Tag Archives: word tasting notes

reefer

Posted on June 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

So these dudes were, like, smokin’ some reefer in a reefer, eh? So and it was lucky that they were wearing reefers, ’cause they got cold stoned, and they woulda been stone cold without the reefers to protect them in the reefer while they were cookin’ up that reefer. Man, they mighta had a visit from the grim reefer! Hee hee hee hee…

Madness, you say? Hmph. Refer to a dictionary. We are simply saying that they were smoking marijuana cigarettes in a refrigerator train car while wearing heavy overcoats. And then we made a pun.

It is, indeed, largely coincidence that leads these three things to be homophones. Largely, I say, because undoubtedly two of them took their present form under the influence of resemblance to an existing English morphological construct which happens, by transference, to name the third.

Let us start at the beginning. In the beginning was the Germanic word reef. It referred to a strip of canvas, such as a sail may be made with, and seems to be cognate with the word rive. Oh, that other word reef referring to something sailing ships don’t want to hit? Apparently unrelated, but apparently cognate with rib. Anyway, a reefer is someone who reefs sails, which is to say rolls up reefs of the sails to reduce the area exposed to the wind (so, no, there is no derivation from refurl). It came to refer to a midshipman. And the coat a midshipman may wear (at least since the later 1800s) is a heavy, close-fitting, double-breasted thing called a reefer jacket or reefer coat, or reefer for short. Reefers typically have gold buttons and epaulettes, as they are worn by officers – a midshipman is a low-ranking officer.

Meanwhile, up from Latin came the word refrigerator. It shares a root with frigid, which is a condition in which you may wear a reefer jacket. But that is not the connection; it is because of the North American pronunciation – with the vowel like in “reef” rather than the British schwa version – that refrigerator came by 1911 to have the rigerat dropped, leaving what is pronounced and respelled as reefer.

And meanwhile there is Spanish grifo, “cannabis smoker”, related to grifa, “cannabis”, which is somehow related to the third reefer, which means “cannabis cigarette” or simply “cannabis”. Again, the existing English reef likely served as a bit of a magnet, and I’m sure that the sound of “reef”, modestly reminiscent of the inhalation of smoke (or of the sound made by a stoned toad) and a little reminiscent of the middle of marijuana, may have helped a little. At any rate, reefer in this sense was established enough by 1931 that Time magazine referred to it: “Its [marijuana’s] leaves can be dried, ground and rolled into cigarets, which are bootlegged under the name of ‘muggles’, ‘reefers’, or ‘Mary Warners’.” A scant five years later, a film came out by the name of Reefer Madness, and it was not warning parents of the dangers their children faced from refrigerators or overcoats. On the other hand, it was also not called Mary Warner Madness or – and J.K. Rowling will have been glad of this – Muggle Madness. Somehow reefer just sounds more seedy, sleazy, easy, with a bit of a wheeze, those Hispanic-sounding /i/s (not that Hispanic is actually sleazy or seedy, but we must be aware of the stereotypes that influence usage), and of course the ever-reliably low-grade retroflex /r/.

And we know which of the three words has prevailed most strongly. My wife came by a few minutes ago and, looking at the title of this note, gave me a swat on the shoulder. Fridges and coats do not typically produce such a reaction, I think, but if you dispute, we may call a referee…

floatel

Posted on June 3, 2010 | 1 comment

When Roberto De Vido brought this word to my attention, the first thing I thought was, Floating hotel? But then I thought, Well, wait, that might not be it. After all, a cartel isn’t a cart hotel, and there are other words with el endings that trace back to Germanic diminutive forms. Gunsel, for instance (more recently more often used for gunslingers, but originally from a Yiddish word for “little goose” and roughly synonymous with catamite).

And anyway, floatel has such a close resemblance to floater, which has a variety of associations, many of which unappealing (whether it be those bits of errant crap that sometimes may wander through your eyeball, or some bit of food spotted in a beverage, or any of several less savoury things), who would really want to apply it to a hotel? And the other blend with hotel that comes to mind is of course motel (from motor hotel), a type of accommodation which has successfully avoided the luxury niche or any sort of upscale associations.

Well, here’s the sentence in which Roberto spied it, from cnn.com:

He said the company now has about 30 aircraft searching for signs of oil and has moved more than 300 people of offshore “floatels” to speed up its response time.

(I think of offshore… is supposed to be to offshore…). So, but wait, there are hotels just floating about in the Gulf of Mexico like spare squid or algae? Well, the OED helps clarify: while the first definition is “A floating hotel, or one built over water; spec. a boat operating as a hotel,” it adds “Also used of the accommodation blocks for workers on off-shore drilling rigs.” I suspect there may have been some irony – or its opposite, marketing – in the use of the term for rig accommodations, which probably don’t feature chocolates on pillows and triangled toilet paper.

But there are some floatels that likely do feature those niceties of fancy hotels. And I don’t mean cruise ships, since they might not count (as they don’t stay put), although I can tell you the Queen Mary 2 does feature chocolates on your pillow and toilet paper that has been put back to a point practically every time you go to use your washroom. Rather, I am put in mind of such as the creatively (not) named Floatel in Calcutta, India (located at an address made for tapdancing: Kolkata Jetty), or the Bakkara and Faraon floatels in Kiev. Or any of many built since the 1950s, when the word first appeared. Not the Floatel in Northwich, England, though – it was demolished last year.

So while at first I thought this word might refer to some kind of jetsam, it seems it may more readily feature the jet set. And why not? Float anagrams to aloft. True, floatel also anagrams to fall toe and oat fell, and to folate with an l left over. But those might relate to a spa that surely must be on board one or more of these, which would be suitable given that hotel roots in medieval Latin hospitale (which formed first hostel and from that hotel).

On the other hand, there’s probably no spa on the oil rig floatels. Just a guess, but…

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schorl

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 1 comment

Hmm, does this wood need another lork? No, that’s supposed to be an r, not an o: schorl. But the influence of school may make you want to say the sch as “sk”. This is, however, a word derived from German, not from Dutch, Italian, Latin, or Greek, so the sch is “sh”. That makes it a little less like the last sound you hear as water finishes emptying down a drain. But still, it sure’ll give you a taste of whorl, won’t it? But also an impression of a crush of rock, perhaps – less like coral and more like something you’ll find on a shore.

There used to be a town named Schorl, near the German-Czech border (with a pond, too). The town’s still there, but the name has improved a bit: now it’s Zschorlau – pretty much the same, but prettier. So what is it that made this town eponymous? Something they found in a tin mine: tourmaline.

Well, they didn’t know it was tourmaline. Actually, tourmaline hadn’t been “discovered” yet in medieval Germany. The name tourmaline – note that it, too, has those curly liquid sounds, ironic for a mineral crystal – comes from Sinhala, and names pretty rocks found in Sri Lanka. Who knew that the shiny black rock crystals (very geometric-looking, pretty in their chthonic, gothic way) found in Schorl’s mine were the same thing, generally – crystal silicate compounded with various other elements? The Sri Lankan stuff is just prettier. Well, eventually someone figured it out. Which would be sort of like figuring out that gold and iron were the same thing, because natural deposits of schorl make up about 95% of all natural tourmaline deposits. That sure’ll give you a new perspective! (So will the collocation schorl-schist. Be careful where you say that!)

Speaking of new perspectives, consider the different ways you can say this word, depending on where you’re from. The Oxford pronunciation guide just gives an extended vowel before the /l/; the /r/ is elided. Anyone who trills the /r/ will give quite a different, vibrating result. And for those of us who speak with retroflex /r/s, it has that swallowed sound and gives a bit of extra tongue exercise – say “Are you really sure it’s rural schorl?” a few times and see how you like it. Ah, all those realizations with the same basic material. English rocks!

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moulin

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 1 comment

Most likely the first thing you’ll think of on seeing this word is Moulin Rouge, a Paris cabaret once a bit scandalous but now very touristy and expensive (and also the rather altered, fantasized subject of a Baz Luhrmann film). Moulin Rouge, for its part, makes my punning mind think of Hua Mulan (or Fa Mulan; the name means “magnolia”), the legendary Chinese woman warrior, who, if she had been fighting for the communists, could have been called Mulan Rouge.

For that matter, Mulan rouge might name some makeup she applied. If she applied makeup, that is – I don’t know that it would have been appropriate for Chinese warriors of 1500 years ago. I’d imagine muscles would be more in fashion (not mussels, moules, which one would order closer to the Moulin Rouge – though muscle, mussel, and moule do all have the same source). But as a woman in the army of that time and place, one wonders whether her position was not a bit Quixotic – tilting at a windmill, as it were. A windmill? Moulin-à-vent.

But never mind wind, and never mind red. How about a hole in a glacier that drains water from the top to the bottom? That would be a moulin bleu, perhaps, or replace vent with eau. While you’re mullin’ that over, consider that whatever it is, it’s called a moulin, anyway (yes, as in French for “mill” – the water’s swirling is the reason for the name), and as Greenland’s glacier cap is being run through the mill of global warming, we can wonder whether our efforts at forestalling the big melt are like tilting at windmills. The glaciers are being taken down by these new mill streams – one two-square-mile meltwater lake, 11 million gallons, drained in 84 minutes (that’s more throughput than Niagara Falls).

The word moulin looks a little like different angles on a glacial moulin: the waterfall m, the hole seen from above o, the pond before the hole bores all the way through u, the channel seen in side cutaway li, and perhaps a bit more flow n. It has such a smooth sound, nasals and liquid, it’s hard to associate it with churning, or grinding, or the roar of a massive drain. But it seems the speakers of Latin found molina as natural a name for a mill as we find mill to be – anyway, molina is the source of both moulin and mill. Molina is also a common enough surname, for various noted artists, athletes, and politicians, as well as millions of ordinary folks. I wonder if there’s a milliner named Molina who makes hats for the Moulin Rouge? Maybe a costume on a Mulan theme, made with magnolias. One would hope such an effort would not meet a chilly reception, be all wet, or go down the drain.

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zurrukutuna

Posted on June 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

This word displays what Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food (1999), calls “the unusual appearance of Basque words.” It just happens that Basque – we should really call it Euskara – has three voiceless fricatives in the neighbourhood where English has two (“s” and “sh”); it spells z the one made with the blade of the tongue behind the teeth, s the one made with the tip of the tongue (thus the tongue concave) just by the ridge, and x the one that’s basically the same as English “sh”. And Basque likes to use these sounds. The result, when combined with the morphology of Basque and the commonality of the sound /k/, spelled k, is something that to English eyes looks like numerous small electric zaps. Here’s an example from euskadi.net:

Lehengo egunetik bakailao beratzen utzi da, ura hiru aldiz aldatuz gatza kentzeko. Txorixo piperrak beratzen egon behar izan dira ere bai gutxienez bost orduz haragia ateratzeko. Buztin ontzi batean baratxuri lurrinduta xigortzen utzi. Ondoren, prest badago piper berdea erantsi, arin lurrindurik. Biguna dagoenean bakailao izpitua bota, txorixo piperren haragia eta ogi xigortuarekin batera, salda pixka batekin estaliz. Egiten den bitartean nahasi eta sakatu masa bat lortu arte. Bukatu baino zerbait lehenago arrautzak irabiatu gabe bota gehitu masa gainean egin daitezen. Arrautzen gainean perrezil xehatuta bota eta sutan utzi arrautzak egin arte.

It puts me in mind of Davidson’s description of Basque women. He is explaining possible reasons for the men-only nature of Basque gastronomic clubs:

perhaps to some extent a male desire for peace and quiet (Basque women being not only beautiful but formidable)

Indeed, is not this tongue beautiful but formidable? It is not even evidently related to any other language: it is an isolate, and odd theories abound as to its ontogeny.

But of course these angular characters are unexceptional to Euskaran eyes; it’s a matter of what one is used to. And the sounds they represent are not so shocking, and not necessarily so foreign. See this word in the middle of what I quoted: txorixo. Remembering that x is like “sh”, say it aloud. Yes, it’s the Euskara version of chorizo, as in the pepper (not the sausage).

This far in and I haven’t even gotten to the word I’m tasting yet! Well, I have, in a way, but it’s a bit circuitous. That block of Euskara up there is the cooking instructions for a soup made with garlic, salt cod (bakailao, which again may look a little familiar), peppers (piperren – along with the zaps, Euskara purrs, as there is a distinction between r and rr), oil, onions, and bread, and topped off with an egg – or more than one egg, depending on how you’re serving it. And its name, I am given to understand, comes from the word for “wood oven” (zur is “wood”), which apparently it was once made in, though all the recipes I’ve seen have it made on a stove. It is, yes, zurrukutuna.

I haven’t eaten the soup – I first saw the word just today, in Tony Aspler’s latest Spanish travelogue – but I have a clear sense of its flavour, and the (to our eyes) angular tang and electricity of the word would seem to be matched by the peppers and salt. We may also take note that it is a word that may be said while blowing on hot soup, as the vowels are /u/ all the way through until the end and there are no labial consonants. Just be careful not to spit on it with the /kutu/.

It is a sort of male-dining word, isn’t it? The zurru brings to mind Zorro, moustache and swagger; the u‘s are convivial cups. The k kicks in the door and drags a chair t to the table n. There’s just the issue of that tuna – too healthy for dude food, really. Replace with salt cod. Ah, there we have it. Now we can eat our food and hide from the women in peace… (Clearly these fearful gastronomes need the sort of advice doled out by this sign.)

Hardanger

Posted on May 30, 2010 | 1 comment

You are in a world of white, white on white. All ice is, white ice, made of snow, hard snow. It is in cubes, cubes on cubes, piled in regular geometric patterns; it is in diamonds, stepped diamonds, and it is in eight-pointed stars. Corners everywhere; any false turn can crack a convex vertex into your cortex. You feel that there is a figure and ground you cannot quite separate: you see a danger, and you see that it is hard, but somehow it doesn’t quite work together – you see one with one eye but the other with the other. How can you get down to the numbers on this, how can you figure it out? And then you roll over, and all these frozen edges lie soft against your cheek on the pillow: it was a dream. It was in your mind. You were upset, and all that you were seeing was your own hard anger, inspired by the place your head lay; the white on white was only your own world laid on itself.

Well! Doesn’t that seem quite a bit of embroidery on this simple word! Well, yes, in fact, it does, just as it should. Hardanger is after all a name for a kind of whitework embroidery, white thread on white thread in geometric patterns – you probably have seen it sometime on a cushion or pillowcase, or perhaps a tablecloth. It’s a mathematical discipline in its way, with much stitch counting (five-by-five blocks in tidy patterns, so many up and so many down, all symmetrical). It’s founded on a style that made its way up via Renaissance Italy from Asia; the eight-pointed star motif, so common in Nordic countries, is also to be seen in the near East.

It must be ironic that this embroidery style, so low-contrast, has taken its name from a rather high-contrast place: Hardanger, Norway, a fjordland district in southwest Norway near Bergen. It’s not certain whether the hard comes from a word meaning “hard” or from an old Germanic tribe name, but the anger – which is pronounced not like English anger but rather to rhyme with wronger – is from a word meaning “fjord” (the modern name for the fjord in Hardanger is Hardangerfjord, which does seem a bit redundant in that light, doesn’t it?). The original (and also still used) name for the embroidery is Hardangersøm, with søm meaning “work”. Anyway, it is a Nordic place, so one may think of it as being rather white, but it is hard to get away from the contrast of sharp fjord walls, and the angular light of the farther north – see Gude’s painting Fra Hardanger and tell me whether you think it looks like this Hardanger embroidery.

Indeed, Hardanger the place may seem to have much hard danger or the hard anger of high rocky cliffs, but just as the word loses some of its negative overtones in the pronunciation, the embroidery has embraced a lower contrast than the fjord – in line with the austerity of the north, indeed, but hardly in tune with the greater colour that one may sense from voiced stops and nasals and liquids. Such a stitching as this would seem to seek a whisper, nothing more: the opening /h/, and more layers of /h/ on top of it, and that would be the sum of the søm.

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bargello

Posted on May 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

So I was in this bar, y’know? And they had this Jell-O… cubes of the stuff, all sorts of colours. Oh, I don’t know what was in it, but man, I had some, and I started seeing these cubes arranged in zig-zag jagged lines, like flames, like diamonds, like curves, like great big square pixels. The patterns were mathematical, too; it was intricate. Oh, it was wild, man… but it was funny too. It had me in stitches, like big stitches, I’m too serious. But that stuff was trouble. I woke up in the slam. A big castle-like prison. And I was strapped to a chair… and it had the same patterns on it… wwwwwww…

OK, no, bargello is not some electric bar Jell-O. It’s two things, but mainly, unless you’re in Florence, it’s a kind of decorative stitching. It’s stitched not on clothes but typically on canvas, and the stitches usually cross four threads and are set up in squares – and the squares step up or down in regular patterns. The squares are different (often vivid) colours, making bands that form waves, diamonds, sharp zags like curves…

I’ll tell you something else that has squares on it, though all in a tidy row and flat grey: the Bargello.

Wait, what? Ah, I mean the place. Which is to say the palace. The Bargello is a building in Florence, Italy, also called the Palazzo del Popolo. It’s a museum now, but it used to be a prison and guard station – executions were performed there too. The chief of guards, whose domain it was, was the bargello. Um, huh? Yeah, the building was named after the dude. But it gets better… the dude was named after a building. What building? Late Latin bargillus (cognate with German Burg) meant “castle” or “fortified tower” – which in fact the Bargello is. It has a crenellated parapet and crenellated tower, meaning they have those square teeth. So you have squares, and you have a building that refers to a man who is named after a building that looks like the building. This seems a bit like, say, a nested diamond bargello pattern.

Not that the word bargello will necessarily make one think of a detailed, rather demanding type of needlework pattern. The overtones of barge seem rather broad and pushy, and Jell-O fat and jiggly. (Jell-O manufacturers: yes, I know there’s no fat in Jell-O.) But the voiced affricate in the middle of the word has a certain acuity to it; it’s the same sound as starts judgement and justice, after all. And the the parallel lines of the ll have that linear mathematical taste too. And then there’s that bar. No, not the one with the coloured gelatin cubes. Well, maybe.

Oh, how did the building and the needlework come to have the same name? The needlework pattern is evident on a series of chairs in the Bargello. But somehow I don’t think they were ones the prisoners used.

labdanum

Posted on May 26, 2010 | 2 comments

The screen goes black for a moment. Then, in the darkness, a single curving line of a lambent red. Behind, you hear a rumble of a drum: labdanum!

The red grows, and we see that it is a bottle, emerging. Its top is a defiant metallic grey, molybdenum maybe. Again the rumbling thunder of the drum, a cretic foot struck on a taiko: labdanum! And we see… the bottle is shaped like a red fist… it contains perfume, no, cologne, no, a scent so manly and musky that none may muster the speech to capture it. Only once more the drum: LABDANUM!

Not that any perfume or cologne would be made solely of labdanum, of course. Its woody, musky, leathery, animal scent is added to the mix to make many a scent. Whatever its notes on the nose, the wearers may hope it will be as intoxicating as laudanum, a substance that, like labdanum, is also called ladanum, and, like labdanum, may be traced back to pretty little flowers.

Oh, yes, indeedy. While laudanum (tincture of opium) comes from poppies, labdanum is extracted from the rockrose. It used to be collected by brushing the fur of goats that had grazed on and by the rockrose. Sometimes the hair, soaked in labdanum, was cut off and formed into a false beard – that’s what the Egyptian pharaohs wore (along with their pschent).

Now the collection is a bit more direct, of course. But the word has nonetheless taken an indirect route. Does it look Latin? Of course it does. But Latin got it from Greek λαδανον (as in “[sniff] I smell a lad anon!”). Somewhere in medieval Latin the /b/ got inserted, and sometimes it was a /p/ instead (may a man wonder if lapdanum will get him a lapdance?). It is unrelated to laudanum.

This word, along with its rubbing bd (like a goat’s belly on a bush), its lab that resonates of science and black dogs, and its num that is either yummy or insensate, brings to my mind (if not to yours) the Russian name of the fish that the lead character in Gogol’s The Government Inspector is so impressed with that he declaims it loudly: labardan! (Put the stress on the end!) But labdanum, while impressive, is not so fishy (ambergris and musk, maybe, but not salt cod from Aberdeeen, which is what labardan was), nor is it, um, a bland scent for a numb lad. Don’t get it mixed up. And don’t think about pretty little red and white flowers. The fist thumps its amphimacer one more time, the resin resonating: LABDANUM!

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milliner

Posted on May 25, 2010 | 1 comment

Ah, the world of fashion. Millionaire designers having hats made in their mills for les filles, and may no maligner malinger near their pillboxes and pailles and felt, flannel, linen… But do you find milliner a more refined-sounding word than hatmaker, even with its clear taste of the mill? Does Miss Milly with her millions spring first to mind, and does the uncommonness of this word lead to a higher value?

The shape of this word could be a hat, of course; practically any shape, however liminal, could be a hat once you get into the world of haute hat couture. The illi could involve ribbons or flowers or feathers; the m may be the bangs and the n the bun at the back. Or it could all be something so much farther out – follow your fancy and go gaga; if you find the right fascinator you could be a mascot at the Ascot.

But whither should you follow your fancy? And what will you find there? A milliner’s shop may now be all hat, but a broader selection of apparel was formerly available. The proprietor may well be a proprietress; millinery is not a line of work that has ever been exclusively managed by one sex (whereas one would be surprised to find a female haberdasher). But the homeland of this business is unitary: the fashion hub of northern Italy, Milan.

We now put the accent on the second syllable in Milan, but it was not always thus; a half a millennium ago the English said it with the stress on the first syllable, and so sometimes spelled it Millen, Myllan, Myllon, and so on. And while if you are cooking a sauce that was first concocted in Milan you will call it milanese, the line of fashion work that came to be associated with Milan got its merchants called Milliners – now without a capital (but with much capital on the merchant side of things).

And why should fashioners of hats be forever identified with Milan? Well, why should women who are attracted to other women be forever identified with Lesbos? Why call conjoined twins Siamese? Do all our jeans come from Genoa or all our dollars from Joachimsthal? It just happens that Milan was the fashion at one time, and, despite the winds of change, the word was just hatpinned onto the language.

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toilet

Posted on May 23, 2010 | 1 comment

My word tasting class was reconvening after a brief intermission. “Well,” I said, “now that we’re all back from our toilet…”

Eleanor, near the front, immediately shot her hand up, and proceeded without waiting for acknowledgement: “Please don’t be vulgar.”

Here we go again. “Vulgar?” I arched my left eyebrow.

“Graphic. You seem to revel in the foul. There is no need to assail us with such indelicate images.”

The right eyebrow joined the left. “You find my reference to a lace doily foul?”

“You said doily?” Eleanor knitted her brows. “It sounded like something else.”

“Toilet,” I said. “A word that originally referred to a little piece of fabric that was used to cover a woman’s dressing-table. From French toilette, related to toile, ‘fabric’. The same toile also came to English as toil, a now-uncommon word for a net for catching game. Of course, I’m being disingenuous; no one uses toilet to mean ‘fabric’ now. But, really, it is interesting that you find it so unacceptably graphic when it was originally intended as a euphemism. Washroom and its Latin-based equivalent lavatory are more literal, even if more polite-sounding to us now.”

Anna piped up from the back of the room. “Maybe crapper would be better.”

Kayley, next to Anna, raised her hand. “You know that’s from the inventor of the flush toilet, John Crapper.”

I was about to speak when Brian saved me the effort; he turned back to Kayley and said, “Too perfect to be true. Actually, though Thomas Crapper, the 19th-century British plumbing company owner, did make flush toilets, he didn’t invent them, and the word crap is much older.”

“Thank you, Brian,” I said, “you’re quite correct. The word crap has been in English to refer to waste since the middle ages. Michael Quinion has a very good run-down of the term and its relation to Thomas Crapper on his site, worldwidewords.org. And commodes have a long developmental history that was certainly added to, but certainly not started, by Thomas Crapper.”

“But it’s in Trivial Pursuit!” Kayley protested.

I shrugged. “I know. Their research was not quite good enough on this one. It happens.”

Eleanor was sitting with her face puckered as though she was sucking on a bitter lemon, shaking her head. “It’s indecent,” she said to the fellow sitting next to her, a skinny, beleaguered sort named Rupert. “And I fail to see the connection between lace and lavatories.”

“Lace and lavatories!” I said. “Well, thereby hangs a tale.”

Anna, at the back, sang, “Give to me your lavatory, take from me my lace.” Ah, Stevie Nicks. At least she didn’t make a comment on hanging tails.

“A woman’s dressing-table came to be referred to as her toilette,” I said. “We still see that in some usages. Eau de toilette, which is a version of perfume. Toilet soap, an old term for face soap and hand soap.”

Brian raised his hand. “There are many paintings with title such as ‘Lady So-and-So at Her Toilet,’ and they’re getting dressed or doing their hair.”

“You can get pictures with titles like that now on the web,” Anna said, “but they’re not getting dressed…” Kayley stifled a giggle. Eleanor turned and glared at Anna.

“The point,” I said, “is that the dressing-table was the toilet, and then toilet came to refer to the action of dressing, or washing and grooming, and to the room in which that was done. And then, out of delicacy, the fixture came to be referred to using the same word. And now the table has turned. We take the word toilet to be a literal word for the fixture. But, now, what do you think is the relation of the sound of the word to its developed sense?”

Rupert raised his hand. “Yes, Rupert?” I said, almost surprised.

“Well, sometimes you have to toil at what you’re doing there…”

Eleanor pulled a face as though someone had just held a fresh dog turd under her nose.

I laughed just a little. “True, sometimes. But is the ‘oy’ sound a contributor to the sense of indelicacy of this word? I mean, oily is not so nice, but doily is fine. Boil is somewhat neutral with a little negative shading. Boy is fine; goy – well, all that Yiddish oy has its own flavour which will probably vary somewhat by hearer. It also relates to the Brooklyn-style ‘oi’ kind of sound for syllabic /r/, as in ‘boid’ for bird, ‘goil’ for girl, and so on, all of which has a lower-class connotation.”

Brian raised his hand. “Hypercorrection from that has given us pronunciations such as ‘ersters’ and ‘terlet’.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Does it have the same feel to say ‘terlet’? Or to say it in the French style, ‘twa-let’?”

“French is much more elegant,” Kayley offered from the back.

“It tends to have that connotation, because of cultural images we have acquired, and the high-toned context of usage of French terms in English,” I said. “French itself has its highs and lows, and I don’t know whether I would call a language with so many inefficiencies elegant structurally – but that’s a more mathematical use of elegant. Anyway, French may get moved in a different direction thanks to less rarefied words such as poutine.”

“That would be a good word for toilet!” Anna declared. “Poo-tine! Like a canteen for poo!”

“Can you please stop!” Eleanor’s shout of disgust was taking on the pleading air of the delicate stomach.

“To return to the ‘oi’ sound,” I said, hoping to calm things down a little, “does it suggest a shape to you?”

Rupert raised his hand again. I looked at him. He waited for me to say something. “Yes, Rupert?”

“I think it’s like a spring, ‘boing boing boyoyoyoyyy,’ so I think it’s like a spiral.”

Brian smiled a little. “Like water swirling in the bowl.”

Kayley raised her hand. “Did you know that it swirls the other way in Australia?”

Brian was about to respond, but I beat him to it this time. “Actually, the direction of the swirl is really determined in the main by the positioning of the water jets.”

“But it’s like the bathtub drain,” Kayley said. “It’s the coriolanus effect.”

“Coriolis,” I said simultaneously with Brian, but we were both drowned out by Anna, who declared triumphantly, “Corral your anus!”

Eleanor was alternating between white and red. She stood and said, “Excuse me. I need to be excused. I require… to be excused. To go down the hall.” She rushed out, words failing her.

Rupert looked at her retreating form and smiled slightly. Without raising his hand, he said, “She has been caught in our toil.”

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