Tag Archives: word tasting notes

picrorhiza

Posted on April 19, 2010 | 1 comment

This word presents something of a melange of flavours. The pic naturally brings to mind a point or a sharpness, whether from pick or pique or piquant, and the picro in full reinforces this with a hint of, for instance, pico de gallo; the cr has that grasping, gathering, grabbing feeling to it; the ror more rolls than roars on the tongue, and is, like rural, a bit of oral effort to say because it quite lacks any points of clear opposition, just a rolling subsiding and resurging of the tongue; the rh we know is just another /r/ but gives the visual effect of a wheeze, reinforced by the iz; crorhiza may make a person think of coryza, also known as catarrh but commonly called runny nose today. Put together it may seem a bit like the various rumblings and groanings of unhappy innards. Visually there is also a certain sense of smoothness in symmetry, in the _i_ror_i__, but disrupted by sharp and unbalanced p c h za.

But does it taste bitter anywhere in the root? Well, it has a bitter root (but that root is not bitterroot, which is a nameused fora  few other plants, significantly Lewisia rediviva and also, according to the OED, Apocynum androsæmifolium). Specifically, picro is the Greek root (typically a prefix in English) meaning “bitter”. It happens to be used nearly not at all in ordinary English, reserved for taxonomic terminology and similar scientific usages. On the other hand, rhiza does show up a little in common English, mutatis mutandis, for instance in rhizome. What is it at root? “Root”, in Greek of course.

So picrorhiza names a bitter root? Yes, specifically Picrorhiza kurroa, a plant called variously katki, katuki, kutki, or katuka. It grows in the Himalayas (I know not whether it grows in a row on the peaks, but that would seem to lack reason, because Himalayan peaks are rather inhospitable to vegetation; however, it does grow at high altitudes); it has been used medicinally for ages as a treatment for heart and liver problems, jaundice, and asthma. It would appear that such other botanical names as mycorrhiza as well as its medical context, bringing with it recollections of words such as arrhythmia, lead it sometimes to be written picrorrhiza, which is nonetheless a misspelling. Its active ingredients include picroside I, kutkoside, androsin, and apocynin. Research indicates that, among other things, it protects the liver and stimulates bile production; it may also help the immune system and may lower blood sugar. And – and this is fortunate – it appears to help treat hypoxia. So if you get altitude sickness while up picking it, you could always eat some. But watch out: it’s quite bitter.

Thanks to Dawn Lowen for mentioning Lewisia rediviva and mycorrhiza.

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tempura

Posted on April 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

“O tempura! O morass!” Maury fumed, standing over some soggy shrimp fritters in his kitchen.

“O temper! O Maury!” I replied, coming over to look. “I take it the temperature was insufficient?”

“First there was the intemperately tamped tempeh, and now this trumps it! Deux fois trompé!”

“Trempette de foie?” I said, proffering pâté.

Maury dabbed a chip in it. “My culinary self-esteem is taking a dip.” He wandered into his living room and dropped himself into a chair.

“You’re just gaining seasoning,” I said, following him.

“Like a frying pan. I might as well have stuck with painting.” He gestured at a tempera of a temple. “Rather Apollo than appalling.”

“Where is that?”

“The Vale of Tempe, Greece.” He declaimed the beginning of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

“Et in arcadia ego,” I said. “Beats its namesake Tempe, Arizona, anyway.”

“Where you can fry an egg on the sidewalk,” Maury said. His testiness tempered, he rose again and returned to the kitchen.

“Well,” I said, “your food’s not so unlike painting. Egg tempura and oil. It’s the same root, anyway, tempura and tempera.”

“For which we can thank those Portuguese missionaries to Japan of four centuries ago. Them and their tempuras, which were meat-free days.”

“Other sources say it comes from tempêro, ‘seasoning,'” I pointed out. “It’s a tasting kind of word, anyway, tip and lip, like dip – French trempette. Anyway, temper, tempera, temperature, tempura, all trace back to temperare, ‘divide in due portion’, ‘mingle’, ‘temper’, ‘exercise restraint’…”

“Whereas tempeh comes from Indonesian.” Maury stood over his counter again and contemplated his ingredients. Seeing that the oil had heated up somewhat, he began dipping vegetables into the batter. “Well, I might as well view this as just a temporary setback. No point in dumping it just because it’s a bit damp.” He glanced up at the clock. “Tempus fugit!”

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Eyjafjallajökull

Posted on April 18, 2010 | 5 comments

The sight of Icelandic can scare people sometimes. A word like Eyjafjallajökull might seem like a Viking war scream, something you’d hear coming at you across a wide-open rolling plain with mountains and glaciers behind, a rugged, untamed land – some of the youngest land on the planet (with more being spewed fresh from the mantle on regular intervals), but with an old language, one that has changed little in a millennium. Iceland: a land of incessant striking scenery (“stunning but nondescript,” as my wife put it after several hours – see our travelogue), a harsh land where for centuries people spent many long hours in small cold cabins, an island country where, thanks to a small population and an annual democratic gathering, there is no significant dialectal variation in the language. A land of very few trees, and not big ones either (what do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? – stand up), where many of the population believe in the existence of huldufólk: hidden folk, for instance trolls, after whom a whole peninsula is named.

How do trolls hide in a place without forests? Iceland is a place where you can see for miles and miles and miles but whatever you’re looking for you probably won’t see until you’re practically on top of it. Its famous waterfalls, for instance – they don’t fall down to you from above you; rather, they fall from a river that has carved into the plain you’re on, down into a gorge even father below. And major sites of interest – historical sites and geological sites – are marked with little signs and small, mostly empty parking lots next to their two-lane roads. You’re just driving along, and suddenly, whoa!

The language likewise is plain and yet spectacular. Names for things are generally straightforward – they translate to things like Smoky Bay (that’s the capital), Island Fjord, North River, Lake Glacier (the biggest glacier in Europe – and the word for “lake” is the same as the word for “water”), and Midge Lake. But Icelandic has retained three letters that English lost long ago (edh, thorn, and ash: ð, þ, æ) and has retained an involved system of inflections too, and it has developed a tendency to devoice things (for instance word-final l and r) and often to pre-aspirate double voiceless stops (not only do you devoice the consonant, you cut the voice off even before you get to the consonant). If you see nn or mm, you’re looking at a voiceless nasal – and with the nn there’s a sort of [t] at the beginning too. These are sounds you really can’t even hear unless you’re at close quarters in a quiet place. And ll? A voiceless lateral affricate – the same as we see rendered with lh for Tibetan names (e.g., Lhasa) and tlh in Klingon. If you say “hotlips” making sure you actually touch the tongue on the t (rather than making a glottal stop of it) you’ll sort of get it. To all this relative exoticism add the tendency to make compounds and you get some striking words.

For instance, take “island”, “mountain”, and “glacier”: ey (said “eh” – y is just like English y), fjall (said “fyatlh” – one syllable, ending with that ll voiceless lateral affricate, not like the end of Seattle, which keeps the voicing), and jökull (the ö is like German ö and the u is similar but a little lower and farther back, like in French coeur). Since Icelandic puts modifying nouns in the genitive case, you add genitive suffixes to the first two nouns. Then you glue all three together, and whoa! Eyjafjallajökull, “ehya-fyatlha–yökuhtlh”! It’s like you’re driving along a wide-open space and suddenly a Viking horde comes at you from a hidden ravine, and they’re all screaming and whispering at you. Or you’re standing on a glacier and suddenly a volcano erupts from under it. The word looks sort of like a fall, a flight, a horde itself, or the onrush of smoke and ash, perhaps. But all those ascenders and dots and descenders are really your hair standing on end at the very sight of it.

And at the very prospect of saying it, if you’re like a lot of people. And, well, there’s the thing: just as out of nowhere there is all this ash filling the air that is keeping people from flying, likewise out of nowhere is this word, the name for the glacier on the mountain and for the volcano under it that’s burping up the ash. The ll sounds begin to sound maybe like burps of steam and pumice, in fact. And good luck finding another European language that can even deal with this word phonologically. Icelandic has retained and added sounds not found in even the other Scandinavian languages. English certainly just has to do its best with what it can. This word can’t become an English word, after all, unless and until it’s adopted English phonotactics. And it remains to be seen how people will agree on pronouncing it, if they in fact ever will.

People are surely wishing for something nice and simple like Krakatoa right about now. Even Popocatépetl is looking good… though it (in the original) ends with exactly the same sound as does Eyjafjallajökull: not with a bang but a crackling hiss.

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satisficing

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 3 comments

To at least some people’s ears, this word surely does not satisfy. What you see is a common English word (satisfying) with just a slight addition making it a blend with another word (sufficing) – like mocktail (a word that I confess pulls my nose hairs). But this has the added bitterness of business-speak, and of seeming to try to sound clever or superior by dint of a slight modification while not necessarily succeeding, at least in the utterance of its average user.

It’s not that the guy who invented this word was soft-headed. Herbert Simon was one of the leading American social scientists of the 20th century, a Nobel prizewinner, a Turing Award winner, a seminal figure in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and economics (among other fields). He knew how people really do things: markets don’t work with perfectly rational consumers making fully informed decisions, for instance; the cost of getting full information and the effort required to attain perfect results often outweigh the perceptible increase in benefit over a less costly, easier result that is close enough. And choices are often made by groups of individuals with conflicting desires and positions, and simply coming to an agreement is often quite enough, never mind coming to the best possible agreement. So people do what is sufficient to satisfy. Anyone who has worked in the world of business – or, for that matter, just about anyone anywhere who has done anything, really – knows this very well. “That’s good enough – move on,” and the great mantra, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Satisfice.

And no doubt the association of this word with business buzzspeak is a strong factor in its distastefulness to those who dislike it. I think the sound of it is also a problem. To start with, it sounds a bit like a razor doing something I wish it wouldn’t to some usable part of my anatomy. It’s a real hiss festival, and those three i-dots are sort of like one’s hairs standing up at the sound. But beyond that, there’s something satisfying about the word satisfying – that big, wide-open [aI] is like a sigh of satisfaction. But with satisficing, just when you get to that part, there’s an [s], slicing into it. And if you’re Canadian, the vowel sound even changes: the [a] part raises up a bit in the mouth (say eyes; now say ice; repeat) – and the voiceless consonant following it also makes the vowel shorter (a standard effect in most English phonology). So it’s like relaxing in your easy chair and suddenly getting a sliver of ice down your back.

And then there’s the question of redundancy. If we’re talking business, what does satisfy mean, as in “satisfy requirements”? It means “do enough” – not “do everything” but “do enough” (it’s always meant that; it comes from Latin satis “enough” – also the root of satiated – and facere “do”). And suffice means “be enough, be adequate” (from sub “under” – which is often shifted in sense as an affix – and the same facere). It would seem that satisfice is rather more than enough, especially for a word that means, as Oxford puts it, “To decide on and pursue a course of action that will satisfy the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a particular goal.” I guess satisfy, suffice, and various existing phrases had too much latitude for interpretation, and so Herbert Simon came up with this one to stand clearly for just the meaning he wanted. I do feel that he could have come up with a more aesthetically likeable word, but perhaps he didn’t see it as worth the extra effort.

Thanks to Adrienne Montgomerie for wondering aloud about this word on the EAC list.

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nonce

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 6 comments

As I was on my nightly stroll through the Oxford English Dictionary, I spotted a word that quite fishhooked my eye: hirquitalliency. Needless to say, my hair Van-de-Graaffed. I clicked and looked. It referred to the state, in an infant, of acquiring a strong voice, and was ported over little changed from the Latin for the same, which in turn borrowed it from a Greek word for a male goat. I looked at the citations. How many times had it ever been used, then? Once! Yes, and the OED declares it a nonce-word. Apparently nonce-words used by Sir Thomas Urquhart in or about the year 1600 are worthy of inclusion (with the dagger of obsolescence clearly affixed), even if, in terms of actual usage, they are a non-see.

Of course, one couldn’t include every nonce formation out there. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake would blow the doors off the project from the get-go. But nonce words are perfectly good and useful things, suitable in their various cases for entertainment, display of erudition, filling out a line of verse, and plain old directness. They may be non-correct English, ‘n once is enough, but many things are worth doing for the nonce, and neologizing is among them.

Borrowing, compound, derivative, formation, and phrase also all attach to nonce. But outside of linguistic terms, it is seen almost exclusively in the phrase for the nonce (though I suppose it is nonced in here and there on rare occasion, when speakers don their noncing shoes). You will probably already have guessed that its present form arises from a reanalysis – a transfer of the n from word word to another. This is true. However, if you surmise that it comes from for then once, you are mistaken. The transfer happened in the Early Middle English period, back when we still had somewhat more inflection than we do now. The old form of the word one was ane, and the genitive of it was anes; it could be used adverbially in a prepositional phrase, and the definite article had a different form for the genitive, so the phrase was for than anes (to than anes was also used). As the inflections reduced in use, this established phrase became a whole nother thing: for the nanes. And that came to be for the nonce today, without ever actually involving the word once.

So… shall we nonce? It has a nice, light touch to it, doesn’t it? Like the tip of the finger tapping a moment in time, no more than an ounce of eternity (though, ironically, the tongue taps twice, holding the second time). It’s all small, round letters. They could be logical operators: the n is like the intersection sign, the c is like the subset sign, the e could be the “element of” sign, and the o a Venn diagram with only one circle. A single set, a set of one, arising at the unique intersection of specific circumstances, a subset that is an element of… what? Of all the possibilities of that word. Or perhaps the ce is the eyes of a person running a cups-and-ball game (cup: n; ball: o), one eye winking at you: just this once I’ll let you have it, and he flips the middle cup to show you: non. Like that ball, what is for the nonce has a sort of spatiotemporal ubeity; it is, we may say, ad-hocsome. It is a party of one.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting nonce.

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bogus

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

This word may have that high-sounding Latin-looking us ending, but you just know that it’s the us that likewise graces (or disgraces) doofus, dorcus, and similar epithets – the extended index finger of its high sound is not apodictic or apotropaic but simply there to poke us, and so this word is less bonus and more onus. It has all the bluntness of the voiced stops, making what could be the end of hocus-pocus into something so much less clever-sounding, and its core is the ominous, odious, or simply moaning long puckering /o/. That bo is bumptious enough, bowling you over from the start, and then along comes its brother, not Luke but gus. Oh, and they’re big, those buggers – ahem, beggars. They come boogeying out of the bog with a bag of bugs and boogers, and, dude, it’s bogus!

Duuuude. Remember Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Of course you do, even if you never saw it. Unless you weren’t around in 1989 to see Keanu Reeves get his big leap into stardom. (Refresh your memory, or find out what I’m talking about – here’s the trailer.) Anyway, bogus was their word for “bad” – a word they liked enough that the sequel to the movie was Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (they go to Hell).

There was also another movie with Bogus in its title: Bogus, 1996, starring Whoopie Goldberg, Haley Joel Osment, and Gerard Depardieu as Bogus (an imaginary French musician). Never heard of it? Apparently it was pretty bogus – Goldberg got a Razzie nomination for it. But it was directed by Norman Jewison!

Bogus isn’t bad news for everyone. If you live near Boise, Idaho, and you ski, Bogus Basin will be your bag. And if you speak Indonesian or Malay, bogus will remind you of bagus, which means “good”. But for most people, bogus means “fake” or “counterfeit” – common words for it to modify include claims, checks (or cheques to non-Americans), cards, charges, argument, documents, bills… It’s pretty much equivalent to spurious, but where spurious spears, bogus bludgeons. Spurious sounds like spearmint, which still has a mint, but bogus is the kind of money that you get from a bogeyman.

Some people think it may have a connection to bogey, too. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The most standard account of its epiphany is in application to a machine for counterfeiting money, in 1827 (it transferred thereafter to coins made by such a machine). It has been suggested that it is a shortening of tantrabogus, an eastern American vernacular term for “any ill-looking object”. This might in turn be related to a Devonshire term for the devil, tantarabobs, which may in turn relate to bogey. But who knows? That could all be bogus.

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mustelid

Posted on April 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hoo-wee! What’s that smell? Is that mustard gas? Man, someone musta let one, eh! Or musta left the lid off the composter… Whoever did it shouldn’t weasel out of it. It’s not fair at all; they oughta do the right thing without being badgered. …What?

Actually, that musty, not to say mephitic, miasma is wafting your way courtesy of a mustelid. So what’s a mustelid? Is it a kind of worm or mollusc? Perhaps a plant, like a mustard green? No, it’s closer to a mus musculus, but longer and larger. If your kind of vermin is ermine, or if you like to think of mink, you’re on your way to the source of the stink.

Yes, the mustelids are a family of carnivorous critters (in Latin the Mustelidae) with long bodies, short legs, fur – often quite luxuriant – and musk glands. The must in this word is not related to the musk gland, nor to the word musty; rather, it’s from mustela, Latin for “weasel”. And along with the weasel you have the ferret, the otter, the badger, the ermine, the stoat, the mink, and the wolverine… and, until recently reclassified, the skunk (now reclassified, fittingly, as Mephitidae).

The elid gives the word a fairly good biological – specifically taxonomical – flavour; one thinks quickly of annelids, for instance. But actually the morpheme boundary is at id, and there are plenty more taxonomic words included by that: hominid would be closest to home. The must is as down to earth in taste as the id is scientific; one may think of freshly crushed grapes, or imperatives, or some longer words: you must muster the mastery to remove the mustard from your mustache. In the middle of all this you may also see tel, which may seem delicate or may have the telling air of a report. Looking at the meeting of these two opposite ends with the telling middle, you may call it dualism, but with armed scent glands, I call’t duelism.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting mustelid.

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persiflage

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 3 comments

Here’s a word that immediately communicates two things (to those who understand it): the discourse referred to is light, and the person speaking or writing is erudite.

Persiflage refers to the sort of light banter one just breezes through, breezy talk to shoot the breeze, mere raillery: more flapper than sage; more purse than flag; a trifle, a siffle, mere piffle. To speak in this way is to persiflate, and indeed one may just as well purse one’s lips and inflate a balloon (you know how to persiflate, don’t you? you just put your lips and tongue together and blow smoke): it is flattery or flatulence, but no divine afflatus. It is prating parsley on the plate of locution (not so unlike the decorative starlets the Italians call prezzemolina, which means “parsley”). It is designed as prophylaxis against a slip, a gaffe, a slur – although it may mask a jape or a sly undercut.

And the breeze comes etymologically to it: it comes from French, per (from Latin for “through”) plus siffler “whistle” (which traces back to the same Latin root that gives us sibilant, a phonological term that describes sounds such as [s]). Thus, it is a high-toned means of blowing discourse away like dust. “Meretricious persiflage,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love. “Infidelity and confections and persiflage,” wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to Leaves of Grass. “Smooth and shallow persiflage,” wrote Charles Kingsley in Hypatia. “This vertiginous persiflage, this gyrostatic amphigouri,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in a New York Times review of the 1920 play Where’s Your Husband? “Is this a time for airy persiflage?” wrote W.S. Gilbert in The Mikado.

Well, and perhaps it is a time for airy persiflage. Does not everyone, once in a while, want to pass the time flapping the gums, one hand waving lightly through the air, the other perhaps sustaining a martini? One may even all the while endeavour to sound frighteningly erudite. “Oh, do come join us for some syllabub, a pousse-café, a canapé, and a peck of persiflage.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting persiflage (quite some time ago).

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sough

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 9 comments

The first time I recall encountering this word – or, rather, its present participle, soughing – was actually when I was in graduate school. The drama department at Tufts University (that’s where I was) was performing Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, in the translation by Patrick Bowles. (I was playing one of the two blind eunuchs. It was not my moment of greatest glory on the Tufts stage – that was probably when I played Flan in Six Degrees of Separation.) There is a line in it, “Cool wood, and the wind in the boughs, soughing like the sea-surge.”

Which tells you well enough what soughing means, without your having to rough it out or tough it out yourself. What it doesn’t tell you is how you pronounce sough. You may guess, from the assonance evinced by the line as a whole, that it rhymes with bough, and that may be what Bowles had in mind. But Heather, the assistant director (the director was a native of Shanghai and left the English tips to Heather, an American grad student), told the actor to pronounce it like soft minus the t – i.e., soughing was to be “soffing”.

It happens that Heather’s is not one of the two pronunciations given in the OED, the Random House, Merriam-Webster, or the American Heritage Dictionary. All agree that the two possible pronunciations rhyme with how and stuff (or with bough and tough, if you will). The OED allows a third for Scots speakers, [sux] – where [u] is the vowel in loop and [x] is the same voiceless velar fricative you hear in loch (so it’s not a respelling of sucks).

The Scots pronunciation is actually the one least changed over the ages. The source of this word is Old English swogan, but the g is really a yogh and would thus be a velar fricative (though perhaps voiced). But velar fricatives have been lost in most kinds of English for centuries, and they have been replaced by a variety of approximations: [f], [w], [i], [ə], nothing at all. Consider that almost anywhere you see a gh there was originally a velar fricative: cough, rough, laugh; caught, bough, though, through; height, weight… The loss of this phoneme, combined with various caprices of vowel shift, has done much to loosen the connection between English spelling and pronunciation.

This word, for its part, was also in danger of being lost, at least south of Scotland. But it proved useful to the literary muse in the 19th century and so had a bit of a revival, and its persistence in the works of Wordsworth, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Thoreau, and their ilk has given it a certain lasting presence. It shows up both as verb and as noun: “its branches soughing with the four winds” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods); “That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). It can also refer to sighing or even to whining.

You may also see another word sough, unrelated, used to refer to a bog, a swamp, a gutter, a sewer, or a slough. Naturally, since it can refer to a watery slough, it’s pronounced to rhyme with the desquamation slough rather than the watery slough. What did you expect?

But, now, you tell me what sound wind in the boughs and the sea-surge make. Go dig through your 1970s LPs for the Environments series released by (fittingly) Atlantic in the 1970s, and play the first side of the first one, titled The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore (did I say 1970s!), 30 minutes of waves (recorded at Brighton Beach but significantly adjusted on an IBM 360) – or pick up any of the many relaxation CDs more recently made inspired by them (go to a spa and get a massage; odds are you’ll get rubbed to the sound of harp, pipes, or piano with waves in the background – here, listen to this, it makes me smell sandalwood already). Or – I know it’s out of fashion, and a trifle uncool, but I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool – go to your nearest beach to watch the sun go down. (Don’t have a beach? Go find a slough, and lean close to see if you can hear a sough in the sough.) Listen to the waves: what do you hear? Sough, sough, sough… which sough? But then listen to the wind in the trees (that’s Environments 5, side 2, by the way), or perhaps the breeze in the heather, and again you’ll hear sough, sough, sough… but which sough? Is it the same one as the waves? And does either of them sound more like Heather’s version than the dictionary versions?

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting today’s word.

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lorem ipsum

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 4 comments

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Oops… was that all Greek to you?

No, no, you might say, that sure looks like Latin. And indeed it does. But it’s still what’s often referred to as greeking – it’s incomprehensible dummy text. It’s even incomprehensible in Latin. If it looked like English, it would go something like this:

Sires to obtain pain of itself, it is pain, but boccasing circum stanccur in which toil and pain can him some grea. To take a trivia example, which of un ever under takeslab ise, except to obtain sowe advantage from? Dut wh has any iright pain find fault man who choos esto enjoy a pleasurences voids a pain tha produces no resultant? Demoraliz by the charms of pleasu of the moent, so blindhat the cann forese nd trouble tha.

So OK, so what? Well, that bit of quasi-Latin up there is known as lorem ipsum, after its first two words, and it’s far and away the best-known dummy text in the world. Dummy text? Filler text. When you’re doing layout, and you don’t have the text yet, or you just want to display a layout design without people getting distracted by the text.

And it certainly seems like mumbo-jumbo, doesn’t it? Especially since Latin is the archetypal source for mumbo-jumbo in English. All manner of bogus incantations and assorted hocus-pocus is based on, or made to look like, Latin. Hocus-pocus, for instance. (Mumbo-jumbo, on the other hand, is based on a word from Mandinka, a West African language. There are always exceptions.) Anyone who’s read Harry Potter books – or any of quite a few other books in related genres – will recognize the pattern. And since very few people can understand Latin these days, Latin text – or, even better, garbled Latin – makes a very agreeable bit of filler to make your eyes glide right over it.

The term itself, lorem ipsum, rolls nicely off the tongue. The first word starts with two liquids and always made me think of it as meaning “when” because of its resemblance to French lors. The second word is real Latin that you might have seen elsewhere, perhaps in slightly different form – ipso facto, for one. On the other hand, it might seem like gypsum, which is fair enough since this text is a sort of literary drywall. Both words end in that nice hum of an m, with its soft weight.

This text had been in use for quite some time without anyone really wondering if it was based on something specific when, about a decade and a half ago, Richard McClintock, of Hampton-Sydney College in Virginia, did wonder. Since his expertise was Latin, he could tell at a glance what text was real words, and he zeroed in on the word consectetur, third-person singular present subjunctive passive of a verb meaning “pursue”, because it’s uncommon. Hey presto, he very quickly found a citation of it in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, “On the ends of good and evil.” Here’s the passage from which it is taken:

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur? At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio.

And here’s the 1914 English translation by Rackham:

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

Now, about that “for quite some time,” by the way. You will find it said in many places that it started being used in the 1500s. I haven’t yet found any actual citation, just a repeated assertion that someone said once and everyone else is repeating (just like the text itself). What is known is that its popularity comes from its having been distributed by Letraset in the 1960s in sheets that could be cut out and pasted in. McClintock (I learn from www.pri.org/theworld/) happens to have noticed that in the 1914 Macmillan edition of Cicero’s text, there is a page break right in the middle of dolorem, so that a page starts with lorem ipsum (What kind of a typesetter puts a page break in the middle of a word like that! But there it is). It’s his hypothesis that that is, in fact, the version of the text that the lorem ipsum was based on. This makes me speculate that, rather than a printer grabbing bunches of letters from a page of set type, dropping some, adding others, and so on, this may have been a deliberately imperfect typewriter transcription of a random page.

All of this doesn’t address one important fact about lorem ipsum: as a placeholder for English, it’s kind of imperfect. It doesn’t accurately represent English word length and distribution. If you need 500 words of placeholder text, 500 words of lorem ipsum just won’t give you an accurate expectation, and it doesn’t really look like English or break up lines like English. Several years ago, I decided to make some dummy text based on English. I took the beginning of a well-known novel by a 20th-century American author and ran a simple replacement algorithm on it: one sequence of vowels, another of different length of consonants, looping through the vowels and consonants repeatedly in their different phase lengths, a kind of typological minimal music. And I put numbers every 50 words so it could be taken in whatever needed quantity. Here are the first 101 words:

“Spe al Rist Sopl?” Lru setsp ler astisp, olr Ustes Pelrast siopl rus tespelraist spo lur’s tesp. Lre sat sip lour es tespla, ristous eplrestasp. Lir stos plu restes pal ir sto usp el rse tspail, rostus spelrs teaspl fis otus, epl rse atis pouler stseaplr is Otsue Pelrast, 50 siplors uts plers – et as pli roustees pal rios utspelres ta spi louresets apiolurest seplar sit. “Spo lur see tas plir?” ostus Eplea Ristosp, lur seets pilro. Stu sep learis otuespl rse tasi op lru seetsap; i lorsu et spelar stisp lorust sep lersatsip lro sutes pelras it spo 100 lru.

You can get the whole 500 words of it at www.harbeck.ca/James/texttest.html. It’s not perfect; I think I might do up another version. But it’s better for the purpose than lorem ipsum.

And yet, I must acknowledge the cultural hold of faux Latin, not to mention the incredible entrenchment of the lorem ipsum text. So why would I bother? Running those replacements is something I have to do by hand; it’s rather tedious. Does anyone care? Well, yes: I do – I also do layout, and I have on occasion needed truly useful placeholder text. I don’t do it because it’s tedious and laborious (though the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch might disagree with Cicero about choosing pain for pain’s sake); I do it because the tediousness and labour of it produce something that does me some good. And if that makes me happy, and doesn’t harm anyone, who has any right to find fault with it?

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