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gazpacho

Posted on July 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

For supper tonight, Aina made some delicious gazpacho. It’s always been her dish to make – she’s the soup queen around here – so I’m not perfectly sure of the proportions, but the ingredients that go into the blender are:

  • bread
  • garlic (or garlic scapes)
  • olive oil
  • sherry (or Madeira – or sherry vinegar, but who has that)
  • salt (unless she doesn’t bother)
  • ice cubes
  • watermelon

And once it’s in the bowl, we crumble feta on top of it (which kind of obviates the salt). It’s delicious.

Yes? I see a hand in the back? Yes?

It’s not?

Are you sure?

Well, then, tell me what makes it not gazpacho.

Really. Is that so. Tomatoes.

Gazpacho, as I’m sure you know, is a very old Spanish recipe – in fact, an ancient one; it is thought to have been brought to Spain, in one form or another, by the Romans. Now, tell me: did they have tomatoes in Spain at that time?

Another hand back there? Yes? 

Yes, that’s right. Tomatoes originated in the Americas. They’re popular in European cuisines now, but that’s comparatively recent. Tomatoes were first used in gazpacho in the 1800s. For all those centuries before that, gazpacho was made with many different ingredients – I’ll get to that in a minute – but not tomatoes. And they’re still not essential, though they are common.

Cuisine, folks, is like language. It’s produced by people in cultures constantly interacting and varying. Almost any recipe – and especially any traditional recipe – doesn’t really have a single source or a single correct original version. Ingredients are imported from other countries – do you know why the Spice Route was such a big thing for so many centuries? Have you looked at where the various containers in your kitchen are from? Hot peppers and potatoes, like tomatoes, came from the Americas, but they quickly became so popular in cuisines on the other side of the planet that they are now generally accepted as essential in “authentic” recipes. 

Authentic, like original, pure, and any other word of that sort, when applied to cuisine – as to language – means just that the speaker wants to present one point in time and space as valid and all others as less valid: any history after the version the speaker considers correct is degradation, and any history before it doesn’t exist; any version from another place (or even another kind of person in the same place) is deviant. But the truth is that different people even in the same place do different things, because cooking uses available ingredients, techniques, and implements and follows individual tastes and whims. Of course people have their opinions – recipes such as chili and barbecue inspire very heated discussions – but they’re founded in taste and fantasy. 

That doesn’t mean we can’t talk meaningfully about a particular named recipe – for instance, it would be obnoxious to put hot dogs in a blender with orange juice and call it gazpacho (or anything else, for that matter) – but we do best to be pragmatic and shy away from absolute pronouncements (except for the sake of trash talk, I guess, since cooking can be very competitive). And we should be wary of terms that imply some pure point of origin: most recipes, like most points of grammar and most words, trace back in their sources into the impenetrable mists of time and may well use elements originally from other places.

Take gazpacho, for instance. The word is of… uncertain origin. It may have come from Arabic. Or it may have come from Latin. The speculated etymons are such as may raise an eyebrow on a historical linguist. But the word is here now, and its spelling and pronunciation are established. (Well, you can argue about the different pronunciations of the z in different varieties of Spanish. I’m not here to do that.) And so, within very broad parameters, is what it names.

Gazpacho is a kind of soup; that much is a given. It’s usually – though not always! – served cold. It comes from an old recipe involving bread, garlic, vinegar, olive oil, salt, and water, and those ingredients are standard, though you can apparently get away with leaving out one or more of them if the soup is nonetheless sufficiently gazpacho-like. It has variations throughout Spain and, now, around the globe. It is now commonly, but by no means universally, made with tomatoes. Cucumbers, onions, and peppers are also common ingredients. It was traditionally made using a mortar and pestle, but food processors and blenders are popular today for reasons that should be obvious. It may be thick or it may be thin; you may even drink gazpacho from a glass, but you are unlikely to finish a bowl of gazpacho using just a fork. It may be garnished with boiled eggs, ham, almonds, or various other vegetables. (Or, you know, cheese, if you want.)

In other words, gazpacho is a general kind of idea, like garden salad (which we also had tonight), meatloaf (did not have), ice cream (soon to be served), beer (drinking now), pizza (had for lunch), chili (not today), lasagne (not lately), and really just about any well-established recipe of any real complexity from anywhere on the planet. You can have the same kind of fun arguing about edge cases of gazpacho (or chili, or lasagne, or…) as you can about edge cases of chairs, tables, cups, et cetera. The way your mom made a particular dish (if she did) is naturally important to you, but we don’t all have the same mom. Nobody requires you to like the way everyone else makes it. The number one rule with almost any food is “Enjoy it”; if you can’t follow the number one rule, try finding someone at your table who can and let them have yours. 

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cottage

Posted on July 18, 2021 | 4 comments

My wife and I took a little break this week: we joined a couple of friends up at a cottage they were renting.

The image you’ll have of that may vary quite a lot depending on where you’re from. In Ontario, though, and especially southern Ontario, that means we went to a country vacation house, likely on a lake (it was), with a certain rustic charm – though perhaps not all that rustic. 

This is not a universal Canadian thing, though some people seem to think it is. I grew up in Alberta, and there was no idea of people having “a cottage” and “going up to the cottage” and so on (though some people might “go to the condo,” meaning a vacation property near a ski resort – or “to the chalet,” if they had even more money). No, to us in western Canada, cottage was (and I suspect still is) just a word for a little house, possibly (though not inevitably) in a rustic setting. Sure, some people might have a cottage as a second property, in the same way as some people might have a boat on some area lake or a Cessna at the local small airport. Nobody assumed it was a usual thing.

Not that having a cottage is a usual thing, even in Ontario, no matter how much some people seem to assume it is. Sure, there was a time when vacation cottages were within reach of ordinary working-class people. My wife’s family had one up near Lake Simcoe; it was a fairly simple, not-too-large place where they would spend a relaxing time doing fairly simple things not in the city. It didn’t even have a telephone. (It sounds like a couple of houses my family lived in when I was little. Only they weren’t vacation getaways. They were our homes!) But that was also a time when the standard guideline was that your car should cost a third of a year’s salary and your house should cost three years’ salary.

Anyway, cottages up in “cottage country” in Ontario almost never list for less than a million dollars now, no matter how small and basic they may be, and some are selling for more than ten million dollars. And while the standard image of a Muskoka cottage (Lake Muskoka is cottage central, though not the only place for them) is a single-storey woodsy place of less than a thousand square feet (a hundred square metres), many of them now are multi-storey showpieces, much more impressive than the average urban house.

In short, if you don’t already have a cottage in your family, and you don’t have access to several million dollars, you’re not going to own a cottage. You can still rent one if you can afford it – or you can stay in a swanky hotel somewhere nice for less. Nonetheless, especially since the pandemic hit, cottages have become very popular. Which has driven the prices even higher.

Depending on where you’re from, this all may sound familiar, or it may not. Russia famously has a cottage (dacha) culture – people who can afford it often have dachas out in some rustic location. Finland, Sweden, and Norway also something equivalent. So do some parts of the US. And, apparently, so does Hong Kong. In England, a rough equivalent would be bungalows, but there are also summer cottages. But of course there are cottages everywhere English is spoken; it’s just that in many of those places, they’re nothing more or other than little rustic houses. A poor working person might live in a cottage. But in Ontario? Nah, they’re for people with money now.

Where, by the way, does this word cottage come from? The -age gives a hint that it might be from French, and it sort of is; English got it from Anglo-Norman, which got it from Old Northern French cot or cote, also as in dovecote (you know, where you keep your doves – you do have doves, don’t you?). But that traces back to Proto-Germanic, and may be related to hut.

I know you’re wondering, so I’ll tell you: cottage cheese is so named because it’s a simple, inexpensive cheese originally made with left-over dairy. It’s curds and whey, originally for people whose incomes consign them to a humble existence. And of course now it’s often eaten by fancy people too.

No, we did not eat any cottage cheese at the cottage we went to this week. Lots of other kinds of cheese, though. And plenty of other good food, all of which we cooked ourselves.

This cottage wasn’t all that large: its main floor area and plan was similar to that of a house my family lived in when I was eight. The resemblance stopped there, however. The house we lived in didn’t have Scandinavian modern décor, or a basement, or a bunkhouse, or a large patio, or a dock on a bay. (But on the other hand, this cottage didn’t have an outhouse. Didn’t need one, either.)

Why are vacation cottages popular? I guess people like to be able to get away to a simpler kind of life. Just as long as it’s by choice. And maybe – at least for some – not all that simple, really, either, when you come down to it. But relaxing.

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al fresco

Posted on July 11, 2021 | 1 comment

Yesterday, for the first time in 16 months, we saw a play. But this one had a fresh perspective: it was done al fresco.

Ontario is still easing out of its Covid lockdown, so indoor theatre is out – and so (for a few days yet) is indoor dining. But it’s warm enough that we can do these usually indoor activities outdoors, in the warm summer air. Al fresco. So to speak.

Al fresco: in the fresh air, right? Fresh and clean and clear, constantly refreshed by currents and so relatively free of the accumulated exhalations of indoor atmosphere? Well, yes, but there’s fresh and then there’s fresh. And that’s the ironic part. Well, it’s one of two ironic parts.

Fresco, you see (also fresca in the feminine), is Italian for ‘fresh’ (as in ‘fresh plaster’ in the kind of mural called a fresco), but it generally carries a sense of ‘cool’. If you dine al fresco, it’s in the fresh air, yes, but in particular in the cool (or cooler) air. That doesn’t mean that al fresco dining in Italy (or elsewhere) is only said to be such when the outdoors is cooler than the indoors, but there is that tone to it.

And, indeed, if we had made the phrase in English, in the fresh (as in “We’re dining in the fresh today” – sounds entirely plausibly English, doesn’t it?), there would also be something of that sense, because even though we use fresh more to mean ‘not cooked’ and ‘not stale or rotten’, we are still aware of the ‘cool’ sense – “A bit fresh out today, isn’t it?” But we don’t put it that way because, for one thing, we got the phrase from Italian, and for another, we like the Italian sound of it. “Would you like to dine in the fresh?” sounds like PG Wodehouse or EM Forster; “Would you like to dine al fresco?” sounds… inviting, really.

That, however, is the second ironic part. Perhaps you have noticed that fresh and fresco seem like they could be related. They are, but not because fresh comes from fresco. No, both words trace back to Proto-Germanic *friskaz; Medieval Latin acquired it as friscus through contact in Lombardy. And *friskaz meant… ‘fresh’ and ‘unsalted’. In other words, fresh as in fresh water, and fresh as in unpreserved food. The ‘cool’ sense followed on thereafter.

All of that, following through to the present (including the borrowing of al fresco into English in the early 1700s), means that we can have go from an air conditioned house onto a patio to eat bacon and other cured and salted meats, as well as cheese and cooked foods, in warm (even very warm) air, and it will be dining al fresco.

We can also go see a performance of an old farce in warm air, likewise al fresco. But you know what? It was refreshing.

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aimy, aimish, aimly, aimsome, aimed, aimful

Posted on July 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Quick: What’s the opposite of aimless? Is it aimy, aimish, aimly, aimsome, aimed, or aimful?

There’s a case to be made for each one, you know. Come, see.

You may be thinking, “Aimy? Oh, come on, that’s almost someone’s name.” Which it is, yes, but let’s be frank: it’s hardly the only English word that sounds like someone’s name. And tell me: What’s the opposite of rainless? Of iceless? Of snowless? Of dustless? Of dirtless? Of smokeless? Of leafless? Why, it’s rainy, icy, snowy, dusty, dirty, smoky, and leafy. Now, you may object that these are all things you encounter in nature, not abstract concepts, and you’re not wrong. But then there’s sleepless and sleepy and guiltless and guilty. They all have a sense of general dispersion of suffusion of the thing or quality, though, so aimy would mean something like ‘tending to have an aim; inclined to aim’.

Aimish has about the same problems. It looks like Amish, of course, though (unless you have an unusual way of saying Amish) it doesn’t sound like it. And it often connotes a certain general tendency; boyish, boorish, and brutish aren’t really opposites of boyless, boorless, and bruteless, though on the other hand Daneless could be an opposite of Danish. Still, while beamish might readily be said to be the opposite of beamless, aimish is among the less likely contenders for opposite of aimless.

OK, how about aimly? I don’t mean the adverbial form (“He raised the gun aimly”—actually, I don’t even fancy that). What is the opposite of godless? Why, godly, of course. We may think that lovely and homely are not opposites of loveless and homeless, but originally they pretty much were. But in general, -ly indicates tendency or likeness (it’s from the same root as like, in fact), so it’s not as strong an opposite as one might shoot for.

Well, then, aimsome has some aim, doesn’t it? Sure, sure, handsome is not the opposite of handless, but adventuresome opposes adventureless, and tiresome opposes tireless. Still, it’s not the most common formation for this kind of thing, and it generally expresses a tendency to causation – so what is aimsome is perhaps more likely to give aim to the aimless than to be itself the thing that is no longer aimless.

Aimed seems almost too easy. Obviously if a gun is aimed, it’s not aimless, right? But that opposes a very literal sense to a more figurative one. Besides, that’s not what I was aiming at. I mean the -ed that forms an adjective straight from a noun without passing through a verb in between. For instance, a person who is wearing a bowtie can be said to be bowtied, even though they were not tied in a bow, and one who is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed has not been the subject of bright-eyeing or bushy-tailing. And clearly if you are bowtied you are very much not bowtieless. (There is also a be- formation, as in bespectacled, but beaimed is just… no.) The only thing is, these all seem to imply a bestowal. You are aimed if you have been given an aim. Which is consistent with the usual sense of aimed, of course! But it’s not the best opposite of aimless; what we want is a word for a more self-motivated quality.

Which leads us to aimful. Full of aim. Just like beautiful, restful, joyful, and so on, all of which suitably oppose beautyless, restless, joyless, and so on. And guess what? Of all these words (leaving aside aimed), aimful is the one that has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary and Wiktionary. It’s been in use at least since the 1700s, and it still shows up from time to time. (Aimless, on the other hand, has been around at least since the 1500s. But I think it’s usual to be first aimless and then aimful, no?)

Notwithstanding all that, though, I must admit that my favourite of the bunch is aimy. I just think it’s more… amiable.

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ipsedixitistic

Posted on July 2, 2021 | 4 comments

You’ve all heard of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, of course. But what about ipsedixitistic? Try this to that famous tune:

Supercilious mumpsimuses, ipsedixitistic,
Prone to captious pickiness, so priggish and sadistic,
Just-so stories not so apodictic as just mystic…
Supercilious mumpsimuses, ipsedixitistic!

What, you can’t sing it straight through at high speed on first try? Then you’re not trying hard enough. It’s so simple, 87% of four-year-olds can do it.

Where did I get that figure? Everybody knows it. It’s obvious. I read it somewhere, anyway.

Well, what. Didn’t you know that 78% of statistics are made up on the spot?

If you haven’t met this word ipsedixitistic before, you will likely come to love it soon. Of course it’s a bit of a party trick to say – or even to read – but once you see how it’s put together it’ll be a bit easier. It comes from Latin ipse dixit, literally ‘he himself said it’, a thing that followers of Pythagoras and, later, other thinkers were prone to saying (though I imagine at least some of them said it in Greek at the time, not Latin). It was a flat appeal to authority: something must be true because their vaunted teacher said it (not that he even did in every case). A modern parallel would be “My English teacher always taught me…”

From this comes ipsedixitism, whence also ipsedixitist (one who utters ipsedixitisms) and ipsedixitistic (characterized by ipsedixitism). Ipsedixitism (or, countably, an ipsedixitism) is something that appeals flatly and dogmatically to an authority (citations typically not forthcoming), but it can also appeal to the speaker’s own authority: an ipsedixitism can be just a flat, dogmatic statement. Most variants on “That’s not good English” are ipsedixitisms. You’re expected to accept that the thing speaks for itself.

Which would be res ipsa loquitur, by the way. (Implied is the authority of the speaker, who has the discernment to point out things that lesser intellects ought simply to accept.) But in ipsedixitisms, res does not actually loqui ipsa. They may insist that it’s omnibus notum (known by everyone), scilicet (obviously), but the very fact that they feel obliged to point it out gives the lie to that – res ipsa loquitur (or, as logicians like to say, QED)! In fact, though ipsedixitisms are presented as apodictic (speaking the incontrovertible truth), they’re typically mumpsimuses: mistaken beliefs held to dogmatically.

There are many kinds of ipsedixitistic utterances. Grammatical prescriptions (and other statements about language, such as “English is the most expressive language”) are common, but so are statements about society (such as “there’s no such thing as society”), economics, and, of course, cooking (ideas about aluminum foil, lifting the lids on pots, and the proper handling of a Bialetti come to mind). The most tiresome ones, though, are the ones where someone, encountering a statement well supported by extensive research, calls it an ipsedixitism. My own quick survey of social media instances suggests that these make up a substantial minority of uses of the word ipsedixitism, but I won’t say that’s reliably true everywhere – you might as well check it out for yourself.

Thanks to Ellen Jovin and Stan Carey for talking about this on Twitter today, inspiring me to write about it.

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sud

Posted on June 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

I pulled the plug, and the sink, a seething mess of soap suds, slowly swirled south until all was down the drain save a single last sud.

Wait, can I do that? A sud?

Not everyone would say I could. Some would seethe with resentment. Others would tell me to sod off. I don’t think I’d get sued, though.

But if I did get sued, I’d win. Because yes, though one seldom sees singular sud today, it is, it would seem, the base of suds.

This sud is of not entirely certain origin, but some things are known and others are conjectured. We know that it has long been used predominantly in the plural, and no surprise; one seldom sees a single sud. We also know that before it named soap bubbles, it named scum – wet muck. And as such it seems related to sodden. (However, sod referring to turf is not related, and of course neither is the British crudity as in sod off.)

Sodden in its turn is the past participle of seethe (see the connection?). We know seethe now as a word for anger, and perhaps we imagine seeping steam, but it was originally the usual word for ‘boil’ (the word boil came from French and gradually took over, as many French terms did in the kitchen; the French word came from Latin bullire, ‘boil’, ‘bubble’). Boiling is bubbling, of course!

I would like to say that this is why there is a restaurant near me called Sud Forno. But I’ll have to burst that bubble: that sud is the Italian word for ‘south’ (and forno is ‘oven’). It doesn’t come from Latin, though; Italian took it from French, and French took it from Old English suþ, source of our modern south. That suþ in turn traces back through Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European to a root meaning ‘sun’ that also produced Latin sol and Greek ἥλιος, helios. So somehow the sun floated north like a solitary sud and then flowed back south to become ‘south’. But at least the restaurant isn’t called Sud for no good reason.

So anyway, there is some basis for saying a single sud. But is it common? No. In fact, you won’t easily find instances of its use anywhere, now or over the course of history. Any attempt to deploy it might land with a thud… or perhaps even get the reader into a lather.

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fonds

Posted on June 26, 2021 | 1 comment

Do you know what it is like to use a fonds? Have you ever dug deep into a fonds? Do you agree with respect des fonds?

Do you know what a fonds is? 

Are you wondering why I keep using the singular article a with an evidently plural word, fonds?

Fields often have concepts and terms of which they are particularly fond. Often these are things that within the field are treated as “everybody knows” things – assimilated as part of the base collective understanding, and referred to without explanation – while to outsiders they are unknown, and the terms may even seem jarring or self-regardingly counterintuitive. 

Such a one, for archivists, is a fonds.

A fonds, in brief, is a collection of documents having the same source (person or organization). The principle of respect des fonds is that you keep a fonds together, in the order the originator put them in. So, for instance, if you have a child, and your child draws pictures and writes things and so on, and gives them to you or puts them in scrapbooks or whatever, when you collect them all without re-ordering them, taking any out, or adding anything from any other source to them, you have a fonds. And as long as that child keeps drawing and writing and so on, you can keep adding to it.

This also means that if you have two people who write letters to each other, a collection of all the letters of both is not a fonds, and a collection of all the letters and papers in possession of one or the other is not a fonds (it is, rather, to use the archival term, a collection – oh, wait, I already called it that). A fonds for each person would include the letters by that person… and not the letters in response.

In truth, a fonds is a more effective approach for a public entity that principally emits documents, such as a government department. If you have every single damn missive uttered forth by the Ontario Department of Widget Frobulation, for instance – every white paper, every manual, every ad, every sticker, every abusive letter from the assistant director, every annual supplier holiday party invitation – that is a fonds, but it must not contain so much as one single unattached complaint letter from a concerned taxpayer, nor even a copy of that seven-part investigative exposé in the Globe and Mail. And if you’re doing your job according to Circular no. 14, you’ll keep all those documents in the order in which they were organized by the Department, even when it went through that bad period where the two chief administrators hated each other and had starkly different ideas of proper organization.

Circular no. 14? Oh, yes. The principle of respect des fonds does not (as many people think) come from the TV series Happy Days; it is typically attributed to a document issued by Natalis de Wailly, head of the Administrative Section of the Archives nationales de France, in 1814. It seems M. de Wailly was sick and tired of dealing with many and varied and frankly capricious systems of organizations of papers. He said, “Right, that’s it, we’re keeping stuff from the same source together, in the same order the source organized it. Respect the Fonz fonds!” Now, he may not truly have been the first person to have that idea and insist on it (really, it would be surprising if he had been). But he was the prime vector, and Circular no. 14 was the Love Potion no. 9 of archives (but more long-lasting).

OK, fine, all of that, but I know what you really want to know: the same thing I wanted to know. “Whaddya mean, a fonds?”

Like, why use that plural, right? Is there some kind of hidden agenda?

Well, that would be appropriate, at least, since agenda is plural in Latin (it means ‘things to do’) but we use it as a singular in English. But no. It’s a bit more like those names that look plural but are actually singular. You know, Jeeves, Giles, James… but in fact it’s most like a name such as Ivars Taurins or Arturs Ozolins. That’s not to say it’s a Latvian term (it’s not), but the s isn’t there by accident. It’s left over from when it had a specific basis.

Basis? Foundation. Fundament. Or, in Latin, fundus. Which passed into French as fond, alternately spelled fonds; the two spellings were in free variation for a long time. As Littré says: “L’s de ce mot n’est pas autre chose que l’s du nominatif dans l’ancien français, qui est restée au mot comme dans fils. La distinction qu’on a essayé d’établir entre fond et fonds à l’aide de cette s accidentelle est tout à fait ignorée des auteurs un peu anciens.” Translation: “The s of this word is nothing other than the s of the nominative in Old French, which has stayed on the word as on fils [‘son’, from filius]. The distinction that has been imposed between fond and fonds with the help of this accidental s is entirely ignored by earlier authors.”

But since about the 1600s, fond has been the word for ‘base’, ‘bottom’, ‘foundation’, ‘depths’, et cetera, while fonds, singular, has been the word for ‘capital’, ‘resources’, ‘fund’, and so on. (Littré gives these nice examples for the figurative use: “Un grand fonds de savoir. Un fonds de malice. Il a pour vous un grand fonds d’estime.” In translation: “A great fund of knowledge. A fund of malice. He has for you a great fund of esteem.”)

So, in truth, since fond (the French word, not the English one, which is an old English word originally meaning ‘foolish’ or ‘naïve’) and fonds come from the same source, they should be, on principle, kept together. And, in the opinion of Littré, “Le mieux serait de supprimer l’s de fonds, et de ne faire qu’un seul mot de ce qui n’en est réellement qu’un”: “The best thing to do would be to get rid of the s on fonds and make a single word of what really is only one word.”

But would that truly be respect des fonds?

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nucivorous

Posted on June 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nuts to that doctor. Really. …Actually, no nuts to him. I’ll have the nuts. See if he stops me.

The doctor in question is one I talked with a few years ago, one who helped me to an important realization: that some medical specializations tend to filter out people who have a normal sense of enjoyment of life. This doctor, who seemed affable enough and demonstrably had a sense of humour, nonetheless was telling me that I should make eating a spoonful of psyllium my “special time” of the day. And that I should avoid Thai food, because everything in it was bad for digestion. And nuts? “I don’t even understand why anyone eats nuts.”

By that time I was beginning to feel a little… squirrelly.

Well, at least in that squirrels are nucivorous.

Isn’t that a delicious word, a munchable word, a word you can get your teeth into? You can see the -ivorous, which you’ll recognize from carnivorous and herbivorous and omnivorous and so on. And the nuc(i)-? Well, you may (just perhaps) recall the term nuciform sac, a fictitious organ (invented by G.B. Shaw, I think); that literally means ‘nut-shaped sack’, not to be confused with the common term that is exactly like that definition but without the -shaped part, and names something not fictitious at all.

So, yes, nuc(i)- means ‘nut’. It’s the combining form of the Latin nux. Which, I must say, is about as perfect a word for a nut as any I have ever seen. Especially if you can crack the nut with your knuckles. It’s a bit of a pity that it changes form when used in combination; nuxivorous would be even better. But Latin declension is a tough nut to crack, and I think I will decline.

The word nucivorous doesn’t get a lot of use, but there are some critters that eat mainly nuts. Squirrels are the emblematic case, but I can tell you from personal observation that they eat quite a few other things too. There’s a bird called a nucifrage that is noted for nut-eating; its Latinate name translates directly to its much more common English name, nutcracker. What it eats, though, are often actually seeds, as for instance from pine cones. (Do those count? Nuts if they do.)

And most people are, in the non-restrictive sense, also nucivorous. We’re all-sorts-of-things-ivorous, really; most of us are omni-voracious. But sometimes some nutcase of a gut doctor tries to redirect our diets.

Well. I’ve eaten a heck of a lot of Thai food since I last talked to him. With peanuts in it. And I’ve consumed countless almonds and even countlesser pistachios (or, as I call them, vegan clams). I remain nucivorous. And if the doctor says no nuts are good nuts, I’ll have his.

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elucubrate

Posted on June 22, 2021 | 1 comment

Here I am, elucubrating again. If you want to set the world on fire, sometimes you have to burn the midnight oil.

Allow me to elucidate. It is late, and I am creating. By the glow of lamps – OK, of electric lights and also of my laptop screen – I am researching and writing yet another work of lit literature. (And, as brevity is the soul of wit, and the hour is not getting any earlier, I intend to make this one more soulful and witty than most, although this parenthesis is not helping the cause.)

You may be familiar with the verb lucubrate or its noun form lucubration. It is often used to refer to strenuous learnedness, overdone erudition, the output of late-night sweating over inkhorn terms by the glow of a lamp. Well, elucubrate is about the same kind of thing – working late by lamp light – but perhaps with less implied derision. It has escaped the accumulated sootiness of snootiness through the simple expedient of not being used. Both lucubrate and elucubrate appeared in the early 1600s, but lucubrate has stayed in occasional use – mainly as a pointedly learnèd word (used to scorn pointed learnedness) – while elucubrate has generally not. But oh well. Here it is, come to light once more.

The source of both words is Latin lucubro, which means ‘I work by lamplight (or candlelight)’ and traces back to lux ‘light’ and luceo ‘I am light; I illuminate’. It was clearly a common enough activity in ancient Rome that they had a word for it. In fact, they had more than one, because they also had elucubro. The distinction between the two words is in the e-, which adds the sense of expenditure (it means, basically, ‘out’). So it’s not just that you work by light; it’s that you use up the light – or its fuel. Or your own fuel, until you burn yourself out. You burn the midnight oil, so to speak. In fact, ‘burn the midnight oil’ shows up in the definition of elucubrate.

Of course, we mostly don’t literally burn oil in our houses now for light. But that doesn’t mean we don’t burn it at all – the electricity powering your lights and your laptop may be coming from combustion of coal or even oil. And while, as Edna St. Vincent Millay knew, a candle that burns at both ends (so to speak) “gives a lovely light,” in the long run of elucubration we may not be able to sleep even when we want to, if we’ve set the world on fire…

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swath, swathe

Posted on June 17, 2021 | 1 comment

You sway as you swing your scythe: swoop, swish, slash. And again and again. Each sweep makes a swath: a track of cut stalks as wide as your blade and as broad as your swing.

And then, oops, you slip! Your scythe cuts your skin. You stop and grab a bandage, a big piece of cloth, and wind the swathe around the wound until it is swathed.

Most of the time, swath – also spelled swathe at times, mainly in England – and swathe are used figuratively. We know “cuts a wide swath,” for instance. We think of a swath as a sweeping span of terrain, typically lately cleared by action. The sw- plays well with other words suggesting curving motion; they make a nice set, even though they’re not all related. But then there’s this other swathe just to confuse things: the one that is not an exposed patch but a wrapping or cloth for one. You could lay down a swathe on a swath, even.

Is that how we got here? That you make a swath and then you ease it with e, laying that last letter on so you can lay a swathe on top?

Nah. The words are not originally related. It’s like cleave and cleave. Except that the cleave words were at least distinct in Old English. The swath(e) ones were already both written as swæþ by the time of Beowulf. But, on the other hand, they sound different. The scything one, which rhymes with moth, comes from a root to do with swinging – it may or may not be related to swing – while the wrapping one, which rhymes with lathe or with the first part of rather, comes from a root to do with bandages – and is also the root of swaddle.

So how do you remember which is which? I tend to think of the one without e as bare, and the one with e as dressed. But remember that readers in general are likely to be less familiar with the swaddling one. And while you’re at it, remember that the bare-patch or open-tract one shows up most often in tired clichés. Consider cutting it.

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