Tag Archives: word tasting notes

Ascot

Posted on June 17, 2011 | 2 comments

It’s Royal Ascot week, and today was the Ascot Gold Cup, a.k.a. Ladies’ Day. Apparently a horse race is involved, but nobody really talks about that much; it’s mainly the fillies in the stands who get the attention, with assorted confections fastened to their heads – hats and fascinators galore, in colours from lilac to apricot, some more like mascots than millinery. Have a look at this year’s crop at fashion.telegraph.co.uk/hot-topics/437/royal-ascot-fashion.html. Many a North American might think, “I would never have my Ascot in that.”

Such hats, mind you, are not called Ascot hats. On the other hand, the ladies’ escorts have ascots, for it happens that a type of cravat suitable for wearing with a morning coat – what gentlemen are to wear in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, plus top hat – is now called an Ascot tie, or, particularly in North America, just an ascot (it’s lost the capital A, which actually looks a bit like an ascot).

I should say that various of the wordplays one may give in to the temptation to make on Ascot actually don’t work if you pronounce it the British way. The cot, you see, is reduced entirely (somewhat like the base of a fascinator), making Ascot sound rather like ask it and go nicely with waistcoat (“weskit”). So it’s a tisket, a tasket, a basket worn at Ascot; the lid of it hangs before her bangs, and her head looks like a casket. (How does it stay on? Perhaps with an elastic.) The word comes from east cot, “east cottage”. It is, as it looks, an English word of thoroughbred pedigree.

That pre-empts the more impolite double entendres, which is just as well, as there is a clear code of formality and decorum – and attire – for the Royal Enclosure. (Many in attendance stretch the rules some, exposing more flesh than recommended, perhaps including tattoos and bottle tans, and this year there was something of a dust-up among some of the blokes in one of the enclosures, with a champers bottle being wielded as a weapon. How infra dig.) A race, after all, is an occasion for one’s best behaviour and one’s best attire, as I demonstrated a few years ago: www.flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/5840900617/in/photostream.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

cortex

Posted on June 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

I remember this record my Dad bought when I was a kid. My brother and I listened to it quite a few times. It was all about the brain – a song for every part (rather amusing, too, as I recall). I can’t remember much of it now, but I do remember one song (musically just a little reminiscent of “Copacabana”), the chorus of which began, “It’s the cortex! The cortex!”

That was, I’m pretty sure, my first encounter with the word cortex. And what sorts of flavours did cortex have for me? Not Gore-Tex, that smart outer layer to wear when you’re encountering nature and its elements – that hadn’t even been invented yet (not for another few years: 1976). No, it would have made me think of Chargex – what VISA cards used to be called in Canada – and similar commercial things and brand names ending in ex. And it would have made me think of core, of course. Which is certainly ironic, since the cortex is not the core but the outer layer of the brain. Your conscious interface with the elements, inner and outer. The part you’re processing this right here right now with.

Other flavours cortex may bring depend on context – and include context. You might get mixed up and think of an escort or perhaps of your oxters (that means “armpits”). You might think of Hernán Cortez, the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztex – oops, I mean Aztecs. You might be reminded of Texas by the tex – or even by the size of the cortex, which is really rather expansive: about 2000 square centimetres, around the size of a newspaper page. A wrinkly newspaper page, though: the cerebral cortex has all sorts of wrinkles in it.

But, yes, whatever you think of, whatever new wrinkle, in whatever context, you’re thinking of it with your cortex. And not just history and geography but biology – your biology: the nerves in your oxters connect to your cortex as well.

But how did this crisp word come to be the name of the rind of the mind? You can play with the shapes, see the c come to o, the connection made and circle closed; you can see the crossroads of information at x. You can feel the tongue tap at the back, then (with a little wave motion) the tip, then again at the back and subside into a fricative at the tip, like water rocking in a box. But what has it all to do with the surface of the pond that is your brain?

Well, it’s not really that it’s the surface of a pond. It’s that it’s the bark of the brain tree – consider the ramifications of that. Cortex is Latin for “bark”, you see. Think of the bark of a pine tree, with its wrinkles.

But then think of the wood of that tree being made into a bark, to float on the seas of imagination: the wandering bark that is love, the bark of fantasy… It’s all in the cortex. The cortex!

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

barque

Posted on June 15, 2011 | 6 comments

Can a word that immediately calls forth a harsh, sharp sound (from a dog or other creature) be somehow elegant, lovely, or dreamy?

I don’t see why not. Of course, as soon as you use the que spelling, everything gets a little fancier – barque is what Phydeaux does, perhaps, while bark is what Fido does. The que calls forth French but also Latin – in Latin, que stuck on the end of a word (and fully pronounced) means “and”, as in Senatus Populusque Romanus “the Senate and People of Rome”. So if you had a place called Barbecue Barque perhaps it would mean it had a barbecue and a bar. (And maybe they should go with the alternate spelling Barbeque, which, however, I have a hard time not reading like “barbeck”.)

But the best evidence of the possibility of a little crisp, fresh elegance is the contrast with barge. Barge is a word that brings to mind something quite lumpish and unpleasant – perhaps a garbage barge – and goes with ill-mannered action. “He just barged in! What a bounder – I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole!” On the other hand, embark is what one does on an expensive trip.

And yet barque (bark) and barge most likely come from the same source, by way of barca and barga. There is some dispute as to the origin – Celtic, perhaps, or maybe Greek, but by way of Latin anyway. They were once the same boat, but they’re not really in the same boat now.

Barque and bark rather are in the same boat, on the other hand, although barque can refer specifically to a three-masted ship square-rigged on the foremasts and fore-and-aft rigged on the rear. Bark can name any of quite a variety of mid-small boats – though nothing as small as a birch bark canoe (and no, that’s not the same bark any more than what a dog does is).

Why use the barque spelling when bark will do? Well, for clarity, for one thing. But also for the beautiful balance of the form. Whereas bark bursts a bubble (b > k), barque presents a back half that seems to be made of rotated forms from the front half, sea-changed: b > q (the mast trimmed and turned to make a rudder), a > e (a type a has some resemblance to that rotated e, the schwa ə), r > u (the lost leg grown back). And paradoxically we view inefficient, wasted silent letters as somehow elegant (certainly not in the mathematical sense!).

Still, it’s not the spelling preferred by poets. Well, if Noah released a lark from the ark, we may hark in the stark dark and mark a bark, wandering. Oh, yes, wandering! Shakespeare set down this collocation in his 116th sonnet: it is love that is “the star to every wandering bark.”

And where does the bark wander? In dreamland, surely. I recall again (as I did in my note on virch) “a barca da fantasia” from Madredeus’s O Pastor:

Ao largo ainda arde
A barca da fantasia
E o meu sonho acaba tarde
Acordar é que eu não queria

“At a distance still burns the barque [or barge] of fantasy, and my dream ends late – waking is what I didn’t want.”

And what do you see on the lovely barque of dreams? Perhaps a world as painted by Georges Braque…

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

ctenophore

Posted on June 13, 2011 | 1 comment

We have established, in my note on amphithect, that, as the 1888 Encyclopedia Britannica says, “ctenophores furnish examples of eight-sided emphithect pyramids.” We now know that this means the pyramids are oblong but are symmetrical on two axes. But apparently not everyone knows what ctenophore signifies.

First off, I must affirm that that is the correct spelling. No matter how much your eyes (or your brain) may want it to be so, centophore is incorrect. These things don’t bear hundreds; gracious, that would be macaronic. The phore is from Greek φέρω phero “carry”, and cent is a Latin root. Nope, we want the Greek root χτένα khtena, which came by way of Latin spelling to be cteno here. You could connect it with amphithect by overlap to make a portmanteau, amphithectenophore (not that anyone does). There certainly is something gluey about that ct, anyway – it suggests a tip-and-back coarticulation on the tongue, very sticky (of course, in real life Anglophones simplify the onset).

It stands to reason that, not being Latin in origin, cteno also does not relate to catena, “chain”. Nope, χτένα is “comb”.

So… does that mean your hairdresser is a ctenophore? Hmm, well, I hope not, not in the sense it’s used in English. Actually, the combs of ctenophores are more hair than comb – they are cilia, rows of hair used to propel the squishy beasties.

Yes! Ctenophores are squishy little sea critters (a jelly body with two layers of cells holding it all in) that come in a variety of shapes, amphithect pyramid being but one. Most of them have rows of cilia. They have not brains but nerve nets. And yet they’re not at the bottom of the food chain, either – they eat all sorts of things, even each other, and can eat up to ten times their own mass in a day. They typically catch their prey using glue. (Perhaps they gum them up by asking them to say ctenophore.) Some are a few millimetres wide. Some are up to 1.5 metres wide.

Boy, that really stops the conversation, doesn’t it? A jelly-like thing, reminiscent of some protozoan viewed under a microscope, but large enough to wrap around a child. So, uh, how is it that they’re not much heard of?

That ugly name might have something to do with it. But of course there are various kinds, such as the cydippids and the lobates, and the ctenophores are known more colloquially as comb jellyfish. No, though, they’re not actually jellyfish – real jellyfish are cnidarians.

Yup. Cnidarians. There is it again, that c attaching to the beginning like some sucking (perhaps squishy) sea critter. I’m just gonna have to say that it’s what you get – they’re found under the c.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

clerestory

Posted on June 11, 2011 | 5 comments

If you don’t know this word, it’s no great surprise; it is circulated mainly among the clerisy (that is, the literati – people of learning and illumination, and in particular people of learning about illumination, especially architects). I first saw it in an article in The Buffalo News.

No, no, I’m not being silly. The article was on the new terminal for the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, at that time soon to be under construction (it’s been open for several years now), and for whatever reason it mentioned that the terminal was to have clerestories, but didn’t explain what they were.

I knew it had something to do with fenestration, but beyond that I was met with frustration. I also guessed that it was pronounced with four syllables, and wasn’t sure if the stress was on the first (/klɛ/) or the second (/rɛ/). So, of course, at my next chance, I looked it up. And the first thing I learned was that it actually has three syllables and is pronounced like “clear story”.

The second thing I learned, of course, was what a clerestory is: a high window, in this case (as often) a window in a raised section of roof that lets light into interior spaces – not a skylight, which is set into the roof without interruption, but rather one of those windows of which the archetypal image of a factory has many, giving its roof a sawtooth appearance. (In the original sense, it is a set of high windows in a cathedral that allow the centre of the nave to be well illuminated.)

So raise the roof! That shed sufficient light on the matter. But, now, how do we come to have this word in this form? Ah, well, it turns out the story for that is not quite clear. The clere is really an old spelling of clear, in this sense meaning “lit, light-bearing” because the sense “unobstructed” did not exist for clear in the early 1400s when this word was first written down. We would assume that the story is as in a level of a building (what we prefer in Canada to spell storey), but the problem is that that sense of story is otherwise unknown until a couple of hundred years later. So we don’t really know the story here altogether.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that the spelling of this word obnubilates or even obfuscates its morphology for me. I keep wanting to treat it like a word like refectory or consistory or conservatory; it makes me think as readily of clerisy and Clerihew as of clear. Habituation to clear and to the various -(t)ory words just makes a “clear story” pronunciation seem wrong, because I’m not really used to this word.

Mind you, the spelling clearstory does exist too. But, now, knowing that the spelling clerestory exists, most English speakers will feel by reflex that clerestory must be the “better” spelling precisely because it is the less expectable – the perverse historical development and present patterns of our spelling make us tend to think “marked” (irregular) forms must be more authentic, formal, better. (Hence, for instance, many people will think an historic must be correct, when in fact for anyone who pronounces the h it’s actually not.)  Such lines of thought make it desirable to have some means of shedding light into the middle of the messy factory floor of English usage.

Or the busy airport, if you will. Actually, as many Torontonians will tell you, Buffalo Niagara International Airport is nice for being considerably less busy than Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. And cheaper to fly out of if you’re going to the US. And even cheaper to get to if you take the bus. None of which has anything to do with clerestory in particular. But should you happen to go there, you will not need to look up clerestory. You can just look up.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

unctuousness

Posted on June 10, 2011 | 1 comment

Look at the letter forms in this word. Excepting the t, and maybe the e, they slip and slide around – curve up, curve down, curl, make a ring, slither…

The sound of the word, for its part, starts with a thickness and stickiness (that velar nasal and stop and alveopalatal fricative, the tongue pressing softly in the back and then sticking and rolling forward to release finally, gradually, at the tip, the whole experience like stepping forward through mud) and then, after stepping through the open door of the lips and leaving a pucker behind, it slips into a hiss. It makes me think of the stickiness and hissing bubbles of stove-top cream of wheat just when it’s ready, or perhaps of thermal mud pots like Iceland’s Hverarönd (I have some pictures at www.harbeck.ca/James/iceland/iceland3.html).

But this word’s object is not quite like mud, though close, and likewise not quite like cream of wheat, though close. It’s not sticky or viscous, but it’s thick, like fat. Unctuous, from Latin unctum “ointment” (from unguere “anoint”), means “oily” or “greasy”, though it has a rich luxuriousness that you don’t get from oily or greasy. Those are both lighter, more slippery words. This… this is like goose fat, great gobs of goose grease rubbed in loops and rings all over your body, u u u n n c o e s s s (with a little t where two dabs cross over in the middle).

Does that image make you uncomfortable? The object of unctuous may well too, since it’s often used to describe not a substance but, as it were, what we might call a lack of substance – an oily insincerity: you’re more likely to find voice than any other word next to unctuous. You know the voice – it’s smarmy, it’s dulcet but not delicious; it’s the speech of a funeral director, perhaps.

Amusingly, unctuousness, though viewed poorly in English, is seen from the better side in French. The French, as we know, are not afraid of fat; they appreciate rich foods (partly because they don’t eat like starving dogs). So, as Polly-Vous Français notes and I have observed myself, onctueux is often seen in French advertising for smooth, creamy treats, of which of course France has many. (Polly-Vous finds the overriding flavour of unctuous unappealing and unappetizing, which helps her to eat less rich food, she says.)

Still, unctuousness is a thick and rich word, in its way delicious on the tongue – as Jens Wiechers (who suggested this note) says, “it somehow grows on you after a while and you wait for a chance to use it.” But here’s a question: why not unctuosity?

Actually, both unctuousness and unctuosity have been in English since the fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first citation for each from 1398 – because they’re both from the same book. And, over the centuries, there have been times when unctuosity was the more common word. But now unctuousness wins out.

There are linguistic fads, of course, and the figurative uses of this word may figure into the choice: unctuosity has often enough been used to refer particularly to an oily religiosity, and it has a better echo of religiosity. But for the material thickness, unctuousness surely wins in its feel; unctuosity has that longer, wide open vowel in the middle, and a quick tap of a /t/ after that. It’s sort of like the difference between, say, olive oil (unctuosity) and butter (unctuousness). And while I like olive oil, nothing beats butter.

Well, no, I’m not comparing it to Nutella, they’re different kinds of things, even if they both have a certain unctuousness… Ah, zut, et voilà, j’ai faim.

(Translation: Oh, drat, look, now I’m hungry.)

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

plank

Posted on June 8, 2011 | 3 comments

As I was walking down the street, I encountered Marcus Brattle, my adolescent mentee. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed (that’s British for “Great!”). He pulled out a camera. “You came along at just the right time.”

I looked at him warily. “You have plans?” His plans typically translated into disasters or messes, often involving humiliation, sometimes mine.

“I’m the plan king!” He said. “In fact, I’m planking!”

Oh. The faddishness of youth. “Planking?” I said, disingenuously. “Is that short for public wanking?”

“Get over it,” he said. He pointed to one of Toronto’s newly installed racks of Bixi bikes, nearby on the sidewalk. “I’m going to extend myself like a plank across two of those bikes there, and you’re going to photograph it so I can post it.”

“Haven’t people gotten board of that fad yet?”

“It’s planks for the memories,” Marcus said. “People have planked on some remarkable things and in some remarkable places.”

“And fallen to some remarkable deaths,” I said. “It’s all just plankton for the whale of media fads.”

“It’s the exploratory spirit.”

“Sort of like a negative of spelunking,” I observed. “Going up and over instead of down and under. We get a spree of planking followed by spill and plunking. One might come to imagine that plunk is the past tense of plank.”

“Where does that leave plonk, then?”

“Plonk is cheap wine,” I said. “Possibly a play on vin blanc, though people do hear in it the sound of a cork being pulled or a bottle being, well, plonked on a table.”

“Onomatopoeia followed by I’m-a-gotta-pee-a,” Marcus said. It occurred to me that he had learned much from me, but probably not the right things. “And you can plink the glasses.”

“I don’t think anyone actually uses plink that way – for that it’s clink, but tiddly-winks and musical instruments do plink.”

“And where’s plenk?”

“There is no plenk. It’s plink, plank, plonk, plunk.”

“All based on sounds,” Marcus said. “After all, when you drop a plank on the floor, that’s the sound it makes: plank!”

It does, I thought. However… “Actually, the word comes to us by way of various French versions – modern French has planche – originally from Latin, probably related to plana, flat.”

“Well,” Marcus declared, “I’m the planna here, and I plan to be flat. On… those two bikes right there.” He indicated two bikes with about five feet of space between them. “You stand over there and take the photo when I’m ready.” He pointed to the other side of the sidewalk.

I took the camera and walked to where there was a good angle. Marcus grabbed one bike with both hands and swung one leg up onto the other. Then the other leg. “Alright,” Marcus grunted, “have you got it?”

“You’re sagging,” I said.

Just then a woman walked up and asked, “What’s he doing?”

I turned to her. “Planking.”

“Blanketing?”

“No, planking. Like salmon.”

“Sounds fishy to me. Anyway, I want to use one of those bikes.”

Just then I heard another grunt and turned to see Marcus collapsing onto the ground.

“Was that a plunk?” I said. The woman walked over to one of the bikes to take it away.

Marcus started dusting himself off and standing up. “Ow. Did you get a picture while I was holding it rigid?”

“Uh…” I looked at the camera. “Is blank close enough for you?”

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

apologetic

Posted on June 8, 2011 | 3 comments

Coffee joints, aside from – or because of – being good meeting places, are also good places for people-watching, which of course also means linguistic observation. I was seated in the Metaphor Café awaiting the arrival of a few of my friends; at a table close by, a relationship was having a public rough patch. A young man who had clearly committed an indiscretion that he was sorry for having been caught in (but perhaps not for having done) was being as appropriately hang-dog as he could muster with his girlfriend. He seemed to have prepared a statement that he was reciting to her.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m apologetic for doing it.”

What a weasel, I thought. He couldn’t even commit to the actual speech act: I apologize. Saying that is in itself making an apology; it’s an act that is done by saying it’s done, like I promise or I declare or I pronounce you man and wife (something this pair seemed unlikely to hear in the near future). Saying I am promissory does not constitute a promise.

“You wiener!” the girl said.

Well, she got that pretty much right on, I thought. The guy’s probably cribbed his speech from Representative Anthony D. Weiner, who, on being caught out sending suggestive and flirtatious pictures to various women and lying about it, said (among other things) “I don’t know what I was thinking. This was a destructive thing to do. I’m apologetic for doing it.”

The girl continued. “I am sooooo angry with you!”

Ah, I thought. Now there’s a statement of emotional state. I’m angry and I’m happy and I’m sad have adjectival predicates that describe a person’s feelings. I’m apologetic is also phrased like an emotional state. But it’s not. It’s not I’m feeling bad. It’s just a state of being inclined to make apologies. It pretends that an apology has already been made. There is, however, one statement of emotional state that is, in the right context, also (and more actually) in itself a speech act of apology: I’m sorry.

“You can’t just talk it away, you know!” the girl said.

Ironic, I thought, since apology is from Greek ἀπό apo “away, off” and λογία logia “speaking”. It first referred to speech meant to explain and defend; now its common meaning is more in the line of what wolves do when they bare their throats – it’s a payment in the social economy of status and obligation exchanges; it acknowledges lower status and indebtedness. But apologetics also refers to an argumentative defence of a doctrine (the usual context is Christian).

The girl continued fuming. “It’s appalling behaviour!”

Appalling? I thought. Maybe Apollonian! Not just because apologetic sounds sort of like a blend of Apollo and exegetic but because in the schema proposed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian is the mental, rational, organized contrast to the lusty, emotional, chaotic Dionysian. And this guy has clearly engaged in the Dionysian and is now trying to be as cold and Apollonian about it as he can. But, as Cassandra says in Agamemnon, “Ototoi popoi da! Apollo!” Which means something like “Augh WTF oh nooooes! Apollo!” Sometimes you just talk yourself into more trouble. And sometimes, as with Cassandra, nobody will listen to you anyway. (And don’t forget that olo in the middle of apology, which looks a bit like a rude gesture.)

“Appall— aw, gee!” the guy stammered, about as close to a real apology as he was likely to get. “It was just a text!”

“It was a tweet,” the girl said icily. “You twit.”

Apparently the young man, like Anthony Weiner, hadn’t realized the whole world was about to get a glimpse of whatever it was he was sending. Tweets are not private, not even when you tweet your privates.

The guy tried a new tack. He held out a beverage loaded with whipped cream. “I bought you a fancy triple-whip cap-frap-cinnamellatte. Cuz you’re my special sweetheart.” He tried a little smile and cocked his head.

Just then Jess arrived. She observed me observing. “Missing something good, am I?” she said, sotto voce.

At about the same moment, the girl, having taken the beverage, lashed its contents full-force into the guy’s face. I reflexively flinched back and, in so doing, knocked over what was left of my first cup onto the table and partly onto Jess. The girl stormed out, the guy stood there dripping, and Jess was simultaneously trying not to laugh her head off and looking down at the coffee stain on her pants.

“Oh,” I said to Jess, trying to keep a straight face and seizing the spirit of the moment, “I am apologetic.”

Jess raised an eyebrow and smirked a little. “Weiner.”

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

trinitite

Posted on June 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is a word for crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s – a trinity of each, t t t and i i i, three crosses and three candles (are any other letters left? yes – other letters left: r n e). It taps on the tip of the tongue, with three allophones of /t/: affricated, aspirated, unreleased. All that softens are one liquid (half voiceless) and one nasal. And the e at the end is written but we never hear it.

So what is it, in its entirety? It reminds me of trinitrotoluene, which is usually shortened to TNT. But that’s small-time compared with what we’re dealing with here. The echo of trinity is true and lasting, but we are now facing death, the destroyer of worlds.

July 16, 1945. Trinity nuclear test site, New Mexico. A nuclear bomb is tested, leaving a lasting echo in history. Robert Oppenheimer is reminded of a (not quite accurate) quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” After the fire has glowed in an enormous bright ball, a destroying angel trying to ascend to heaven but at last turned into an enormous toadstool of smoke, and all has cooled down, a layer of glassy rocks is found covering the area. Trinitite – the mineral (-ite) of Trinity.

It’s almost pure silica (quartz), of course: the sands of time, softened into a liquid, fused into a glass. It has unmelted sand stuck to the bottom, and it has many bubbles in it. It was thought at first that it was caused by the sand being melted in place by the blast. Now it is thought that the sand was taken up into the heavens with the fireball and rained back down from the cloud.

If we look into this bubbly dark glass, only lightly radioactive, what will we see? Will we see graveyards, or candles? Will the answer to our questions be on the tips of our tongues, tapping three times? Will we see our aspirations, or will they be unreleased? Our end may be written, but will we hear it?

Perhaps we will see the verse from the Bhagavad Gita, which in Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation is

I am time grown old,
creating world destruction,
set in motion
to annihilate the worlds;
even without you,
all these warriors
arrayed in hostile ranks
will cease to exist.

Or perhaps we will just see what there is to see, a rock that was the sand, for which the hourglass (or quartz watch) has run out, and now it is fused. The future is already here. And what colour is it, this rock of the future, this future in the rock?

Green, as it happens.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

toad

Posted on June 5, 2011 | 5 comments

One of my colleagues from the Editors’ Association of Canada, Daphne Davey, moved last fall to a town in P.E.I. with the charming name of Crapaud. Naturally, she named her residence Toad Hall.

For those who don’t know French, I’ll explain: crapaud, aside from having a taste of crap that can hardly be more pleasing than the odour of toad, is in fact French for “toad”. And toad is a word that does not bring a whole lot of charm… except in connection with Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, in which a key character is a moneyed, mansion-owning, maniacal toad (named Mr. Toad) who goes on wild jags (his fanaticism for motor cars lands him in jail – I can’t remember if any car gets towed away, but Toad gets away with several). Toad Hall is the name of Mr. Toad’s abode.

But step away from that vehicle and you will find toads associated with little that is fun or appealing (save perhaps the band Toad the Wet Sprocket). Indeed, one might almost wonder whether toad stands for “take off and die”, given that it is commonly used by women as an epithet for unattractive men. (I am unaware of any similar use of it on women.) It also has a long literary history as a byword for a lowly, ugly, nasty, stupid person – Shakespeare used it several times, for instance.

What, after all, is a toad? An amphibian that appears to be covered in warts (they’re not really warts and you can’t catch warts from a toad) – a squat, croaking thing that is a byword for animal unattractiveness. Even the word plays into that; although the look of the written word toad is not abnormally homely (though, as Margaret Gibbs has pointed out, it’s “a short, fat, squat little word, sitting there with its mouth and eyes agape in the middle”), the word is capable of being said in a way that emphasizes the ugliness: the lips puckering out, possibly with the nostrils narrowing a little, as though expressing disapprobation at an unpleasant smell; the initial stop spits a little, and the final stop is voiced, so the vowel is held long enough that one may lower the voice to a croaky level, and it’s that round back vowel that is quite lacking in brightness.

Oh, and toads were formerly thought to be poisonous (now we know of some poison frogs, but frogs are much cuter). Charlatans and mountebanks hawking snake-oil nostrums for the cure of poisoning would have an assistant who would pretend to eat a poisonous toad so that he could be cured by the elixir. From this, someone in a servile or sycophantic role was called a toad-eater, and this was shortened later to toady (as in fawning lickspittle toady).

This word and its imagery lend their flavour, in fact, to an assortment of different compounds. After all, it’s a convenient, short word (straight from Anglo-Saxon tadige; the Latin is, incidentally, bufo – that seems somehow suited, too, doesn’t it?), naming a common enough creature that may be associated with various things. So the OED gives us, among others, toad-fish, toad-flax, toad-back, toad-bellied, toad-blind, toad-cheese, toad-flower, toad-grass, toad-head, toad-housing, toad in the hole, toad-legged, toad-marl, toad-poison, toad-pond, toad-pool, toad-rush, toad’s bread, toad’s eye tin, toad’s-guts, toadskin, toad-snatcher, toad-spawn, toad-spit, toad-sticker, toad-strangler, toad-swollen, toad under a harrow, and toadwise. Among others.

Including, of course, toadstool. Which is not the tool of a toad, but rather (as you likely know) a mushroom. It’s also, in my personal history, an object lesson in getting what you pay for.

I’ll explain: at one time I was looking at some French translations that had been done by an agency which was, I believe, chosen for its, uh, fiscal efficiency. In an article on food poisoning, I noticed that toadstools had been translated as excréments de crapaud. Which would be “toad stools” (that’s stools in the medical sense).

Um, well, yes, crapaud crap would give you food poisoning, but, no, that’s not what we had in mind.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting toad in honour of Daphne Davey.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,