Tag Archives: word tasting notes

Cobb salad

Posted on January 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s not so much the word salad I’m tasting here – that merits its own examination, but it is relevant here for its soft lick as of lettuce, which is the basement of a Cobb salad – as the word Cobb. What does that make you think of?

Although it makes me think of the town of Cobh in Cork, Ireland, it shouldn’t, because I know perfectly well that Cobh in Irish is said like cove in English – and in fact Cobh is just an Irish respelling of the originally English place-name Cove. So stick a cork in that one and look at the more obvious: cob.

You know, not as in cobweb, but as in corn on the cob. It gives a nice image, doesn’t it? Of kernels of roughly even size arranged all in even rows? It does have a blunt name, true, like the sound one may make with a corn cob denuded of its kernels when one strikes it on a table – especially a table in a pub. The sound and gesture of it make me think of a full mouth caught in mid-gobble or clogged with a gobstopper. And of course in its written form it’s double-stopped, too, with its two b’s (like adjoining kernels seen in their adjoining rows, just perhaps).

It happens that Cobb salad is one of the menu items I have come to look for when in a pub. It’s a solid restaurant standard, and is quite flavourful, nutritious, and filling. But I judge them not just on the freshness of their ingredients and the overall flavour and texture of the salad, nor do I add to that only the inventiveness of the ingredients (the basics are tomato, bacon, egg, chicken breast, avocado, and blue cheese, on lettuce, with dressing, but additions and variations are possible and in fact common). No, I look to see how the ingredients are arranged.

Some restaurants toss the ingredients together. This always disappoints me, not horribly but about as much as seeing Ceaser salad rather than Caesar salad on the menu might (unsurprising, but sigh…). Others arrange them separately but in fields arrayed around the centre, splayed perhaps like a cobweb. Some chop them into various-sized pieces; others leave them almost whole. But only rarely do I see a real attempt at the optimal arrangement: neatly and fairly evenly diced, in neat rows.

No, I didn’t decide they should be like that because of corn on the cob. In fact, the Cobb salad is named after Robert Howard Cobb, who was the owner of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant, where it was invented (he may have invented it himself) – by one story, he cobbled it together from what was in the cooler. But whatever the origin, it happens that at the Brown Derby, they always diced the ingredients neatly and arranged them in neat rows.

Now, it’s not that I’m a weirdly picky eater who must eat everything in order. And I know that it’s all the same when it gets into my stomach, but folks, it goes past the eyes and through the mouth before it gets there, and that matters to some of us. Might as well toss together my bibimbap or my chirashi sushi. (Coincidentally, just as I judge pubs on their Cobbs, I judge sushi places on their chirashis. But that’s more on the quality and type of the ingredients.) I may even toss it together some before eating it… but I want to get to do that myself!

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foxtrot

Posted on January 3, 2011 | 1 comment

Suppose for a moment you’re a Romeo. Not just any Romeo, an alpha Romeo. What kind of dance would you do? Tango or foxtrot?

I suppose it might matter who you were, and where. If you were at some golf hotel on a delta, the echo of a foxtrot would be closer (though you could be deft and add a tango after – but a foxtrot with an alpha Romeo followed by a tango could produce an unpleasant result). But if you’re a Romeo in uniform in the sierra, perhaps a Yankee, it might be rusty, but a tango would be more in order.

At this point, some of you might say “Bravo,” others might say “Bravo, alpha delta,” others might just say “What?” and some might call the bartender and say “Whiskey! Tango? Foxtrot?”

I admit I digress a touch. Foxtrot just happens to make me think of the NATO phonetic alphabet – not what linguists would call a phonetic alphabet, but rather that way of spelling things out unambiguously over radio: Alfa Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu. (You may note that, in spelling out foxtrot, you say foxtrot once and tango twice. I guess this is because it takes two to tango. Which two? Romeo and Oscar… and the foxtrot is Oscar alone.)

Foxtrot also makes me – and millions of others – think of Bill Amend’s very successful comic strip FoxTrot, which follows the Fox family. It’s one of those strips where everyone stays the same age forever: Jason the prepubescent geek, Paige his adolescent sister and polar opposite, Peter the typical high-school-age male, and their two parents, the doofus father and the all-wise-stable-smart-and-in-control-of-everything mother. They’ve been pretty much the same for the past two decades, and week in, week out, nothing ever goes smoothly… of course. (Compare this to For Better or for Worse, where the characters aged with real time, or Doonesbury, where they aged slowly at first, then a bit closer to reality, and are now aging about as quickly as reality.)

Well, but, then, the foxtrot has, in its basics, been pretty much the same for 96 years: slow, slow, quick quick (or, in the slow foxtrot style, slow quick quick). It’s a very smooth dance, slinking across the floor perhaps as a fox slinks through the underbrush. Contrast that with the fast, clicky two-step of the word foxtrot, sounding more like a tapdancer, and its written form complete with four crossed letters, most notably the criss-cross x. Oh, it does have those o‘s, looking round – but in the sound, flat, no rounding of the lips. So it’s easy to understand if someone unacquainted might think a foxtrot is quick and tripping.

So it didn’t get its name from onomatopoeia, obviously. No, it may have some reference to the movement of a fox, but one source says the name it was first given was bunny hug, which might seem a bit springier than the reality but at least has the softness and smoothness of the dance. However, the name that stuck was foxtrot, no doubt influenced by the name of the dance’s inventor, Harry Fox, a vaudeville dancer and comedian. Harry Fox was actually born Arthur Carrington. Would the dance have taken his name if he hadn’t changed it? Perhaps not – but Carrington is a smooth enough name for it.

But of course the dance wouldn’t have made it into the NATO phonetic alphabet then. It would be beaten by Charlie, and what would fill the f spot then?

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filibuster

Posted on January 2, 2011 | 1 comment

In one recent conversation with some Americans I met on vacation, I mused about some differences between our politics and theirs, in particular the fact that the US Democrats, in spite of having almost 60% of the senate seats, were having a lot of trouble getting their way in anything there, while the Canadian Conservatives, with fewer than 50% of the seats in parliament (46%, in fact), were getting their way in pretty much everything.

Now, the reasons for the latter phenomenon are various and worth a good discussion on a political blog, but the reason for the former phenomenon is principally one: the filibuster. Or, these days, usually the mere intention of a filibuster. For (to simplify the matter a bit) one party can declare its intent to filibuster a specific bill, and that bill will be suspended until the filibuster threat is lifted, but other pending legislation will pass through without obstruction and without an actual filibuster happening. (Without the accepted practice of letting selective intent block specific measures, an actual filibuster would have to take place, and all legislation would come to a halt, backed up and stacked up like the fili being pressed against the wall by the big block of buster.) The only way to get around this is to have at least 60% of the seats voting to overrule the filibuster, which is a rarity. In this way, a minority can exercise control over a majority – sounds almost like an act of piracy, doesn’t it? Or of some coup to overthrow a democracy?

Ah, filibuster: makes me think of a nut (or perhaps about 42 of them, dedicated to keeping about 58 others from getting anything done). But that’s filbert. The buster makes me think of a naughty young boy, if only because buster is what my dad sometimes called me when I, as a young boy, was being naughty. Filibuster sounds sort of like someone who breaks a bronco, that is, breaks the will of a horse (subdues a maverick, perhaps?), in this case a filly. It also has a sound a bit like some spell being cast in a Harry Potter movie, or some magical being whiffling through the air and breaking through an object. Or perhaps a fuse burning down, followed by an explosion and echo. And it certainly has an air like swashbuckler or, perhaps, freebooter.

Well, it ought to be a little reminiscent of freebooter. The words are directly related. Both come from Dutch vrijbuiter, which means “freebooter” (of course), as in someone who gets free booty (I mean plunder, not the other kind). Filibuster came filtered through French and Spanish. But it was still used first of all to mean pirates. After that, in the mid-1800s, it referred to organized expeditions from the US that aimed to spark revolutions in Central America and the Spanish West Indies (what, did you think that sort of thing only started in the 20th century?). From either or both of these senses came the sense of practicing obstruction in a legislative assembly, showing up first as a verb in the mid-1800s and then as a noun before 1900.

But, as most of you probably know, it’s not just any kind of legislative obstruction. It is specifically holding the floor with lengthy speeches, hijacking debate (and thus the ship of state). It implies a huge amount of hot air and flapping jaws and so forth. Not quite wind in the sails and flapping banners, let alone gunpowder and clashing swords, but you use the weapons at hand. (Words are certainly better than a gutta-percha cane, which was once used against a senator on the senate floor…)

Now, the US Senate is not the only place where filibusters happen; far from it. We get them occasionally in Canada, too. But the rules and customs in the US Senate give filibusters rather more power and efficacy than they have in most places. Moreover, in order to change the rule requiring 60% of the senate to override a filibuster, you would need a vote of 60% of the senate… making it a tough filbert to bust.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting filibuster.

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hangover

Posted on January 1, 2011 | 2 comments

After an excess of revelry, some of us have on occasion been found to hang over a toilet bowl, or come to consciousness with head hammering like Hanover during Allied bombing runs. Some way to ring in the new year, with new ringing in the old ears! After more than governed intake, one gets more than governable Kopfweh and Katzenjammer! And yet, even though the threat of it may hang over your head like the sword of Damocles as you have that ill-thought-out eighth drink (without a thought of the ill outcome), you still rush headlong towards ebriety like a car towards a cliff… and end up with your front wheels hanging over, spinning uselessly. Just like your head.

I particularly like the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “2. The unpleasant after-effects of (esp. alcoholic) dissipation.” So dry… and dissipation is so seldom heard in that use here and now. But did you notice that that’s definition 2? The first definition, with citations slightly pre-dating the one we know and love, is “A thing or person remaining or left over; a remainder or survival, an after-effect”: something still hanging around, carried over. Once the alcoholic sense caught on, it reflected back on the first sense, so that whenever one refers to anything as a hangover of or from something, there is a clear aura of paying the piper after a few too many loony tunes.

Funny to think, though, that this word has only been with us for just over a century. I’m quite certain that people got drunk before 1904. Now, though, we seldom use any other term, aside from cute references to “feeling a little off” and so on. Is there something about hangover that just seems appropriate?

Well, hang surely has the right kind of tone – it rings, it smacks of execution and hangnails, it has echoes of harangue and dang, clang, bang, et cetera. And over carries tastes of finality as well as of impending and threat. The word, when said, is strong on the first syllable and then gives a weak double-beat to follow up. It’s not really a dactyl, though, a three-time beat; it’s more like a half note and two quarter notes. It’s a bit like the sound of a hammer being let drop: a big bang and then two little bounces. Or would that be more like a bang and a whimper…

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decade

Posted on December 31, 2010 | 2 comments

This seems like a good word for this evening, for a few reasons. First, it’s the end of a decade, the 201st, if you start counting from the beginning of AD 1 (which is the basis for our numeration of years – AD or, if you think AD is dead, CE). Of course, many people prefer to count in what, without reference to the beginning of the count, may seem a more obvious or user-friendly way: going by the second digit from the right, just as we do with years of our own lives (for instance, I’m in my forties). We refer readily to the 1980s, for instance, by which we mean 1980 through 1989, not 1981 through 1990.

But – and this is the second reason – many people think that (just like use of circa (ca.) to mean “established in”) such use of decade is evidence that our language has decayed, or anyway our mental acuity in its regard has – we’re brain dead, can’t add, etc. A year ago, many people were writing indignant screeds declaring that it was not the end of a decade, and that those who said it was were idiots.

Well, as I explained at the time in “When does the new decade begin?“, those indignant people were really face-egg-nant people, because they were, quite simply, wrong. They were displaying mental inflexibility and an evident desire to beat others into submission with rigid rules. The fact that today is the end of a decade does not mean that a year ago today was not – it was just the end of a different decade, one that overlaps this one by nine years. A decade is any set of ten years (in fact, originally – in the 1600s – a decade was any set of ten anythings, and a set of ten years was, even into the 1800s, said as a decade of years). The 1980s were a decade. You’re being dumb if you say they weren’t, or say they didn’t end on December 31, 1989. Ditto the oh-ohs on December 31, 2009, and ditto the onesies on December 31, 2019. So this popular usage of decade is not proof of the language’s decadence.

Ah, and there’s reason number three: It’s New Year’s Eve, party time. Let’s be decadent. Now, admittedly, decade and decadent are not cognate; decade is from Latin for “ten” and decadent is from Latin for “falling down”. And decadence may be related to cadence, but the cadence is different when you say the cadence.

And how about the cadence of decade? It’s not a whole lot if you say the word (it’s almost a spondee, and sounds like someone who helps you build a deck), but you can also play it on your piano: D-E-C-A-D-E. I leave the rhythm to you, but it’s a an energetic little relation, more spry and tight than the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind but less spooky and high-strung than Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells theme used in The Exorcist. The question is, when you repeat it, do you play the D-E twice in a row or overlap? Is the second D-E a pick-up tag, going where otherwise there might be B? (And at the end, do you play the B instead? Or end on C or E or A? Say, what mode is this? Phrygian? Dorian? Fridge-doorian? It has a certain magnetism.)

Well, we know the decades loop around, like de back to de, each count arbitrarily beginning again, just as centuries do (in Roman numerals, C), just as millennia do (in Roman numerals, D and D add to make M), just as the Mayan long count will in 2012… An arbitrary endpoint imbued with meaning entirely by cultural choice. Which is not to say it’s meaningless; meaning is what minds create in interaction. Which is good. I like creation of meaning. Destruction or limitation of meaning, not so much.

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shaman

Posted on December 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

I was reminded of this word this evening when I was at a spa, sweating it out in the steam and taking in some redeeming pain (a.k.a. massage). The spa in question has an almost astonishingly large collection of paintings by Norval Morrisseau, one of the great Canadian aboriginal painters. His grandfather was a shaman; his grandmother, a devout Catholic. His paintings are strongly focused on the spiritual, including totemic animals and shamanic journeys.

The word shaman brings to mind for me a dinner several years ago where (perhaps getting into the spirits) I was conversing with a member of that most unpleasant set, the crusty prescriptivists. She was the sort of person who would evince physical pain at the sound of a split infinitive. Anyway, I mentioned something or other about a shaman. I pronounced it like “shah man.”

“SHAY man,” she corrected me primly.

“Or shay woman,” I said, brushing it off.

Was she right? Exactly as right as she was about split infinitives. In other words, she clung doggedly to one viable option and militated angrily against another option that was at least equally viable and in fact had a better historical basis. Honestly, it’s a shame an’ a sin to hear such people bruiting their abuse about, especially when they (as she did) make some of their living tutoring others. Healer, heal thyself!

Where does this word shaman come from? At least some of us may now be inclined to associate it with First Nations (Native American) spirituality – sweat lodges, purifying pain, et cetera. But it comes from a part of the world much farther east – a part I associate first with a massive meteor airburst in 1908, a blast 1000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb: Tunguska. There, where the heavens came down with devastating fire, is mostly a lot of trees and empty space, but there are also some people: the Tungus. And it is from a Tungusic language that we get the word shaman, by way of Russian and German – in all of which languages the first vowel of the word is like “ah” and not like “ey”.

Which is not to say that someone not from a Tungusic culture can’t be a shaman (nor that anglophones can’t say “shay man”). The experience is one found in many human cultures: a person with unusual spiritual susceptibility, one who likely was led to the spirit world by a health crisis (as Morrisseau was), one who has gone on a spiritual journey and perhaps regularly goes on them, one who experiences the divine fire and (again like Morrisseau) has visions. Often a wounded healer, one whose own pathology is the channel for the divine. (“There is a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in.” Thanks, Leonard Cohen.) Morrisseau had problems with spirits of other kinds – alcohol, to be specific. But a shaman is not a shame-an, one who takes on shame, and though one may be touché (too shay), he or she is not a shay man: the man is not our man. These are but things of one’s own one brings to the word and sees in it.

The shapes of this word are such things, too. Is the s a snake or a wisp of the spirit? Are the a a totemic animals, spirit guides (they do look like hieroglyphic hawks as seen in the Egyptian books of the dead: a a)? Is the h a sweat lodge (hear the steam coming out: shaaaa)? Or is it the shaman, or the spirit, first standing h, then bent m, then reduced n? Only you can decide. Who are we to be? There’s the rub.

Where’s the rub? Well, at the spa this evening, for me. The massage therapist and I conversed about metaphysics – we agreed that the reality of reality was overrated and largely co-created. Much of it is but things of one’s own one brings to the world and sees in it. Why may it not be made of layer on layer of common imagining, awaiting a plumbing of the depth, an externalization through internalization, projection through injection, the transcendent function? Time for inception: Go west, Jung man. “There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving.” “When you make your secret journey, you will be a holy man…”

Oh, yes, we talked about music too. And then I took a steam bath. And had a shower, man.

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sned

Posted on December 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hmmm… this word looks like a shed that’s been pruned a bit. Maybe someone breezed by on a sled and sliced it… No, not sliced. Snipped. This is, after all, a /sn/ word, not a /sl/ word. The /sl/ words are slicker, sleeker, slipperier; they slash and slit, slide slenderly; they may be slow or sloppy or slack, but they still slurp, even if only slightly. With /sn/ words, the liquidity is replaced with a nasality, sniffing from the snoot – a snee may snicker, but a snout will snort snarkily or snap snidely.

Indeed, this is no snow sled, nor for that matter a shed that has shed or been shorn. But we do hear the /Ed/ rhyme, which stops with a dullness that treads towards the heavy, although words such as red and bread counterbalance dread and dead, and the echo of the poetic diction of the past tense, draggèd forth from time to time, gives it a tinge of gravitas with a whiff of fancy.

It adds a layer of flavour to this word – a verb, as it happens – to know that it is related to the verbs snithe and snathe. Ah, don’t those two have a sound! Snide and scathing, like Snape from the Harry Potter books… prone to cutting remarks. Well, actually pruning and making cutting marks. Snithe means “cut”; snathe means specifically “prune”. And so does sned. In particular, it refers to lopping off branches (or parts thereof). Such may be done, for instance, to a Christmas tree to give it a smart shape and to fit it into our warm dens… or, after Christmas, to fit it into the shed until it can be taken away. Send not to know for what the shear sneds… it sneds for thee; it sneds thy tree. Such are all our ends.

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nativity

Posted on December 29, 2010 | 2 comments

It’s a word as Christmassy as a Christmas tree – and as crisp in sound as Christmas tree, or as the crisp winter air Christmas is typically associated with. Crisp is of course relative – as I write this in late December, a quick check tells me the temperature in Bethlehem is only a couple of degrees lower than the temperature inside my apartment; outdoors here in Canada, of course, it’s much more like what Christina Rossetti envisioned: “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone”… a very northern version of Christmastide.

Even more northern and Canadian would be the Huron Carol: “’Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled…” Ah, but that’s a particularly native nativity: “’Twas in a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found; a ragged robe of rabbit fur enwrapped his beauty ’round…” I’m put in mind of the similar presentation I first saw as a kid on the Stoney (Nakoda) reserve, which as it happens my dad has recently written about in his column: Christmas story in Stoney points to hope for humanity. Braids and buckskins, and a babe in a moss bag (they’re comfy, moss bags, by the way; I spent lots of time in one when I was that age).

But should a nativity be native? Well, um… Funny how we don’t always think about the link between nativity and native, obvious as it is at a mere glance (indeed, nativity could mean “nativeness” if it weren’t already in use to refer to the birth of Jesus). The shift of stress results in significant phonemic changes and a definite shift in reference. One may certainly speak of being a native of this place or that – but that’s not the overriding flavour native has now (and indeed, when my dad first arrived at the Stoney reserve, when they asked him where he was from, and he said he was a native of Buffalo, they told him he wasn’t a native!). Oh, “the natives are restless,” we all know that one… but the nativity is very restful. Sleep in heavenly peace, eh?

Still, why not a native nativity? If we can sing about ice and snow when those were not likely present at the actual birth of Jesus (which probably wasn’t in December anyway), if we can have songs and art that present the infant Jesus as some pale, blonde Germanic sort, if we can sing joyously that Little Lord Jesus made no crying (seriously, a man who as an adult was very good at creating stirs was somehow a perfectly quiet little baby?), why not also a native nativity?

The essence of the nativity, anyway, is the birth – of course, it has the Latin root for birth, nat, as seen in such words as prenatal – but also the humble surroundings. The very shape of the word nativity lends itself nicely to the humble birth: look at the symmetrical centre, tivit, and tell me you don’t see a manger (a hay trough) and two flanking parents. True, that tivit is surrounded by a nay, but that may be not so much naysayer as neigh-sayer. And anyway, who knows what else we may see if I tantivy mix up the letters? Well, it may come to vanity, but it may as readily give a glimpse of the tiny vita represented.

But while changing the letters may change the word, a little switching and replacement in the nativity scene does not impair its central theme, and may remind us of the common bond of humanity and the experiences and hopes we share – for instance, an African nativity scene (wzakcleveland.com/national/wzak/black-nativity-angers-italys-white-xmas-party/), or a Japanese one (mattstone.blogs.com/photos/asian_icons/nativity-ki-chang.html)… You really don’t need to be a Christian to appreciate what such depictions are getting at. (Of course, some people like to have fun with it, too; see relijournal.com/christianity/the-24-most-creative-nativity-scenes/.)

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caboodle

Posted on December 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

No doubt you came out of this Christmas with oodles of gifts – enough to fill a cab, I’m sure, or even a caboose. Any more and your full-to-overfull house would go kaboom. Books, booze, toys, togs, the whole kit and caboodle. And maybe, if you are an ailurophile, even a caboodle of kittens.

Ah, well, even without the kitten caboodle, or a cab with oodles of noodles, poodles, doodles, or, uh, Boodles Gin (which may or may not be served at Boodle’s gentlemen’s club in London, but surely is at the Boodles Challenge tennis event), or even a couple canoodling in the back, there is the eternal question: what the heck is a caboodle?

It will no doubt clear things up if I tell you that the whole kit and caboodle is a more recent version of the whole caboodle and of the whole kit and boodle, and that caboodle is thought to come from kit and boodle. (I frankly think the presence of kit was just the needed little nudge in the direction of adding that phonaesthetic ca or ka at the beginning, which has the sound of a small explosion preceeding a bigger one, or of a backswing or other preparatory step for some sudden éclat; we see it in not only kaboom but ka-ching, alakazam, and various places also as the variant ker: kerplop, kerplunk, etc. Not to mention its effect on words that just happen to have it, such as catastrophe.) So caboodle doesn’t exist as a word outside that phrase, and is really a variant of boodle.

Oh, boodle? Well, I’d think you’d be able to guess what it means – “pack, lot, bunch,” typically with a dismissive tone. Its source? Uncertain, but perhaps Dutch boedel, “possession, estate, etc.” But, now, boodle by itself has an almost silly sound, doesn’t it? A little daft, with that loopy /u/ spelled oo, and the tone we can get when we hear words containing it (noodle is a silly word for one’s head or brain, and can also refer to playing around idly, for example on a piano; poodle is a name for a dog that is seldom taken seriously, even though they do bite; doodle is a light, probably inane drawing; oodle is an overeager term for a large quantity; toodle-oo is a light way of saying farewell). It has a playful boo and then idles or toddles off at the end. But add the ca and you get an echo of kaboom and a sense of leaping-up magnification.

And try kit and boodle against kit and caboodle. The first is two trochees, reminiscent of the triplets of liturgical Latin:

Fed a poodle with a noodle,
But he ate the kit and boodle
And concluded with exudal.

It’s fairly simple, rhythmically. The second makes a dactyl of the first foot, and really gives us something like alakazam or Kalamazoo or thingamajig, but with an extra unstressed beat at the end – much livelier. It also has a repetition of the /k/, with a /t/ (typically glottalized) between, which gives a clicky catchiness before mooving into the noodle-muddle of boodle – perhaps like the clickety-clack of a train loaded with goods (the Polar Express, perhaps?), including, of course, a caboose.

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Antilles

Posted on December 24, 2010 | 1 comment

I often get a taste of something gill-like – or perhaps like a flap of a fabric frill – from ill words, such as the girl’s name Jill and the place name Antilles. I find the word Antilles to be a somewhat delicate-seeming word, a bit French-ish (its Greek overtones from Achilles notwithstanding), in contrast with other names that can also be used for that sweep of islands from just north of South America to just south of North America: the West Indies (which includes some islands not part of the Antilles, such as the Bahamas), the Caribbean islands, and the various names of the individual islands, which include assorted territories of colonial countries (including the Netherlands Antilles, British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, French West Indies) as well a goodly number of independent – but not always affluent – nations.

The pronunciation of Antilles varies from language to language. The word is a little different in some (Spanish Antillas, Portuguese Antilhas, Dutch Antillen) and clear enough in those versions, and the French pronunciation is obvious enough to those who speak French. An anglophone, on the other hand, may well be confused until he’s told. But, as I have already hinted, it’s a rhyme for Achilles. It sounds like until he’s. It may make you think of Milli Vanilli, that duo of great dancers but musical impostors. Such an echo would be basically useless, however, neither of the front men of that group being from the Antilles.

Nearly as useless would be the echo that it tends to have most strongly for me: anthills. Anthills are, after all, beehives of activity – ah, let me rephrase that: they are anthills of activity. Oh, heck, you know what I mean. They’re regimented, and busy busy busy. This is not the image of the Antilles – we’re talking the Caribbean, mon. Irie is what it’s all about. Relaaaax. the sun will always shine. (OK, a hurricane here, a hurricane there, but the sun still comes out after.) The weather is always warm. There are always beaches, and rum punch. Tourism is very big in these islands. For those of us who have taken vacations in the Antilles, they certainly are not useless. But you know what is useless? Folk etymology.

I’ll explain. I was recently in Aruba and Curaçao, both part of the Lesser Antilles, both territories of the Netherlands. One of the bits of touristic information I was given suggested that Antilles came from the Spanish designation of the Lesser Antilles (the smaller, more southern islands) as Islas Inútiles: “Useless Islands.”

Oh, folk etymology on place names abounds. I’m sure to get into this topic again. As to Antilles, it would be tidy to have a cut-and-dried origin. But in fact it seems that Columbus called the islands he encountered Antillas because he had been told to expect to encounter an island called Antillia before he got to the Asian continent. Cartographers at that time did, it seems, feel free to posit as certain – and even to map out with some specificity – places that they had simply concluded ought to exist, or had somehow come to believe from hearsay were there. Why, to make things up just because they decided it was so! Who does that? Aside from half of everybody at least, that is. Which is why we get so much BS circulating as etymology.

Oh, and where does Antillia come from? That’s disputed, but a rather plausible explanation is that it’s from Latin for “before” (ante) and “islands” (illas). So the Antilles are the islands before the mainland. Fair enough: we stopped at them before we got to Panama and Costa Rica (we being my wife and I, among others on the boat). Which in turn we stopped at before we came back home…

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