Tag Archives: word tasting notes

styrax

Posted on July 26, 2010 | 1 comment

Ladies, this is the word you wish your man could be. Look at the beginning: it’s a saint (st). Look again: it’s no stranger to the street (st again). Do you see a sty? This is no chauvinist pig word. It’s the word of a hero, an Ajax, the Greek warrior, who really cleaned up in battle, like a comet. You see the swords crossing and clashing: x, y. You hear them: /st/, /ks/. Now he’s the Trojan Astyanax. Now he’s Orpheus, crossing the Styx to bring you back. And when you look back at him to check out his muscled thorax, you see a master of the masculine (xy) arts. This is a man who keeps snakes on his tie racks. His pet bird is an archaeopteryx. Give him a golden goblet and he drains it as if it were styrene. He doesn’t pay tax. He even broke syntax. Now he’s a woodsman, holding a sharp ax. What kind of ax? Try a sax. Look again: it’s a hyrax. And it’s eating a bunch of snowbell flowers.

What’s snowbell? It’s a shrub of the genus Styrax. Yes, Styrax is the name of a genus of shrubbery, suitable for pleasing the Knights Who Say Ni! For all I know, it is also pleasing food for the hyrax, which, though it sounds like it should be some kind of heroic horse, is a little furry round creature that weighs about five to ten pounds. (But isn’t it so cuuuute!) But, well, things aren’t always as they sound. The classicists among you will already have thought, “Astyanax wasn’t a warrior – he was killed in infancy!” Likewise, what styrax names is, well, not quite as manly as all that.

But if it sounds like styrene, that’s because styrene is named after it – but actually after levant styrax, an unrelated plant (well, they thought it was related), from which styrene was first extracted. There is some stryene in styrax, too. That’s not its greatest historical usage, however; it has been used for scents for a long time. The resin can be used as incense, or to add a vanilla-like scent; the oil has a woody, balsamic aroma. Of course, it also varies by which of the plants in the genus Styrax you’re getting the scent from – or whether you’re getting it from Liquidambar orientalis, i.e., that levant styrax again.

Anyway, styrax comes to us from Greek, if you hadn’t guessed: στυραξ, also borrowed into Latin as storax, which has also become another English name for styrax.

And is it part of the formula for Old Spice? Dude, I have no idea.

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fricative

Posted on July 25, 2010 | 2 comments

“Well, I know what my favourite kind of phoneme is,” Marilyn Frack purred. “A fricative.” She rubbed herself, catlike, against her other half, Edgar Frick; the effect was enhanced by their wearing not their usual leather but satin, so that the frottage made a /ffff/ sound.

“That’s an infraction, you know,” I said. “Your frequent displays of affection have, you will recall, caused the Order of Logogustation to effect a censure. You’re being fractious.”

“Refractory, in fact,” Edgar said, with a saucy smile. “Look, we left our leather. Tonight is the Favourite Phoneme Festival, so silk and satin seemed suitable, as… yesss… we do like those fricatives.”

“Well, be aware that your friction – and frication – may engender friction.”

“I like gender friction,” Marilyn said. “Anyway, they’re asking for it. Look what they’re serving!” She reached over to the nearby high table for her plate, whereon was a helping of fricassee. She started to brush the plate against her garments. “Mmm, ah want to rub against every Frick ah see!”

“Well,” I said, “I seem to recall there was a phonemic motivation in that, yes, both in the pun and in the fact that a fricassee, when cooking, sounds rather like a fricative too.”

“Indeed,” said Maury, who had wandered over, possibly sent by others to caution the dynamic duo. “Even though fricassee does not share an origin with fricative and friction.”

“There’s the rub,” Edgar observed drily.

“Here’s the rub,” Marilyn said, and again made as if to afflict us with her affection for Frick.

Maury raised a hand. “Please… Bis repetita non placent. Besides, you seem fixated solely on voiceless fricatives: ‘f, s, th’… There are voiced ones, too, don’t forget.”

“Oh, I don’t forget,” said Marilyn. “‘Vvv, zzz’… Such sounds as are made by –” she tugged on a tag on her apparel – “zippers.”

Whereupon, with an appropriate sound, she unzipped her shirt to the navel, exposing a lacy brassiere about the same colour of red as Maury’s face had suddenly turned.

“I think,” said Maury, gesturing towards the door while noting the approach of other members of the organizing committee, “you may be about to change your phoneme type to ejective.”

Thanks to Roberto De Vido for suggesting fricative (a little while ago).

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scuttlebutt

Posted on July 23, 2010 | 1 comment

This word rattles across the tongue like so much prattle, the skittering tattletales of a flibbertigibbet. Maybe it sounds like it should be the crabby tongues of fishwives – crabs scuttling across the deck of the dimmer day. But while scuttlebutt means gossip, it’s not just any gossip; it’s the dirty low-down, the backstory, what you hear not from the captain but from the guys who swab the decks.

It’s a nautical word, too, and not just because those tt pairs look like masts ready to have sails unfurled. Nor is it because if you’re the captain you need to be on watch so your men don’t scuttle your butt. Actually, you want them to scuttle a butt – but a butt of water.

Butt, I should say, in this case means “cask”; it comes from a Late Latin word (butta, buttis) which comes from we’re not sure where, but someone heard it somewhere. And scuttle? Well, it started as a noun in the Romance languages, for instance Spanish escotilla “hatchway”, and became a word for a hole smaller than a hatchway, and from this we got the verb “make a hole [in a ship]”, which can be extended to a wooden vessel such as a cask. Oh, and where did that first noun come from? Again, I can’t tell you – someone heard it from somewhere, know what I mean?

So anyway, a scuttlebutt was a cask of drinking water which had had a hole made in it – it was the ship’s version of a water cooler. And we know what people do at water coolers, office kitchens, school staffrooms, and similar places: they gossip, they swap the low-down, be it over bottles of beer, cups of coffee, or the taking of a toast and tea.

But however genteel the exchanges may be (After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me), even now the word has a certain down-and-dirty tone to it, which can only be abetted by the butt and, for that matter, not just the cut but the scuttle, which at its nicest is dirty (coal scuttle) and can make one think of a skittering motion or, well, the act of sinking a ship. And when the ship has sunk it may meet more scuttling, as in the kind in the quote from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that first comes to my mind for scuttle:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

That verb scuttle, by the way, is unrelated to the one in scuttlebutt; it comes from scuddle, which is the frequentative of scud, which comes from somewhere, not sure, we just heard it from someone…

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting scuttlebutt.

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hatchet

Posted on July 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Maury made a gesture of exasperation. “It was a hatchet job!”

Are we going to rehash this again? I thought. “Look,” I said, “you hatched the idea and egged him on.”

“And ended up with egg on my face,” he grumbled. “If we had had the real cook, rather than this hatchet man…”

“The guys are busy,” I said. “They can’t just cater to our every whim.”

“But corned beef hash with an egg on it!” he exclaimed. “Who can ruin that? …Well, we know now. I’d like to settle his hash.” He slugged back his wine. “I bet he was high on hash, too.”

“Well,” I said, “you could always ax him.” I knew Maury knew that French for “axe” was hache, which is also a conjugated form of hacher (“chop”, whence hash) and is homophonous with the French for H, and can also refer to hashish.

“Well, I’d sooner give him the axe than ask him, anyway. You know,” he added, lifting his empty glass and then setting it down again in disappointment, “I peeked in and saw him consulting some pocket Hachette cookbook.”

I refilled Maury’s glass. “Hachette makes good dictionaries.” (As it happens, the French dictionary closest to hand at my desk is my Pocket Oxford Hachette French Dictionary.)

“For all I know, they make good cookbooks, too,” he said, “but this guy is clearly not very sharp. …How did a publishing company get named after a little axe, anyway?”

“Founded by a guy named Louis Hachette. Quite a socially progressive fellow.” I sipped my wine. “Look, these guys are the caterers we always use at our functions. Can’t you just bury the hatchet?”

Maury made a malicious smile. “In the back of his head, perhaps? …That chophouse refugee,” he grumbled. “That hack.”

“I think you’ve got this little bit of hash in the back of your head,” I said. I stood and waggled the bottle, which was empty. “You’re cut off.”

Maury’s shoulders slumped. “Ah, shit.”

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endorse

Posted on July 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

The most common current usage of this word appears to be political: you endorse this or that candidate, or – perhaps moreso – some other person or organization does. It’s like they’re giving the candidate a jersey with their team name on the back. (If you or I endorse a candidate, of course, it’s not really a team jersey so much as just a pat on the back.) It probably also comes with something like a blank cheque, at least as far as action is concerned, and perhaps as far as money is concerned, too – or at the very least funds to use ad libitum.

We speak of endorsing ideas and similar things, too, of course; the usage transfers easily. But there is another use that’s not just common but standard: what you do to a cheque to make it negotiable. If the cheque is made out to you, it’s only good for you; once you endorse it – sign it on the back – it can be negotiated by your bank, or, for that matter, redeemed by someone else.

That’s actually the sense from which the political sense comes. The source of this word is Latin indorsare, from in “upon” and dorsum “back”, meaning “write on the back [of whatever]”. The French makes it a bit more transparent: endosser, with dos – “back” – right there in the middle.

We don’t use cheques and similar personal means of transferring funds as much as we used to, so let me tell you why endorsing a cheque is like endorsing a candidate: it at least used to be the case that if you endorsed a promissory note, cheque, banknote, or whatever, you were taking on responsibility for its being paid. The buck stopped at you, so to speak. (This is not the origin of that phrase, by the way; passing the buck comes from passing the deal around in a poker game – the dealer was originally indicated by possession of a buckhorn knife, it seems.) So by endorsing someone or something you are giving your word that he, she, or it is good.

Endorse is a warm kind of word, especially at the start: it has that nice nasal, a good echo of endorphin, and the air kiss of the /or/. After that it cools a bit with the air of the /s/, but it also gets an echo of horse. (End horse? Perhaps, but you hope it won’t be a horse’s end.) And if your candidate is the horse you’re backing, well, it’s at least a pat on the back, and it may well be your name on the back, too – of the jersey, or of a cheque.

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scree

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Say you’re walking along the side of a mountain, perhaps below a cliff face – let’s say, for example, the Eiger, in Switzerland. Rocks tend to fall off cliffs and accumulate at the base, resulting in a steep slope of loose rocks. Now, because you’re below the cliff, you may think you can’t fall. But you take a step, and some rocks slip. You take another, and more slip, and soon with every stride you are sliding faster and faster down, down, down, unable to stop, and your voyage culminates in a scream that falls away… a lesson learned too hard.

Oo. How unpleasant. Well, that’s scree for you: if the word seems like scream falling away at the end, it’s just fitting. It has that /skr/ onset, too, often used for loose or rough things (scrap, scrabble, scramble, scribble, scratch, scrub). And these loose, rough rocks do tend to slide, which is so well set forth with the /i:/ (“EEEeeeee…”).

Scree isn’t found only at the foot of a cliff – it can also be left behind by glaciers, for instance – but it is very often associated with the word talus, which means “detritus at the foot of a cliff or similar”. It’s loose rocks on a slope. It’s inviting to think of the letters in scree as resembling so much scree, but the truth is that the rocks in scree are often rather angular, having gotten where and how they are by breaking.

Scree is a word that comes to us from Old Norse – specifically skriða “landslide” (of which we can feel sure there are plenty in Norway’s fjords). Most likely it came to English in the plural, and the dental fricative slipped out before the final alveolar fricative (like saying clothes as “cloze”), to make screes, and that backformed to the singular – the /z/ slipped away too. Skriða for its part came from a Germanic word meaning “slide” or “glide” that came through to modern German as schreiten, “stride”.

There are a couple of other common collocations with scree, by the way: scree plot and scree test. This is not the land that scree is on or the act of nudging scree to check its stability; rather, these terms refer to something one can do in statistical analysis: for each eigenvalue, plot its contribution to the overall variance, from greatest to least. The result will look like a steep slope with a point where it becomes a shallow slope, sort of like the foot of a cliff with a scree slope. That’s a scree plot. The scree test is the act of looking at the scree plot and deciding where the slope shallows out (the “elbow”) and declaring the eigenvalues on the steep side to be important and the rest to be relatively unimportant. So, for example, in the factors causing you to go for a slide down the slope, the instability of the slope and your own obliviousness may make a significant contribution, and your clothes and the temperature may not make that much of a difference, perhaps.

And what’s an eigenvalue? Well, aside from saying that eigen is German for “characteristic” (and “own”, as in “my own”) and that it may have an etymological relation to Eiger, I think I would do best to direct the interested to further self-directed explorations. A warning, though: it’s a bit of a steep learning curve.

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chuckwagon

Posted on July 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ah, the Calgary Stampede. It has all the things that similar events from county fairs to the Canadian National Exhibition have: various booths set up selling souvenirs and household goods; music performances and variety shows, including dogs doing various clever things; and a midway, whereon, if you are not on one of the rides, you are most likely loading up with food from one of the many portable stands or tents. It might be something deep-fried, or it might be some cheap cut of beef… eat it out of a paper wrapper or off a plate and then chuck the remains in a garbage can.

But the Stampede also has rodeo events. One of its marquee events is the chuckwagon races. Not just any wagons, you understand: chuckwagons. So along with the lumbering, trundling sound of wagon, you get the wooden (woodchuck?), choppy sound of chuck. It has nothing to do with chukker, one of the periods of a polo game, even though chukker comes from Sanskrit for “wheel” and wagons have wheels. And there’s also nothing to do with the act of chucking. To the average Stampede-goer, the chuck in chuckwagon is sort of like Jack – it seems like some guy’s name used just as a meaningless intensifier or filler, or somehow just there and you don’t know why: as in jackknife and jackfruit, the chuck in chukwagon may seem to mean jack squat.

But if you watch the race, you might observe that before the wagons start to go, there are some guys who have to load up a bunch of stuff into the wagon at the beginning (I won’t say they chuck it in, because there’s a penalty for any bit that falls out) and then ride around the course with the wagon. What is that stuff? Well, it’s a tent with poles and a stove. Refugees from the midway? Nope, necessary accoutrements.

You see, a chuckwagon is – or, more generally, was – a food wagon, a chow cart. When you have people travelling, for instance cowboys out on the range, the job of feeding them is an important one, and the guy who drove the wagon with the stove and supplies was a pretty important dude. He would often fill other tasks as well, such as carrying the cash. (My wife tells me that in her days with travelling ice shows, the guy who ran the refreshment cart backstage was a similarly important figure.) The wagon he drove had a tent that would be set up on the end, and a stove that could be loaded and unloaded. And from there he would serve the cowboys their chuck.

So, yes, chuck meant food. And I’m just going to pretend you’re not thinking it got its name from being the reverse of upchuck. In fact, it most likely comes from chock, as in a lump or wedge of something (chocks are used to keep airplane wheels from rolling when the plane is parked, for instance). It may or may not have come by way of chuck meaning the cut of beef between the neck and the shoulder blade, which is modified from chock.

So the wagon with the chuck was the chuck wagon. Now it’s normally written closed up, chuckwagon. And while there are chuckwagon cook-off competitions, the chuckwagons used in the races are not chock full of food. More’s the pity – as already mentioned, the Stampede is a great place for fast food.

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rodeo

Posted on July 14, 2010 | 1 comment

Know what word’s most often seen out with rodeo?

Drive. By a country mile.

Now, if you’re thinking, “Wait, you don’t drive in a rodeo,” well, you’re right. You don’t. You shop. And not in. On. Rodeo Drive.

It’s in Beverly Hills.

They say it “ro-day-o.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Ain’t that the most citified, prettified thing? I mean, OK, yeah, the word rodeo comes from Spanish (from rodear, “go round” – as in “round up”), and in Spanish they pronounce it “ro-day-o.” But come on. Just try saying it that way in Calgary. Or, rather, don’t. It would be like going to the icefields and saying glacier like “gla-zeer.” It’s “roady-o.”

And most of the other things that go with rodeo go with the real kind of rodeo: clown, cowboy, rider, circuit, queen…

Kinda funny, isn’t it, that the one that sounds like road is the one that does not go with drive? But never you mind that. When you say it that way, it rhymes the /o/s, and it gives a kind of yodeling, coyote-howling sonority, a sound that you can hold on the end and trail off as your voice slides down into the gravel. And if it sounds like road, well, it sounds like rode, too, and that’s the past tense of ride, and that’s what you do in a rodeo: ride.

And how ’bout that drive? Well, you could have a cattle drive, that would be something. But most likely you’ll drive to get to the rodeo. Oh yeah, in a pickup truck, and the horse in a trailer, if you’re bringing one. And if you’re going to a great big rodeo like the one at the Calgary Stampede, well, you’re driving into the middle of a city of about a million people, and, y’know, things can get kinda prettified there, too, with those white hats and all that stuff.

But it’s still a “roady-o.” Don’t give me that “ro-day-o.” Not unless you’re singin’ that banana boat song. Or speakin’ Spanish. Y’hear?

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yeehaw

Posted on July 13, 2010 | 11 comments

There’s hardly a better way to say “Things are startin’ to get mighty western” than just to shout “Yeeeeehaww!” And such a good shout it is – it may be strongly reminiscent of the braying of a donkey, but that’s just because donkeys know about it too (but can’t quite get the start of it or the intonation right). Listen, pardner, it’s like one a them oil wells settin’ to blow a gusher an’ then doin’ it. You got the build-up, yee, with the pitch a-risin’ and the strain a-growin’, and then it just goes, haw, wide open as the Alberta prairie, fallin’ steeply like a plunge down the side of a foothill or a buffalo jump, echoin’ across the mountainside. Yep, ya jut yer jaw an’ then ya open yer mouth wide, like you’re darin’ a dentist to take a try. It’s just so much more primal than, say, exultemus.

Of course, though I got to know the term well enough when I was growing up in southern Alberta – especially around Stampede time – the term’s not from Alberta. Oh no, it’s from the States. And it’s from someplace even more western than Alberta. What’s more west than Alberta? Well, Hollywood, for one.

Yep, hate to break this to you, but cowboys of the 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t shouting yeehaw as they rode out after the cattle, and they weren’t shouting yeehaw at the square dance, either. Aside from possible occasions of some long-ago speaker ordering his team of horses to turn left (“Ye haw!” – “right-left” to a team of horses would be gee-haw, but there’s no apparent link with yeehaw), nobody was shouting yeehaw it until some guys in Hollywood invented it in the mid-20th century… just like the fast draw (yep, that too, invented by a Hollywood stuntman… at Knott’s Berry Farm, in fact).

There are a couple of places yeehaw is thought to have cropped up first. One is the 1948 John Wayne movie Red River – see the trailer at www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=12520. You can hear the cowboys shouting, though none of them is really making a clear yeehaw. Another possible vector has been suggested by linguist Jonathan Lighter, who notes that when Speedy Gonzales – yes, that cartoon Mexican mouse – goes zipping down the road, along with andale and arriba and yip-a, he shouts yeehah. And Speedy Gonzales has been around since the 1950s, becoming really popular in the 1960s.

No doubt various other popular entertainments jumped on the chuckwagon, I mean bandwagon, as well. I think most of my exposure to yeehaw has been on TV shows. But no matter how you get around it, it’s an entertainment word – came from entertainment, which is always self-conscious, and has passed into culture as a self-conscious westernism. And often enough now as a sarcastic expression feigning enthusiasm (and meaning “ho-hum”): “Well, yee-haw.”

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lasso

Posted on July 11, 2010 | 1 comment

Have you seen that lass, Sue?
That lass who lassoed you?
Lassoed you with her leather and her lace?
The lace that laced her bodice,
And, just ’cuz she was modest,
That lace that hid her pretty little face?

Oh, I’ve seen her, alright –
I saw her just last night,
After a hard day riding on the range.
I was lassoing and roping,
And came back really hoping,
But I found that she was acting kinda strange.

Oh, I hugged her and I kissed her,
And told her that I missed her,
And said I’d go and lasso up some chow,
But she said she’d be alright,
And then she said good night,
And that she felt real tired anyhow.

I said it was a loss,
And I was feeling kind of cross,
But then I heard a noise under the bed.
I looked and saw a man,
And said, “Come out if you can,”
And then I shot that rascal in the head.

So now I’m on the run –
Shoulda used my rope, not gun,
But hindsight, as they say, is no damn use.
The sheriff’s on my tail,
So I’d better hit the trail
’Fore lace and lasso lead me to a noose.

Ah, yep, the old west, where men rode hard with their lassos, and the lasses who lived in the towns snared them with their lace and their laces. But lasso and lace will always lead you to a noose. And that’s not some moralism: it’s etymology.

I won’t keep you in suspense. Lasso comes from Spanish lazo, which, like the word lace, comes from Old French laz, which comes (probably by way of an intermediate lacium) from Latin laqueum, which means “noose”. The connection? Well, it should be obvious enough for lasso, which is a kind of noose you throw. For lace, the kind that’s on your shoes came first, with its loops; the decorative kind with many tiny loops came after. So that rough-and-rugged cowboy tool and that soft feminine accoutrement both use words derived from a word for a rope loop – of the kind that can keep you in a most unpleasant suspense.

The shift from a “lass-oh” pronunciation to a “lass-oo” pronunciation came in the US. The British kept saying it the older way until well into the 20th century. Why did the American cowboys change it to “lass-oo“? Well, I don’t rightly know, but I am entertained by the (probably not accurate) notion that that way of saying it is more like the act of using one: the “lass” like the hissing sound it makes swinging near your ear, and the “oo” like throwing it – we know that that “oo” sound has a certain ballistic flavour, and putting the stress on it matches its being the main muscle thrust and the point of the action. Certainly the American way lends itself better to being shouted.

Also, the British way of saying it makes it identical to the last name of the Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso. And since, as we know, cowboys like to talk about Renassiance madrigals, there was a real risk of confusion.

Well, come on. We know they like poetry, anyway. Is it really such a stretch?

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