Tag Archives: word tasting notes

yoik, yoicks

Posted on March 26, 2010 | 2 comments

Yikes! What a pair have we here! The first might look like a typo for yolk, but the second looks like a plural of the first but with the addition of a c. They also may bring to mind yoink, a slang term for “steal”, and yonks, meaning “a long time” (as in “I haven’t seen him for yonks!”).

At any rate, the words seem suited to a high-sharp shout – which is what yoicks is, really: a shout in fox hunting to encourage the hounds. Apparently the sound of yoicks really gets the dogs going. It is thought to have come from hike. It can also be used as a non-dog-related shout of encouragement or exultation.

Yoik, on the other hand, sometimes seen as yoick but also seen as joik (or even joiggus or joiku), is a kind of song. Some of it may involve sharp, high shouts, but mostly it sounds to many ears more like Native American songs. If you guessed from the spelling joik that the source is actually northern Europe, however, you’re right: specifically, the Saami, who live in Scandinavia. They speak Finno-Ugric languages (thus related to Finnish and Estonian and, more distantly, to Hungarian) – actually about ten different languages. They were traditionally reindeer herders, and some still are; their nomadic lifestyle led them often to live in portable residences that will look to many eyes very much like teepees. And because they got to northern Scandinavia first, they are considered the indigenous people of the area – one might say autochthonous: belonging to the land. Which seems, unfortunately, to have resulted in their being treated like dirt, historically, after the north Germanic people landed in their laps. (Oh, laps: the Saami are often called Lapps or even Laplanders. They would rather be called Saami.)

Anyway, yoik is sometimes used to refer to any Saami song, but it is often more specifically referring to the luohti song of the North Saami, a song that aims to communicate the essence of an individual person or place. It often has a repetitive, chanting kind of sound, and the text itself is often elliptical and has many nonlexical syllables. It can often be heard performed with more modern instrumentation and arrangements now; I was first made aware of it by the music of Mari Boine. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbEfoOMlo4Y for a yoik from her with images of the Saami and their native land. (For more in-depth information on yoiks, see www.fimic.fi.)

I’ll take a yoik over yoicks – so much more durably exalting to my ears, and not at all gone to the dogs.

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frith

Posted on March 25, 2010 | 4 comments

A short word, exhibiting thrift in form, soughing like the sound of a small, furry animal passing freely through grass or heather on the heath, or the breeze in the branches of a brushwood thicket. You can see the grass or the thicket in the varying-height ascenders, too… perhaps the r is a rabbit, seeking the sun.

Well, in the world of Watership Down by Richard Adams, that rabbit would be a follower of a sun-god named Frith. (Watership Down has nothing to do with ships sinking, a fact I discovered after agreeing to go see the movie when I was 10. Watership Down is the name of a hill in Hampshire. But there are some bloody battle scenes between rabbits.) If the word rings a bell for sci-fi fans, you may be thinking of scrith, which is what the Ringworld is made out of in Larry Niven’s books.

But this word is also a real word, come up from the old Anglo-Saxon roots. In fact, it’s at least five words – three nouns and two verbs. And, frankly, you’re unlikely to encounter any of them in the wild – the words, I mean; their referents persist.

The first noun is related to freedom and, in fact, means “freedom and security” – the freedom one has among one’s own people in a secure society, like the freedom of a rabbit in a warren. It has current cognates in other Germanic languages meaning “peace”: German Friede, Dutch vrede, etc.

The second noun refers to a wooded area, or more specifically to brushwood or underwood, such as rabbits out of the frith of their warren might hop through (the furry fellows swiftly whiffling from frith to frith).

The third noun is just a metathetic form of firth, not as in Colin Firth (a great actor) but as in an estuary, e.g., the Firth of Forth (which has a great bridge over it). The two verbs are just derived forms of the first two nouns.

This word has other overtones in sound, too. Frisk comes to mind, as does rift. Fifth is present, as is fourth. So is forth, as in what must be Frith’s first and greatest command to the rabbits: Go forth and multiply.

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting frith.

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flutterbudget

Posted on March 24, 2010 | 2 comments

I was giving a class in word tasting, and from a book by L. Frank Baum I had pulled a real winner – not only a flavourful word that trips a pretty fillip on the tongue, but one signifying something that could well use a word like this to signify it. I wrote it on the blackboard: flutterbudget.

I turned to the class. “Let’s all say this together.”

Most of those in attendance obliged, if perfunctorily. One hand shot up. I quickly glanced at my diagram of who was sitting where. “Yes, Eleanor?”

“I don’t think we should say that.”

I blinked. “Well, why not?”

“It just sounds vulgar.”

I was momentarily taken aback – as were, from what I could tell, most of the others in the class. “It’s not vulgar,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything vulgar. If it were vulgar, you would know it. And we can’t have phonetic profiling. There’s no value in avoiding words just because they sound like something bad. You’d cross out a huge portion of the English vocabulary. …Although I can’t really think exactly what vulgar thing you think this sounds like, aside from its starting with f and having an ‘uh’ sound in it.”

“If we said this on the street,” Eleanor protested, “someone might think we were saying something rude.”

“They might think that no matter what you say if they don’t understand it,” I said, and noticed another hand up. “Brian?”

“I think it sounds like flibbertigibbet,” Brian said. “Or… butterfly.”

“Fussbudget,” piped up a voice from the back that I determined was Anna.

I put one finger on the tip of my nose and pointed the other at her. “Bingo. Same budget. Slightly different sense.”

Another hand, at the back. I glanced quickly… “Kayley?”

“A fussbudget is someone who worries about money a lot, right?” Kayley asked.

“Just someone who fusses a lot,” I said. “Someone who finds fault and makes fusses all the time. A nitpicker. The budget is not our most common sense now but the sense that it grew out of. Just as bank comes from a table for handling money, budget comes from a purse for storing it in. It’s from French bougette, diminutive of bouge, which means ‘bag’ and also gave us bulge – so if the bulge in your pocket is a wallet, then it’s perfectly apposite. Anyway, from the bag sense came the contents sense – a budget can still be a bundle, the contents of a wallet or sock. Now picture that being a bunch of fusses.”

“Or flutters!” Anna interjected from the back.

“Well, it’s not right,” Eleanor said. “Talking about fluttering budgets just invites trouble.”

“Because a budgie might flutter away with your money?” Anna chirped.

“You don’t want to talk about losing money,” Eleanor said primly.

“Well, this doesn’t,” I said. “The flutters here are needless worries – butterflies in the stomach, what-ifs. The word is from L. Frank Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz – the Flutterbudgets are a group of people who spend all their time worrying about things that could happen or that might have happened but didn’t. Their favourite word is if. For example, one of them has pricked her finger with a needle.” Eleanor winced, whether at pricked or at the description of violence I’m not sure. “She is terribly afraid that she will get blood poisoning. Dorothy tells her that she – Dorothy – has pricked her finger many times and survived. At first the woman is relieved, but then she starts wailing again: ‘Oh, suppose I had pricked my foot! Then the doctors would have cut my foot off, and I’d be lamed for life!’ And so on.”

“I’d rather be a flibbertigibbet.” Of course that was Anna.

“It’s not nice to make fun of people who are concerned,” Eleanor said.

“There are the concerned,” I said, “and then there are the worrywarts and hand-wringers. Anyway, we are here to taste words. And this one trips around nicely on the lips, the tip of the tongue, the teeth, with just one retroflex. …Brian?”

“In a British pronunciation there wouldn’t be the retroflex r,” Brian said. “There would be three of basically the same vowel, three syllables in a row.”

“True, more or less,” I said, “but we’re Canadian, and Baum was American, so we and he get the alternating pattern. We all get the nice, bouncy four syllables, though. There are quite a few words with that kind of double trochee, all the way from pitter-patter and fuddy-duddy to paternoster.”

“That’s sacrilegious!” Eleanor exclaimed.

I was about to respond to that, but at the same time, from the back of the class, the voice of Anna chimed in, “Or motherf—”

I very nearly leapt across the room, but Kayley saved me the trouble, clapping her hand over Anna’s mouth.

Eleanor’s eyes widened accusingly as she looked at me over her glasses. “What if someone had been here? What would they think?”

Credit where it is due: I have http://www.anglaisfacile.com/forum/lire.php?num=3&msg=51851&titre=Traduction%2520-%2520flutterbudget to thank for bringing this word to my attention.

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conundrum

Posted on March 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ah, the sound of distant thunder: conundrum. “I hear her heart’s beating, loud as thunder / saw they stars crashing down.” Oh, love that David Bowie – “Sound of thunder, sound of gold, sound of the devil breaking parole.” But what does that mean? From another quarter another rumble mumbles:

A bridge a very small bridge in a location and thunder, any thunder, this is the capture of reversible sizing and more indeed more can be cautious.

Perhaps this will clarify:

If comparing a piece that is a size that is recognised as not a size but a piece, comparing a piece with what is not recognised but what is used as it is held by holding, comparing these two comes to be repeated.

Ah, well, sigh…

Lying in a conundrum, lying so makes the springs restless, lying so is a reduction, not lying so is arrangeable.

Conundrum: a numbing rumble, like a stone. A stone? A Stein, Gertrude! These things we learn, or unlearn, from “Rooms,” a long piece by Stein from Tender Buttons.

Oo, tender buttons? Like the little round button at the top? No, that was another drum: “And there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top.” This nonsense is the origin of Grand Panjandrum, which has one thing in common with conundrum: it is a fanciful pseudo-Latin confection.

Yes, indeed. The exact origin of conundrum is itself something of an unanswerable conundrum (making it a word, like pentasyllabic, that describes itself), but if you notice that it has the rim-shot rhythm of the punctuated punchline, “badum-bum,” well, that’s because the joke is on you. Once upon a time (a few centuries ago) the Oxford set and their ilk found faux-Latin words terribly amusing, because amusingly terrible. This is one of those. (If you were to write the word in Gothic script, you would be faced with an even better conundrum, as the n‘s and u‘s and m would all be written with series of similar crooked vertical strokes, hardly easier to read than cossssssdrsssss.)

This word in particular, now generally used as a synonym for enigma or dilemma, originally referred to a fanciful conceit (meaning that even then it described itself); from that it came to refer to a kind of play on words, as we see from this 1645 quotation: “This is the man who would have his device alwayes in his sermons, which in Oxford they then called conundrums. For an instance..Now all House is turned into an Alehouse, and a pair of dice is made a Paradice, was it thus in the days of Noah? Ah no!” From that it came to refer to a riddle the answer to which involved wordplay: “What is black and white and red (read) all over? A newspaper.”

And now, its fanciful nature forgotten, it is collocated with real, old, age-old, ancient, and philosophical, and is very often followed by a colon, as in this 2009 quotation from Sports Illustrated: “It is the age-old conundrum: the integrity of the sport versus the teeth-gritting ticket rain check.” Oh, that age-old conundrum! Didn’t they mention that in the Bible? Ah, heh… clearly this word is in decline, at least when it comes to fun. O bang the conundrum slowly!

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting conundrum.

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xynomavro

Posted on March 21, 2010 | 2 comments

This word strikes me as rather masculine in its initial appearance. I mean, look – it starts off with xy, the male chromosomes. Whatever it is, it’s no ma; and if you find the nom Avro in it, well, Avro made fighter jets, which are pretty masculine things, no? So this word might seem to be juiced up – full of spit and vinegar (or whatever that phrase was).

There’s an interesting thing about it, though: it has a certain vocalic hermaphroditism in the form you see – or at least her-mavro-ditism. You see the tail on the y? That v is really a y that has had its bit bobbed. Well, more to the point, both are the same letter in Greek – upsilon, a letter that once had an [u] sound, then moved front to be like German ü ([y]), and in modern Greek is an [i] sound… except between another vowel and a consonant, where it long ago took on a [v] sound (or [f] if the consonant is voiceless). Upsilon is most often represented in the Latin alphabet with y. But not, of course, when it stands for [v].

So this masculine word may seem a bit emasculated. An oxymoron? Or maybe just sour grapes?

In fact, it is sour grapes – sour black grapes, to be precise. That’s what the word means literally: “sour black” (or “acid black”). It’s the name of a kind of grape. Guess where they grow it? (Hint: northern Greece.) And guess what the juice from these grapes is loaded with? (I’ll give you this one: tannins. Tannic acid.) In fact, they ferment the juice from these grapes in special tanks to cut down on the tannins (see www.tonyaspler.com).

But good winemaking – and sometimes good blending too – can produce good results from some rather challenging grapes. There are some nice xynomavro wines out there, with lots of structure and with notes such as cedar, red berries, currants, even some floral hints. And because of the tannins, they tend to age well. So never mind the o‘s – the pucker factor is not so pronounced; it’s no ax on the tongue (though, to use the standard disclaimer abbreviation, YRMV (your results may vary)). And, you know, you can even get a quite pleasant sparkling red wine from it. Don’t worry, you can drink it without being a girly-man… just say this word and it’ll put hair on your chest.

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galore

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ah, ’twas a fine evening in the gallery with a gal or two… and a gallon or two! Sure, we had Guinness galore going down our gullets. Or, as we’d say in Gaelic, Do raibh Guinness go leor againn…

Ah, ’tis a good word, galore, for gulping and for glorious gluts. It moves a bit like a swallowing motion of the tongue, and leaves the mouth in that rounded position that is often seen in reaction to superabundance. And it even has a nice hint of the Irish in that sustained retroflex /r/ at the end – not that many languages have that sound: most kinds of English, most kinds of Irish, some kinds of Dutch, Mandarin Chinese… there are not sources galore for it!

Galore is indeed a Gaelic word, barely converted at all, at all. The original in Irish is go leor, literally “to sufficient” (in Scots Gaelic, it’s gu leòr). The pronunciation in the original is nearly identical to how we say it, even though the sense has magnified some. And, of course, since it’s a prepositional phrase, it goes where prepositional phrases go: just as in abundance goes after fish in we had fish in abundance, and out the wazoo goes after chips in and we had chips out the wazoo, so galore will follow the noun phrase it modifies, as in and of course we had Guinness galore… and as in the name of the novel and movie Whisky Galore, and as in its most common collocation in modern English, the name of one of the most famous Bond girls, Pussy Galore, played by Honor Blackman in Goldfinger.

Irish makes use of prepositional phrases even more than English does. You don’t say “I own it”; you say “it is with me,” tá sé liom (“is it with-me,” said like “ta shay lum”). You don’t say “we had Guinness,” you say “Guinness was at us,” do raibh Guinness againn (“[past] was Guinness at-us,” said like “doe rev Guinness uggíng”). And if someone did something to your detriment, he or she did it “on” you – do bhris sí an cathaoir orm, “she broke the chair on me” (“[past] broke she the chair on-me,” said like “doe vrish she an ca-heer orum”) just means she broke your chair, darn it, not that she broke it over your head. This usage is colloquial in English but standard in Irish.

This prepositional tendency gives us some Irish-English phrases like I’m after talking with him, meaning “I just talked to him,” and it also shows up in the well-known Éireann go bragh (often seen as Erin go bragh), “Ireland forever” – and in galore, in use in English since the 17th century.

Ironically, galore may first have been borrowed over from Scots Gaelic… but, of course, as everyone but the Scots knows, Scots Gaelic was originally a dialect of Irish Gaelic, so of course it comes back to Ireland, sure and it does.

Thanks to David Moody for suggesting galore. ‘Tis true, I’ve done it before, so now we have galore galore!

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prognathous

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Does this word seem pugnacious? Well, if your prognosis for pugnacity involves lots of jutting jaws, you just might have it. But you gneed gnot gnash your teeth… prognathous really describes a kind of facial physiognomy. And, yes, the g is pronounced as written, which means your tongue does a one-two back-front touch that might make you think of a stuffed-up nose but won’t necessarily make you jut your jaw much.

And it’s the jutting jaw that is the essence here: Greek pro “forward” and gnathos “jaw”. This word always makes me think of Philip IV of Spain – take a little time to look at any of the several portraits of him at various ages all made by Diego Velázquez. But others might sooner think of, say, Jay Leno. For the clinical sense, however, the jaw need not be as long as all that; it just needs to jut at a sharper-than-average angle.

There is something about this word that feels right to me for a big jaw. The gn seems to have the right feel, but it’s not just that. While magnum may seem jaw-y, cognition doesn’t really. The visual effect, even when the g is not said, may be a bit of a cue, but while gnash has a similar mandibularity, gnat has not. So it’s hard to separate out true phonaesthetic effect from simple awareness of the sense filtering through.

Still and all, tell me how, for instance, the name Gnaeus Naevius strikes you. Does it seem rather growly and toothy or otherwise pugnacious, perhaps like Gnasher, the nasty dog of that nasty British boy Dennis the Menace (no, not the American one drawn by Hank Ketcham; this one, started on the other side of the pond and appearing first a mere three days after the American one hit the presses in 1951, is unrelated). Gnasher has been know to chuckle gneh-heh, so why might he not, when gnawing on a bone, growl Gnaeus Naevius? Well, in fact, Gnaeus Naevius was a Roman satirical playwright, known for making the patricians gnash their teeth. There is no evidence that he was prognathous. But doesn’t his name have that feel?

On the other hand, there is also no evidence that he was opisthognathous. There is nothing at all to tell us about his gnathic index, in fact.

OK, what and what? Gnathic index: an indicator of how relatively far forward the jaw does or doesn’t jut. Opisthognathous: why, the opposite of prognathous, of course, and a word just made for lisping weak-jawed sorts to say.

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apoplectic

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 1 comment

What! Apoplectic! Apoplectic!! APOPLECTIC!!! Aaaghkx…

Oh, isn’t this just the perfect word for a sputtering fit? Four voiceless plosives, at least two of which are typically aspirated – and in one of which the aspiration spreads onto the following liquid like flames onto a puddle of gasoline: listen to the /pl/ as you say it, and think of the last time you lit a gas barbecue. And then in the next, the /kt/, the back and tip of the tongue are touching the top of the mouth simultaneously, which can make for extra pressure in the release – even a pop, or at least a tic. It’s a one-two punch: hold your hand in front of your mouth as you say this word. You’ll feel one puff (or two in close sequence) of air towards the top of the hand, and then one down by the bottom or on the wrist, thanks to the different tongue positions at release. Vocal fireworks! And the possibility of a little release of spit! It even has a suitable look to it, with those p p like ballons on sticks popped at the c c, perhaps.

These days, this word is used pretty much entirely for “bustin’-a-vein furious.” But it – or rather apoplexy, the word from which it derives – was once a standard medical diagnosis. And a common one: it was credited with laying low people from Al Capone to the Dowager Empress Cixi, from Louisa May Alcott to William Lyon Mackenzie, from Felix Mendelssohn to Catherine the Great, and two US presidents too: Wilson and Harding (that’s another one-two: Harding was right after Wilson). And what did it refer to? Why, bustin’ a vein. Or, more generally, any death following on sudden loss of consciousness – typically due to a ruptured aneurysm, but also possibly due to some ischemia, even heart attack.

The term is not used now in medicine, but it remains useful for states of extreme fury or similar. There aren’t really suitable adjectives formed from heart attack or stroke, after all, and they remain too potentially literal; this word is known to be figurative, it’s a nice direct adjective, and it has such a perfect sound. It is often followed by fit, which is a perfect fit, sound-wise; it can also be followed by rage. On the other hand, perhaps with a nod to its literal sense, it is often preceded by practically or nearly.

I learned this word in my childhood, but first I learned apoplexy, and in an unusual instance that gave it a different tone for me: the classical Greek painter Zeuxis was said to have laughed so hard at a painting of an ugly woman that he died of apoplexy. So apoplexy and paroxysm have always seemed kindred to me. But, pace apoplectic Zeuxis, apoplectic has ever had the capillary-popping rage association, especially since it was often applicable to me in my childhood: I had a terrible temper. I might have taken the word as an admonition of sorts, since at least one of my ancestors died of an aneurysm (thereby leaving a constant little worry at the back of my mind).

You probably have figured out that this word comes from the Greek, with its apo at the beginning. Apo can mean “off” but it can also, as a prefix, mean “completely”. The rest of the word comes from the verb plessein, “strike”. So to be apoplectic is to be struck down – felled by a stroke.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting apoplectic.

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vacay

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 5 comments

Hey, vacay, it’s like a playday and a soirée… What do you say? Oh, extra syllables are soooo last whatever. No need to “shun,” just let it trail off at the end into that creaky city-girl growl. It’s a lay-back-and-check-your-nail-polish kind of sound. You just, kind of, vacate that last syllable, y’know? And that [eI] diphthong ending may be catching on. Oprah decided to name a certain organ the va-jay-jay, for instance.

Vacay also looks like a place to go on vacay. There’s Rum Cay, Sandy Cay, Mira por vos Cay, why not Va Cay? (Or, with the pronunciation, Vay Cay? Maybe it’s off Miami Beach – Oy Vay Cay!) Or it could be on some Spanish island: vaca y… “cow and ” what?

The word is almost neatly symmetrical; the v shapes are like martinis or upside-down umbrellas or swaying palm trees or deck chairs seen from above, the c like a glass of beverage or a table seen from above… the tail of the y gives it that extra sway, or perhaps it’s draining away something: stress, rain from a storm, final syllables…

If the word seems to engender an empty stare or an empty desk chair, or if it bespeaks an empty mind or an empty wallet, well, it is from vacation, which is ultimately from Latin vacare, verb, “be empty” – or (I like this better) “be free”. Free as a bird! Vacay? Okay…

And how did this relaxed, quasi-urbane, Paris-Hilton-sounding word come our way? Its primary vector seems to have been the ciné: Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon. “You mean, like on vacay? Road trip!” Give the girl a standing ovay…

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pasticcio, pastiche

Posted on March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

I remember very clearly my first part in a mainstage production as a university drama student. The play was Sheridan’s The Critic, of 1779. I strode on as an Italian gentleman of the time, accompanied by a daughter whose singing I wished to promote and by an interpreter, and declared briskly to the English lady of the house, “Ah, vossignoria, noi vi preghiamo di favorirci colla vostra protezione.” The interpreter leapt in to ease communication: “Madame, me interpret. C’est à dire – in English – qu’ils vous prient de leur faire l’honneur –” This macaronic mash-up, of course, didn’t help the poor lady at all.

My character’s name? Pasticcio Ritornello. Rather fitting, naturally, given the linguistic pasticcio accompanying him. If language were the food of love, this scene would be, well, a pasticcio, perhaps: a pie made of a mixture of meat and pasta. Or pastistio, which is the Greek version of the same thing (no crust, just pasta, meat, tomatoes, and white sauce). One could wash it down with a glass of pastis (ouzo to the Greeks among us). Or drink the pastis as an appetizer – as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “what’s pastis prologue.”

Of course, pasticcio and pastiche – one might call them my character’s version and the interpreter’s version of the same word – are more often used to refer to an assemblage of disparate elements, a paste-up job, as it were (en français on dirait une collage). And how fitting that is! Paste comes from pasta, meaning “dough” and then later “noodles” (you did know that noodles are made from a tough dough, didn’t you?); it in turn comes from a Greek word for porridge. Pasticcio comes not from pasta as in noodles (though pasticcio contains them) but directly from the Latin pasticium “pie, pastry”, also from pasta of course. Pastiche comes from pasticcio, and both of them spread to things in music and art that have divers ingredients, pasted, stitched, or stuck together. The same past root also made its way into French as a word for “hodgepodge, mess”: pastis. That word was applied to a beverage that, though clear, turns murky white when water is added: ouzo, sambuca… pastis.

These days, pastiche and pasticcio seem to be things of the past; the preferred term currently is the rather lumpy Anglo-Saxon mash-up. It does happen to be the case that mash was first of all a word for the mixture of water and barley malt used in brewing, so we have come full circle to the barley recognizable origins. But when it comes to linguistic medleys, I prefer a term drawn from a a dish made with a type of hollow pasta, which in turn may originally have taken its name from a Greek word for barley broth. The pasta and the dish (which is the pasta plus butter and cheese) are called macaroni (or maccheroni or a few other spellings), and a mixture of languages – as one finds in some medieval music, where Latin and the local vernacular are mixed – is described as macaronic.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting pastiche.

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