys and sells food in bulk. From Old French grossier, from Latin grossarius, from grossus “thick” (and thus “in bulk”). It is that “thick” and “coarse” sense that gross retained into English that has lent itself to the ultimate development of the colloquial sense as in “That’s really gross” – something you might say of a messy spill in a grocery store (and then, of course, there are the grammar grumblers who complain of gross negligence or gross ignorance when spotting some orthographical peccadillo on a grocery store sign – if you’re not sure what I think of the sort of people who would take out a pen and correct someone else’s sign, see “A new way to be a complete loser“).

So, yes, it’s the same gross; the c spelling existed alongside an ss spelling for a long time and finally prevailed (why the c? just because it sounded that way – but remember that it was scribes and law clerks doing it then, not grocers). Grocers have been around a long time – the Worshipful Company of Grocers was founded in 1344. At first they were dealers in spices and other imported goods (or is that spice’s and other imported good’s?), for sale in quantity. Nowadays you can buy quite a lot of things in small or great quantity, of course, but if you really want bulk you don’t deal with a grocer – you go to Costco, and there’s nothing grosser than some of the 144-packs that you can there. Or 288-packs – but those really are two gross for me.

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hyssop

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

How this word tastes to you will surely be strongly affected by your religious background. For many people, it’s an unfamiliar word, or at most the name of a herb that may be used medicinally to treat coughs, fevers, and similar symptoms, and may be used (though not commonly in North America) in cooking to give a slightly bitter minty flavour. But hyssop plays an important role in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, though not all members of the Jewish and Christian faiths will be equally familiar with it.

For me, as someone who has sung in choirs, it immediately brings to mind the “Asperges me,” a text based on Psalm 51 that is sung in the Latin mass in conjunction with the act of sprinkling holy water:

Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor,
Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

(Listen to a stirring setting of this by Cristóbal de Morales.) In English, this is translated as

You will sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed,
You will wash me, and I shall be washed whiter than snow.
Pity me, O God, according to Your great mercy.

The hyssop’s central association is indeed with bearing water or other holy fluids – and with sacrifice. At the time of the Passover, it was with a hyssop branch that the Israelites were told to sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the lintel and doorposts of their houses. It was also used in other rites of purification, with the blood of a sacrificial dove or with water. And in the Christian tradition, add this: According to the gospel of John, when Jesus on the cross said he was thirsty, he was offered a sponge soaked in vinegar on the end of a hyssop stick. You can see that this herb, and thus this word, comes with a solemnity, a flavour of sacrifice and purification, for those who have encountered it in this context.

What is the word, anyway? Where does it come from? The hy may make you think it comes from Greek, and indeed it does, via Latin: ὕσσωπος hussópos. But Greek seems to have borrowed the word from Hebrew ezob. Interesting how the voiced/unvoiced difference affects it: ezob seems more to me like a name for a desert herb; hyssop – pronounced “hissup,” by the way – has a whispering quality to it, like a breeze, like waters, like a whisper in a basilica, the voice of a purifying spirit. But, then, that’s also because of the associations I have for it.

But there is another thing: as sometimes happens, names shift (chalcedony is another example of this). The plant referred to in the Bible is probably not the plant we now call hyssop. It was more likely Syrian oregano or a similar plant. But that fact is not meant to cast aspersions on the taste of this word. Indeed, this word – or its object – is what will cast aspersions: it will asperge, which is to say, sprinkle. And purge, and wash, and make white as snow. Yes, that’s what hyssop sounds like: pure snow, with the breath of the spirit passing over.

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cissoid, sistroid

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Apparently there was some big sporting event over the weekend, some game played by men with odd-shaped balls. It’s supposed to be macho or something, but the people I’ve talked with about it have focused mainly on the fact that the men were wearing lots of padding and spandex and had a liking for dancing around and patting each other on the buttocks. Now, it happens that a lot of the most likeable guys I know are comfortable with padding and spandex and dancing and so on, but that hardly seems to go with beating other guys to a pulp on a field of grass and mud, which is apparently supposed to be an important component of this game. Guys who like that kind of thing, by my experience, usually call guys who like dancing and padding and so on sissies. So this whole thing is throwing me a bit of a curve.

That might seem like a bad metaphor, since throwing a curve is a baseball reference, and I’m talking here about what Americans and Canadians call football. But when those football players throw their ball, well, that ball has a curve, and brother, that curve is kind of sistroid. And if they say they’re not a bunch of sissy-pants just because they wear spandex and pat each other’s bums, remember that those tight pants of theirs reveal a definite cissoid curve in the butt.

What are cissoid and sistroid curves? They’re really planar geometry, so I’m cheating a bit when I describe 3-D objects with these terms. But the short of it is that a cissoid is the shape formed when two concave curves meet at a point. Consider the bottom of someone’s bottom, and how the lines that describe the lower limit of each cheek meet in the middle. That’s not a classic cissoid (describable in Cartesian terms as y2(2a–x) = x3), but it’s of the general type. Another example would be the line described by a ball bouncing off the ground. A sistroid is the converse: two convex curves meet at a point. Sort of like a cross-section of the tip of a football (an American one), or the nose of a blimp (perhaps one flying over the game to get an aerial view).

But where do these words come from? When we say them, they sound the same except for the /tr/ in the middle of one, but when we spell them, one has ciss where the other has sis. It’s all hissy, but it also makes us think of sissy – also spelled cissy – and sister. What’s the relation?

Well, sister is an old Germanic word. Sissy is just a diminutive formed from sister and in use in its current sense since the later 1800s (and sometimes spelled cissy or cissie since around 1915). Cissoid, on the other hand, comes from Greek κισσός kissos “ivy”, since the curve resembles the tip of an ivy leaf (and here you thought a kiss was always under the mistletoe – well, mistletoe doesn’t even have a cissoid curve). And sistroid comes from Greek σείειν seien “shake” via the noun σείστρον seistron “sistrum” – oh, and a sistrum is a kind of metal shaker made of a frame with rods in it. The sistrums (a.k.a. sistra) I’ve seen haven’t looked sistroid to me, but perhaps when the converse of cissoid was desired they wanted a sister term and that one sounded good.

I suppose I could leap off from that to ask whether, in football, the Ivies are getting their fair shake – the Ivies being the Ivy League schools, not really as focused on sports as some other universities, although the first collegiate football game was played between Harvard (an Ivy) and Tufts (not an Ivy but a similar kind of place). But the truth is that while I am rather uninterested in professional football, I am if anything antipathetic towards what collegiate sport generally is now in the US (much less so in Canada): the tail that wags the dog for a lot of universities (not the Ivies, however). The athletes who are pushed through to fill out their teams aren’t always graded on a curve – other than the curve of the balls they play with.

So I will leave that undiscussed (see paralipsis). We may close instead with a picture of the sissy sisters of spandex and super bowls, their cissoids and sistroids soaring and whistling through the air like asteroids.

Thanks to Michael Corrado for suggesting these words.

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springe

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 2 comments

This is a word of deception. It looks like spring – but is it a false spring? Indeed, it ceases to be spring even before the unexpected silent ending: it rhymes with hinge, and has a taste of injure.

It is not related to hinge, though a springe can lead to swinging; a springe is a snare attached to a spring such as a green branch. The arrangement varies, but those who want a bit of iconicity in the form of this modestly symmetrical word may see the i as the attachment point of the spring and the p and g as the pegs holding the rope to the ground. But, really, springe looks more like a hinge; a springe looks more like an an upside-down U next to a small o. It simply sits ready, the wood cocked, until some unsuspecting bird errs into it and is caught up: the spring is released and the bird is suddenly aloft, and not in the way it wants to be. Just as the tongue of the speaker is suddenly not at the velum but touching the tip and coming to a hard end with the silent loop of the e, the bird is not on the soft ground but at the tip of a tree and silenced by a loop.

Oh, and what kind of bird? Well, springes can catch many kinds, but they are most associated with woodcocks. And not per se because springes are made with cocked wood! We most owe the association to Shakespeare. As it happens, I heard this pairing with my own ears on Friday night, at a performance of Hamlet starring my friend Kyle McDonald. You hear springe twice in the play. The first time, Ophelia is talking of Hamlet’s protestations of love, and her father, Polonius, says, “Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.” Now, isn’t that a phrase with a crisp flavour? It starts at the lips and tip of the tongue, then moves into tongue-tip affricates, and at the end of this quick consonantal scuffle it hits hard stops at the back of the mouth. The second time is in the final scene, when Laertes says, “Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric; I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.”

And is springe related to spring? Yes, it is. The cocked wood – that green wood of spring – is a spring made of green wood; it is something that is made to spring, and thus it is named with an old causative formed from the verb spring (just as fell as in fell a tree is a causative from fall). And during the green season of the year, life and greenery spring forth, just as water springs forth from a spring – all of these springs spring from the same source. But the spring of the year and the spring of water are life-giving; not so a springe.

Not so a false spring, either, come to think of it. Right now around where I live, the woods are cocked and ready to spring forth, and indeed birds are chirping and buds sprouting – even though it’s supposed to be the snowy season. If too much of the spring ventures forth into this false spring, it, too, may be caught out and silenced by an unexpected turn of the weather. As it goes for the rest of nature, so, too, can it go for us, in the long term. And when the weather is like this, people may stop and ask whether we have had some effect on that. Are we woodcocks to our own springe?

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whitebait

Posted on February 5, 2012 | 4 comments

On uncommon occasion, reading some British book, I have seen a reference to eating whitebait. This has generally struck me as one of those pretentious understatements, rather like calling an enormous mansion a country pile, the pile in this case being short for pile of stones. After all, bait is something you use to catch fish; it’s not something for human consumption. Might as well be referring to a salad as rabbit food – only referring to it that way and no other way, since any time I saw whitebait it was used just that way with no further explanation, paraphrase, or context, as though absolutely everyone knew just what it meant.

Rather frustrating, aren’t they, those in-group cultural references? Terms used in an everyone-knows manner when you have no idea what they might be referring to. Do you know, it was years and years between the first time I saw consumption referred to as a disease in a work of fiction and the time I finally learned that it was just another term for tuberculosis. (That was before we could just Google everything up on Wikipedia on teh interwebz.)

I gathered, anyway, that whitebait must be some kind of fish. The context made that plain enough; also, I knew that fish were sometimes used as bait for other fish (it’s a fish-eat-fish world), and, having done fishing on occasion in my youth, I knew that the other things you might bait fish with were less likely on one’s dinner plate. I figured it must be some term for some set of white fish.

In fact, it refers to very young fish of actually quite a variety of species – mainly herring and sprat, but varying from place to place. The original fish to which it referred were caught in the Thames around Greenwich, and given the name because they were used as bait to catch bigger fish. But they gained popularity as snacks and light eating. After all, they’re just one to two inches long. You eat them whole, head, bones, and all. I think whitebait might make about one bite.

The word whitebait, on the other hand, makes two bites, or anyway two touches of the tongue, one at the end of each syllable, and each syllable is a morpheme, a whole word in fact, an entire Anglo-Saxon root. In saying whitebait, the mouth starts more forward, and ends up pulled farther back. If you make it sprat whitebait it will have three short, crisp syllables, but it seems that generally one doesn’t bother specifying what species they are; indeed, they’re all so small, you could lose them altogether if you were to batter them for deep-frying. Mind you, they often are coated in flour or some kind of batter for deep-frying, but you may feel sure it’s not the thick kind of batter you’re likely to get with full-size fish that’s served with chips.

I’m not sure exactly why this word came into my mind today, but it was brought back some hours later when Aina and I went for fish and chips at Off the Hook, which has five different kinds of fish available in four different kinds of batter (one of which gluten-free) – but no whitebait. It happened that on the TV screen in the back of the place the movie Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck was showing, and it reached its conclusion just as we reached ours: the small white men in their small wooden boats going after a large white whale; they want it for consumption (I mean oil, mainly, but perhaps food too), but it becomes all-consuming for Captain Ahab, and in the end he, small mouthful that he is, is fully consumed by it – not eaten, but caught up in the harpoon lines and dragged under, and his whaleboat likewise lost. You might say he was the white bait; at any rate, his life was abated when he was ablated. He was no less fish than the whale was, and in the end he was battered and deep-sixed.

But at least he was not in his infancy. Whitebait are so small because they have not yet reached maturity. They are cut off before they can reproduce. The result can leave us hard of herring and short of sprat. Better to stick with the thicker batter rather eating something that’s just one biteweight.

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realm

Posted on February 3, 2012 | 1 comment

This is a magical word, a word of resonant voice, redolent of wonder, royalty, the more-than-real. It rolls in with the soft regal thunder of the /r/ and drives forth with the mid-front vowel moving smoothly into the liquid /l/, which is then closed off with the pensive, appraising hum of /m/. There is nothing abrupt, nothing infra dignitatem; it is smooth like a sweep of a cape or a wide wave of a wand, or the expansive swing of a hand’s commanding gesture displaying the full breadth of a realm. It is firm as an elm. And it has the added expense of a silent a in its heart.

We do use this word today, and not always in especially regal and evocative contexts; it shows up in public realm, political realm, realm of possibility, realm of theory, and such like, as well as in the stock phrase the coin of the realm, but into each of these contexts it imports an air of something beyond the mere local scope. As it does such yeoman service it is like a king incognito, or like the god Krishna serving as charioteer to the warrior Arjuna: the majesty will out.

What is a realm? Not a simple place; it is an expanse, a region, a land, even a new universe unto itself. A realm is something you may enter (perhaps the realm of possibility) or move into or descend into (perhaps the realm of fantasy); things may be within or in a realm, or they may even be beyond or outside it; something may open up new realms for inquiry, investigation, or the like, as though pushing through a mass of coats at the back of a wardrobe and discovering the entry to a new kingdom.

Kingdom? No, realm. But what is the difference? Surely a realm is a region ruled over by a king? After all, it comes from Middle French realme, reaume, reaulme (and similar spellings), which traces back to Latin regalis “regal” – “of a king”. Over history, the l has sometimes been present, sometimes absent from the word, and for some time not standard in the pronunciation; but we may say this l is like the sceptre, and it will ever return. Not only kings and queens have sceptres, however; any territory ruled by a sovereign can be called a realm – the Grandy Duchy of Luxembourg, for instance, is a realm. Realm can also cover parts of a country’s territory that are not part of the country itself but are owned by the country.

More broadly, of course – in the extended uses – a realm is, as Visual Thesaurus puts it, “a domain in which something is dominant”; in that sense it has synonyms in land and kingdom. It can also be a domain of knowledge – also called a region. And I would say that in general it is the bounded (but not always precisely bounded) expanse that is more key to the semantic essence of this word rather than the specific monarchy – or any specific borders.

After all, we do not talk of the animal realm rather than the animal kingdom; if Disney had a magic realm it would not be quite the same as a magic kingdom; things do not enter the kingdom of possibility or open up new kingdoms of knowledge. A kingdom has a king, castle, borders; kingdom is the state of being a king, too. A realm may have a king and castle and borders, but those are not the focus; it is the pervasive majesty and dominion and the contiguity that are more important – the power and dominion distinguish it from land or region, but dominion is not quite as grand as realm (and in Canada it’s a fairly common word, found in the names of such things as banks, grocery stores, and such like, due to the official use – until 1982, and in fact still occasionally – of the name Dominion of Canada).

Realm also has specialized usages, such as in the sciences – a major biogeographic division – and in geometry – a hyperplane – as well as in traditional Buddhist cosmology, in which there are several possible realms of rebirth. One of those – lower than that of animals but higher than that of hell – is the realm of hungry ghosts. And a well-known reference to that is In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a best-selling book about addiction by Gabor Maté, a physician who works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Most of the other top results for realm on Amazon.com, however, fall into two realms: that of fantasy novels and role-playing games (Forgotten Realms, Into a Dark Realm, Keeper of the Realms) , and that of New Age mysticism and magick (Realms of the Earth Angels, Wisdom of the Hidden Realms, Practical Advice from This Realm and Beyond). Which brings us back to the wondrous power of this word, like a purple velvet curtain that encloses, occludes, but parts to reveal and to allow entry. Consider the magic it brings in to set the tone in John Keats’s “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

It is, too, a word long associated with the ancient glory of England. Queen Elizabeth I referred to her land with the term – for instance, “I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom,” and “I … think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”

But the best place to hear it in this role is in John of Gaunt’s great speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II. I enjoin you to listen to John Gielgud deliver these lines; the video, on YouTube, is ten minutes long, but this speech is near the beginning – be warned, though: you will want to watch the remainder. Here is the passage, which so thoroughly seasons the dish that this word and a few others will ever give you the savour of it:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth.

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noisome

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 3 comments

You’re sitting, let’s say, on a streetcar, bus, subway, in a food court, whatever. And all of a sudden it’s as if Pepé Le Pew has pranced past: something odiously malodorous has been unleashed on the environs. You companion coughs, waves, turns, eyes watering, to you: “Was that you?”

You, shocked, taken aback, defensive, wanting to protest your innocence of the noxious nuisance, can only say (between gasps), “No – I – some…” and then asphyxiate.

Oh, those mercaptans, like olfactory cacophony: annoying noise for your nose. How much better it would be to be merely bored: who would not take ennui over a noisome nastiness?

But why would we call them noisome? Is it by some runaway metaphor, cacophony turning to phony caca, so that just as you may say “your singing stinks” you may conversely say “your stinking sings”? And, by the way, can we use noisome for things other than smells?

To answer the latter question first: Yes, you can use noisome for anything annoying, though it is most commonly used for odours that make your nose say “Oy!” and for other things causing nausea. If you look for synonyms on Visual Thesaurus, you get two sets, one clustered on “offensively malodorous” – words such as fœtid, foul, funky, and stinky – and the other on “causing or able to cause nausea” – words such as sickening, queasy, vile, and loathsome.

But what, then, is the link between noisome, noise, nausea, and annoying? If you think you can sniff it out, you may be after a rotting red herring. Oh, there are links, and there are also disconnections, but they may not all be where you expect.

Let us start with something odious, hateful (in fact, we did). In Latin, est mihi in odio meant “it is hateful to me”; this phrase was apparently the source of the old Venetian inodio, which spread through other Romance languages, wearing down in the process, turning up in Old French as anoi and in modern French as ennui. English took anoi and made of it annoy, which was first a noun – the verb annoy came along just slightly later from the derived verb in French. From this annoy was made an aphetic (trimmed) form noy, possibly through reanalysis as a+noy. And from noy plus the same some as we see on loathsome, toothsome, winsome, and so on we got noisome.

But what about noise? What a nuisance! Where does it come in? Heh. Well, it seems likely that it comes ultimately from nausea – by a semantic shift from “seasickness” to “upset” to “uproar” and “din” – but it may instead come from noxia, which is in turn from nocere “harm” (whence innocent); noxia is the source of noxious and nuisance. But none of this is related – except by coincidence of sound and consequent reanalysis – to noisome.

Well, if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog, smells like a dog… Hmm, well, it’s still not a dog really, but it may dog you even after doggèd digging. Words usually diverge over time; we have plenty of cognates, words that come from the same original word. But sometimes they converge. And sometimes they come to look like something that they specifically are not, and when you have learned them it’s a badge of knowledge that you use them in the “correct” sense, rather than what they look like they mean: words like enormity, meretricious, wizened, noisome… They lurk in the language like invisible mephitic clouds, just waiting for you to walk into them.

Thanks to Cathy McPhalen for suggesting noisome.

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fortitude

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 1 comment

I glanced over at the copy of Vanity Fair my wife was reading and noticed a pull quote: “Jon has lots of fortitude.… This is good when life requires being resilient, but it’s bad when it requires change.”

Fortitude! Not a word you see all the time, and the particular sentence struck me as a bit odd. How often do we say that this or that person has fortitude? I almost rather think is strong or, perhaps, is fortitudinous would be more expected. But beyond that, to have lots of fortitude – right next to each other you have a very colloquial term, lots of, and a rather formal, erudite, poetic, or at the very least officious term, fortitude.

The article, by the way, is on Jon Corzine, former head of Goldman Sachs, former governor of New Jersey, most recently in charge of the brokerage MF Global in its $40 billion meltdown. The actual text in the article is just slightly different from the pull quote: “‘He has lots of fortitude,’ says someone who has worked with him. ‘The winds don’t buffet him. This is good when life requires being resilient, but it’s bad when it requires change.’”

And that’s a nice little gloss of fortitude: “The winds don’t buffet him.” He’s not the sort of guy who dives for cover at the first sign of opposition. I am put in mind of Major Chaterjack from Spike Milligan’s World War II memoir Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (page 99):

He was this kind of man. Autumn morning – the early sun had melted the night frost, leaving glistening damp trees. Battery parading – small wafts of steam are appearing from men’s mouths and noses – the muster roll is called – B.S.M. is about to report to Major Chaterjack: ‘Battery all correct and present, sir!’ The roar of a plane mixed with cannon shells all over the place – M.E. 109 roof top, red propellor boss – panic – Battery as one man into ditch – not Major Chaterjack, M.C., D.S.O. – stands alone in the road – unmoved – produces a silver case, lights up a cigarette. He is smoking luxuriously as well all sheepishly rise from what now feels like the gutter. He addresses us: ‘Very good – you realise you did the right thing and I the wrong.’ What can you say to a bloke like that?

I can tell you what you say of the other sort of bloke, the kind who dives for cover when his neighbour sneezes: the stock term is lack of intestinal fortitude, and in fact intestinal is the word that goes most often with fortitude now. (Post-traumatic stress disorder is a whole other matter, of course, and has often been mistaken for lack of intestinal fortitude – as happened later in the war to Milligan, too.) Intestinal fortitude doesn’t mean you can survive a bowl of five-alarm chili – well, it may mean that too, but it’s not a literal reference to your bowels. It’s really a fancy, often jocularly fancy (perhaps jocular in that army way), way of saying “guts” – in the figurative sense.

Fortitude, anyway, by itself, is stiff upper lip, “keep calm and carry on,” but it’s more than that. It’s courage, moral strength, but specifically the strength to endure pain or adversity, as opposed to the strength and courage to take action. It’s actually one of the four cardinal virtues (did you know there were four cardinal virtues?): prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude.

Is it me, or do three of those four sound quite reserved, cautious, and conservative? What about kindness or helpfulness or cheerfulness? Are the “cardinal virtues” the virtues you most seek in a person? Does it make a difference whether you’re evaluating the person as a role model or as a friend? Edmund Burke, in On the Sublime and the Beautiful, certainly thought so:

Those virtues which cause admiration, and are of the sublimer kind, produce terror rather than love; such as fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like. Never was any man amiable by force of these qualities. Those which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of loveliness, are the softer virtues; easiness of temper, compassion, kindness, and liberality; though certainly those latter are of less immediate and momentous concern to society, and of less dignity. But it is for that reason that they are so amiable.

Heroes are great for doing great things, but are they the sort you want to hang out and party with? Grim, stoic determination hardly seems like great dinner company. But on the other hand, a sort like Major Chaterjack shows you can combine fortitude with amiability and wit.

Fortitude is, of course, from Latin for “strength”; the root fortis “strong” shows up in quite a lot of places. Fortitude could have been an expensive synonym for “strength” in the literal sense, and in fact it formerly was used that way; however, it’s useful to have separate terms for inner strength of endurance and for physical strength, and that is how it has developed – indeed, it has developed to the point that even in the figurative senses it has split a bit from strength, so that you can even find references to having or needing the strength and fortitude.

The word’s bare phonetics don’t carry a whole bunch of intrinsically “strong” sounds; /f/ is the softest fricative, and /t/ the lightest voiceless stop, and the whole of it taps lightly along in three steps. Words like guts and strength may be said to have a bit more basic oomph to them. But on the other hand, fort is well associated with strength and strongholds, so the word comes on stronger with that.

As for other echoes, fortitude carries ones of such words as attitude and other tude words as well as fainter ones of more distant arrangements such as ratatouille, but the one that comes first for me is the one that says fortitude is what you need when others are at sixes and sevens and problems are multiplying – after all, six multiplied by seven is forty-two.

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