Tag Archives: word tasting notes

bungle

Posted on November 26, 2008 | Leave a comment

If this word stays in the jungle, it’s alright by me, but it’s more likely heard in a bungalow, perpetrated by some blundering dumb bunny. So where did we get this word from? Well, it seems that it just sounded right. It fits in comfortably with bumble, brangle, boggle, fumble, mumble, stumble, rumble, tumble… The -le could be taken as the frequentive ending heard in such words as suckle, but with the nasal and voiced stop it’s rather more reminiscent of the kindred words just mentioned; finagle comes to mind, too, and especially tangle – all words that involve messes, trips and things getting shaken like marbles or going like a string of Christmas lights all balled up. The vowel in bungle, represented in phonetic transcription by a caret or schwa, is often associated with dullness and dumbness, especially in context with nasals and voiced stops. The bung has that hollow sound you might hear when a cork is jammed into an empty barrel… by the head of somone tripping. There is little resonance from a front-vowel sibling such as tingle – far too bright and sharp. This mid-central unrounded vowel (heard as a mid-high back rounded vowel in some dialects) seems to group with back vowels, such as in bongo – and perhaps Congo, though the influence of other sounds carries Bangalore too close to torpedo. Bugle is hiding in the form of this word, but you might not notice it, while you probably will think of bangle. But one thing’s for sure: when a bungle’s done, you’re left with a shambles.

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ghetto

Posted on November 25, 2008 | 3 comments

A word for a place you probably don’t want to get to. In the sound, it comes across as the beginning of get away, but the final o can give a mournful hollowness fading away like a dying cry echoed among tenements, especially when sung after the words in the. The look is spookier still, with the gh of ghost to start – and that silent h gives a sense of hollowness realized in a context like this (but quite absent in spaghetti, which this word seems little reminiscent of in spite of the commonality in form, due to the great difference of emotional tone in the referents). The tt could be twin tenements. The flavour of this word is strongly inner-city African-American now, as evidenced by the well-known ghetto blaster (now so common a phrase that the ghetto reference is skimmed across with nary a glance) and the newer ghetto fabulous and similar locutions (including descriptions of things as very ghetto, so ghetto, etc.). But any even passing student of European history – anyone who has learned anything at all about the persecution of Jews in Europe – will know this as a word first of all not for a vaguely defined lower-class area into which people (usually of a single disadvantaged ethnic group) slide and try to climb out but for a sharply defined quarter in which Jews were often forced to live. And where was the first one, the one that gave the name to the type? If you spotted this word as Italian, you were right: Venice, 1516 – a city in which also lived many merchants, as Shakespeare noted. The place name predated this assignation, and its origin is uncertain, but it may have come from and industry that had formerly occupied the island: the flames and smoke of a getto, a foundry.

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radish

Posted on November 24, 2008 | 1 comment

This word brings echoes of reddish, radical, even perhaps raffish, laddish and kaddish. Those who have eaten its object may think of burning when they hear the sh and perhaps think of raw or mad (or even bad) when hearing the first syllable. (Those who have seen the word laddish lately might think of that, too.) This word probably will not bring to mind the name Radisson, but the converse is likely often true. Ironically, this word for a root plant has no descenders… Of course, you could think of the x-height as the soil level and the ascenders and dot as the greenery sticking up. The word may also be seen to match the plant in that the rad is like the red outside and the ish is perhaps, in its white noise, like the white inside. This duotonality, while not typically raised in comparison to the Canadian flag, made radish at times a term of abuse for communists who only paid lip service. But while the radish communists may not have been true radicals, the radish certainly is – not because of its peppery flavour (however “rad” that may be, dude), but because radish comes from Latin radix, meaning “root”… which also gives us the word radical. Radical change is change at the very roots. And it’s often rather hot to the taste, too.

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roger

Posted on November 22, 2008 | 1 comment

A word that purrs like a tiger – a big masculine one. Although the visual hint of rogue is weakened by the pronunciation and the sound of Raj is mitigated by the spelling, the r‘s have it here – the same growl we learn as kids from “They’rrrrre grrrrreat!” and produce when imitating race car sounds, with the voiced alveolar affricate in the middle standing in for the gear shift (or any other mechanically connecting working). Nor does the chest hair stop there. The word begins with the raw ro and then the ger could be starting jerk – another quintessentially masculine word – or even German, calling on the Teutonic testosterone. It’s renowned as the rough and ready word of flyboys. It has had a few other senses over the ages, including a ram (male sheep) and a man’s todger. From the lodging of the latter, by 1711, came a still-popular verbal use, a very laddish way of referring summarily to an act that female writers sometimes require whole paragraphs to circumlocute. Look to the collocations for further piss and vinegar: Jolly Roger, the sign of a pirate, yet another archetypally laddish occupation. And what morphemes were mated to make this macho murmur? Germanic hrod “fame” and ger “spear.” Say no more. Say no more! Or, rather: Roger that!

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fatuous

Posted on November 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

You could guess at this word’s meaning by appearance, but that would be silly. It does seem to ask disingenuously, “Who’s fat? You? Us?” And certainly it seems a bit pudgy, with its baggy-cheek u‘s and its o like a hungry mouth. But clap the s on like a hand, Benny or Culkin style, and you know the mouth is agape in daft wonder. And if the uous is a head, the fat is its metaphorical descriptor. This is a lovely word in that it can make the object appear foolish (perhaps in a John Candy kind of way) and the speaker appear pretentious simultaneously. No wonder it’s so useful to academic argument. It is quite promiscuous, though it does have one regular flame – fire. That coupling is really a pair of Latin lovers, however: ignis fatuus is the more standard term for what is also called Will-o’-the-wisp, a spectral mirage caused by, well, swamps farting and lighting it. Does that sound dreadfully inane? Well, fatuus, after all, is Latin for “foolish” or “idiotic.”

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sconce

Posted on November 20, 2008 | Leave a comment

Does this word conceal, inset, or fortify? To hear it is to hear a hiss of hush (or of magician’s steam), in the middle of which – a con? ‘S gone! Sss! But you can only see once. And yet, as secretive, dim or elegant as this word’s reference may be, it carries with it a bread-and-butter overtone. (But butter your scones improperly at Oxford and you may be sconced – oxonian argot for fined an ale). Interestingly, we get this word from more than one source. Best known is the one from Latin absconsus, “hidden,” referring to the shield for a light (and the ab us? absconded with, evidently). But there is also the fortifying earthwork, from Dutch schans, which over time came to refer to protective shields and other things more resembling the sense of the word whose form this one had taken. This word dances most often with wall, but it is much more often seen ensconced (comfortably, safely, firmly, happily) in (always in) ensconced, sitting like the flickering light behind the en and attached to the d.

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cacophony

Posted on November 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word like an awful evening at the symphony. This word brings you the bad music (caca), the bad composer (phony), the bad audience (cough), the bad tuning (off), the stuttering singer (c-c-), the bad conductor (cack-handed), the bad date (get your hand off my knee), the poor intermission beverage selection (coffee only), even the irritating bird outside the concert hall (caw!). And it doesn’t even have a pleasant rhythm – it’s not a nice bar of 4/4 with the ictus on the first syllable; it’s like tripping on a step in the aisle and stumbling for the next three. This word came to us from the Greeks, of course (via Latin), caco from the word for “bad” and phony from the word for “sound” (not the similar-sounding Greek word for “murder,” though one might wonder).

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punch

Posted on November 18, 2008 | 1 comment

A short, punchy word, on the whole – or, rather, several identical short, punchy words. One (or two, counting noun and verb) comes from puncheon, a tool for poking holes or, by extension, stamping into (as with a die), which comes from the same Latin source as puncture. From this application of direct force came the sense with the fist. One comes from a commedia dell’arte character, Policinella, with a big paunch and a hooked nose, who became Punchinello, an English puppet character, shortened to Punch, who became best known for beating his wife, Judy, with a stick. One comes from the Sanskrit and Hindi word for “five,” as in five ingredients – in a beverage that was adapted by the English to something that rather caught on. (And began drifting semantically quickly once unmoored from the Raj – rum punch, big in the West Indies, has four ingredients classically: “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak” are the measures.) But a good glass of punch packs a punch (and may punch a hole in your stomach if you have H. pylori problems). Hole is certainly a common collocation of this word, and ticket comes in often enough with the same sense, but outside of specific uses – and even to some extent within them – the puncture sense is bested by the pugnacious force of the word. Other collocations include pulling, packing, drunk, press, card, in, out and up. Even the letters have more the rounded shape of a blunt object (fist, wife-beating stick*) than any reminiscence of an awl or similar piercing object. Only a vowel separates this word from pinch, but the broad u and the narrow i are as opposed as the two actions. This word has the opening phonaesthetics of abrupt words such as puff, punt, pug, and punish, and the closing impact of crunch, bunch and hunch and the crisper munch and lunch. But when you’re quaffing a glass, it may make you think sooner of quench.

*The story that “rule of thumb” comes from the size of a stick a man was allowed to beat his wife with is not true; that account was invented long after the phrase, which came from estimating measurements. See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rul1.htm .

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vertex

Posted on November 17, 2008 | 1 comment

A word that starts and ends with angles: v, x. (It is perhaps ironic that this word lacks an A, since it was first of all not just any angle put the apex of a triangle – ah, APEX: there’s the angle to take.) Even in pronunciation you can find an angle: you start at the lips with [v], pass the alvolar ridge at [t] and proceed to [k], but then turn back forward to [s] – in [eks] the tongue closes the angle like a tapping telegraph key. And this word may have a flavour of narrowing in other ways, as other verts may seem narrow because tall (vertical) or simply reminding one of the angle of a v (divert). Others have a more vicious vibe (pervert). And of course there are the ones that turn to the point of dizziness (vertigo), true to the turning origins of vert. But somehow this word does not whirl like vortex, which forces the mouth into a funnel and has the roar of voracious and the lethality of vorpal. Yet vortex comes from vertex, which in Latin meant both the top of the head (and the highest point of anything) and a whirlpool. The o version took the swirl and the e version has taken the whorl on the top of the head. And so we find that the true tellers in the shapes of this word are the t – which has the highest point – and the two e‘s, which are the closest thing to a spiral.

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ersatz

Posted on November 15, 2008 | Leave a comment

This word, to look at it, could be something spectacular or chintzy. There’s something of the lightning bolt in it, but that diamond twinkle, it seems, is Brummagem – not coruscating but coarse. The sound of satz is not an electric spark but mere air – and that coffee in your cup is, well, not. Indeed, coffee was once a particularly common collocation of ersatz, but now this word gets around rather widely – but always with a cheesy (Velveeta?) or cheating tone. The roughly synonymous spurious is like a sneaky, curious snake that spears you with its fangs from behind, but ersatz is more of a whoopee cushion, or a phonaesthesis for the taste in your mouth after eating a dry, overcooked turkey wiener. It makes out better in its native German, where it cleaves closer to the norm; there, it’s simply a word for “replacement” or “substitute.” But who in English would refer to a one-day fourth-grade fill-in as an ersatz teacher, or a ninth-inning mound step-up as an ersatz pitcher?

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