Tag Archives: word tasting notes

eyey

Posted on February 14, 2021 | 2 comments

“It’s – aieee!”

At least that’s what I thought I heard Jess say. She was sitting in her apartment, and I in mine, and with us were a few other members of the Order of Logogustation, peering into our respective computer cameras and thus out of our respective windows in the fly’s eye of a Zoom screen. (Word tasting, like everything else, is not quite the same in the Year of the Plague.)

“What’s wrong?” I said. Some of the others said “What?” and “Huh?” and “You OK?” Daryl said, “Did you just get stung by a bee?”

“No,” Jess said, and held up her iPad to her camera. “It’s eyey! It has lots of eyes!” Once the camera had focused, we could see a word in the Cyrillic alphabet: многоꙮчитїи.

Margot, in one square of the screen next to Daryl, flinched and turned away. “Sorry,” she said sideways, “I have trypophobia.”

“Oh, these aren’t holes,” Jess said. “They’re literally eyes! Seven eyes looking out at you from the centre of the word!”

“Eugh!” Margot said, shuddering, and absented herself, leaving Daryl to hold down the frame.

“Is…” Maury said, and leaned in as he pulled his glasses away from his eyes. “Is that Old Church Slavonic?”

“Of course it is!” Jess said. “Mnogoochitii, ‘many-eyed’. As in many-eyed seraphim.”

“Nice,” I said. “Genuine typographical eye-conicity.” No one seemed to recognize the clever pun I had just made.

Elisa, up in the corner, snorted and giggled. “Sorry,” she said. “It looks like a potato with all those eyes!”

“The eyes have it,” Jess said. “Old Church Slavonic scribes liked to make eyes out of O’s.”

“That gives a new sense to ‘dotting eyes,’” I said. Nobody also laughed.

“Here,” Jess said, scrolling and flipping through some things on her eyePad. She held up a page of what I now know was a PDF from 2007 about the inclusion of additional Cyrillic characters in Unicode. The key paragraph was hard to see until I clicked the button to put her full screen:

MONOCULAR Ꙩꙩ, BINOCULAR Ꙫꙫ, DOUBLE MONOCULAR Ꙭꙭ, and MULTIOCULAR ꙮ are used in words which are based on the root for ‘eye’. The first is used when the wordform is singular, as ꙩко; the second and third are used in the root for ‘eye’ when the wordform is dual, as Ꙫчи, ꙭчи; and the last in the epithet ‘many-eyed’ as in серафими многоꙮчитїй ‘many-eyed seraphim’. It has no upper-caseform.

“These are all in Unicode,” Jess said. “You can insert them as characters in a document. James, you could use it on your blog.”

“I was just about to ask you for the link,” I said. I clicked Zoom back to the multi-person view.

“But these are scribal ornaments,” Daryl said. “They’re just decorative forms of the Cyrillic letter O. Right?”

“Yup,” Jess said. “But I guess it’s worth keeping them for archival purposes.”

“Well, it will get many more eyes on them,” Maury said.

“Eye eye, sir,” Jess said.

“I think I’d like to have Unicode characters for some of the ornamental capitals in medieval documents, in that case,” Daryl said. In the background, off camera, Margot’s voice came in: “Just what we need. More rabbit penises.” She reappeared and sat back next to Daryl, turning their Ꙩ into Ꙫ.

“Too bad we can’t do that with the English word for ‘eye’,” Elisa said.

“There’s always ꙩcular,” Maury said. It seems to me he dotted the o as he said it.

I said, “I think the word eye looks like the e’s are two eyes giving someone the side-eye.”

“What was the word you said before, Jess?” Elisa asked.

“Which one?” Jess said. “Mногоꙮчитїи?”

“No, the one that sounded like you found an eyeball on your chair.”

“Oh – eyey! A great word, not used often enough, and usually applied to potatoes and cheese.”

“And Zoom screens,” Daryl said.

We all paused a moment and looked at our screens. There were our eyes, Ꙭ, looking out from our respective frames, and the whole thing looking like a squared-off version of ꙮ.

Margot breathed “Aieeee” and absented herself abruptly once more.

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whutter

Posted on February 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

You are out by the lake shore, you and one other person. You hear the susurrus of the tall grasses, the soughing of the trees in the breeze, the lapping plashing of the little waves, perhaps the whiffle-fluffle of corduroy walking. A dog off leash darts from the boardwalk onto the strand, whereupon a half hundred wings lift fitfully off the soft shore and, feathers flapping frenetically aloft, a flock of waterfowl fly far from the bounding hound. Your companion, jolted from reverie, says “Whut?”

You have just heard a whutter.

Not your companion. Well, perhaps your companion too. But in the main, it’s the birds you heard. A simple flipping and flapping of feathers is a flutter, but when the source is something larger – a big bird, or a bunch of birds (a big bunch of birds or a bunch of big birds or a big bunch of big birds) – the word for it is whutter. Even a murmuration does not murmur; for startling starlings, you are rewarded with whuttering.

Why? Why not. Who knows when this word was first heard, but the Oxford English Dictionary has an 1831 quote from John Wilson in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “A sound like the whutter of wild-fowl on the feed along a mud-bank.” It has been used since, not often but enough to keep it in the air.

And where did it come from? You know perfectly well: nothing other than the ears of the hearer and a sense for the feel of words. Flutter has been around since English’s earliest days, and the whispering and whistling of “wh” is always available, round, soft, dark, and hollow, heavier and harder to capture than “fl.”

Don’t you love it when words take flight?

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cacology

Posted on February 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

As Steve Martin put it, “Let’s face it: some people have a way with words, and other people… oh, ah… not have way, I guess.”

Cacology looks like it could mean ‘talking shit’ – you know, caca plus -logy. But this is caco, as in cacophony, from Greek κακός; it means ‘bad’.

Of course, that could still mean talking bad about someone – you know, vilipending them, as the kids say, or, yes, talking shit, as professors say (well, the ones I know, anyway). And back in the 1600s, that’s what cacology meant. But that sense has fallen into desuetude, and now, when this word is used, it’s used to mean ‘talking badly’.

Which can still mean a number of things. It could mean talking wildly and crazily –

– or articulating insufficiently –

– or, even if speaking (or singing) smoothly and clearly, still incomprehensibly –

– but it can also mean just, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “Bad speaking, bad choice of words; vicious pronunciation.” (Does that sound like a reprimand to a talking dog?) 

Opinions vary widely on what is “bad,” of course. Some people cannot abide the word get in any circumstance; some promote superstitions such as that you should not end a sentence with a preposition; some believe that “[person] and me” is always an error for “[person] and I.” On the other hand, some dislikes have some basis in fact and established usage. Think people most this that sentence grammar correct not has, and as long as we’re following the established rules of any variety of English I’ve ever seen, they’re right. But blenderized syntax is uncommon. Tired clichés, needless circumlocutions, other obfuscations, and dime-machine buzzwords, all quite common in usage, are also disliked with good cause.

And of course so are vicious words – racial epithets, for instance.

And, for that matter, swearwords, cusswords, naughty words – whatever you want to call them. I’m not at all opposed to swearwords; they serve a necessary function, and they do not bespeak poor character or intelligence (oh, believe you me: some of the nicest and best-educated people I know use cusswords freely as the occasion demands, and some of the worst people I’ve ever met would never utter an impure word – though there are plenty of very nice people who don’t swear, too, and no shortage of nasty people who do). But I do think they need to be seen as cacology, or else they lose their charge. After all, talking shit is less effective if the shit is just… caca.

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hebicentric

Posted on February 6, 2021 | 3 comments

There was a time, I remember, in the 1990s, when it was considered deep and true and honest for singers of popular songs to sing with a certain… “style,” what one might think of as “poor voice placement” and a lack of what one might call, um, “tuning.” A sort of strained half-shriek, half-grunt one might hear from someone with a cold and dysentery who is sitting in an outhouse and has just seen a hornet headed straight for him. It was not eccentric, not exactly; that would mean they were off-centre, and as far as this goes that’s beside the point, because if the fashion is to be unfashionable, well…

Anyway, as I worked away in the mail room at the Tufts library to pay some bills while I was dissertating, I would have the radio on, and the local station would play stuff by, you know, Porno For Pyros and Bush and Jane’s Addiction and The Wallflowers and so on, and there was no lack of this style. And then I heard a song use a word that seemed like the mot juiced for this whole thing, this, um, kind of rough and underripe vocal styling paired with expensive studio production values that were pretending not to be expensive (like high-priced fake craquelure). The song introduced the word but didn’t explain it, just threw it down there, which was also so damn typical of these uber-cool guys who were trying so hard to be hip it was tragic, and were so tragic it was hip. (To be fair, the singer of the song in question was actually able to sing well when he chose to, which at key moments he did not.)

The etymology of the word was not completely obvious. The second part was clear enough: centric. But the first part? It sounded like “heb-I” or “heb-eye” but I assumed it was spelled hebi. The thing is, there’s no classical root that matches that. But there is a Greek root hebe-, referring to youth; perhaps it was blended with bi, meaning ‘two’ (as in the duality of expensive production values and good instrumentals with a singing style that I had always known as “bad”). Or maybe they were just being deliberately obscure and difficult. Like, hey, I just mutated this word, isn’t it so awful you have to love it and buy it. But there was no doubt that the song was about someone who embodied this value, because they sang it over and over again: “You are a hebicentric! You are a hebicentric!”

I suppose if I had already been studying linguistics at the time (I was still a drama scholar) I might have decided that it was deliberately incomprehensible, like the famous sentence confected by Noam Chomsky to illustrate that a sentence could be syntactically coherent but semantically incoherent, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” After all, the whole line I heard sung was “That’s when the hornet stung meeee, and I had this furious dream! You are a hebicentric! You are a hebicentric!”

In the end, though, I realized that I had created a mondegreen (but one every bit as plausible as classiomatic, I’d say). What I was actually hearing, which even contained the title of the song (not that radio deejays ever bothered saying the titles of the songs), was “You are ahead by a century.” (Also, the words before it were “feverish dream” and later “serious dream” but never “furious dream,” alas.) But I still think hebicentric is a good word for that hiply tragic, tragically hip style…

Anyway, here, if you don’t know the song. It’s “Ahead by a Century” by The Tragically Hip, from 1996.

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Thule

Posted on February 4, 2021 | 1 comment

Is there, truly, a Thule?

Edgar Allan Poe thought so: in his “Dream-Land,” he begins,

By a route obscure and lonely, 
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.

But we know there is no place out of space, out of time. There is no end of the earth. There is no where so far away that we cannot displace it, misplace it, replace it. We can go so far that we want to go no farther, but we will always want others to go farther for us. And when we go around, we come back around.

In ancient days, the people living on the sea between Europe and Africa thought it was the middle of the earth – that’s what Mediterranean means – and the ends were as far away from that as one could get. In 325 BC, around the time that Alexander the Great was expanding the Greek empire eastward, a man named Pytheas, who lived in the western reaches of that empire, in Massalia (now Marseille, France), headed north to see who they were trading with. He reached, he said, the end of the earth, a place so cold that land, sea, and air were all one like a jelly, and in the middle of summer the sun barely set. Of course there were people there already.

Pytheas called the place Θούλη, which would transliterate into English as Thoúlē, but it passed to us by way of Latin to be Thule. Officially, by the dictionary, in English we say it like “thoo-lee” or “thew-lee” or sometimes “thool,” but many people assume the Th is “t” – which it is in languages that don’t have the “th” sound, such as Danish. Pytheas may or may not have made the name up; either way, no one really knows its origin or etymon.

Pytheas, as is now known, improved his travels overmuch in the telling. If he made it to his Thule at all, it was some island off Norway (or perhaps Estonia), still south of the Arctic Circle (as we know from the fact that the sun set at all in midsummer). Or he may just have written down some accounts collected in a tavern. But Thule held onto the popular imagination, calling us into the unknown. Poe would know:

Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,—
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

Does that sound like the idealized Canadian north, as represented by painters like Lawren Harris? I think it does.

But everyone knows Thule is in Greenland.

I certainly knew. I knew Thule was in Greenland long before I heard of its mythical connections. In fact, the first time I saw mention of Ultima Thule – it might have been in one of Umberto Eco’s novels – I thought, “Huh? Someone made some myths about this cold town in northern Greenland?”

Well, someone brought myths. Knud Rasmussen did. Knud Rasmussen was part Inuit, born and raised in south Greenland; he went to study down south in Europe, but came back to Greenland and made his name as an Arctic explorer. He gave the name Thule to his northernmost trading post. Of course there were people (Inughuit) already living in the area, as there had been for nearly four millennia; little point having a trading post if there’s no one to trade with. In 1912 Rasmussen set off from Thule to transit the ice cap at the north end of Greenland. He succeeded, and then came back around to Thule again.

Four decades later, the United States Air Force arrived to bring the Cold War to the cold world. The site they chose had people living there, so they chose another site some 60 miles north – not for the air base, for the people. They told them they had four days to get out, so they got out. And then the Americans built the air base where the people had been. 

We can go so far that we want to go no farther, but we will always want others to go farther for us.

Thule Air Base (said the Danish way, with a “t”) is still there. The place farther north where the Inughuit were made to move to is also still where it is. It is home to more than 600 people; it has stores, a hospital, a church, all ranged up a hillside between the sea ice below and the inland ice above and beyond. But there is less ice than there used to be. The world there is changing, rapidly and obviously, thanks to the doings of those of us far to the south. Still, though, it is never what we would call warm, and for four months of the year the average temperature is below –20°C. The forecast for tomorrow is –32°C all day, with zero hours of daylight. On February 13, the sun will rise, briefly, for the first time since October 27. It always comes back.

This town, which was once called New Thule, then just Thule, is now known as Qaanaaq. Indigenous place names in Greenland generally mean something – they name a land feature or a thing that happens there. But Qaanaaq? It seems to mean as much as Θούλη, which is to say, nothing other than the name of the place: “According to the language secretariat for Greenland,” writes one American who now lives in southern Greenland, “Qaanaaq is only a place name and has no literal meaning.” (But The Great Danish says it means ‘caves by the beach’.)

And when Qaanaaq goes, it comes back around, like Rasmussen and like us, and like the sun: It starts out with q at the back of the throat, comes forward to touch the tip of the tongue softly at n, and returns the same way to q. It, too, like Poe, has, at the end, 

wandered home but newly 
From this ultimate dim Thule.

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longage

Posted on February 1, 2021 | 1 comment

When the pandemic arrived, we all expected shortages: toilet paper, medicine, paper towels, fresh vegetables, toilet paper, imported electronics, coffee, toilet paper, oil, voyages, fun, and toilet paper, among other things. But what we may not have anticipated were the longages.

I don’t mean the long ages, as in endless expanses of time, except yeah, I do mean that too, because we have a longage of available time. Just ask the managers of people who are still employed; they generally seem to believe no one has anything better to do, and yet simultaneously to think if they don’t hold their employees hostage to a longage of work they will just skive off and, uh, go for walks to see the foliage or something. 

What, in fact, many of us do do is try to avoid shortages of items by buying on line and having them delivered, resulting in a longage of mileage for people in the haulage and porterage business and a longage of packages in the lobbies of buildings – and a longage of some kinds of items in our homes. At this time last year, my wife and I had two devices for making coffee and two kinds of coffee beans in bags ready for the making; now we have four different devices and a dozen kinds of beans. 

We also have, in spite of our shortage of storage, an increasing longage of wines of various vintages. And our stacks of books waiting to be read have grown like the skyscrapers that continue to sprout fungally around us here in downtown Toronto – construction is “essential,” even in the ice age, and if you’re in the building trade here and now you have a longage of work adding to the longage of office and dwelling space. If, to take advantage of my longage of spare time, I go for a stroll, I often encounter a shortage of sidewalk space because the construction is hoarding it up.

In short, many people have a longage of work hours, and many have a longage of leisure time and leisure devices and the various baggage of adultage; many – especially those with a shortage of employment – also have a shortage of funds, while a few people (Bezos, Gates, and the ilk) have a considerable longage thereof, thanks to their leverage on percentages. And everything seems to be overage and underage and never average. It’s easy to get discouraged and to disengage.

This word longage is not of my coinage; it already existed in our language, though it’s not often seen. Wiktionary assures me it’s in informal use in economics (“A shortage of supply is a longage of demand”), while the Oxford English Dictionary has never heard of it, except as a Middle English variant spelling of language. (Oxford does inform me that shortage has been with us since the mid-1800s and appeared first in the USA.) 

But Wikipedia knows the word… OK, it knows Longages. Which is the name of a commune in the department of Haute-Garonne, 35 kilometres south of Toulouse. Longages has been around a long time. The town website says that the name comes from a Gallo-Roman root, longaticum campus, meaning ‘long field’; the only catch with that is that longaticum isn’t proper Latin, and the only search results I’ve found for it so far are as the Latin form of the name of the Slovenian town Logatec, a Latin word itself apparently derived from a Celtic root. But one Jacques Lacroix, looking at the many French place names that have Long- in them, has reckoned in his article “Le thème gaulois longo- dans les noms de lieux” that it traces to a Celtic root (France was Celtic before it was overrun by Romans, and its place names and many other parts of its language – including its weird way of saying 80 – have considerable Celtic pentimento). The Celtic root in question, longo-, relates to boats and other vessels. Many of these Long- places are nowhere near where you could use a boat, but Lacroix views the usage as more figurative, relating to topographical forms. In addition, for names with -ag- he cites research connecting it to Germanic awja ‘humid meadow’ (or, as he gets to it ere long, ‘swamp’). So, in his view, Longages gets its name from being on a hillside dominating a plain between two rivers. (Google Street View makes it look pretty flat, but I dunno.) The possibility that this Celtic root long- comes from Latin navis longa, as is sometimes suggested (though not by Lacroix!), is beside the point, though it would be an interesting long way around.

Yes, yes, that’s a longage of verbiage and gymnastics on a tangent about historical onomastics. Well, what. I have a longage of time and a longage of resources. And what’s your hurry?

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jnana

Posted on January 29, 2021 | 1 comment

What does a mirror look like when it reflects only itself, and no one is looking?

You know what it is to know. To see things and people, and to recognize them, and to know that they are there, and that you are here seeing them. But that is not the same as knowing their thoughts or feelings or knowing what it is like to be them. You are here and they are there and there are two of you. How would it be if you looked and knew you were not two, but one?

The essence of knowing is the mind perceiving external things and concepts and modelling them and assimilating those models into its schemes and structures and mental Minecrafts. Which means that knowing is an intrinsically separate and separating act; even knowing yourself takes parts of your self as objects, models them, and adds them to your miniature village of the mind. So what do you call the knowing that knows that the knower and the known are the same? The realization that all that is realized is all that realizes, and that at root the watcher is watching the watcher, and any plurality is just the reflector reflecting?

Well, you can call it jnana, if you want.

Yes, yes, jnana looks (a) like the word banana if it were in the process of realizing that it is a banana (does not a j resemble a banana?) and (b) rather hard to say. In truth, English speakers who use the word tend to use it on paper more often than on tongue. But it comes from a Sanskrit word. And the usual transliteration of the Sanskrit is jñāna, with a tilde on the n to indicate that it’s palatalized just like Spanish ñ. The way it’s written in Sanskrit even makes one out of two: from ज “j” and ञ “ñ” comes ज्ञ “jñ” – which sort of looks like your tongue trying to say “jñ.”

How do you say it? In English, just try to say what you see – it’ll end up sounding like a posh merger of “Jenna” and “banana.” In Sanskrit, you could say it like English “j” immediately followed by “ñ” (with no intervening vowel) and then “ana” (like in “Ana Gasteyer”), but you could also say it like “gyana” – the affricate-nasal-palatal sequence becoming one, sort of, as a palatalized stop, because when you’re speaking Sanskrit all the time you’re going to merge things and simplify things just like any other human will. Just like ज्ञ merges ज and ञ.

Why did that j and ñ get that way in the first place, then? Well, we know that its root jñā also gave rise to jānāti ‘know’, which shows clearly its parts, but we also know that it came from Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃-, which also led to Greek roots (e.g., γνῶσις gnosis) and Latin roots (e.g., notio, source of our notion) and Slavic roots (e.g., Russian знать znat’ ‘know’) and English know. It’s always the blade or back of the tongue (first g, from which k and the affricate j and the fricative z) followed by n and an at least somewhat open vowel. Same general form, same general meaning.

So yeah, this word for knowing the knowing that is beyond (or at the root of) knowing is the word for… knowing. And indeed, in Sanskrit that’s just what it meant. The word jñāna is the Sanskrit word (well, one of several) for ‘knowing’ or ‘knowledge’, in all the everyday and specialized senses, and its modern descendants in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, Kannada, Telugu, and even Burmese, Khmer, and Thai all mean the same thing and are all pretty similar in sound. It’s a very basic and broad word, just as English know is, and we know that know can have many special and distinctive senses, a few of which are suitable for a nudge and wink.

So why use jnana (our English borrowing of jñāna) rather than just, you know, knowing or knowledge? Well, it has that special sauce – the same special sauce as salsa has. 

You probably know that salsa is Spanish for ‘sauce’; in Spanish that’s what it means, ‘sauce’, and there are plenty of people who will point out that salsa sauce is redundant. And yet we’ve borrowed the word salsa to refer to a particular kind of sauce – a sauce we specifically associate with Spanish cuisine (well, Latin American cuisine). It’s not the only sauce called salsa in Spanish, but it’s the one we decided we liked, and part of its charm for English speakers is its exotic quality, so of course we took the word with it. This kind of culinary borrowing is popular in English but, let’s be fair, is pretty widespread around the world. 

Anyway, we did the same thing with jnana. All the other senses of knowing we pretty much have covered. But this idea of knowing that one is not separate from the ultimate unity of the universe (specifics depend on religion – Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh – and particular sect or school within the religion), well, that’s something that we particularly wanted to see as an exotic thing we could borrow from them, like a jewel from the East, the prize of a secret journey to find a holy man. Not that such ideas didn’t exist in the Western traditions – oh yes they did, and do, thanks to our own “mystical” traditions – but yeah, look, man, it’s jnana! It’s like, um, tikka masala of the mind!* Yum yum!

Do you discern a certain irony? That this word for knowing non-duality, non-otherness, is the result of a deliberate othering, a focused exoticism that treats something that has been known in our own cultures – and names something that, if it’s real, applies exactly the same to everyone everywhere – as something apart, distinct, foreign? And with an added bonus of a flagrant resistance to our own phonological rules (i.e., things we consider pronounceable)?

But, then, even the very idea of a word and concept for the realization of utter unity is irony on irony. And all words are a form of alienation. So perhaps this jnana split is as much apposite as opposite.

*Tikka masala, by the way, is a dish based on Indian cuisine but most likely invented in England, though most people who eat it don’t know that last bit.

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McMurdo

Posted on January 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Last word tasting, we looked at Longyearbyen, which, aside from being a word that you probably feel unsure how to say at first, is the name of a town of almost 2400 people just 12 degrees from the North Pole. Today, for the sake of balance, and because I thought of it while talking to my mother, we’re going to look at McMurdo.

McMurdo is a Scottish name, yes, you probably guessed that; it’s from the Hebrides, and it comes from Gaelic Mac Murchaidh or Mac Murchadha, meaning ‘son of Murchadh’, where Murchadh is a personal name that means ‘sea battle’. So… Seabattleson. 

It matters to us here today because of Archibald McMurdo.

Archibald McMurdo was born in 1812. He joined the Royal Navy in 1824 (yes, at the age of 12). He was made a lieutenant in 1836; he progressed through the ranks, making captain in 1851; he retired as a rear-admiral. He had command of the ship HMS Contest, detailed to the west coast of Africa, but he had already made his name in much colder climates, as a lieutenant on the warship HMS Terror. The Terror had made its mark in the year of McMurdo’s birth at Fort McHenry, firing rockets that glared red and bombs that burst in the air; McMurdo was on it first in 1836–37 in an expedition to try to find a Northwest Passage through the Arctic (it failed and returned to England, but nearly a decade later, without McMurdo, it went back under Sir John Franklin, and you may have heard how that went), and then in 1840–43 to find Antarctica – successfully – with James Clark Ross. And that’s where McMurdo gained his fame.

It’s not that he did anything special in particular. But I guess Ross liked him well enough, or at least found him to be a sound officer. When Ross’s two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, sailed into an Antarctic bay of the Ross Sea (as it had just been named), Ross named the two nearby volcanoes after his ships, and he named the bay McMurdo Sound.

And when, in 1956, the United States opened a base on one of the few patches of bare ground in Antarctica (technically on Ross Island rather than the mainland, but it’s all iced together), right near where Robert Falcon Scott had set up a camp in 1902, they called it McMurdo Station, because it’s on McMurdo Sound. Today, McMurdo Station, or McMurdo for short, or Mac-Town for shorterer, is the biggest human place in Antarctica. In the summer (the warmest months are November, December, and January, because it’s the South Pole, not the North one), its population gets up over 1200. In the winter, there are about 250 people keeping it going. It provides services and support for a number of research stations in the area. It’s just over 12 degrees north of the South Pole, but its location shelters it from the worst of the polar weather; midwinter temperatures are usually in the –20s (Celsius), and the coldest it’s ever been recorded is just below –50°C (for Antarctica, that’s not so bad). On the other hand, the warmest it’s ever been recorded is just under 11°C, and average daily temperatures never break freezing any time of the year.

Most people who have heard of McMurdo, including – I suspect – many of those who spend some or all of their year there every year, don’t know who it’s named after, let alone that it might as well have been called Seabattleson. But so it goes; we usually don’t know much about where our words come from. And Archibald McMurdo couldn’t have guessed the fame his name would gain from his service as a lieutenant on an exploring ship. But everything turned out well enough for him. After the two polar trips, he headed for someplace warm while his former ship ended its days frozen in the Arctic Sea. And his name carries on.

Do you want to know what it’s like at McMurdo? Of course you do. It’s different from what you probably imagine. PBS Terra did a series on it (and its environs). Here are the three little episodes you’ll certainly want to watch to know about the town:

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Longyearbyen

Posted on January 24, 2021 | 5 comments

If you lived in a place where there were only 127 days in a year – where the sun rose only 127 times and set only 127 times in a year – would you think of it as having a long year or a short year?

How about if the year was exactly the same length, in hours, as any other year (8760 hours, except in leap years), but it had 127 days, and one of those days had almost 3095 hours of sunlight, and one of the nights was almost 2687 hours without sunlight? Do you feel differently about that now?

In Longyearbyen, the northernmost settlement of more than 1000 people in the world, the sun sets at 12:54 pm on October 26 and doesn’t rise again until 11:42 am on February 15, and after it rises at 1:31 am on April 18 it doesn’t set again until 12:19 am on August 25 (ending the day of August 24).

Those of us who live in relatively boreal latitudes – which is more people than you might think – can feel like the year is dragging quite a bit in the dark, cold days of December and January. But imagine going nearly four months without any daylight at all. (And imagine going more than four months without any night!)

Not that that’s why Longyearbyen has its name. No, it has its name because it was (and still is, but only a bit) a coal mining town.

It’s not that being down in the mines makes night out of day, and all that stuff. It’s not that every year mining in a place at 78 degrees north is like two years anywhere else. No, it’s just that the mining company that set up on the island of Spitsbergen in 1906 was run by John Munro Longyear, and he named its company town Longyear City, because of course he did. And eventually, in 1926, a decade after the company was taken over by a Norwegian company, the name of the town was changed to Longyearbyen, because in Norwegian byen means ‘the town’ or ‘the city’ (by ‘town’ + en ‘the’).

Which, by the way, resolves what is probably the most vexing issue of this place for language freaks like me: how to pronounce it. You see, in Norwegian, the letter y is pronounced like German ü (in other words, like English “ee” with the lips rounded), and for quite some time after first seeing this town’s name and learning that it Norwegian, I wondered if the y in Longyear was a Norwegian y. Well, it’s not. But the y in byen is. So if you want to say the place name as accurately as you can (disregarding Norse intonation), it’s like “long year bü en” (with the “en” basically like as in “broken”). But if you’re just a regular English speaker who wants to say place names with sounds from the spice jars of English vowels, say it as “long year bee-en.” Anyway, don’t say the by like English by.

You probably won’t have that many reasons to say it at all, admittedly. Longyearbyen is a small place (not quite 2400 people, but more than that many snowmobiles, and far more than that many polar bears in the suburbs). But it does have one thing that might lengthen our years on this earth: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opened in 2008, which stores seeds from around the world to insure against loss of biodiversity in the world’s plants. It’s located in what was formerly a coal mine.

But, by the way, what is the deal with this surname Longyear? Well, John Munro Longyear was the son of US Representative – and later district court judge – John W. Longyear, who was descended from one Jacob Longyear, who was born as Jacob Langjaer in the Netherlands. And this family name Langjaer in turn appears to come from Geman Langjahr. Which, if you know German – or if you know historical variations in Dutch – will tell you that the family name actually means… ‘long year’.

Yeah. That took the long way around to end up in the same place. And why were they called that? I don’t know. Maybe if I had a year – a long one – to do some research, I could find out.

But don’t you like the digging, as in coal mines? And don’t you like how every little bit like that plants seeds for future discovery?

If you want to know more about Longyearbyen, here are some videos about it, showing the different ways you can present the same not very large place:

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antimetabole

Posted on January 20, 2021 | 3 comments

“Not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

That’s really a throwback to the days of oratory past, isn’t it? How about this:

“While once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe,’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.’”

It really gets your heart racing a bit, doesn’t it? What a turnaround that represents!

Not just a turnaround in the outlook or course of a country, but – easy enough to see – a turnaround in the sentence. It’s a syntactic mirror of a mental transformation, a discovery, what Arthur Koestler called bisociation, what Edward de Bono called lateral thinking. The first phrase comes along, and the second throws it right back. That’s why the rhetorical figure is called antimetabole, from Greek ἀντιμεταβολή, from ἀντί (anti, ‘in the opposite direction’) and μεταβολή (metabolé, ‘turning around’) – which is in turn from μετα- (which means all sorts of things but as a prefix indicates change or transformation) and βολή (noun, ‘throw’). (Your metabolism is called metabolism because it’s all the constant changes happening in your body.)

But it also turns around and looks back. It puts itself in history by putting history in itself. The two quotes above are from Joe Biden and Amanda Gorman, from Biden’s inauguration today, January 20, 2021. Sixty years ago to the day, January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It has not been forgotten.

Antimetabole is a long-loved effect for the mental jiujitsu it performs. There is the grand old saying “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” And on the other hand, there is Malcolm X’s “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

There are less solemn instances, too. A type of joke called the Russian reversal is often associated with Yakov Smirnoff but pre-dates him; an example from Laugh-In is “Here in America, is very good, everyone watch television. In old country, television watch you!” Garry Kasparov made more trenchant use of it: “Every country has its own mafia; In Russia, the mafia has its own country.” The movie Mystery Men had a character called The Sphinx who was overly fond of such turns of phrase: “To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn” is a basic example; “When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack” is a bit more… convoluted. Some other fine examples, including one from the (not a comedy) movie Sophie’s Choice, are perhaps a little less polite.

This kind of turn of phrase is sometimes called a chiasmus, but chiasmus is a broader term that mainly denotes a reversal of grammatical structure without repetition of words: “By day the frolic, and the dance by night” (Samuel Johnson). I think antimetabole is a more likeable term anyway, not only because it’s longer (six syllables! two dactyls – an-ti-me-ta-bo-le – like two fingers crossing) but because, once you know the etymology, you know that it means what it says and it says what it means.

And when it is used on a grand occasion marking an important change, it uses a new order of words to make words for a new order.

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