Tag Archives: word tasting notes

rile

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 4 comments

It’s quite something how some people get riled up about language. (Some people? I’ll bet most people have some usage or other they hate.) An interesting point of general consistency is that these hate-ins usually lack a defensible basis. (See “When an ‘error’ isn’t” for a rundown of some popular bugbears that aren’t the bogeymen they’re made out to be.)

The basis they often do draw on is amusingly opposite to a common trend in some other areas of human behaviour, where change is seen as good: people want to have the latest clothes, the latest electronics, et cetera. Stirring the waters is desirable. And indeed there are fads in language, too, and people may be mocked for using out-of-fashion words. But when it comes to hobby horses, it’s typically a conservative impulse that motivates it – albeit often a misguided one that actually muddies the waters rather than clarifying them. A person learns about some “original” form and decidnes that anyone who uses some changed version is an annoying cockroach and that the usage is a linguistic weed, a dandelion on the lawn of the language, and must be eradicated.

Of course, when talking of language, “original” is nearly always nonsense talk, since there is almost always a form prior to the one cited, and a form prior to that, and it’s turtles all the way down. And, for that matter, change is central to the nature of language. A language that has stopped changing is dead. But typically those calling on some “purer” form are off on some important fact anyway. I am reminded of a fellow student at the University of Calgary (back in about 1986) who “informed” me that Calgary wasn’t really a city because it didn’t have a cathedral. This was based on the idea that in medieval times a city was a city because it had a cathedral. But that was not the first or last definition of a city, and anyway Calgary does – and did – have a cathedral.

But if I seem to have produced a bit of a troubled or turbid tasting here, let me pour some oil on the waters to address what one may see as a mixed-up lie about the word rile. I will quote from the alphaDictionary “What’s the Good Word?” email I got today:

First, let me get this off my chest: “Nothing roils me more than hearing someone pronounce roil [rail] or seeing it spelled rile.” Now, here is a quaint Southernism I just concocted to remind us of the original meaning of today’s verb: “Don’t roil the water where you may have to drink.” It also serves to demonstrate that not all Southerners misspell this verb rile.

It is true that rile is most likely a variant form of roil, which means “make turbid, stir up”, with reference to water. However, it is not some odd American regional aberration, though it has been thought by some to be such, due to a greater use in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of it is from a 1724 translation of a classical Greek text, published in London; the next is from an 1815 list of Essex dialect words in a magazine. (Note that the OED’s first citation of roil for the sense “make angry” – which is of course what rile means, as I think we all know – is from 1742, and the second from 1818.) So these words first split a quarter of a millennium ago, and rile is quite well established now; indeed, it is much more common than roil (either sense of roil), even in Britain.

“But it came from a mispronunciation!” some may object. “It’s like saying ‘bile’ for boil!” First of all, it is more accurate to say that it came from a dialectal pronunciation, and was respelled, as many words have been over time. But even if it had come from a mispronunciation, so what? It’s established now. It’s far from being the only common word used today that has its present form due to an error or aberration of some kind back in history, and people don’t get riled up about most of them. So never mind whose fault it may be – oh, sorry, should that be faut? tsk – it is as it is now. If we accept a complete reanalysis such as cockroach (from Spanish cucaracha) or dandelion (from French dent de lion), or if we have no problem with cleaving to the cloven pair daft and daffy, or or or (I could spend a lot of time adducing examples), we can certainly accept such a well-established word as rile.

And it does such a nice job, really. It tends to go with some fairly folksy phrases – get all riled up, for instance – but I have seen it in perfectly mainstream contexts. It has that cranked-up /r/ start (I’m put in mind of the sound some people make when imitating someone who’s ranting: “Rarrarrarrarrar”), followed by the biting-down diphthong /aI/, which is part of a rime that rhymes with I’ll, as in “Arrrr, I’ll smite the next person who says ‘rile’ instead of ‘roil’!”

So, yes, rile is a good word – quite a good one, I think. And it’s a nice reminder that, really, we English speakers are living the life of Riley when it comes to our luxuriously replete wordstock and freewheeling usage patterns. Some people may dislike such richness and comfort, but really, I’ll take it.

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dabchick

Posted on October 2, 2011 | 3 comments

How would you like to take a quick dip with a dabchick? Does that sound a little agreeable, or is it even in the least grievous? Would you have a bird, would it be a baptism of fire (“Stop, liquid, stop!”), or would you just duck out altogether?

Well, you would think a dabchick would be a dab hand at quick dips. After all, the dab here refers to dipping – or diving – quickly. Yes, it’s related to our verb dab, as well as to dip and deep. But when I’m talking about a dab chick, I’m not talking about a girl, let alone some dapper boychick; in fact, this chick is not even a truncated chicken (though chick is always a truncated chicken). Rather, it’s a little grebe.

OK, now, we’ve moved from a two-syllable word with a certain charm – the light and lively connotations of dab (not just dab hand but all those dabs of colour) and its cheerful bookends d and b, plus the slick check-and-click of chick to sharpen the sound after the voiced stops – to a one-syllable word that might not seem so agreeable. The various gr words it brings to mind are not invariably pretty: grab, grub, grip, grim, greed; green can be OK, and greet is meet, but their final consonants differ from /b/ in two features (place and manner), not just one, so they’re a little farther to swim.

But do you know what a grebe is? It’s a swimming bird, rather like a duck (but the dabchick has a pointed bill and a “powder puff” posterior). There are various kinds of grebes, all the way from the least grebe (120 grams, 23.5 centimetres) to the great grebe (1.7 kg and 71 cm – good grief). The dabchick is a kind of grebe also known as the little grebe, a name which has its own pretty patterns (the various parallel lines in little with liquid-stop-liquid, and then the repeated e’s of grebe with stop-liquid-stop).

Dabchicks aren’t much for running; their legs are too far back. But they, along with a few other small grebes (including the least grebe), are such sudden dippers that they make up the genus Tachybaptus. That’s from the Greek for “quick diver” – yes, that’s the same root you see in baptism, but this bird is no holy diver; its sudden ducks would make for a tacky baptism indeed, what with a fish in the mouth on resurfacing.

This is not to say that these wee birds say fishy things. If the little grebe has been a little piggy in its eating, or even if it hasn’t, it will be heard to say “wee-wee-wee” all the way home (or to another dabchick’s home; it’s a mating call). Which reminds me that there’s another bird called a dabchick, the New Zealand dabchick, a.k.a. the weweia.

Oh, and Dabchick happens to be a nickname for residents of Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England. There are various stories to account for this. But as I am only dabbling lightly in this tangent, I will leave it to you to check them out for yourself. Or perhaps one of the readers of Sesquiotica will add a comment with context – they may not all be dabchicks, but they are dab hands and quick dippers into the lexis.

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Charlevoix

Posted on October 1, 2011 | 3 comments

My wife and I took a few days off this week and had a small vacation in Charlevoix, a region of Quebec I had heard of at various times but knew not all that much about. Various people had told us it was nice (or better than nice), and it was supposed to be a place rich in good scenery and good food. And my wife had long been charmed by the images of the Fairmont Manoir Richelieu. So a conjunction of available vacation days, a seat sale on Porter Airlines (free wine with breakfast? but of course), and a good rate at Le Manoir Richelieu made for a midweek excursion.

We tasted some lovely food, oh yes we did (my eyes still pop when I recall the duck breast on maple sabayon at Les 3 Canards), and saw some beautiful scenery and drove some roads with up to 20% gradients, and now I’m back to taste the word Charlevoix with you.

Of course, forever henceforth for me, Charlevoix will have a strong flavour of maple-covered hills and maple-soaked food and outstanding cheese (many great cheeses are made in France, but the best I’ve ever had have been from Quebec, and Charlevoix is a key cheese-making region) and fresh air and on and on. You can be sure I will come back to Charlevoix! But before I went there, the word had a few other resonances for me.

First of them was of Charlebois, as in Robert Charlebois, a French-Canadian singer popular in the ’60s and ’70s, known for a very large, curly head of hair and for songs such as “Je reviendrai à Montréal” (“I will come back to Montreal,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZAaEZAzGf0). As it happens, he was also once a part-owner of Unibroue, that remarkable Quebec beer maker. (Most things in Quebec come back to food and drink eventually, and usually fairly quickly. It’s wonderful.)

But also, Charlevoix had the simple resonances of Charles (which Charles? or Charlemagne?), char (“chariot”, or, slangily, “car”, such as the rental one we drove up and down and over and around), and voix (“voice”, also sounding like voie “way, lane”, such as those on which we drove with said car, and of course like the start of voilà, which is from vois “see [second person singular imperative]” and là “there/here”). The soft fricative and liquids of the Charle seemed to speak with the voice given them by the voix; the /v/ gives the word a vibration, a verve, a joie de vivre. And the angularity of the v and x catches the eyes. And what does the voice have? Perhaps choix, “choice” (taking which from Charlevoix you are left with arlev, an anagram of velar; by choice or not, the word Charlevoix has no velar consonants – though in French it has a uvular liquid r).

It does seem classic French in form, taken to the ninth degree with the ix end (which may manifest a bit of Gaul as well). And noble? Why, yes, as it happens: it’s a family name from French lesser nobility. Its most famous holder was Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit priest for whom is named everything named Charlevoix (including the town in Michigan, which is pronounced with a final “oy” – oy!).

What did Charlevoix do for such honour? Well, you see, his was an important early voice in Canadian history – of the sort of voice you see: a book. He travelled to many places (including Japan) and wrote about his travels; of his considerable time and travels in what is now Eastern Canada (and some of the US) he wrote Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le Journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale (History and general description of New France, with the historical journal of a voyage made by the order of the king in North America), published in 1722.

Did Charlevoix visit what is now Charlevoix? Well, he certainly had to go by it – it’s on the way up the St. Lawrence. In 1608, Jacques Cartier had tried to anchor at the river close to where the Manoir Richelieu now is, but he found it unsuitable for anchorage – and then the tide went out and his ships were grounded. So he called it Malle Baye, “bad bay”, which became in modern French La Malbaie, the name of the town right there. But I should say that for a long time it was called Murray Bay, after the English general who succeeded Wolfe (who won at the Plains of Abraham but was also killed there).

It happens that Murray Bay came to be a popular vacation spot starting in the 1760s; indeed, some call it Canada’s first tourist resort. In the 1800s and early-to-mid-1900s many Americans came to visit it. The present Manoir Richelieu was built in 1929. And it remains a cardinal point in the area.

But have you heard of it? And have you been there? I would encourage everyone to visit un lieu si riche et chaleureux (a place so rich and warm)… except that it was rather nice without crowds. Tell you what, you go in the summer. Then we can go and see the autumn colours (and sometimes snow on red leaves) without people in the way.

(If you want to see more of Charlevoix and Quebec City, see my photos on Flickr.)

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school

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 3 comments

The time is come around again: shoals of students appear in the hallowed, formerly hollow hallways of schools across the country. The youngest are wide-eyed oo; older ones stay cool as they scan their schedules. Some submit meekly, and some dive in enthusiastically, while others resist in ways passive or active. They are socialized in ways society finds expectable and acceptable, and may seek out opportunities for going against the grain. But for all it is an important part of their formation through information: they learn things that may not be self-evident, some of which may even be capriciously arbitrary, but they also learn to use their brains.

One of the things they learn is, of course, to spell – English spelling being so capricious as to be mocked in the reference to the elementary school trivium as the “three r’s” (reading, riting, and rithmetic). They may have heard this word school, but they couldn’t possibly predict its spelling from its pronunciation. In fact, they will certainly learn that sch as a rule is pronounced the same as sh, leading to mispronunciation of bruschetta and variant pronunciations of schism and schedule (thoroughly capricious words, neither of which having any actually good historical reason for having an h).

But they will learn that this word is pronounced /skul/; on the other hand, they are unlikely to learn that it comes from Greek σχολή scholé, and thence Latin schola, and has cognates in pretty much all Western European languages, most of which spell it without the h – as English also did until around 500 years ago, when the h was added back in, presumably because that’s how it is in Latin (idealized at the time and often since as the model language) and Dutch (native tongue of many of the early typesetters of English).

School is one of the earliest words kids will learn, so it will affect their perception of some other words, and it will have countless social accretions and collocations. Many of those will involve songs – old standards such as “School days, school days, good old golden rule days” or the one we sang on the bus home from the last day of school, “No more school, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” etc., or any of quite a lot of popular songs (songs by Supertramp and the Moody Blues spring to mind immediately for me; I wonder what today’s students associate musically with school).

There are also a few words that school may or may not make you think of but that might make you think of school: cool, skull (actually remarkably different for how similar it is), spool, stool, and snool (verb, “submit meekly” or “cause to submit meekly”; noun, “one who submits meekly”).

There are many words that show up commonly with school: before it, elementary, high, public, private, etc.; Sunday, business, medical, etc.; after it, year, bus, uniform, etc.; and of course verbs such as go to, finish, skip, and prepositions such as after, at, and in. The verbs and prepositions demonstrate a particular grammatical fact about school that native speakers have no trouble with but adult learners of English often find confusing: it can be a countable (at a school) or a mass object (at school). Sort of like fish.

Ah, yes, fish. As in a school of. Why are fish in schools? Lexical splitting and merging. On the one side we have this word descended from Greek and Latin and referring to a place of education; on the other side, and taking the form school just a couple of hundred years ago, we have a Germanic word with the same meaning and origin as shoal – school and shoal split apart at about the same time as school regained its h. That’s shoal as in “large group of marine life”; shoal as in “shallow area in the water” is of different origin, cognate with shallow. English words split and merge about as readily as high school romantic pairings.

Oh, yes. What do you remember from school, really? How much of the experience of the lessons? And how much of the social experience? We have school reunions to meet up with friends and to relive our fun times, not to review notes from our classes. But is not school work? It involves it, of a sort, but we ought to remember that school originally – and still, for some people in some places – is something one does instead of work. (In our society, grad school is certainly known as such.) You take your leisure time to learn something new and interesting – just as you are doing this very moment. After all, as you probably did not learn in school, Greek σχολή originally meant “leisure”.

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nerd, geek

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 8 comments

Dear word sommelier: When should I call someone a nerd, and when should I call someone a geek?

I ought to be a reasonable authority on this, since I’ve been something of a nerd and a geek for pretty much my whole life, although in recent years I’ve become socially adept enough, and learned to dress myself well enough, that my status has occasionally seemed questionable. But my wife still calls me a “sexy geek” and many of my readers call me a “word nerd,” so I guess I still meet the criteria.

But what are those criteria? They’ve shifted during the course of my life. When I was in high school in the early ’80s, geek was really a rather insulting term – I tended to think of some skinny person who couldn’t dress himself properly and had no social skills, or at least no non-repugnant ones.

I do think the phonaesthetics of the word, including the articulatory gesture it involves (mouth spread wide as though you’re trying to swallow something unpleasant and slimy, and the tongue’s double-touch at the back of the mouth reinforces that), had some influence on my sense of it. It was also commonly bruited about that the term originally referred to someone who bit the heads off live chickens. (The correct term for that is actually Alice Cooper Ozzy Osbourne. Oh, sorry, that was a bat.) In fact, geek was used as a name for sideshow freaks of various sorts, especially those who ate nasty things; its origins seem to be a Low German word for “fool”, via Scots English. Somehow it came to be transferred to what Brits call swots and anoraks. But with the rise of computers as a major social tool and necessity, those kids you used to insult have turned out to be very valuable: the ones who are immoderately interested and expert in things that most people find flummoxing and perhaps a bit distasteful. It’s sort of revenge of the geeks.

Wait! The movie is Revenge of the Nerds! So why is it that we tend to use geek more than nerd for these kinds of people now? When I was in school, nerd was what you called the smart kids who weren’t smooth socially but were well-intentioned and knew all sorts of stuff that everyone else would never know. Nerds dressed for function, not looks – pocket protectors, tape on the glasses – and were fascinated with things that made other people’s eyes glaze over. And you know what? I still think of nerds that way. Nor am I the only one. I think of the YouTube videos by NurdRage (yes, a different spelling), in which various chemical and other physical stunts are shown – cool lab stuff. Cool, that is, if you like to see, for instance, how you can make flowers glow in the dark, or use a chemical reaction to cause gallium to beat like a (small and fast) heart.

Nerd is a 20th-century term, possibly coming from nert, a slangy variant on nut. It’s a softer word, with a nasal sound characteristic of many a nerd’s speech; it stays near the tip of the tongue but uses that syllabic /r/ for its peak, which may seem intense or ineffectual. It seems suitable for something ineffectual and without sharp edges. A possible prime vector for the word is Dr. Seuss’s book If I Ran the Zoo, in which a nerd is a kind of exotic critter. Which, come to think of it, nerds still are, sorta. (Nerds are also a kind of candy: tangy, crunchy sugar nubs sold under the Willy Wonka brand. Could you imagine a candy called Geeks? Me neither.)

Why, then, has geek taken over? It seems that nerd has retained the sense of “an intellectually inclined person without social skills” and geek has kept the sense of “someone who has an abnormal amount of knowledge and interest in a certain topic” – as tvtropes.org points out, “There can be such a thing as a Fashion Geek, someone who knows a lot about fashion and is pretty obsessed with it. A Fashion Nerd, in contrast, would be completely unaware that stripes and plaids are unmix-y, and wouldn’t care, even if you told them why the two don’t mix.”

I would add that, while sexy nerd remains something of an oxymoron, the collocation sexy geek is reasonably current – Wired magazine has even had a “Sexiest Geek” contest, and you can see a buxom devochka discourse on geek and call herself a sexy geek at www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jlefnXKyQ. As she points out, intelligence has become very popular, and that has caused geek’s stock to rise somewhat.

But I find that the distinction is not altogether clear cut. In some cases the sound matters – for instance, where word geek might seem natural, rhyme helps word nerd to prevail. Often, though, personal proclivity comes into it. Of course, not everyone cares that much; if you have strong opinions on the difference very much, then, as the great nerd (or is it geek) comic strip xkcd diagrams, you are a nerd, a geek, or both: xkcd.com/747/.

But speaking of Venn diagrams (since you’re a geek, a nerd, or both, you know that intersecting-circle diagrams are Venn diagrams), there is one currently making the rounds that purports to set the matter straight on the difference between not just nerd and geek but also dork and dweeb: www.buzzfeed.com/scott/nerd-venn-diagram. It’s not bad, but I don’t find that everyone sees it exactly that way. I polled editors and people on Twitter and got a mixture of responses, among which were the following distinctions:

– nerds are less intelligent than geeks
– nerds are much bigger losers
– on Big Bang Theory (wondering how long it would take for me to mention it?), Leonard is a geek but not a nerd, while Sheldon is both
– nerds are antisocial, while geeks are just not socially focused
– nerds have no friends, while geeks have people seeking their advice
– nerds use pocket protectors; geeks don’t
– geeks are cool
– nerds swim against the pop culture grain; geeks are more tech-focused
– nerd = geek squared
– a geek has a useful skill

I just asked my wife if I was a geek; she said “Of course.” I asked her if I was a nerd. She demurred. I asked what the difference was. She had to think. “Well… they’re both genius… geek seems to be more… suave?”

So, in the current linguistic climate – though this may well change – although the terms have a certain amount of overlap, and although you have to allow for factors such as rhyme, generally geek is applied more broadly and with a certain amount of approbation, rather like wonk, while nerd has a greater connotation of social ineptitude or some kind of cluelessness. Among the crowd watching planes take off and land, a geek would be more like an aviation photographer, a nerd more like a planespotter. Trainspotters and other anoraks are no longer geeks; they’re not cool enough. Oh, but what about gongoozlers? A class of their own, I think.

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sinecure

Posted on September 25, 2011 | 1 comment

What is more important to you: a job that is secure, or a job where you feel sincere? Do you want to increase your experience and efforts, or just your bank account? Would a position with no work and good pay be the cynosure that drew you forward, or a curse, a sin, worthy of censure?

Back when the Church was the great pan-European power, it could be very desirable to have a position as a priest in some parish; depending on the location, you might get a quite healthy income from it. Not everyone who got these positions – called benefices, because you benefited from them in money – was highly qualified, to be sure; one particularly poor example was the source of the word mumpsimus. But sometimes one could have a benefice without having to perform any priestly duties, such as, you know, helping the ailing soul. Such a do-nothing position with an income was called sine cura, “without cure”, not because there ain’t no cure for laziness but because it was not a position that involved cure of souls – i.e., priestly duties. Sine cura became our English word sinecure, which is normally pronounced as three syllables (only the last e is “silent”), but the i can be pronounced “short” or “long” (“sin” or “sign”).

The church’s dominating role has been taken over by commerce now. Everything must be justified in terms of profit. Never mind a nice ecclesiastical position; one would rather have a nice job in some Bay Street tower. Even better is to be a board member, and get a handsome income without having to show up and deal with the actual work day in and day out, just attend meetings as necessary, or perhaps not even that much. You’re basically on cruise. (Better still, of course, is to take the money you have and invest it and let other people do the work while you reap great profits. But that’s not considered a job – lately it seems to be considered more worthy than working, given that shareholders get more consideration than employees much of the time.)

So jobs still exist that people call sinecures – political patronage positions, nepotism installments, rubber-stamp board memberships, and so on. The question is, what does and doesn’t qualify? The term includes more than just jobs with no work at all; a job with light work might also be called a sinecure. But how light is light? I find, for instance, this in a book excerpt: “Dodd wanted a sinecure, a job that was not too demanding yet that would provide stature and a living wage and, most important, leave him plenty of time to write.” And in a comment on a New York Times article there is this: “The good teachers, who believe that teaching jobs in New York are not a sinecure for the bottom third of the graduating classes of the public colleges, will back her.”

I think it rather odd that one could ever consider teaching a sinecure (especially in New York)! If you held a teaching position but never had to prepare a lesson or stand in front of the class and talk, that might be a sinecure. But to actually do the job, even in an indifferent fashion? Yet here’s another comment from another article: “Administrators view teaching as a sinecure without intrinsic value.”

We seem to have a certain drift happening here. Sinecure is now becoming a word for any job that might indeed seem to others a sin, and to the holder a cure for having to put in an honest day’s efforts: a nice, sure, easy job with a good paycheque. You may not be flatlining in the position, but you are holding a steady sine wave, just the normal ups and downs, not unlike the n and u in this word.

Should the meaning broaden that way? If you don’t want it to, then use it in the narrower way and don’t use it in the broader way, and define it overtly as you want it. It may or may not have effect.

I will say this, though: at least no one can describe writing word tasting notes as a sinecure, involving as it does real work (if only an hour a day on average) and no pay at all. (One silly person wrote a comment complaining that I was probably supported by his tax dollars. Um. No. But I guess there ain’t no cure for cranks and trolls…)

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crisp

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 5 comments

The Henry V concert was over, and I met up with Montgomery Starling-Byrd on the sidewalk outside Roy Thomson Hall.

“How was it?” I said.

“Crisp,” he said.

“As in Crispin or Crispinian?” These two were the martyred twin brothers honoured on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, which is when Henry V won the battle of Agincourt. You may be interested to know that the brothers lived in Soissons, France, less than 300 km away from Agincourt (take the highway A26), but 1130 years before the battle.

“Yes,” he said. “Aside from the martyrdom bit.”

“No martyrdom for Crispus today,” I said. “I’m not wearing a tux.” I’ll explain that one: Crispin and Crispinian are derived from Latin crispus, which means “curly”; Crispus Attucks, a man of half-African and half-Wampanoag ancestry, is generally thought of as the first person killed in the American Revolution, at the Boston Massacre. And, yes, I was wearing white tie and tails, not black tie and tuxedo.

“Indeed, proper tails are a constant.” I suspect he was making a joke on Emperor Constantine I, who had a son named Crispus. Whom he had killed.

“Just as well,” I said, “my tux is going to hell in a handbasket.” That was a pun on Helena, the mother of Constantine, and also on Helena Bonham-Carter, cousin of Crispin Bonham-Carter, who is also an actor.

“Well, let us turn back to the future for a moment,” Montgomery said. I was surprised that he had seen Back to the Future, which starred Crispin Glover as McFly. “I ought to have gone once more into the breach in the concert hall; my intermission libations are catching up on me. Is there a pay toilet around here?”

“No pay toilets in Toronto,” I said. “We prefer to hold our manhoods cheap – or free, actually.” This was a reference to a line in King Henry’s speech before the battle. “We could go across King Street to Quotes – I’ll have a pint, and you’ll have a –”

“Yes,” Montgomery said, cutting me off, “that sounds good. A snack perhaps. All I’ve had is a packet of crisps. I wonder whether they have crêpes.” Yes, crêpe is cognate with crisp too. We started walking.

“More likely just French fries,” I said. “Calamari and Guinness are what I usually get. They might have curly fries, though.”

“Indeed, the original crisps,” Montgomery said. What he meant, of course, was that, as I’ve mentioned, crisp comes from Latin crispus – yes, “curly” – and came to mean “rippled, wrinkled” in the 1300s and “brittle” only in the 1500s. Lexicographers are unsure how it came to have the “brittle” meaning but speculate that the sound of the word had some influence. “But of course,” Montgomery added, “French fries are really chips, looking like wood chips. Whereas you colonials use chips to refer to crisps.”

“I do admit,” I said, “potato chips sound more like crisps. You can hear it when you eat them: ‘crisp, crisp, crisp.'” We walked on for a few seconds, pondering onomatopoeia. “So,” I said, returning to the original topic, “Crisp – I mean, Christopher Plummer was suitably plummy for you?”

“He has a voice one can curl up with,” Montgomery said. “And the orchestra and the two choirs could make one’s hair curl. And it was all, as I said, crisp and clear.”

“Marvellous,” I said. “I’m looking forward to doing it again on Saturday. But now,” I said, veering to the steps down to Quotes, “let it be in our flowing cups freshly rememb’red.”

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Caerphilly

Posted on September 21, 2011 | 6 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd, international president of the Order of Logogustation, happened to be passing through town and was pleased to have the chance to catch the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform, among other things, William Walton’s Henry V featuring Christopher Plummer, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and the Toronto Children’s Chorus. Today was the day before the first performance, and he was at Domus Logogustationis for conviviality with local word tasters. We had laid on some cheese and crackers and wine and so forth.

“I’ll have to be off to the dress rehearsal soon,” I said to Montgomery and to Maury, looking at my watch.

“Oh, yes,” said Montgomery, “you sing with the choir. Well, sing carefully.”

Elisa Lively was passing by. “You’re singing in something?”

“Walton’s Henry the Fifth,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “can I see the score?”

“English two, French zero,” Maury said. I reached down to my bag, pulled out my copy of the score, and handed it to her.

She flipped through it. “There’s quite a lot of tacet here.”

“Orchestra and narrator,” I said.

She kept flipping. “Oh, the Agincourt carol, nice.” Flip, flip. At the last page, she read a line at the bottom and remarked, “The layout was done in Caerphilly.” She pronounced the place name “care-filly.”

“Say that carefully,” Montgomery said. “The stress is on the second syllable.”

“Ker-filly,” she said.

“Now, when I hear that,” Maury said, “I think of cheese.”

“I’m certain the performance will not be cheesy,” Montgomery said.

“Because of Philly cream cheese?” Elisa asked.

“No,” Maury said, “Caerphilly is a kind of hard, crumbly white cheese. Named after the town it was first made in.”

“And the town’s name,” Montgomery said, “means ‘Ffili’s fort’.”

“Where is that, anyway?” Elisa asked.

“It’s a suburb of Cardiff,” Montgomery said, “down in south Wales. It is known for Caerphilly Castle, an excellent, almost archetypal example of the medieval castle. Thirteenth century, built for military purposes.” (The interested reader can see good pictures and description at www.castlewales.com/caerphil.html.)

“I daresay the English would have had a harder time attacking that than they did attacking Harfleur,” I remarked, referring to the first battle in Shakespeare’s Henry V, on which Walton’s piece is based. “They’d look at it and go once more into their breeches.”

Montgomery raised one eyebrow slightly at my off-colour pun on a Shakespearean quote. Then he said, “They would certainly have to do it carefully. But in fact, although it was built by English to intimidate the Welsh – at which it succeeded – the English did attack it too. Well, one set of English did it against another: the castle’s last real battle was when Queen Isabella besieged it in the early 1300s as an attack on her husband, Edward the Second, and his favourite, Hugh le Despenser.”

“It would have been either ironic or fitting,” Maury said, “for Henry to attack it, for though he was an English king, he was, as he declares in Shakespeare’s play, a Welshman.”

“Well,” I said, looking at my watch again, “today is St. Crispin‘s Day.” (That’s the day of the battle of Agincourt.)

“Tomorrow, rather,” Montgomery said.

“October 25, in reality,” Maury said.

“Well, today is ‘have some crispies day,'” Elisa said, and handed Montgomery a crispy cracker with a large dollop of cream cheese on it. “Be careful – that’s Philly.”

“You seem to have it in ample quantities,” Montgomery said.

“Oh, yes,” Elisa said. “We have a huge dispenser.” She snort-guffawed at her pun.

I made a small salute as I sidled towards the door. “Hold down the fort,” I said.

“And hold up the forte,” Montgomery said. “I’ll see you on the morrow.” And with that I left.

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whilst

Posted on September 20, 2011 | 6 comments

I saw the following sentence today in a little health calculator tool on the web, one of several options in a question about back pain: “I have no pain whilst travelling.”

I looked a second time to confirm that travelling had been spelled with two l’s. Of course it had. That’s the British spelling. And whilst is generally a flag for a British dialect.

It’s not that no one in Britain uses while. If I search the Telegraph‘s website, I see 2,970 hits for while in the most recent articles – compared to 6,710 for whilst. The Guardian, on the other hand, gives me 11,132 hits for whilst, and 446,935 for while. But of course while also has more uses (e.g., I haven’t seen you in a while). Cross the pond and you see that the New York Times has in the past 7 days used while more than 10,000 times – and whilst only 6 (not 6,000, just 6). The Globe and Mail gives me 343,369 results for while in all its contents, and 388 results for whilst. In the British parliament’s records (parliament.uk), while gets 158,169 hits and whilst gets 47,595; on parl.gc.ca, the Canadian parliament site, while as a simple search gets 55,296 hits and whilst gets 275.

In short, on the basis of these counts, use of whilst in relation to while appears to be an order or two of magnitude more frequent in Britain than in North America. And that matches what I think we all expect.

But what do we think of whilst? It’s cleaner, crisper, more definite; by comparison with it, while seems to wander. Of course, while has the effect of its other senses – noun (all the while; it’s been a while) and verb (while away the time), the latter of which in particular lends a laziness to it. But whilst also has the sound of a broom that doesn’t simply let time blow by, it sweeps it past. It has a taste of whisht (meaning “shut up” or “hush”) and whistle and wist (as in wistful) and, for that matter, whist (a card game, as you may know). You may also get a note of hissed and perhaps hilt.

I have no evidence for this – it would take me more time than I have right now to gather it – but I think it has a greater air of formality or correctness. At least in North America it is likely to, since it’s associated with British usage, and in particular more formal British usage.

It’s one of a family of words that also counts as members amongst, amidst, and even against: all have versions without the st as well (though again – or agin, as some people spell it – is not current in standard English to mean “against”). Now try each in alternation:

I have no pain while travelling.
I have no pain whilst travelling.

His money was scattered among the flowers.
His money was scattered amongst the flowers.

He remained placid amid a swarm of hooligans.
He remained placid amidst a swarm of hooligans.

You may also detect slight differences in shadings of meaning; amongst may seem more distributive, for instance. But what difference of tone do you taste?

Would you be inclined to think that the st versions are less formal or less correct? That they are errors, perhaps? Probably not. But you may be interested to know that they are newer.

Oh, they’re still old. Whilst, amidst, and amongst all showed up first around 1400. (Their shorter counterparts have been around as long as there’s been an English.) But originally they were whiles, amids, and amongs; the s was the genitive that was commonly used at the time for forming adverbial uses (you can see it also on anyways, besides, and similar words). But about a century later the t showed up.

And why did that t appear? Did something happen whilst they were speaking? Well, yes, the same thing that leads some speakers even today to add one to the word once (causing novelists the nuisance of having to decide whether to write oncet or wunst, neither of which looks right or reads smoothly). It may be by analogy with the superlative st ending (e.g, biggest, meanest), or it may just be a little phonological epenthesis like the /t/ or /d/ some people sometimes say after a word-final /n/: a post-stopping.

So, yeah, if today’s language pedants had been around in the 1500s, they would have been railing about these horrible new idiocies with the woefully uneducated st endings. But these words are instead entrenched in the language, time-honoured, whilom party crashers now wearing white tie and hobnobbing with the guests of honour. Language ever changes, and these are the sorts of things that go on whilst it does.

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benthic

Posted on September 19, 2011 | 3 comments

An article in the September 1, 2011, issue of Nature presents a ray of hope for the once and (perhaps) future toilers off the Atlantic coast. The fish that had once been thick in the depths of the ocean, notably cod and haddock, had been thinned out by overfishing, and a moratorium on their fishing had been imposed, but in the intervening two decades the balance had not been restored – the marine life forms that had flourished had been those that foraged higher in the water. The situation has seemed tragic, a plague, figuratively as well as literally abysmal, producing much unhappiness for many people; the losers have been those that feed at the bottom of the sea as well as those who feed on those that feed there. But surveys of the life forms under the sea (in particular on the Scotian Shelf) have shown indications of a return to the earlier balance: a decrease and stabilization of pelagic forage fish numbers, a normalization of plankton biomass, and the beginnings of an increase in large-bodied benthic predators – i.e., cod and haddock. In short, a period of misery and disappointment may yet turn out to have been the key to the best result for all concerned.

Pelagic? Benthic? These are two general levels of aquatic life. Pelagic (from Greek πέλαγος pelagos, “sea”) refers to the water of the open sea (or ocean, or a body of freshwater) that doesn’t touch any land – not even the bottom. The zone at and near the bottom of the sea (lake, river, etc.) is the benthic zone, and its inhabitants are called the benthos (from Greek βένθος benthos, “depth of the sea”). The bottom of the sea, of course, extends right up to where the water stops, at which point it becomes beach (or shore, anyway); as you might expect, the things that live on the floor near the shore are not those that live in the deepest depths. A broad division may be made between the littoral benthos, near the shore, and the abyssal benthos, down in the depths.

Benthic starts with a blunt /b/, belligerent or beautiful but at any rate bursting forth with voice in the breath; after a mid-low front vowel, it then softens into a nasal and further into a voiceless fricative, soft, whispering, but capable of subtle power; finally it pushes through a quick mid-high front vowel into a hard backstopping /k/. The echoes are many and varied: been thick, bent, nth (as in nth degree), benzene (which may have a familiar ring), bench (which the Scotian Shelf is rather like), bathyscaphe (something you can use to go see the beauties of the abyssal benthic zone), and perhaps even terebinth (an oak-like tree – and a good cure for mal de mer: if you’re feeling sea-sick, go sit under one).

Benthic also brings to mind Bentham, as in Jeremy Bentham, an English jurist and ethical philosopher of two centuries ago who held that the highest morality is the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And it makes me think of Benjamin, which is the name of the youngest of the sons of Israel – the one who would not betray Joseph – but also the name of many more recent people, such as Benjamin Lee Whorf, who suggested that the words we use for things can influence how we think about those things, and Walter Benjamin, a cultural critic who wrote many trenchant things, including this from The Image of Proust: “After all, nothing makes more sense to the model pupils of life than that a great achievement is the fruit of toil, misery, and disappointment. The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing…”

Must beauty therefore be immoral? Such a question may cast its nets too far from the waters of today’s word. But we do know that many a benthic fish has been kissed in St. John’s. And soon, perhaps, there will be more of them to kiss, and more reason to kiss them.

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