Tag Archives: word tasting notes

butterfly, part 2

Posted on November 11, 2022 | 3 comments

The butterfly of Romance: papilio, papillon, farfalla, mariposa, borboleta, fluture

The Romance languages – so called not because they’re romantic but because they come from Roman – have a surprising assortment of words for ‘butterfly’. 

Usually words for the same thing in the different Romance languages tend to resemble each other: for example, the words for ‘bread’ (Latin panis) are French pain, Italian pane, Spanish pan, Portuguese pão, and Romanian pâine(and there are similar words in Catalan, Provençal, and other related languages). Given that the Latin word for ‘butterfly’ is papilio, French papillon is unsurprising, but what about Italian farfalla, Spanish mariposa, Portuguese borboleta, and Romanian fluture?

Let’s start with why the Latin word is papilio. Every word comes from some previous version, all the way back into the mists of time and beyond; we can’t see into the mists of time, but we can sometimes guess what’s in them by the noises coming out of them and what emerges from them, sort of like a fight in a foggy forest. So scholars have done a lot of work reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, the language that is the great ancient ancestor of the Indo-European languages, a huge set that includes tongues such as Spanish, Gaelic, English, Swedish, Russian, and Hindi. And their best guess is that papilio comes from the root *pal- (the asterisk means it’s reconstructed from evidence, like museum dinosaurs), meaning ‘touch, tap, pat, feel, shake’, things like that. But the *pal- is reduplicated, as if they had decided to call a butterfly a papatty or tatappio. Why? I mean, I don’t know, but hey, look at butterflies!

So anyway, French didn’t change papilio much, just added the nasalizing n to the end as it did to assorted other words and gliding the l. But Italian, which usually keeps things recognizably close to the Latin, managed to come up with farfalla. Where the heck did that come from? It may have been something as simple (so to speak) as a Tuscan consonant shift that turns voiceless stops into fricatives: casa, ‘house’, is pronounced as “hasa” in Tuscan, for instance, and a similar thing could have happened to the p’s in papilio. But it’s not obvious what local perturbations would cause it to change this word in particular in standard Italian and not so many others. There’s also the question of where the r came from, though Provençal and Lombardy also got an r in their versions (parpalhos, parpaja). It may instead be that it all happened under Arabic influence; there’s a Tunisian Arabic word for ‘butterfly’, farfaṭṭu, that shows up as farfett in Maltese. A borrowing or cross-influence isn’t too far-fettched… though we don’t know for sure.

At this point you may look at Portuguese borboleta and think, hmm, just change those f’s to b’s – and “b” is as easily gotten from “p” as “f” is, in historic sound changes – and adjust the vowels a bit and Bob’s your uncle. And that might be what happened. But then again, it might not. Instead of papatty, it could be bebeauty – that is, Latin bellus ‘beautiful’ might have become *belbeleta in Old Portuguese, which easily enough changes to borboleta over the years. But, again, we’re not sure…

And how about Spanish mariposa? Does that seem a bridge too far to flutter across from papilio? It is. The Spanish descendant of papilio is pabellón, but it doesn’t mean ‘butterfly’; it means ‘pavilion’ – which, surprise surprise, is also descended from papilio and originally referred to the butterfly shape of an ornate tent (I’m taking someone else’s word for this). But that is a digression for us here to all in tents. Instead of keeping pabellón for the lovely little insect, the Spanish looked at it and said, “Mary, alight” – “María, pósate,” which shortened to mariposa. And may a blessing from the mother of God land on you too!

Meanwhile, Romanian flutters by with fluture. It’s probably related to Albanian flutur (yeah, probably!), but which one of the two came first is a kind of butterfly–hurricane problem. English spell checkers think fluture should be future, which it’s not related to, but it looks rather like flutter, and it might be related to that – very far back, though, because flutter traces all the way through Germanic to Proto-Indo-European, rather than, as one might hope, more directly to Latin fluctuare, which is the source of fluctuate and possibly – but just possibly – the source of fluture. Or maybe it’s something else carried loosely on the currents of language.

Next: the cream of the Germanic summer.

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butterfly

Posted on November 9, 2022 | 2 comments

Papillon. Farfalla. Mariposa. Schmetterling. Vlinder. Sommerfugl. Fjäril. Tauriņš. Babochka. Butterfly. It is, to use a technical term, freakin’ weird how flagrantly unrelated the words for ‘butterfly’ often are even among closely related languages. 

We can chalk that up to the butterfly effect.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect? That staple of chaos theory, of the possible effect of small perturbations on large systems? The idea is that the flap of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon could, through small differences in air currents being relayed and increasing in effect, result in a change in the course of a hurricane in the Caribbean. I think of it as like the effect of my elevator having to stop on an extra floor, resulting in my missing a subway train by a few seconds, resulting in my missing a connecting bus that runs every half hour. But of course at least as much of the time the elevator stop has zero effect: I get to the subway and wait a few minutes, I get to the bus and wait a few minutes. 

Needless to say, most butterfly wing flaps couldn’t and don’t make such a huge difference either… and, more importantly, the paths of hurricanes are subject to countlessly many influences. Our best predictions of hurricane paths are probabilistic. There are so many influences, we can’t trace them all or even be aware of them all. It might as well be random chance, like a roll of dice: if you had all the information about the muscle movements, the weight and shape of the dice, and the details of the surface they’re rolled onto, you’d predict it 100% of the time, but you don’t. “Random” is a word we use when we don’t have all the information or even know what all the information to have is.

And why not turn the butterfly effect around? Have you seen those things fly? There are obviously many air currents affecting them; they flutter by through the air on a wild chaotic path impossible to predict precisely. Maybe a hurricane in the Caribbean is responsible for two millimetres of displacement on the path of a butterfly in Brazil. How the heck do they fly, anyway? Didn’t someone once say that according to aerodynamics, butterflies can’t fly?

If that were true, of course, it would just mean that aerodynamics didn’t have enough information, since obviously butterflies do fly. But as it happens, butterfly flight has been studied intensely precisely because it’s not immediately obvious how it works. In 2021, researchers at Lund University in Sweden published results of a study showing how butterfly wings are aerodynamically effective: they clap together at the top tips first, and from the front rolling to the back, resulting in effective propulsion by pushing an air pocket backwards, and then the downstrokes keep them aloft. (The researchers didn’t say it, but I think it’s a given that butterflies are not prone to motion sickness.) So once again, the butterfly effect has to do more with seeing things as random or chaotic just because we lack information.

And we can apply that to the utter chaotic weirdness of the multiplicity of seemingly unrelated words for ‘butterfly’ in different languages. There are a few factors we can look at to help explain it. One, and an important one, is how pretty and charming butterflies are; this can motivate people to come up with fanciful names or at least to make modifications to existing names. Another is the broken-telephone effects of transmission of words from generation to generation, especially among the general public who have historically not been big on writing things down. Another is the effect of contact between different languages.

I’m going to look at a few language families to see how this plays out around the world. But instead of unleashing one enormous flurry of words on you, I’m serializing it. This has been part one. Part two will be the butterfly of Romance.

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chrysanthemum

Posted on October 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Happy chrysanthemum season! It’s the flower of the month for November. It’s also popular on Mother’s Day in May in Australia (mum’s the word!). It’s a flower of love and friendship, and also of death: in some places (notably New Orleans) it’s the featured flower of remembrance on All Saints’ Day. It’s the imperial flower of Japan – the throne of the emperor is the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the flower is featured on the imperial flag – and it’s also used as slang in Japanese and Chinese for ‘butthole’. In English, it has a long name but is often reduced to a very short one (mum!). It comes in dozens of species and countless cultivars. It is thus, we may say, a flower of considerable variety.

Well, in some ways, at least. Among Western languages, the words for it are just about universally chrysanthemum or something nearly identical (Finnish krysanteemit is about as far as it goes), all tracing back to Greek χρῡσάνθεμον, from khrusós χρυσός ‘gold’ and ánthos ἄνθος ‘flower’ (which not all chrysanthemums are, but the Greek name was first originally for the corn-marigold, Chrysanthemum segetum). The mum to which we commonly shorten it is really just a suffix – a bit of Latinized derivational morphology, nothing to do with the roots.

On the other hand, in China, where the chrysanthemum was first cultivated some 3500 years ago, the name for it is 菊花. That’s also the name for it in Japan, if you’re writing in kanji, and it’s also the name for it in Korea, if you’re writing in hanja. But of course it’s not pronounced the same in all three languages. We’ll get to that; I’ll start by telling you that in Mandarin, it’s júhuā (the j is said about like English “j”; the u is like German “ü”; hua is like “hwa”; and the tones are rising on the first and high level on the second).

菊花 is made of two characters, and the second one means ‘flower’; the first one means ‘chrysanthemum’. Why not just say jú (菊)? Because there are assorted other words that are also pronounced jú, a notable one of which is 局, which means a lot of things, including ‘office’, ‘bureau’, ‘situation’, ‘arrangement’, ‘organization’, and ‘chessboard’. So for clarity the huā (花) is added to make it clear when speaking that this is the jú that’s the flower. (By the way, no, ‘flower arrangement’ is not 花局, sorry; it’s 插花, chāhuā, which could be translated as ‘insert flowers’.)

And why the heck would they have words for ‘flower’ and ‘arrangement’ that sound the same? Well, they didn’t always… in Middle Chinese, the chrysanthemum was said /kɨuk̚/ and the arrangement was said /ɡɨok̚/. But – in Mandarin, though not in all kinds of Chinese – the final stop got dropped (as they all did in Mandarin), and the initial stops got palatalized and merged. But Japanese borrowed the words (both of them) along with their characters a long time ago, and in Japanese 菊 is kiku but 局 is kyoku (there are actually other pronunciations of both of them in different contexts; Japanese’s use of Chinese characters – kanji – is ideographic and not strictly phonetic; for example, 花 is most often pronounced hana but 菊花 is kiku ka).

OK, fine, but what about these characters, these little flowers of ink? The first thing to note is that both of them, 菊and 花, have the same top part, which is a piece that by itself signifies ‘grass’ – or, more broadly, any kind of field-growing plant. Beneath that, in 菊 you see something that kind of looks like a chrysanthemum face-on: 匊. When it’s like that without the grass on top, it’s pronounced jū, and it doesn’t mean ‘chrysanthemum’. Nope, it’s also two parts; the middle bit, 米, by itself is mǐ, and it means ‘grain’; it comes from a depiction of the separation of grains by threshing. The outside part, 勹, isn’t used by itself, but in combining it usually refers to wrapping or enclosing. Together those two, 匊, originally meant ‘handful’ (the amount of grain you could hold in your hand) but now translate as ‘receive with both hands’. 

Which is a lovely thing to do with a big bunch of chrysanthemums, but really the 匊 in 菊, however much it might look like a chrysanthemum head-on, is just there because it’s phonetically the same (though the tone has changed now), so the character is put together as ‘field plant that sounds like ju (handful)’. But that chrysanthemum-looking bit is there; they could have used a different character for the sound, after all – there are others…

OK, and 花? Is it put together as ‘field plant that sounds like hua’? Well… yeah. But again, that phonetic part, 化, is recognizable and has meaning too. It’s made of two parts, which – originally – are the same character, 人, one right side up and one upside down, and it just got modified a bit over time. What does that character mean? ‘Human’ or ‘person’ or ‘man’. Meaning that 化 is formed as two humans, one right side up, one upside down. Nice, eh? And what has that to do with flowers, aside from the sound (huà)? Its meaning is ‘change’. The two humans depicted were really one in two states, tumbling head over heels. Not because flowers will make someone fall head over heels for you – they might, but your results may vary – but flowers are a transformation of a plant of the field from mere grass to something lovelier.

So here. Have a handful of transformation. If you look at all the things this plant’s name has been, there’s no shortage of transformation – and if you look at the things it can signify (including love and death), there’s still more. And then there’s the matter of how many different ways chrysanthemums can look…

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prig

Posted on October 27, 2022 | 1 comment

As I said in my last word tasting, smugness smothers like an overstuffed overpriced cushion, but priggishness pricks like a cactus. A prig is someone who is unassailably conceited on a point of correctness, self-righteous with the primness of certainty of moral as well as factual correctness. And it is not enough for a prig to be right; there must also be someone who is correspondingly wrong. Indeed, I think that prigs choose their opinions precisely on the basis of being able to flatly “correct” others on occasion. As George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, “A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

There is, I should say, no sure etymological connection between prig and prick (though a person who is called the former might well also be called the latter). There is also no known connection between prig and any other word such as sprig or brig or rig, because, to be plain, its origin is unknown. Its earlier senses included ‘thief’ and ‘dandy, fop’, and the latter shaded into the present usage, but before about the time of Shakespeare we have been unable to get a grip on prig, source-wise. Sound-wise, it may well gain from the “pr” we hear on prick and prim and proper and a few other words of similar tone, and perhaps from the stiffness or restriction of sprig, brig, and rig. But there’s no way to know that for sure. Not that priggishness requires any support – it is entirely self-assured – but linguistics sure does. Which is one reason linguistics is a natural enemy of priggishness.

I’ve wanted to write on prig for some time, but each time I’ve had the thought to do so, I’ve determined to wait for a bit so that I won’t seem to be focusing on some specific person I’ve had an interaction with online. The problem is just that by the time the smoke from one such interaction has wafted away, either I’ve forgotten about the topic or – at least as likely – another prig has come along. 

You see, when it comes to grammar and usage, well-informed, open-minded views draw prigs like a fruit basket draws flies. As soon as I use linguistic fact and understanding to contradict some reactionary mumpsimus (remember, “unalterable tradition” is what any given change-hater recalls learning in their childhood, even if it was new at the time and even if they have not accurately remembered it), I can count on someone showing up to flatly contradict me. They don’t present any counter-argument; they simply say I’m wrong, and that’s that, as though they had such authority that I ought to accept it and sit down and be quiet.*

I’m not the only language person to encounter this – not by a country mile. Others with higher profiles than I encounter it even more. My fellow editor and friend John McIntyre recently posted a column on letting go of long-held usage rules, and in it he quoted one person on Twitter who took exception to letting go of one particular “rule”: “actually, right is right and wrong is wrong, and as the ink-on-paper world dies it should do so with some fidelity to the language. also, ‘they’ and ‘their’ as references to an individual are always grammatically wrong. precision exists for a reason.” (This statement is wrong in every detail, incidentally, not just analytically in the present but in terms of historical fact too; I’ve written and presented on the topic in detail already.) As John said in a tweet about the column, “Apologies to anyone from whom I may be taking away things that make them a prig.”

But of course one of the things about prigs is that they refuse to have those things taken away. A prig is someone who clings to the last floating matchstick of a sunken ship and declares themself captain of it. Often that sunken ship is some idea of intrinsic superiority that is actually the ghost of class (well, “ghost” in the same was as a person may leave a “ghost” in an elevator after a lunch of beans and cabbage, and the next people into the elevator will not see a spectre of them but will certainly know something ghastly has passed). A most famous prig – indeed, the one person whose name comes up repeatedly if you search “prig” today – is Jacob Rees-Mogg, an English politician who has resolutely determined to mistake class signifiers for infallible marks of intelligence one hundred percent of the time. 

Another political figure I have seen called priggish is John Bolton, erstwhile US “diplomat” (technically yes, but astoundingly undiplomatic) and national security adviser, whose signature move is lecturing other people and being unable to conceive of any occasion in which he could possibly be even slightly in the wrong. Both Rees-Mogg and Bolton are blue-ribbon members of the “geez, you must be fun at parties” set, and this is an essential quality of prigs: above all, they do not, they may not, have fun. Fun is childish, and they are fully invested in being superior, which means absolutely not childish. You may on occasion see the phrase “joyless prig”; in truth, it’s pleonastic, but use it anyway if it pleases you. As one Reverend Alexander Carlyle wrote in his 1860 autobiography, among the clergy, “The prigs are truly not to be endured, for they are but half learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.”

Which says, in its way and with more words, about what George Eliot said. The motion of the prig is upbraiding. Pigs might fly, but prigs will not – but they will sit on their dilapidated rooftops trying to shoot down anyone who does.

*Which, if you know me, is pretty funny. I have many weaknesses and undesirable traits, and I can certainly be provoked, but if you try to bully me on matters of understanding of language or general perspicacity it is not going to go as you appear to have envisioned it. I may have been bullied many ways as a kid, but, if I’m being honest, when it came to matters intellectual, I was the bully, so much so I didn’t even notice or admit it. And was I priggish? Yeah, probably, but mainly when I was wrong. Priggishness is rigid and rigidity is the best way to be wrong.

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smug

Posted on October 24, 2022 | 1 comment

Today I saw two unrelated but in one way coincidental tweets adjacent in my Twitter. The first, from @PamelaLeibfried, in response to a tweet by @mollypriddy that “we gave morning people way too much power,” read “And they are so damned smug.” The second, from @BCDreyer, said “I know that some people are anti-blocking because blocking allegedly gives the blockee some sense of smug satisfaction, but that’s nothing compared to my smug satisfaction at being rid of the asshole.”

That’s the thing about smugness: it’s insufferable, but we all allow ourselves a little from time to time, as a treat. A person who is smug is a schmuck, but there are some people we will be quietly pleased to imagine thinking of us as schmucks.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this common sense of smug as “having a self-satisfied, conceited, or consciously respectable air,” and I have to say, as much as I love the OED, that definition doesn’t fully capture the particular kind of irritating smugness can be. It could almost equally define priggish, and while there could seem to be some overlap between smugness and priggishness, in truth it’s a narrow borderland; priggishness pricks like a cactus, while smugness smothers like an overstuffed overpriced cushion. 

So, after gently setting aside the plate I received when I was given the Karen Virag Award by Editors Canada, I reached behind my little Eiffel Tower filled with bottles of champagne and other sparkling wines and hefted up my ponderous copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary – which some years ago I portered home from the ACES conference after winning it in a spelling bee – and flipped casually to page 2153, whereat I read what I think is a more satisfying definition: “marked by or suggestive of belief in one’s own superiority, virtue, and respectability usu. accompanied by contented resistance to change, provincial lack of vision, or deprecation of others.”

I may be coming at it just from my own perspective, but I do think the “belief in one’s own superiority” is a particularly signal characteristic of smug as it’s used today, as is “resistance to change” or “lack of vision.” When I think of smug people I have encountered, top of the list is political insiders: that subset of people who have worked in some government office or otherwise had some particular “in” in politics (such as working for a candidate or giving lots of money to a candidate) who are prone to chuckling lightly, rolling their eyes, waving their hands, or whatnot, any time someone in earshot suggests that something better than what we have now might be possible.

Not that they are the only smug people out there, of course. I’m sure we can all think of instances where someone who had a certain seemingly unassailable advantage – money, height, insider status, or some other apparently unalienable boon – treated our concerns or questions as so much lint to be blown off. (The comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates conveyed the sense rather trenchantly a decade ago in their song “Pregnant Women Are Smug.”)

And as repellant as it is on the receiving end, smugness has an undeniable appeal on the giving end. It’s just so… snug. You get to be calm and happy and yet somehow smuggle in just a little bit of emotional murder. 

And so you might think that smug is related to snug, and perhaps to smuggle. Well, yes, I suppose you might think that, since you haven’t been reading up on it. Oh, now, that’s fine, I’ll tell you; you had no reason to know better, really. In truth, snug has an uncertain origin but is likely related to Proto-Germanic words meaning ‘tight’ or ‘handsome’, and has no evidence of relation to smug, and although snuggle is quite obviously derived from snug with the -le suffix we see from time to time, there’s simply no evidence to tie smug to smuggle – in fact, smuggle came into English from a Proto-Germanic root meaning ‘creep’ or ‘sneak’ or ‘slip’.

No, no, smug is a little mysterious – oh, when we’re smug, aren’t we always playing at being mysterious? – but before it had our current sense it started up in English as meaning ‘well-groomed, neat, smart’ and seems to have come from Low German smuk ‘delicate, neat, trim’ – though it’s hard to account for just how that k became a g because, though I wouldn’t expect you to know this, it’s not a usual change in that environment between those two languages. But anyway, that Low German smuk is, yes, related to German schmuck ‘pretty’ and Schmuck ‘jewelry, ornament’.

And does that mean therefore that smug and schmuck (in the English sense of ‘jerk’, taken from Yiddish for ‘penis’ or ‘foreskin’ or ‘fool’) are, back in the mists of time, the same word? Well… we’re not sure. There were, it seems, several kinds of schmuck and related words in the Germanic sphere at the time, and they may or may not all have come from the same source. 

But we know, don’t we.

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offing

Posted on October 12, 2022 | 5 comments

This word tasting has been in the offing for a while – if by offing I may mean my notepad on my phone. It’s not that it’s been perceptible to anyone else. But, hey, it’s my offing. Lay off. -ing.

Most of us know this word only in the phrase in the offing, and meaning something that’s a-comin’ like a slow train across the prairies. Occasionally you may even see it reconstrued as in the offering, because, really, what the heck is an offing? We know what an inning is, and we know what an outing is (by the caprices of English the two are not antonyms), and we know what a siding is and a topping (probably not a bottoming, though), and we can talk about upping the price and downing a drink, but there’s no such thing as an onning and it’s not clear to most of us why the offing is the offing.

Well, what it is, is if you’re on shore and looking out to sea, out there, off shore, off past all the coastal hazards, off in the stretch of sea before you get to the horizon, if you see a ship there, it’s in the offing. Because the offing is that stretch of the sea that’s far off, but not so far off that you can’t see it. And it’s called the offing because, well, it’s off in the distance. 

Really, that’s it. The word’s been with us at least since Shakespeare was alive and writing (though the Bard himself never used it in his plays), and the figurative use has been around at least since the late 1700s. Now, a ship that is in the offing is not necessarily heading towards you; it could be just crossing from one side to the other, parallel to the shore at a distance, or it could even be going away from you. But when people were keeping watch on the offing, it wasn’t principally to make sure that a ship was good and gone; it was to see if there was one coming, looming in the offing, to use a turn of phrase that Theodore Dreiser and Walter Scott were both comfortable with.

The offing is not a strictly established distance or span of distance. The inshore hazards and anchorages extend a varying and imprecise distance, beyond which the offing starts, and the distance of the horizon – the farther limit of the offing – will depend on your elevation. Just for example, when I stand on the shore of Lake Ontario, on Toronto Island, the far shore is beyond the horizon, but when I look from the south window of my apartment on the 27th floor, I can see the far shore, nearly 50 km away. 

This can certainly inform the metaphor too: not just that if you take a more elevated perspective you will be able to see more in the offing, but also that sometimes the offing ends before the horizon – there is a far shore, and who knows but the ship you see in the offing may be heading for it. And you’re on the far side of the offing for people on the far shore. Perhaps that puts you in the onning.

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distraught

Posted on October 6, 2022 | 2 comments

On September 23, George Wallace, @MrGeorgeWallace, tweeted “How come you only hear about folks being distraught? No one’s ever like, ‘I’m good, Bro. I’m traught as hell.’”

The answer to this might leave you variously whelmed or gruntled, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you felt a little straught. At the very least, though, you might be distracted.

The thing is, distraught is… a bit of a historical misanalysis. Like parsnip, or belfry, or cockroach, or penthouse, or female. The best you could even say is that it’s a deliberate blend, like chillax.

Oh, are you a bit distracted by that list of examples? Maybe even disgustipated? Are they vomitrocious? Sorry, I’ll give you the quick low-down and then we can move on to the main event. Parsnip looks like a blend of parsley and turnip but it actually came from Old French pasnaie (from Latin pastinum, probably), reanalyzed to pasnepe under the influence of nep (‘turnip’), and then that was reanalyzed to parsnip because parsley somehow (they don’t have a lot in common). Belfry comes from berfrey, related to German Bergfried, referring to a tall defensive tower – but, hey, bells! Cockroach, as you may know, is from Spanish cucaracha, no relation to cocks or roaches (a roach is a kind of fish, and I don’t mean a silverfish), but if you see one crawling from under your pineapple, you’re only reaching for your Merriam-Webster for the sake of violence. Penthouse is from pentice, ultimately from the same Latin root as append. And female is originally from femelle, from Latin femella, diminutive of femina, no relation to male.

OK, but distraught? Well, it started as distract (meaning, as I’m sure you don’t need to be told, distracted), ultimately from Latin distractus, but, in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup way, it also started as straught, a strong past-tense form of stretch (in other words, straught is to stretched as taught is to teached, except that the strong form won in the latter but not in the former). We could say that distract was just misanalyzed by analogy, but we could also say that it was at least partly deliberate, a blending like disgustipated or vomitrocious or chillax, because being distraught is not just being distracted (even as in “driven to distraction”) but feeling stretched in various directions (as, for instance, by several divergent horses).

The funny thing about that, mind you, is that that’s what distractus meant too: dis- ‘apart, away’ plus tractus, from trahere ‘pull, drag’ – you might recognize the relation to traction, tractor, and even attraction (something that draws you in). If you’re distracted, your attention is pulled in different directions. 

And if tractus had passed through the same Germanic machinery as Proto-Germanic *strakkaz (which became stretch and, at one time, straught), it could have become George Wallace’s traught. It still would have meant ‘pulled’, but only one way, not several at the same time. Which, I guess, is more attractive.

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proteronymous

Posted on September 30, 2022 | 6 comments

I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario today, and I stopped one more time by the exhibition Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empire. Along with the many artworks and historical insights, I especially took note of something I saw on several placards describing artworks:

“Artist once known.”

Think of how many times you’ve been in a gallery or a museum for an exhibition of artifacts from other times and places and seen a placard detailing a work by someone whose identity is not known. Do you remember what it said?

“Anonymous.”

“Artist unknown.”

Or nothing at all, just the place and date.

We all know, but I’ll say it to make sure it’s acknowledged: Everything that has been made has been made by someone. 

And while things made in factories are made by people following the designs of other people and they generally have no expectation of recognition, every singular handmade work of art or craft has been made by someone who has done it in a way no one else would have done quite the same, and most of them were done by people who were certainly known at the time the artwork was completed, even if not for long after. And we can’t assume they didn’t care whether their name was remembered.

We often call works by unknown artists “anonymous.” This is so common in music from earlier times that the different composers known as Anonymous are numbered for identification (because we know all these pieces are by one person, and all these by another, but we don’t know their names). One prolific medieval composer even has an eponymous quartet: Anonymous 4. But those of us who work on bibliographies often make the distinction that Anonymous means that the person deliberately did not want their name to be known (like an anonymous donor to some art institution, say), whereas a person whose name is unknown just by happenstance is Unknown. (Or is just not named: depending on your house style, you may cite articles by unknown authors just by the title.)

The thing about unknown, though, is that it has a timeless air to it: the question is not raised of whether it had ever been known. The name is treated as if it had never been known. (To say nothing of giving only a title or description and not even a substitute for a name.) And, on a moment’s reflection, we know that that is not true. At least one person knew – and probably more than just one. It’s only unknown to us.

Which is why I really like “Artist once known.” It’s accurate, and it also reminds us of the person, and of the erasures and erosions in the river of history. Not only that, you could say it leaves the door of possible knowledge ajar: if once, why not future? Who is to say we might not find out, at some future time, the name and other details about the person who made it? It’s not very likely, but such things happen once in a while.

Now, once known is a perfectly suitable and clear term. There is no need for a classically derived term. But there is also no need for all sorts of fun things that nonetheless do no harm and that some of us still want. Museums are known to have a few. And I enjoy words (did I need to say this?). So… what word could we use in counterpoise to anonymous?

There isn’t an established word for ‘once known’ to match up with anonymous. So I decided to do a little messing around with the Lego kit of Classical Greek. Why Greek? Just because anonymous is from Classical Greek, from ᾰ̓νώνῠμος, meaning ‘no name’. So in place of ‘no’ we want… what?

I looked at a number of possibilities. I had uneasily settled on potonymous or poteonymous, using ποτέ, pote, meaning ‘once, at one time’. But there’s not so much likelihood of that being remembered, used, and for that matter pronounced suitably by English speakers. 

So I am suggesting proteronymous, from πρότερος ‘before, earlier’ plus the same -onymous root (from ὄνῠμᾰ, Aeolian and Doric version of Attic ὄνομᾰ). Easier to deal with for Anglophones. I acknowledge that ‘once, at one time’ is semantically slightly better than ‘before, earlier’, but usability is a thing, you know? And anyway, it’s only for people for whom once known isn’t quite fancy enough… and those of us who fancy another word just because.

And if it passes into general use and no one remembers that I was the one who first glued those two bits together… it’s OK. I don’t mind. It’s not an artwork I toiled many hours on. Unlike paper money, a word is only truly verbal currency when it has no one’s signature on it.

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trice

Posted on September 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

If you know this word, I am willing to bet that it brings a line of poetry to mind instantly. Not necessarily the same line for everyone, but my guess is that for a great many of us (Canadians especially) it’s from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service:

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”

How about I give the whole stanza for context:

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”

(If you haven’t ever read the poem, read it. If you have, you know what’s going on.) I am also sure that I learned the word marge (in that sense) there, and possibly derelict too (I was young).

There are other places you might know it from, too. “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)” by Algernon Charles Swinburne:

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice

“To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode” by James Clerk Maxwell:

I come from fields of fractured ice,
Whose wounds are cured by squeezing,
Melting they cool, but in a trice,
Get warm again by freezing.

“Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning:

Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work,” must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice

(Not the most memorable line, but a beloved poem – or at least its first two lines: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”)

Perhaps you know it from Shakespeare – King Lear, maybe:

This is most strange,
That she, who even but now was your best object,
The argument of your praise, balm of your age,
The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time
Commit a thing so monstrous, to dismantle
So many folds of favour.

Or Twelfth-Night:

I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I’ll be with you again,
In a trice,
Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain

Or The Tempest:

On a trice, so please you,
Even in a dream, were we divided from them,
And were brought moping hither.

Or maybe you think of the song “Violets for Your Furs,” by Matt Dennis and Tom Adair, first sung by Frank Sinatra (and later by many others):

It was winter in Manhattan, falling snow flakes filled the air
The streets were covered with a film of ice
But a little simple magic that I heard about somewhere
Changed the weather all around, just within a trice

Or perhaps you think not of poetry but of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, in which at one key moment Rochester says (though not to Jane) “I’ll make you decent in a trice.”

Or maybe you like rap music and are familiar with Obie Trice (which, atypically for rap artists, is his real name, no gimmicks), or maybe you know (or know of) someone else with the family name Trice. But that won’t tell you what trice means.

Or just maaayyybe you were in the US Navy and regularly heard the shipboard reveille announcement, which includes “all hands heave out and trice up.” But if that’s where you know it from, you might have a different sense of its meaning.

If you learned the word from poetry (or fiction), then you will almost certainly have gotten from context that a trice is a very short period of time, a moment, an instant; a thing that happens in a trice or on a trice or within a trice happens lickety-split. It also, thanks to rhyme, has an above-average likelihood of involving ice, or perhaps vice, or some price (or something nice?). 

But where does the word come from? It looks like twice and thrice, but it’s not twice and certainly not thrice, it’s once and immediately. Does it relate to truce? But how could it? A truce is an indefinite suspension of hostile activity, something that is expected to last far longer than a mere moment. Perhaps trace? But a trace is a scintilla of evidence, not a scintillation of a star or spark. Um… tryst? Oh, come on. (And if you know the Spanish phrase en un tris, literally ‘in a crack’ – tris means ‘crack’ – and having very much the same sense, I regret to say that English in a trice is too old to have come from that. But hmm.)

In fact, the navy reveille gives the clue, though the trail might be hard to follow at first. The origin is a Dutch word, noun trijs, ‘pulley, hoist’, and verb trijsen, ‘hoist’, from which a less specific sense ‘pull suddenly’ or ‘snatch’. And so a trice came to be a term for the amount of time it takes to do a single pull on a hoist – about a half a second, if the timing in the shanty “Haul Away Joe” is any guide.

Funny, though. The word trice hardly seems heavy enough to bring to mind such a muscular action – more like tripping lightly across the ice. Ah well, what it signifies no longer requires the pull of the original; if you wish to think of it simply as a thin slice of time, or some similar choice, you may. After all, we all (or nearly all) know it from poetry, and light verse in particular. And if you happen to drop it into conversation – “I’ll be there in a trice” – it’s more likely to have the tone of “I’ll be with you in the squeezing of a lemon” than of “I’ll arrive in the jerk of a hoist.” Provided your hearers know the word at all, that is.

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stern

Posted on September 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

I’ve learned that if you take pictures of people in the backs of boats, you get some stern looks.

OK, ha ha. Look, at least I’m not doing that other grand old word for the back end of a boat. There’s a lot of play to be had with “back end” and poop, and you should thank me for not stepping into it. (By the way, poop for ‘back end of a boat’ traces back to Latin puppis meaning the same thing, and has no actual etymological relation to that other poop – which appears to come from an onomatopoeic word for breaking wind.)

I’m also sure that the phrase from prow to poop isn’t as popular as the synonymous from stem to stern for reasons of relative ridiculousness. Anyone who deals with children knows that the moment “poop” enters the conversation, anything stern is doomed.

But how is it that there is stern meaning ‘back of the boat’ and stern meaning ‘severe, humourless’? Let’s start with the latter one. It’s from an old Germanic root meaning ‘rigid’; it came into modern Scots as stern meaning ‘resolute, courageous’, but into modern English with a rather less inspiring sense of ‘grim’ or ‘severe’. It’s been in English for as long as there’s been an English for it to be in, first in forms like sturne and styrne and later shifting to steerne and sterne.

It could seem reasonable for the back of a ship to be strong and resolute, right? After all, it’s the place the boat is guided from. And that’s right: it is guided from there. It’s also right in that the nautical stern is directly related to starboard, as in ‘right side’. But neither has anything to do with sternness. Rather, they have to do with steering – in fact, etymologically, with steering. Stern comes via Old Norse from the same root that gives us steer; it showed up in English around the year 1400 (thanks to Norse invaders who occupied a large part of England around then), in forms like steerne and sterne. Steer had already been in the language, long enough in fact that by about 1500 steereboard – so called for the side of a smaller boat that a right-handed helmsman would steer from – was becoming starboard, inevitable subject of folk etymologies.

But of course the bigger boats were being steered from the back end. Hence the name stern, because it’s where you steer the boat – where the rudder and the wheel are. Rudder obvious once it’s pointed out, isn’t it?

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