Tag Archives: word tasting notes

spire

Posted on November 13, 2025 | 1 comment

If you, as an architect, aspired to inspire, what might you do? Would you conspire to spear the air? A tower of any shape has the dominating height that looms like an adult over a small child, but mere parapets, however parental, do not quite get to the point like a spire does. 

In part it’s a matter of perspective: a spire can seem to disappear into the celestial sphere rather than coming to a blunt end. From any angle, it has more to spare. And it can come in many forms – pyramidal, conical, octagonal, even spiral – but it is always poised like a stylus or quill to write in the welkin.

Well, then, what does it write? What words does this needle tattoo in the heavens, or in your mind? It is simple enough to see it in words like conspire, inspire, and so on, and to hear its similarity to spear and perhaps spare and, of course, spiral. We might well expect it’s related to some of them; at the very least, the resemblance can be a reminder, which can add incidental flavours and expectations – the sort of thing that justifies the luxury of having overlapping senses of spiral and helix, for instance: they still sound and seem different because echoes and overtones conspire to inspire, or lift like helium.

But what, really, are resemblances, and how far can they go? What things are the same thing as other things, and what merely look alike? We know it only goes to a point. What, for instance, is the essence of a spire? Let me put it this way: Do you know what the highest spire in the world is? You may think of cathedrals in Salisbury and Cologne and so on, because a spire, of course, is a thing on a church. But all the highest spires are buildings of commerce and capital and occasionally communication, rising from the street without sanctuary or nave or transept. The highest spire in the world is the Burj Khalifa. And I live near another that used to be the highest, the CN Tower. Do you get the point? A spire needs not aspire to divinity to inspire. It needs only be a… what, a spear into the sky?

Perhaps, but etymologically, no: the word is not from, or a cousin of, spear, though there may have been some cross-influence through similarity – especially since the Old English source of spire, spir, was pronounced like modern spear, which in its turn came from Old English spere, which sounded more like how we would say “spare a.” Nor, by the way, is spire related to any of the breath-related spire words such as respire and inspire. Instead, spire is a word originally for the stalk or stem of a plant. A blade of grass, perhaps, or the peak of a tree. Something growing from the earth and reaching sharply for the sky – but just to a point.

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spiral, helix

Posted on November 3, 2025 | 2 comments

“The Art Gallery of Ontario has a marvellous spiral staircase,” I said to Jess and Arlene as we stood talking at Domus Logogustationis.

“Helical, surely,” a voice from behind me said.

My respiration caught sharply, briefly, and then I exhaled and turned. I found myself facing a fellow I hadn’t met before – evidently a guest of some other member of the Order of Logogustation.

He continued. “A helix has a constant radius, whereas a spiral has a constantly increasing radius. The staircases that are commonly but erroneously called ‘spiral’ are wrapped in a constant radius around an axis.”

I reflected briefly that he had probably never tried calling an architect “erroneous” to their face. I certainly wouldn’t – and especially not Frank Gehry, who designed the staircase I was talking about. “Have you been to the Art Gallery of Ontario?”

“That’s rather beside the point, I’d think,” he said.

“Beside the axis, perhaps. Or the axis is beside itself. The staircase in question is in fact irregular. It is called a ‘spiral staircase’ because that is the term used for the general type, but it is not a perfectly helix or spiral, though I would add that its radius does decrease toward the top.” I pulled out my phone as I was talking and found him a couple of photos I had taken of the staircase in question.

“Grotesque,” he said.

“I suppose it’s not to everyone’s taste,” I replied.

“Literally grotesque,” he said. “As in distorted like a grotto. Grottesco. But not helical and not spiral. It is important to get these things right. I was under the impression that you people here cared about the English language.”

“Oh, we certainly do,” I said, “the way naturalists care about a forest, not the way a florist cares about cut roses. English has been here long before us, it will be here long after us, and it grows through us. It is ever growing.” I moved my finger in an increasing spiral.

“Turning in the widening gyre,” our guest said. “Things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. When a word is given a precise meaning, it is an act of desecration to broaden its use wantonly. It will spiral out of control.”

Jess interjected. “If a child is a certain height when born, does that mean we should cut off its legs when it grows, so that it will never become larger?”

Arlene, who had been busily looking some things up on her phone, joined right after her. “And then there’s the question of what it was when it was born. Neither of these words – spiral and helix – was so strict in its definition when it came into the language, and their definitions for most use cases contain each other.” She had the Oxford English Dictionary definitions in hand, plus some etymology. “Spiral: ‘Forming a succession of curves arranged like the thread of a screw; coiled in a cylindrical or conical manner; helical.’ It’s from Greek σπεῖρα ‘something twisted or wound.’ Helix: ‘Anything of a spiral or coiled form’; helical: ‘Belonging to or having the form of a helix; screw-shaped; spiral.’ It’s from Greek ἕλιξ ‘something twisted or spiral.’”

The guest waved his hand. “Yes, yes, that is why I said ‘when a word is given a precise meaning.’ They may have been sloppy to begin with, but a distinction has been made, just as one has been made between persuade and convince, just as one has been made between less and fewer.” I stifled a snort; my opinion on the subject is no secret. He continued, “Precision in all things. I think you have all heard of the etymological fallacy. We can’t say these words should be sloppy just because in origin they were.”

I nearly coughed at his mention of the etymological fallacy. Was he trying to whack me with my own frying pan? If a word isn’t fixed at its origin – and it is not – how could it be fixed at some other point in time? “And who is it that gives these restricted meanings?” I said.

“Once a definition has been established and accepted in a field or expertise most directly relevant to it, it has gained scholastic authority; it is institutionalized,” he said. “This can proceed variously, but the result is the same: its acceptance grows and grows” – his finger traced a downward helix in the air – “until it is quite embedded. Screwed in, as it were.”

“Within that field, yes,” Jess said, “but specific fields have specific exigencies that more general usage does not. Consider the botanical definition of berry, which includes bananas and excludes strawberries. The term has been pressed into a special use in a way that is viable in a biology lab but not in a kitchen.”

“Kitchens are home to much messy thinking,” the guest said. “If cooks were more mathematical they would produce cleaner, more consistent results.”

More consistently boring, I thought. But I said, “Engineering is mathematical. Architecture is mathematical. And yet engineers and architects still call such staircases ‘spiral stairs.’”

“As they have since the 1600s,” Arlene added.

“They have yet to catch up, perhaps,” our guest said, “but the best use of a word is the most precise.” He traced in the air a narrowing conical spiral. “Meaning increases in acuity over time, as long as we shape it. We just need to get to the point.” He jabbed his finger to make the point.

“I gather,” Jess said, “that you have no use for metaphor or poetry?”

“Stopgaps for the primitive imagination,” he said.

Jess snickered. “Stopgaps. No metaphor there.”

“Well,” I said, returning to the initial subject, “Frank Gehry shaped the staircase in the AGO, and I think it’s a great metaphor for language development: irregular, fascinating, with various twists and turns, and at the top, the point of it all, is… art.”

The guest chortled. “There’s a reason I haven’t seen the staircase in question. Art is simply reality badly rendered.”

I inhaled and was about to form a comment on his artlessness, but I sensed that this was spiraling out of control, or at least descending in a helix to hell. I paused, circling in my mind.

But Arlene got straight to the point. Fixing him with a steady gaze, she spiraled her finger towards the door: “Screw off, you.”

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ceilidh

Posted on October 23, 2025 | 1 comment

I arrived at Domus Logogustationis to find an assortment of women, mostly in their thirties but some younger, arranging chairs on one side of the main room. 

Philip McCarr, whose visit from Scotland was the occasion of the evening’s meeting, strode up to me. “Ye’re jus’ in time, lad! Allow me to introduce the ladies I’ve invited.” He indicated them in sequence: “This is Kayley, Caley, Kaly, K. Leigh, Kaley, Cayly, Caolaidhe, Kaylee, Cayleigh, and Keili.” He turned to them: “…Do a have thit right?”

One of the women said, “Almost! I’m Kaly and she’s Cayly. You got the rest, though.”

“Ah, well,” Philip said, “practice makes pairfict.”

“And to what do we owe the pleasure of their company?” I said.

Philip gestured at various instrument cases ranged against the wall. “It isnae hard tae see – they’re here for a ceilidh!”

One of them stepped forward to shake my hand. “We’re the Ceilidh Bunch.” Or maybe she said “the Kayley Bunch” or “the Caolidhe Bunch” – or all three at the same time, or…

“So membership is open only to homophones?” I said.

“More or less.”

“Do you ever have a Kelly, Keely, or Kylie?”

“Occasionally.” She smiled and went back to her work.

“As befits a ceilidh,” Philip said, “they take turns at solos and it’s a casual thing like.”

“Dancing?” I asked.

“It can happen.”

“So I assume,” I said, making my way over to the refreshment table, “that this is a cèilidh and not a céilí” – although they’re pronounced the same, Philip could of course hear the difference because he’s a character in a story written in text – “because you’re a Scotsman, not an Irishman.”

“Bang on,” Philip said, “but, ye ken, all are welcome. The music soonds aboot the same at any rate.”

“It’s rather amusing,” I said, “that it all only works because, by coincidence, it all sounds about the same. Since all the various spellings trace back to Caolaidhe, which means ‘slender’”—

—“Or ‘narrow,’” Philip said. “Although there’s a broad variety in spelling.”

“Yes, and the popularity came under the influence of Kelly and Kylie, which aren’t related. And of course, returning to ‘hard to c’, also of ceilidhe, which—” 

Philip finished my sentence as he gestured at the assembled musicians: “—means a gathering, or a visit. Perhaps from the Auld Gaelic word for ‘companion’, céile.” (For those of you reading, it’s pronounced like “cay-lya.”)

“Old Gaelic?” I said. “I thought it was called Old Irish.”

Philip, ever the proud Scot, turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Do be companionable, man.” He turned to the refreshment table and busied himself with whisky and glasses.

I laughed. “Well, I’m glad they chose to come and keep us company.” They were now tuning up their instruments and the music was soon to start.

Philip handed me a wee dram. “Whit’s the chance ye’ll be up there dancing wi’ them, Jimmy lad?”

I eyed my little bit of liquid courage. “Slender,” I said.

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beguine

Posted on October 8, 2025 | 2 comments

Look out: That wiley big guy’ll beguile you. He may seem like a colporteur for the jubilee, but begone, you, or you’ll get a bee in your bonnet it for him; it may seem a mere crush, but it won’t be so benign… I’m begging you, don’t put the begonia in your hair in the warm Antillean air, and don’t let them begin the beguine.

Oh, dear, I’ve shaken the tree of longing and lexis, and the words have fallen out like so many needles from a memory evergreen. Let’s see if we can draw the connections.

You know the song “Begin the Beguine,” I trust. It’s by Cole Porter (whose words were full of spirit, but he was no colporteur, i.e., seller of religious publications). It first appeared in his silly regal musical Jubilee. It’s been recorded in ever so many versions; I won’t link one, just search for videos of it and choose your fancy. But do you know what a beguine is?

Let’s make a beginning by saying it’s nothing to do, etymologically, with begin. Or with begging. Or, for that matter, with benign, though you probably weren’t wondering. And not with beguile, either, though the song is about some level of guile – which is to say, wiliness (wile and guile are two versions of the same word, historically). Yes, the song is about longing and memory and what the Brazilians call saudade, but there is a turning, a denial and then surrender, or prelapse and relapse, to say nothing of paralipsis – or a pair of lips. And anyway, its heart is not in Brazil.

In fact, Cole Porter composed the song on an ocean cruise somewhere between Indonesia and Fiji. But that is not where the heart of the beguine lies either; this emotional anthill is Antillean.

The Antilles are a pearl-string of islands, greater and lesser, half-ringing the Caribbean sea. The Greater Antilles include Hispaniola, the west side of which holds Haiti, once the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which in the late 1600s had a governor named Michel Bégon who was also an avid naturalist, and for whom Charles Plumier, a patron of botany, named a plant with pretty red flowers the Begonia.

But, ah, begone, ya! That big isle and its blooming bloke are not whence comes beguine. No, it is something both more and less French than that, something both intrinsic to the Antilles and imported by colonists. If you look up béguine, you will find that it is the feminine form of béguin, which names a kind of semi-monastic layperson living in communities, apparently eponymous from Lambert le Bègue, “Lambert the Stutterer.” But there is no tongue-tying involved here. We should sooner look to the bonnets worn by the women of the order, bonnets that were also called béguines. For some reason, these bonnets became a byword for infatuation – the verb embéguiner (‘wear a bonnet’) means ‘have a crush on someone’. So, you might say, beginning the beguine is initiating the infatuation.

Except no. Well, maybe that too, but this beguine is less mooning and more boogeying: it is a dance, a sort of slow rhumba, from the lands of rhum, specifically the French Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. It mixes Latin dance and French ballroom dance, with a hip-roll from the rhumba. It is both local and imported. And in the local creole language, begue means ‘white man’ and its feminine form is beguine.

So there it is. A dance that transports that was transported, a dance that brings to mind infatuation and flowers, in a song by a fabulous wordmonger and musicmaker from Indiana who moved to Paris and later to New York, Cole Porter, who has embiggened this tropical splendor, this music so tender, that puts the ember in remember. The beguine is always already begun, and we are beguiled.

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capade

Posted on October 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

You know what a capade is, right?

You’ve seen capade in various places, I’m sure, often in the plural: horse-capades, lunch-capade, bike-capades, sexcapade, Borscht Capades, mice-capade, and of course Ice Capades. So it’s obviously a word. You hear it, you have the vibes of it, it’s cromulent, like classiomatic.

Only it’s not quite like classiomatic, because it’s not a mondegreen. It’s more like copter or -aholic. But not exactly like those, either, because it does have etymological morphological integrity.

Let me explain that bit. The word (or combining form) copter is shortened from helicopter, taken as being made of heli plus copter, though it’s really from helico (‘spiral’) plus pter (‘wing’). Similarly, the suffix -oholic or -aholic, as in chocoholic or workaholic, is taken from alcoholic, taken as being alco plus oholic or aholic. We know, of course, that alcoholic is from alcohol plus -ic. But alcohol traces back to Arabic al kuhl (‘stibnite powder’). So, like copter, -ohol and -oholic is a rebracketing by reanalysis. We split a word and took something as an independent part that’s not an independent part. 

But with capade it’s not a rebracketing. No morpheme was broken to make this word.

Yes, the first use of capade that all these other uses are taking it from is Ice Capades, the famous touring figure skating company that started in 1940, folded in 1991, and was revived briefly by Dorothy Hamill in 1993 and very briefly by Almut Lehmann Peyper in 2000, since when it has been an ex-capade. If you’re over a certain age, you very well may have seen the Ice Capades. I remember seeing them in Calgary starring Karen Magnussen circa 1980. My wife also saw the Ice Capades when she was a kid. And in 1991, she joined the Ice Capades as a cast member (after it folded, she joined Holiday on Ice). It’s tempting to say she ran away and joined the show, but while she did escape from the ordinary life in Toronto to travel the world (not quite a holiday, but an ice time was had), she didn’t actually elope per se. (Nor did she when she married me nearly a decade later.)

OK, so where did the Ice Capades get capade? You probably know the answer, but let’s say for a moment that you don’t, so you look it up. If you look up capade in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find it as an obsolete word (related to cap) from hat-making, referring to what is commonly called a bat, a felted mass of fur or of hair and wool. And I’m sure, what with the many headpieces worn in their glamour numbers, there were such capades involved in the Ice Capades. But no, that’s not it. And so perhaps you go to Wiktionary, where you find that it is, in Galician, the second-person imperative of the verb capar, which means ‘castrate’. In other words, if you say it in Galician, you’re ordering several people to castrate. But no, that is not where Ice Capades got it.

No, of course, Ice Capades is a pun on escapades. You know what an escapade is; Wiktionary defines it as “A daring or adventurous act; an undertaking which goes against convention.” Sort of like going off to spend your twenties travelling the world with an athletic glamorous entertainment troupe. And that does carry with it escape, of course; the word escaped to English from French, where escapade first referred to the act of escaping, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, and French got it via Spanish escapada, from escapar (‘escape’), ultimately from Vulgar Latin excappare, which etymologically meant ‘get out of a cape or cloak’. (So if a Romulan bird of prey cloaks to escape, that’s paradoxical.) The root in that, cappa, is also the source of cap, the same one that shows up in that obsolete hat word capade. But it is not related to that Galician word. No, it is not.

So anyway, the morpheme division in escapade is es-cap-ade, and so capade is not a rebracketing. And etymologically you could say capade refers to being caped or cloaked, or perhaps otherwise costumed. Which the performers in the Ice Capades were (not very heavily, of course, just enough that you can caper in them). But in the main, a capade is – to get to it at long last – an entertainment extravaganza, or an adventure, or some other thing that guarantees an ice time for all.

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mosey

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

One thing that gets on my nerves is when I really gotta mosey somewhere and there are people in my way on the sidewalk or the stairs or the escalator and they’re just, you know, moseying.

OK, did both of those uses of mosey make sense to you? The one meaning get moving, motor, vamoose, and the other meaning go slowly, meander, no hurry? One like a rolling stone, and the other gathering moss? I’m sure I’ve encountered both of them – well, I know I have, because I’ve encountered both of them in every dictionary I’ve looked up mosey in, but I think I’ve also encountered both in real life – but my impression is that one of them, the one I lean to automatically, is the more common expected sense. And that impression has been reinforced by an informal poll I did on Bluesky, where respondents unanimously agreed… not so much that it means one as that anyway it doesn’t mean the other.

I asked the following:

In your own usage, if you say you are (or were, or will be) moseying, are you meaning:

1) going quickly

2) going slowly

3) either, depending on context

4) nothing so specific as all that

5) some other thing (specify)

I got 36 responses. Of those, 33 agreed that “going slowly” was either the definition or at least part of the definition. The other three, along with some of the 33 who went with “going slowly,” specified that the important detail was aimlessness, nonchalance, casualness, lack of urgency, wandering, meandering, that manner of thing. No one went with “going quickly,” although one allowed that it could be used ironically with that sense, and another allowed some contextual flexibility.

So, naturally, I’m about to tell you that “go quickly, make haste, get a move on” is the older sense. Because of course. You saw it coming, didn’t you?

The word mosey first appeared in the US in the early 1800s, with the first known published instance in 1829. The earliest senses specify not so much the speed as the motivation: fleeing, decamping, escaping, getting out of the way. The implication is also typically doing so on foot. But there are instances where the sense of speed is inescapable, such as “At last the spell were broke, and I moseyed home at an orful rate” from 1859 (thanks to Green’s Dictionary of Slang for that). So, in short, we could say that the first sense of mosey is as a synonym of vamoose.

Well, vamoose first appeared as such about a decade after mosey did, so you could say as readily that vamoose was a synonym for mosey. But you know what I mean. But say… vamoose comes from Spanish vamos, ‘let’s go’. Could mosey have come from that, too?

Well, it could have. But we’re not a hundred percent sure. It could also come from an Algonquian word for ‘walk’. Or it could come from Mosey as a nickname for Moses, either in reference to the exodus led by the biblical Moses or to someone of that name in a popular song who had to flee creditors. We’re just not entirely sure. The word didn’t announce its arrival and origins. It just… moseyed in, real casual like.

But anyway, within a couple of decades, the sense of ‘go casually, wander, meander, amble aimlessly’ et cetera also moseyed in, often bringing along an adverb such as along or off or around. And, at leisure and at length, it prevailed. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get out the way any time soon.

Just like those people who manage to walk in the least hurried manner possible right down the middle of the stairs or sidewalk, vaguely trending slightly right and left but never giving a clear way to get by so you can make it to the walk light or the train that’s arriving in the subway station. Come on, people! This ain’t a mo-seum!

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avuncular

Posted on September 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

Hey, how are ya? Doing great? I found out something interesting you might like. A couple of things, in fact. The first thing is, it turns out that although I have three nephews and two nieces, I can’t be literally, etymologically, avuncular to all of them. Figuratively, sure, and that’s fine, of course. But that leads to the second thing: there are more English words than you might think that come from Latin kinship terms. And if you start trying to be literal about them all, you’re going to make trouble for yourself. It’s your life, of course! But just in case you wanted to know.

Isn’t it nice how uncles are assumed to be friendly and caring in a down-home, benevolent kind of way? That’s what we mean with the term avuncular, which, along with broadly meaning ‘kind, benevolent, tolerant (especially in the manner of an older person to a younger one)’, literally means ‘of, relating to, or like an uncle’. Except the Latin original, avunculus – from avus ‘grandfather’ and the diminutive suffix -unculus – refers only to the maternal uncle. You know, the mother’s brother – or, yes, the mother’s sister’s husband. So since my wife’s sister has two kids, I am literally avuncular to them. My brother’s three kids, though? Nope, sorry. Not etymologically literally, anyway.

But of course sticking to the Latin meaning of these terms would be atavistic. It would be not grandfathering the senses but great-great-great-grandfathering them – because, yes, atavistic relates to atavus, which means ‘great-great-great-grandfather’ – or just ‘ancestor’. That’s from the same avus (‘grandfather’) plus at-, which is a form of ad-, meaning ‘to’, ‘toward’, and a whole bunch of other things.

But let’s take a look at some of the other terms we have in English that come from Latin terms for family members. There are the literal ones like maternal (from mater, ‘mother’), paternal (from pater, ‘father’), and uxorial (from uxor, ‘wife’, which also gives us uxorious, ‘highly devoted to one’s wife’). There are the ones that have both literal and figurative uses, like fraternal (frater, ‘brother’), sororal (soror, ‘sister’; sorority is the most common English descendant), and novercal (noverca, ‘stepmother’ – and in the figurative use of the term, the stepmotherliness is generally wicked). There’s also nepotism, from nepos, which can mean ‘nephew’, ‘niece’, ‘grandson’, or ‘granddaughter’ – our use of nepotism to refer to hiring family members (especially direct offspring) comes from when the popes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance would appoint their nephews as cardinals.

We also have some other less common ones. There’s the term the levirate, which I first encountered in an anthropology book where the author, in categorizing various cultures, divided them between those that “practice the levirate” and those that don’t, but did not even once explain what “the levirate” was. Well, it comes from Latin levir ‘husband’s brother’ and refers to the practice of requiring a woman whose husband has died to marry her husband’s brother. (“Oh, that. Of course!”) 

There’s no corresponding term for marrying a deceased wife’s sister, presumably because that’s not a widespread cultural practice, but in any case Latin somehow didn’t even have a special term for that relation; a wife’s sister is just soror uxoris. A wife’s brother is similarly frater uxoris. But oh, by the way, a husband’s sister is glos; if we had an adjective based on that, it would probably be gloral, but we don’t. (If your husband’s sister is named Gloria, that would be close, though not actually related – except by marriage, of course.)

We also don’t have a word socral from socrus ‘mother-in-law’ and socer ‘father-in-law’, which really seems a missed opportunity. We do have a word materteral, ‘of or like an aunt’, the counterpart to avuncular – not broadly used, but it can mean ‘auntyish’. But, like avuncular, it refers only to the mother’s sister (matertera is just mater plus a contrastive suffix). The father’s sister is amita, apparently formed as a diminutive of ama, which basically translates as ‘mommy’. No word on – or for – what your father’s sister is supposed to be like; amital is not a thing, though its homophone amytal is a synonym for amobarbital and is seen in sodium amytal, the sedative that is supposedly “truth serum”… so who knows, maybe your aunt on your father’s side is prone to telling you the plain truth.

Which brings us to your uncle on your father’s side. If I’m not an avunculus to my brother’s kids, what am I? I’m a patruus. As it happens, we don’t have an English word derived from that – such as patrual. But in Latin, the patruus stereotypically was indeed prone to telling the truth – and not in a kindly, avuncular way. Patrual, if it existed, would mean more like ‘severely reproving’ or ‘brutally critical’. As it happens, we do have a term in English for someone sort of like that (though maybe more blunt than actually mean): Dutch uncle.

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garnish

Posted on September 10, 2025 | Leave a comment

“You said you withheld the garnish for safety reasons,” Maury’s friend Brandur said. “I’m sure it wasn’t withheld from your paycheque, though.” He raised one eyebrow to indicate that he had just made a conscious witticism. “You were not garnished.”

“Indeed,” said Maury, “the cocktail would have been the garnishee. But the garnish would have been an addition rather than a subtraction. However, that’s true in any case, because garnishing a paycheque is a subtract that comes only after an add.”

“Add as in addition or ad as in advertisement?” Brandur said.

“Yes,” Maury said.

There was a pause. Maury sipped his Berlin cocktail and did not immediately explain. Brandur finished his own cocktail and said, “Well, I am going to serve the next cocktail, and I have brought a garnish for it too.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a vacuum bottle, set it on the table, and then pulled out a plastic container, the contents of which were only dimly visible, and set it down too. “But first you have to finish your cocktails” – he looked at both of us – “and explain to me garnish in more detail.”

Maury tossed back the last half ounce of his and set the glass down. “Garnish, as in deduct money from wages to satisfy a creditor, is shortened from garnishee. The verb garnishee is formed from the noun garnishee. The noun means ‘one who is garnished’.”

Brandur was about to exclaim something I probably wouldn’t want to transcribe here, but Maury continued: “It’s not circular because that garnished means ‘served notice’ – that is to say, ‘warned’. Specifically, warned – as for instance with a notice, or advertisement – that they are to have money deducted to satisfy a debt. So the garnish is added as an ad to indicate that there will be subtraction.”

“Ah, I see,” said Brandur. “I should have made the deduction. But such an addition seems more than decorative.”

I set down my empty glass. “Indeed,” I said, “the decorative sense is a latecomer. The word comes from guarnir, the same Old French source as for our word warn. It meant ‘provide’ or ‘furnish’ but also ‘defend’ or ‘warn’. Our word garnish came to mean ‘fortify’, or ‘equip’, and then to mean ‘clothe’, and from that ‘accessorize’ – but also, more pertinently, it could mean ‘serve dishes of food’ and then ‘decorate dishes of food’.”

“And guarnir,” Maury said, “came from a conflation of two Old Frankish roots, one meaning ‘warn, protect, prepare’ and the other meaning ‘refuse, deny’. So it is bifurcated both forward and backward in time, in each direction splitting into one sense meaning something additive and one meaning something subtractive.”

“Well,” said Brandur, pouring a cold, clear liquid from his vacuum bottle into our glasses, “I have prepared this for you.” He opened the plastic container and pulled out three small metal forks; on each fork was an olive and a cube of something white. “Speaking of bifurcation.” He plunked a fork into each glass and gave each a little stir. Then he held up his glass and said “Skál.”

“Scowl?” Maury said (he doesn’t know any Icelandic). He picked up his glass and eyed it skeptically.

“No need to scowl,” Brandur said. “It’s mainly brennivín. Fittingly.” He took a hearty sip and said “Ahhh!” theatrically.

Maury sipped his and made a face like a cat that had just tasted lemon juice. After a moment to recover, he said, “And vermouth, apparently. And something… else.”

I stared at the white cube. “Is that…”

“Kæstur hákarl,” Brandur said, with an angelic smile. 

For those who don’t know, that’s an Icelandic specialty: rotten shark. Anthony Bourdain once called it “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” he’d ever had.

“Well, now, that is the perfect garnish,” I said. “It both adds to and subtracts from the drink. I take it as a warning… and I will have to refuse.” I set my glass back down and stepped away from the table.

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brandish, brandy

Posted on September 2, 2025 | 1 comment

Maury’s Icelandic friend Brandur is quite the firebrand. As I entered Domus Logogustationis, he was brandishing a book and a bottle of Bas-Armagnac and shouting – in a style perhaps more of Russell Brand than of Marlon Brando – “What. Is. This. Word. Brandywine!”

I approached Maury and leaned close. “Is he on a bender?”

“No,” Maury said. “In fact, we were just about to have the first cocktail of the evening. A Berlin.”

“Ah, yes, a splendid beverage, though best had second.”

“We’re out of vermouth,” Maury said.

Brandur slapped down the book, which was a cocktail manual. “Look!” It listed the ingredients for a Berlin as “1 part Becherovka, 4 parts brandywine.”

“How very quaint,” I said.

“Do they think they’re Tolkien?!” Brandur exclaimed.

“Perhaps in a token way,” I said.

“I just want to know,” Brandur said, “is brandywine redundant, or is it a contradiction in terms? After all, brandy is not wine. But it’s made from wine.”

“It’s just the long form,” I said. “The short brandy was clipped from it, or else it was clipped and altered from the Dutch source, brandewijn, of which brandywine is a somewhat anglicized version.”

“At least it’s made from wine,” Maury chipped in. “Unlike that caraway-flavoured vodka with which you Icelanders get carried away.”

“Brennivín!” Brandur said.

“Same word,” I said. “In origin. Imported into Iceland, and localized; the liquor it names was not so easy to import, and impossible to make with domestic crops, and so the spirits were also localized. But, yes, brandewijn means ‘burnt wine’ or, more broadly, ‘cooked wine’.”

“And as brandywine and brennivín have the same origin,” Maury said, “so too does Brandur.”

“What!” said Brandur, brandishing the book. “My fine name refers to a burning log, or a sword!”

“Yes,” I said, “all from the same root. The Proto-Germanic *brinnaną, meaning ‘burn’ or ‘be on fire’, gave us English burn and its assorted Germanic cognates, such as German brennen, as well as brand, which started as a word for a burning log or piece of wood – a firebrand – and came to name a hot piece of metal, such as is used for branding animals and barrels of spirits, and also a sword, flaming or otherwise. And it is from that weapon sense that the French verb brandir came, meaning ‘flourish a weapon’, and from that – which is conjugated nous brandissons, vous brandissez, et cetera – came English brandish.” I nodded to the book, which he was still wielding at head level.

“And now,” Maury said, “let us lift our spirits another way, by pouring some of this brown river into this mixing vessel—” He began to free-pour the Armagnac into a cut-glass pitcher.

Brandur wagged a finger. “Ah, ha, I know what you did there. Brandywine, Brown River.” He turned to me. “In The Lord of the Rings, the Brandywine River’s name is a reanalysis of baran duin, ‘brown river’.”

“Or, in the real world,” I said, “baran duin was backformed by Tolkien, given that he had already given the river the name Brandywine and needed to come up with an in-world derivation.”

As Brandur and I chatted, Maury continued the mixing: he added an appropriate amount of Becherovka (Czech bitters, if you don’t know) and some ice, and stirred, and then strained it into three glasses. “Friends, the Berlin,” he said.

“So called because of the Brandenburg Gate?” Brandur said.

“That’s a rather clever connection,” I said. “Pity Brandenburg isn’t actually related to brandy.”

“It might be,” Maury said, raising a finger.

“Well, it might be,” I said, “but it might not. We’re not entirely sure. But that’s not why this cocktail is the Berlin. It’s so called for the same reason we ought not to be having it as our first drink.” I reached for the cocktail book, which Brandur had set face down open to the appropriate page, and showed him the epigraph on the recipe:

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. —Leonard Cohen

“I see,” said Brandur. “And does it matter what brand of brandy one uses?”

“Cognac, Armagnac, but nothing cheap, please,” said Maury. “That would be disappointing.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “where’s the garnish?”

“Withheld for safety reasons,” Maury said.

Brandur furrowed his brow and looked in the book. “Ah,” he said, and read aloud: “Orange zest, burnt.”

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quick

Posted on August 27, 2025 | 1 comment

I’m reading the autobiography of Geddy Lee, and so I’m listening to even more music by Rush than I usually do. And on Moving Pictures – the classic album that includes “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” and “YYZ” – there’s one song that always quickens my pulse, but especially in times of revived prejudice and reactionary fervor: “Witch Hunt.” The song opens with discordant strings and the dark sounds of a mob, which, I read in Wikipedia, “[Alex] Lifeson explained was recorded outside Le Studio on a cold December day, with the band and others shouting, warmed by a bottle of Scotch whisky.” (I’m not sure how hygienic that was.) The lyrics build to describe xenophobic book-burners, “Quick to judge, quick to anger / Slow to understand.”

Quick. They were quick, and their victims were dead. It cuts to the quick – but in more ways than you might think. In the paragraph you just read, there are (along with quick and quickens) six other words all etymologically related to quick: biography, revived, Wikipedia, Lifeson, whisky, and hygienic. And if I were to point out that Le Studio, in the Laurentians of Quebec, was like a zoo of internationally famous recording acts, that would add a seventh.

I’ll go through them one by one. Let’s start with the origins of quick, though. As you may know, or may have surmised from phrases such as the quick and the dead and cut to the quick, its original meaning was not ‘speedy’ but ‘alive, living, lively’ – and it is from the ‘lively’ sense that it extended through ‘active’ and ‘vigorous’ to ‘speedy’, a sense that first showed up in the 1300s and, by the end of the 1800s, was the dominant sense. But quick, its Latin-looking qu notwithstanding, was cwic in Old English, and that came via Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European *gʷeyh₃- ‘live’, which is the source of quite a lot of other words relating to life – not all of which have the same kind of kissing mouth gesture as [kwɪk].

One of those words is Greek βῐ́ος (bíos) ‘life’, which appears in biography. Another is Latin vivus, ‘alive’, root of revived. Another is Greek ζῷον (zõion) ‘animal’, root of zoo (via zoological garden). Yet another Greek word from the same source is ὑγιής (hugiḗs) ‘healthy’, root of hygienic. And then there’s wiki, as in Wikipedia, which comes from Hawai‘ian wikiwiki, which is a borrowing and reduplication of English quick – a rather quicker etymology than the others.

And then there’s Lifeson, as in Alex Lifeson, the guitarist of Rush. But, ha ha, I’m pulling a fast one with this – you see, life is not etymologically related to quick. But Lifeson is his stage name; it’s a translation of his actual name, Živojinović, which in the original Serbian is written Живојиновић. A translation? Yes, the Serbian name means ‘son of life’, and ‘life’ in Serbian is живот, žìvot, which is indeed from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *gʷeyh₃-, via Proto-Slavic.

And then there’s whisky. It comes, clipped and modified, from Scots Gaelic uisge-beatha, ‘water of life’. It’s a translation of Latin aqua vitæ, and you will know that vitæ is related. But so is uisge-beatha. But while, as Ogden Nash wrote, candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, it’s not the whisky (uisge) part that’s related to quick, sound resemblance notwithstanding. No, I’ve pulled another fast one: uisge means ‘water’; beatha means ‘life’, and that is the word that is related – you may notice (if you squint) the resemblance of Proto-Celtic *biwos to the Greek bíos.

And so we see how one root has quickened many modern words (and there are still more in other languages), in some cases sneaking away after a brief kiss. Words are the stuff of life, and their ways are many and mysterious.

Oh, but did you notice one more word up there that’s related in sense but not etymologically related? Take a quick look and see if you can spot it.

It’s Rush.

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