Tag Archives: word tasting notes

Revelstoke

Posted on May 8, 2020 | 2 comments

I grew up in and near Banff, Alberta, so Revelstoke is a familiar name to me. Familiar enough that I never really stopped to wonder where it came from.

If you drive the Trans-Canada Highway west into British Columbia, over the Great Divide at Kicking Horse Pass, then up and over through Glacier National Park (the Canadian one) and over the Rogers Pass (don’t do this when it’s snowing if you don’t have to), Revelstoke is the first town (technically a small city) that you come down to, ranged up slopes on one side of one of BC’s endless mountain valleys. It’s about halfway from Banff to Kelowna, distance-wise (not stress-wise). As you continue to Kelowna, you’ll pass through Sicamous, Enderby, Armstrong, and Vernon, so you probably won’t stop to think about where the name Revelstoke came from. It’s just another one of those place names, you know?

Besides, it seems appropriate. From the perspective of an Albertan, all these BC interior towns are places to go to the ski hill and get stoked in powder and revel in the steep and deep – maybe at Revelstoke Mountain Resort, which boasts the greatest vertical drop of any resort in North America (and Revelstoke holds the record for the snowiest winter in Canada) – and later to go to the cabin and stoke the fire and revel all night long with a bottle of whatever you brought, which might be a flavoured whisky named Revel Stoke (not made in Revelstoke).

So while I appreciated the obvious party-cabin overtones of Revelstoke, I never really paused to consider where that name actually came from. Not until today, when someone I follow on Twitter, @EbThen, tweeted, “I’m trying to figure out where the title of Baron Revelstoke came from. Like what the hell does ‘revelstoke’ mean? It’s not the name of any of the places or estates or…”

And I thought, wait, who is Baron Revelstoke?

At first I thought maybe this was the name of some character in a TV show, perhaps named after the town. So of course I looked. And no. Exactly not. Baron Revelstoke is a member of the English peerage. We are now on the seventh Baron Revelstoke, Alexander Rupert Baring, who turned 50 on April 8, 2020. The first Baron Revelstoke was Edward Charles Baring, 1828–1897, and it was in honour of him that the town of Revelstoke was named, as thanks for his bank helping to save the Canadian Pacific Railroad (the reason all these towns are even there) from bankruptcy in 1885 by buying up its unsold bonds.

His bank? That’s the other thing that was named after him – or, well, after his grandfather, Sir Francis Baring. Have you heard of Barings Bank? It was a large and prominent institution. It’s forever associated with one of the great teachable moments in banking: in 1995, a bloke named Nick Leeson, the head of futures trading (a form of legal gambling on which far too much of the world economy relies) at the Singapore branch of Barings, went rogue and made some rather bad judgement calls on derivatives and, oops, torched nearly a billion pounds, double the bank’s entire available trading capital. At which point the bank collapsed.

But in Revelstoke, the only banks that might collapse are those of the Columbia River, and they probably won’t either. Revelstoke was sited where the Illecillewaet flows into the Columbia, and at first it was named Farwell. Arthur Stanhope Farwell, a government surveyor, seeing that the railroad would be coming through, bought up a bunch of land and started a townsite, which of course he named after himself. He charged the Canadian Pacific Railway quite a bit of money for running the tracks across his land; they determined that they sure weren’t going to pay even more to put their station on his land, so they put it (and yards, repair shops, and a whole town) farther uphill, starting an Upper Town and Lower Town divide that persists to this day. And, as mentioned, they named it after Lord Revelstoke. And, in the long run, the town fully said farewell to Farwell, whose gamble did not pay off – he did not get so far or do so well.

OK, fine. But why is Lord Revelstoke called Lord Revelstoke?

This turns out to be harder to pull back the veil from than you’d expect.

Normally, if you go to the Wikipedia article for a member of the British peerage, you’ll find out right away where they got their name. And often enough, it’s not hard to work out anyway – one Canadian newspaper publisher, when he got his peerage, became Lord Beaverbrook (after not just any beaver and not just any brook, but a small community near where he grew up). Another (formerly) Canadian (former) newspaper publisher became Baron Black of Crossharbour, after a place in the docklands of London, near where his offices were. But Revelstoke?

You go look. Wikipedia doesn’t say where it’s from. It just says Edward Charles Baring was Baron Revelstoke of Membland in the County of Devon.

And then, if you look up Membland, it explains that it’s a historic estate near Plymouth, purchased in about 1877 by Edward Baring; after Baring had financial difficulties, he sold it in 1899, and the house ultimately became derelict and was demolished in 1927, although there are still some buildings there, plus a gate put up in 1889 by Baring featuring a bull and a bear. The article gives just one clue about Revelstoke: “Membland, in about 1877, and the manor of Revelstoke were purchased by Edward Baring (1828–1897), who in 1885 was elevated to the peerage as ‘Baron Revelstoke of Membland’.”

The manor of Revelstoke? It doesn’t explain and it doesn’t link.

I mean, come on.

Fortunately, the internet is a big place and we have Google to help us. And so I managed to find this:

“REVELSTOKE parish has it church on the sea coast, near Stoke Point and Bigbury Bay, but most of its inhabitants are in the large fishing village of NOSS MAYO, which lies in a low situation, on the south side of a creek from the mouth of the Yealm, opposite Newton Ferrers, nine miles S.E. of Plymouth. Crabs, lobsters, herrings, and other fish are caught at Noss Mayo, where the villagers suffered severely from cholera in 1849, when about 50 of them died, and more than 200 were afflicted with the dreadful malady. . . . The parish had 613 inhabitants in 1841, and contains 1470A. 2R. 19P. of land. The manor of Revelstoke was long the property and seat of the Revells, and was sold about 12 years ago, by Sir J. Perring, to its present owner, Robert Robertson, Esq., of Membland. W.W. Pendarves, Esq., owns the manor of Lambside, and part of the parish belongs to a few smaller owners. The Church is an ancient structure, with a small belfry and two bells; and in Noss Mayo, is a small Chapel of Ease, erected in 1838. The benefice is a perpetual curacy, consolidated with the vicarage of Yealmpton. . . . ” [From White’s Devonshire Directory (1850)]

So. Revell plus stoke. It is now very easy. I will unravel each part in sequence for you.

Revell, as it happens, is a name associated with something quite close to where I live now: Toronto City Hall, which was designed by Viljo Revell. But Viljo Revell was born Viljo Rewell in Finland; he changed the spelling to Revell (perhaps because he was tired of hearing his name mispronounced by English speakers or perhaps because he was tired of seeing it misspelled by Finnish speakers; I don’t know). And I can’t trace much farther back on his family name, but there are quite a few Rewells in Finland and I have nothing to tell me if there’s any connection to Rewells and Revells from farther west in Europe.

I do, however, have plenty to tell me where the Revells of Revelstoke, Devon, got their name: from Norman French, like many of the English gentry. There is some suggestion that the name is related to French reveler, ‘reveal’ (which comes from Latin meaning ‘pull back the veil’), but the more common view is that it is really the same word as revel. As in party. It ultimately traces back to Latin rebellare, also the source of rebel (as in go rogue). In other words, cut loose. Partying is the hallmark of rebellious youth, after all. Mountain resort towns are no strangers to it, and apparently neither are country piles in Devon.

And stoke? Does it have to do with putting logs on a fire?

…Yeah. But not quite directly.

When you see -stoke in an English place name, such as Basingstoke, it comes from Old English stoc, which in discussions of place names is generally treated as meaning ‘outlying settlement’ or ‘stockade’, but basically is a name for a place, a home, a stump to call your own – in fact, one of its meanings is ‘tree stump’. It’s the old form of the modern word stock in all its senses: ‘tree trunk’, ‘length of wood’, ‘stored goods’, ‘capital raised through the issue of shares, subject to trading on exchanges’ (hmm). It’s also from the same root (ha ha) as stoke, meaning ‘put another log on the fire’.

So. Yes. Now we have gotten our Barings, I mean bearings: Revelstoke means ‘party cabin’, when you come down to it. Which, at the end of the day, you will.

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spazieren

Posted on May 3, 2020 | 1 comment

Man, when you’re locked down, locked in, and locked up, it’s nice from time to time (if you’re not afraid of getting locked out) to go out into some outdoor space, get (and give and take) a bit of space, and just… space out. Go for a walk for a while.

I’m sure they feel the same in Germany. When you can do little else, you can still go for a walk: spazieren gehen. Yes, I’m cheating today: spazieren is a German word, not an English one. I’m going for a stroll in the linguistic neighbourhood.

So spazieren is the German word for ‘walk’? Hmm, well. German doesn’t have one specific word that it uses in all the places English uses walk. In fact, it will often just use gehen, ‘go’. But if you’re going for a walk – or going strolling – that’s spazieren gehen. So spazieren could be translated as ‘to stroll’. But the more interesting thing about this word, I think, isn’t where it’s going; it’s where it’s come from.

First let me pause to tell you how it’s pronounced, so you don’t have the wrong sound in your head. The s is like “sh” because it’s before p, and the z is like “ts,” and the stress is on the second-last syllable, so it’s /ʃpaˈtsiːʁən/, like “shpatseeren.” Now let’s move on.

That z may seem like Italian. In fact, that’s the usual way to say z in German, but, in this case, it actually is Italian. This word wandered all the way from Italy, where it’s spaziare. That, in its turn, came from Latin spatiari, which meant ‘go for a walk’ – but it also meant ‘spread, expand, space out’.

‘Space out’? Yes: it’s a verbalization of the noun spatium, which is the origin of our word space and had all the same meanings in Latin, pretty much.

So even the Romans, when going for a walk, might have said “I’m going to space out” (or maybe “I’m going to distribute myself” or “I’m going to spread myself around”). And that stuck into Italian (in which, by the way, spaziare also means ‘spread’ or ‘scatter’). And at last just the peregrine perambulatory sense made it all the way to German.

Hey, even words need to get out and around and space themselves a bit.

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emmetropic

Posted on April 22, 2020 | 2 comments

What do you see here? And with what eyes do you see it?

I see these words on my screen with eyes that are myopic and presbyopic, and when I look at what else my screen shows me, my mind tends to hyperopic. I mean that I am nearsighted – I have been since my childhood, when I decided that I would look better with glasses (I was right) and so started reading books close up in low light, and I got what I wanted – and I now have eyes that have gotten old and don’t have as great a range of focus – so I have several pairs of glasses, depending on what I’m planning to do with my eyes, so accessorize your eyes! – and yet when I read what the web sends me I tend to see far-away things with more clarity than nearby ones: I am figuratively farsighted. (However, sometimes what I see makes me turn away and feel sick.)

In politics and planning and other matters of the world it is supposedly good to be farsighted, but of course you need to see near as well, and it is best to have a good range of focus. So really you need to have good focus at all ranges. And you cannot turn away, no matter how sick it makes you feel.

Is there a word for that?

Let’s look at this word emmetropic. Do you discern bits? Your eyes may settle quickly on tropic – we all like to think of warm climes at times, especially if we can’t go to them and it’s not so hot where we’re at – and then you are left with what emme might be. If it were emmet it could mean ants, but I don’t want to see tropical ants, if you don’t mind. How about the Greek root ἐμέω, which shows up in emetic? In that case, since tropic actually refers to turning, and since ἐμέω means ‘I vomit’, emetropic would mean ‘turning and vomiting’. But that’s one m too few, and one emesis too many.

Look again. Broaden your view to take in words such as myopic, presbyopic, and hyperopic, and narrow it from tropic to opic. You see that emmetropic has to do with eyes and sight, and it splits at a seam that’s not at the syllable boundary – sort of like how helicopter is from helico- ‘spiral’ and pter ‘wing’, not from heli ‘sun’ and copter‘absolutely nothing that the Greeks ever talked about’.

OK, but if it’s emmetr- plus opic (and it is), what is emmetr-? It is from ἔμμετρος emmetros, from ἔν en ‘in’ plus μετρος metros ‘measure’. So emmetropic means ‘having sight in [good] measure’, or ‘having emmetropia’, where emmetropia is ‘sight in [good] measure’ – in other words, having eyes that are in focus at all distances (save, of course, too damn close, which we can define as so close you might accidentally get what you’re looking at in your eye). The New Sydenham Society Lexicon, quoted by the OED, defines emmetropia as “The normal or healthy condition of the refractive media of the eye, in which parallel rays are brought to a focus upon the retina when the eye is at rest and in a passive condition.”

Parallel rays, like parallel lines, like the parallel tracks of a metro or the stems of mm. And of course as you look closer and your eyes change focus, the lines converge. Which is good. Because parallel lines never meet, and everything that involves seeing well enough to change anything eventually involves getting close enough to meet.

And how is that realized with our real eyes? …We’ll see. Just keep focus and don’t turn away.

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dwell

Posted on April 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

Are you dwelling on what you’re dwelling in?

These days we seldom tell of dwelling, unless in a compound such as city-dwelling. The word dwell with its related forms is dwindling; it seems almost to have gone astray somewhere. We talk of where we live, of our home, of our house, of our residence. We reside there. But dwell? It’s more of a special-use word.

It has a holy overtone to it, dwell, thanks to its frequent use in the King James Bible. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever,” the 23rd Psalm concludes. The 24th Psalm tells us “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” At the time of that translation, reside had not overtaken dwell, nor was live so commonly used for this narrower sense.

But as Tennyson wrote,

In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great.

All is not holy with this word, and its past is not so blessed. Let us turn from psalms to a palindrome:

Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel.

You know that’s old, not just because it cheats with the & but because it spells dwel with one l, a form disused for a half a millennium now: our old monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words ending in /l/ have all doubled it up, hell, well, bell, smell, fill, kill, fall, roll, dull, and so on, dwelling just a little longer with the benefit of more easily distinguishing lfrom any other slender grapheme.

But how does one dwell evilly, whether with one l or two? Is not a dwelling good, or at least neutral?

In fact, dwelling was, at one time, more evil than good. We would do well to dwell on this detail for a few minutes.

It is not that we were all nomads and did not want to be boxed in. It is that the word itself was in a bad neighbourhood. We get a clue to this in the fact that we can speak of dwelling on something, which is related to the fact that dwell also refers to the time a train (especially a subway train) spends stopped in a station. Dwell meant – and in some usages still means – ‘tarry’, ‘hang back’.

Which is not intrinsically evil, of course. But if you are not going forward, then you are not going forward on the right path, a fact many a subway rider will be sensitized to if their train dwells a minute too long. And the relation between “not going anywhere” and “not going on the right path” is the core of the early history of this word.

A millennium ago, to dwell someone was to lead them astray, and so to dwell yourself – or just to dwell – was to go astray. This sense of the word came from a Proto-Germanic word reconstructed as *dwaljaną meaning ‘delay’ or ‘hold up’ or ‘be confused’ or ‘perplex’ and a closely related word *dwelaną meaning ‘go astray’. And that is the ambivalence at the root of dwell: to go no rightly, or just not to go rightly.

The English use of dwell (or earlier spellings) meaning ‘abide’ or ‘continue in a state, place, or action’ was established by about 800 years ago, and there it has dwelt ever since. It gained the sense ‘reside’ by the 1300s, and dwelling meaning ‘residence’ was in use before 1400. The usage dwell on meaning ‘linger’ or ‘brood over’ or ‘sustain a musical note’ was in place by the 1400s. And no one has seen the ‘lead astray’ or ‘go astray’ sense since about the same time. You may recall being told, in your childhood, “If you don’t know where you are, stay there”; the history of these two senses supports that: the ‘stay’ one has been found, and the ‘go’ one has been lost.

And that is how a word can have meant both ‘go astray’ and ‘stay at home’. Words are full of possibilities, and poetic words even more so, as Emily Dickinson wrote:

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of eye—
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—

For Paradise is not a fixed, complete, perfect place and state; just as infinity is always increasing at infinite speed, or it would not be infinity, creation must ever be creating, truth must be ever adapting and updating, and meaning must ever be multiplying to stay meaningful. And if this means that it encompasses movement and non-movement, good and bad, so be it.

It also encompasses you being in something and something being in you. As we are learning, there is incessant discovery and revision in our dwellings and dwelling in us. Denise Levertov brought us the truth in “Matins”:

Marvellous Truth, confront us
at every turn,
in every guise, iron ball,
egg, dark horse, shadow,
cloud
of breath on the air,
dwell
in our crowded hearts
our steaming bathroom, kitchens full of
things to be done, the
ordinary streets.

Thrust close your smile
that we know you, terrible joy.

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hopey

Posted on April 15, 2020 | 4 comments

This word looks like it is to hope as dopey is to dope, or as happy is to hap (which, if you’re not sure, is roughly synonymous with luck), or as snippy is to snip, or as jumpy is to jump.

And yeah, it is.

But wait! We have a word hopeful. Why do we need hopey if we have hopeful?

Well, heck. Why do we have both cheerful and cheery? Why both lustful and lusty? Why both masterful and masterly?

And why both bountiful and bounteous, both joyful and joyous, both dutiful and duteous, both deceitful and deceptive, both lawful and legal? Each of these pairs of words could be covered by one word with a wider ambit of sense. Frankly, they’re used in overlapping ways as it is.

But why do you have so many different mugs in your cupboard? Why so many spoons of different designs in your drawer? Why so many functionally fungible belts or ties or scarves in your wardrobe? Why do I have both a chef’s knife and a carving knife, why do I have wine glasses of at least eight different shapes, why do I have almost a dozen 50mm lenses that can go on the same camera?

I mean, some languages get by with a spare, konmari-style vocabulary, while English gets by with a vocabulary that is as restrained, elegant, and tidy as the mansion of a millionaire kleptomaniac hoarder. But there’s always somelittle difference between words, even if just a subtle one of tone or form.

Don’t tell me you can’t sense a difference between hopeful and hopey. Heck, the rhyme with dopey and the echo of happy give hopey a distinct tone right away. Hopeful is a clear future-oriented state: you have an expectation, or at least a sense of probability, that some particular desire will be fulfilled. Hopey is more of… a mood, a general disposition. You feel good about how things are going. There was a lot of that when Barack Obama first took office, for instance (especially thanks to his famous HOPE poster). But any time you’re in a mood that’s the opposite of dreading or worrying…

Of course, we know the distinction between truthful and truthy. There is the risk of hopey leaning the same way, but don’t forget that truth is something that is conceived as externally verifiable, whereas hope is an internal state, and it’s harder to say how it would be faked. Maybe just weakened: “I wasn’t entirely hopeful… just hopey.” But that doesn’t contradict the more general sense.

Don’t bother pulling out (or surfing to) a dictionary to check what it says; you won’t find hopey in most of them. But it does exist as a word! You can find it on Urban Dictionary (I mean, yeah, you can find a lot of completely fake words there too, but…). And it has shown up in a few other places. I claim no invention. It’s out there. Can’t you feel it?

Doesn’t everyone want to feel hopey? If we can find a reason to?

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gemütlich

Posted on April 11, 2020 | 2 comments

This word is at least partially adopted into English, but, frankly, I don’t want the English version. The English version uses only English sounds and I do not find “ga-moot-lick” to be a fitting sound for this word, or even for that matter not unpleasant to listen to. And “not unpleasant” is the heart and soul of this word. So it’s not a hollow “oo” in the stressed syllable, it’s that front round ü vowel, so much cozier and closer, and it almost forces you to purse your lips as if to kiss. And the final consonant is not a hard back “k” nor even the back fricative we know from ach; it’s the German “front ch,” as in ich, made with the blade of your tongue arching towards the ridge of your palate like a cat’s back arching towards your shinbone.

Whisper the two versions: “ga-moot-lick” sounds at best like a Scottish invitation to a date and at worse like a farmer planning nefarious deeds in a barn; “gemütlich” sounds at best like barely bridled desire and at worse like someone bidding good night and about to blow out the candle. Well, at least to my ears.

I first learned this word from German Made Simple, a book I bought in high school at the Banff Book and Art Den. Its chapters follow a certain Mr. Clark, who lives in a suburb of New York (going by the description, it must be a ways out, at least 40 minutes on either the LIRR or the Metro North) and who loves Germany and German things and the German language. In chapter 9 we get a dialogue between Mr. Clark and a certain Herr Müller about the city and the suburbs:

M.: Warum haben Sie die Stadt gern?
C. In der Stadt gibt es Bibliotheken, Theater, Museen, Universitäten, usw.
M.: Es gibt auch Fabriken, Lagerhäuser, Lärm, Rauch und auf die Strassen Menschenmassen, die hin und her laufen.
C.: Sehr richtig! Deswegen wohne ich lieber in der Vorstadt. Hier ist das Leben still und gemütlich.

M.: Why do you like the city?
C.: In the city there are libraries, theaters, museums, universities, etc.
M.: There are also factories, warehouses, noise, smoke, and on the streets crowds of people who are running back and forth.
C.: Very correct. Therefore I prefer to live in the suburbs. Here life is quiet and comfortable.

There. You see it? Gemütlich is translated as comfortable. Though really it has an overlapping but not identical set of associations. It could equally be translated as cozy, snug, pleasant, or homely – or friendly, cheerful, or easygoing. And in origin it relates not to snugs or comforts or homes or pleasing or cheer or friends – not directly, anyway. It comes from Gemüt, which means ‘mind’, ‘soul’, ‘heart’, or ‘feeling’. You can take it apart further by plucking the ge off it (which is a derivational prefix) to get a root that is also the source of modern English mood. (Which is funny, because it’s not very gemütlich to be moody, and less still to be in a cozy space with someone else who is moody.)

But, if you don’t mind, I would like to take issue with one thing Mr. Clark (if that’s his real name) says. He prefers the suburbs because life is “still und gemütlich,” by contrast with the city. I won’t argue the point over “still” (well, except for when there’s a pandemic lockdown, and even then the city is less quiet than the country, though probably not than the suburbs – for one thing, there are no lawn mowers in high-rise neighbourhoods). But gemütlich?

Listen. I’ve lived in the country, and I’ve lived in small towns (such as Exshaw and Banff, Alberta), and I’ve lived in the suburbs (in newer cities – Calgary, Edmonton – and older – Medford and Somerville, suburbs of Boston), and I’ve lived, and live now, right downtown. I associate many characteristics with the 4500-square-foot house we lived in at the foot of a mountain, but gemütlich is not one of them. A small town can be gemütlich, but it can also be a bit stifling; I’m not sure if feeling like everybody is always up in your business is really cozy, friendly, charming, comfortable, et cetera. (I mean, you do you.) A suburb, cozy? Let’s see. You’re in a house that may be small or large but probably has at least two floors and is certainly homey and all that, and maybe you’re on a cul-de-sac and it seems very comfy, but you’re also probably going to have to drive somewhere to do anything, and you’re in the middle of a sprawl of houses that would take a long time to walk out of. You’re far from the madding crowd, maybe, but you’re also where the madding crowd goes to eat dinner and sleep before heading back to mad some more the next day. It’s kinda cozy, but…

…you know what makes me feel most comfortable and safe and snug when I want to get to sleep? The sound of a thrashing rainstorm on my window. The contrast between outside and inside really makes me feel snug. And what makes me feel cozy and warm and calm and gemütlich is, in part, having a thousand square feet of calmness full of books and music right in the middle of the city, where I can look out my window and see the madding crowd (when there is one) and at the same time not be in it. I could go down and be on the street in the middle of everything – there are two theatres a two-minute walk from the door, and grocery stores only twice as far, and all those other city things too, including hospitals should I need one – but when I don’t choose to, I am as snug as a bug in a rug, and embraced by the non-interfering presence of more than a thousand people within a hundred metres of me, all of them in home spaces equally gemütlich.

Sure, not everyone likes it. Different things for different people. But it suits my mind and it suits my mood.

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oneiric

Posted on April 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

I’ve walked these streets many times. I know them, and I always recognize them, and they are never the same. I’ve cut across this endless downtown and known the geography not by recognition but by emotion. I’ve gone into this city centre by a lake, and I’ve taken the elevator in the hotel that goes up a tower and keeps on higher than the top of the building and never stops where it should and only opens the door when it shouldn’t. I’ve driven this freeway to the farther reaches of this city and I’ve known how to get to these endless neighbourhoods though they’re always different. I’ve taken this country turnoff down the exit and the rural road to this lake. I’ve been back to this small town that I spent my childhood in, always at night, and it’s always cold and foreign and always deeply familiar. I’ve continued on the road through the mountains and down into the valley, and I’ve walked the main street of the town there; I can draw a map of the church and the other church and the sanctuary in the one and the stage in the other, and I can describe the shopping lanes that lead off the main street of this town. I’ve been up this town on a hill. I’ve followed this curving street to the far side of this old European town. I’ve climbed to the eleventh storey of this endless house, to the secret rooms, countless times. I’ve gone into the annex of this ranch-style house, the one that keeps going and opens into another room and another and they’re all full of furniture and stored things and I’ve never seen them and always known they’re there. I’ve been to the sub-basement and lolled in the little hot tub. I know these places, and they are sometimes full of people, and no one other than me has ever been to them. They are often irenic, often ironic, always neurogenic.

We have a word, dreamy, that carries such a sedate and happy feeling, like a cloudy glowy love-world, that we can’t use it to describe dreams, which are so rarely dreamy. We have another word, dreamlike, that often draws trite, clichéd, and trivial images, and we can’t use it to describe dreams because they are not dreamlike, they are dream. What is the word that just refers to the world or true quality of dreams? What is the world for this universe that exists only in the mind of one person, arising unbidden when they are cut off from the world their body moves in? How do I characterize the experience of seeing a tornado coming towards me, of seeing waters rise and discovering myself far from shore and surrounded by the deeps, and yet being able to wake and sigh in the safe comfort of sheets? What is the word for when I am in a completely real world, and I think, “Am I actually dreaming? This is all so normal and banal and all-surrounding; how could I be lying in a bed somewhere at the same time? It can’t be” – and yet it turns out to be? What is it when I find myself on a stage in a part I didn’t know I was going to have to play, or stepping off a verdant and impossibly high cliff, and think, “This is a dream,” and make something up, or fly?

It is oneiric, adjective. Of course: so many of our words for the mysteries of the psyche come from classical Greek. Psyche, for one. Hypnopomp and psychopomp for two more. And oneiric comes from ὄνειρος oneiros ‘dream’ (or anything that is like a dream).

It is as different from dream as the world of dreams is from the “dreamy.” Oneiric is not creamy or drowsy; it twists like licorice and it claws at you like iron nails. When you see it, it reminds you that you are the only one in your dreams, and it hints at the eros and erosion of the dream world; when you hear it, it reminds you that sleep is ever nigh, and when you are dreaming wakefulness is ever nigh.

Humans have had many ideas about the meaning and quality of dreams. I can’t speak for anyone else; for me, they are the allegorical theatre of unsolved problems, and they are the discard pile of recent days’ awareness reshuffled back into the deck. They have sometimes pointed out to me what I feel about a person, and more often pointed out to me what I feel about my current situation. They have never told me my future. Not yet, anyway. They have never revealed to me the secrets of the ages, or at least I haven’t noticed if they have. I can’t tell you what your dreams mean, and I’m not going to go into what other people in other times and places have said about dreams. But I can tell you one thing: if you want to do a Google search (or similar) to find learnèd ideas, thoughts, and theories about dreams, a word that will help you is oneiric.

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kenophany

Posted on April 3, 2020 | 1 comment

Yesterday, my Twitter friend @theoriginaledi drew my attention to this video by Hank Green, in particular the part between 2:42 and 4:14:

Hank Green says, in this part,

There is the sudden realization . . . that your life is not gonna be the same anymore, and there is no way to reacquire that sameness. . . . It’s such a specific feeling, this moment where you suddenly realize that you don’t know what the future holds anymore, and the story you’ve been quietly, silently telling yourself about what the future is going to be like, that story just… falls apart. It’s not there anymore. It doesn’t get replaced with something. It’s just gone. I wanted to know what this feeling is called, because it seems so specific that there should be a name for it. I’ve experienced it a bunch of times. I could not find a word for this in English.

Hank says that he asked Susie Dent, and she replied, “I’ve been wondering similar for days. I keep returning to ‘wuthering’: a rushing or raging that you’re powerless to stop. Emily Bronte described it as ‘atmospheric tumult’.” Hank allows that “this isn’t quite it”; he’s willing to make it it, but he’s open to suggestions.

I think the word required is kenophany.

That’s not what I replied to Edi right away. I first said, “Ah, a peripeteia and anagnorisis into the postmodern moment: the Wile E. Coyotification of life, when you look down and realize you’re in midair, and all the metanarratives are empty. The dark side of satori. Postmodern philosophers and Zen Buddhists write about it.” And I think Wile E. Coyotification has a certain something, but Wile E. Coyote had an assortment of calamitous moments, not just the one where he runs off a cliff and doesn’t realize at first that he’s in mid-air. Besides, at that point he does have a sense of a future. It’s a revised sense, but the gravity of the situation is clear and the consequences proceed inevitably.

No, this is more “the dark side of satori.” Allow me to explain. Satori is the moment in Zen Buddhist meditation where you achieve insight, understanding, awareness of the true nature of things; it comes from the Japanese verb satoru and it means ‘comprehension’ or ‘understanding’. But the true nature of things is that – well, I mean, one can’t actually put it in words, but it’s the lack of inherent essence; it’s what in Japanese is said mu, sometimes translated as “void,” but void has strong negative emotional connotations that are not intrinsic to it. It’s just that there’s no there there.

Which can be very disconcerting as an idea to many people. It’s similar to how Fredric Jameson described the postmodern: “incredulity towards metanarratives.” (By the way, if you’re about to rant about “postmodern thinking” as some kind of epitome of the airy stupidity of ivory tower academics, don’t bother; you’re just being lazy – what you think of as “postmodernism” has nothing to do with what it actually is. If you had an accurate idea of it, you wouldn’t be ranting against it, you’d be recognizing in it some of the folksy wisdom your grandparents dispensed about not structuring your life around something just because it’s a fancy story that sounded good.) But since we like to have stories in which we follow a clear path from A and go to Z and make overall sense of everything, we are very resistant to the idea that there is no path, there is no such thing as following, “clear” is our imagination, and “we” aren’t a single coherent unchanging entity either. It’s all… beyond our ken.

Hence the “dark side”: the dreadful feeling of emptiness and void, when in fact it’s just nothing – or, well, not nothing either, but not something; there is no intrinsic quiddity. And then there’s that ken, as in ‘knowledge’; it just by coincidence happens to have a sound-alike in Japanese. A synonym for satori, you see, is kenshō. That means ‘seeing the true essence’ or ‘seeing nature’. Ken means ‘seeing’, which is a bit of a pity since shō (‘nature, essence’) sounds like show, which is the other side of seeing.

Imagine, a viewing of understanding: a ken show. But can’t we make a fancy single word of that? Well, how about pulling in the Greek φαίνω, ‘I shine, I appear’, whence –phany as in epiphany and theophany? From that we get kenophany.

Oh, but the ken in kenophany is not from Japanese ken – that wouldn’t work. And it’s not from English ken (meaning ‘understanding, awareness’) either. No, it’s from Greek κενό, which means ‘void’ or ‘emptiness’. So kenophany is a showing – or a coming to see – the emptiness, the lack of an actual overarching structuring narrative. It’s the moment of the carpet being whipped out from under your feet, and it turns out that there is neither a floor nor not a floor beneath it.

I think we all have had our kenophanies, moments where the storyline we were following is just gone, and nothing is there to replace it. It’s like in the song “La marée haute” by Lhasa de Sela: “La route chante quand je m’en vais; je fais trois pas… la route se tait. La route est noire à perte de vue; je fais trois pas… la route n’est plus.” (“The road sings as I set out; I take three steps… the road is silent. The road is black as far as I can see; I take three steps… the road is gone.”)

It seems inevitable to me, this word kenophany; it’s so neatly suited to this meaning and this moment.

But it doesn’t exist.

Yes, it does. It just didn’t exist until now. You won’t find it in a dictionary or anywhere else as such. I assembled it from the appropriate bits. That’s a thing one can still do with these classical Greek and Latin Meccano pieces. That’s not to say that I invented it; it was already there, just waiting to be put together. And it’s not to say that I didn’t invent it; no one else put it together. But who, then, is this “I” anyway? You won’t get the same results if you check back in a minute.

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empyre

Posted on April 1, 2020 | 1 comment

Comme on dit, l’empire empire.

That’s French for “As they say, the empire gets worse.” And if the empire’s failings are in the sky, you could say “L’empire empire dans l’empyrée” – “The empire gets worse in the empyrean.” Which is a phrase that could get some air from time to time.

But look at today’s word: empyre. What is its sense? Whence does it come? It looks like empire, but in some rakish old style, like vampyre and, um, umpyre; it looks like pyre, which is the same flame as burns within empyrean (celestial bodies are great balls of fire, after all); but somehow there is something… impure. Empirically, it seems impaired.

Well, it is imperfect; in fact, it is obsolete, not in use since about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, and of course spellings at that time were as fluid as fashion. But in its time it was neither imperial nor empyrean. It came from French, yes, but from that other empire – the one that means ‘get worse’, infinitive empirer, descended from Latin, formed from in (the one that connotes increase) and peior ‘worse’ (whence our pejorative).

Empyre has a pair, a modern English word descended from the same roots and meaning about the same thing: impair. But (o Fortuna imperatrix mundi) thanks to fortune impair has tricks and is mundane – we use it now as much to mean ‘impede’ or ‘intoxicate’ or other things that one might infer from terms such as impaired driving. We don’t mean specifically that the driving is made worse; well, we do, but we mean that it’s done by a person whose overall functioning is impaired, made worse (by intoxication, of course). Whereas if we said their driving was empyred, we would mean just specifically that it had been made worse. And if someone beleaguers you, you can say “You are empyring my day.” And if they hear “vampiring” it won’t go wildly astray.

And we can look at history and see how many empires have empyred our world, and we can say that incidents and accidents (and hints and allegations) empyre our lives. And if the form of this word makes us think that we want to toss some things on a pyre, well, so much the better – a word is best if it has extra flavours cooked in.

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moue

Posted on March 30, 2020 | Leave a comment

There are many words that, in saying, intend to imitate the sound of what they name – moo, to give an obvious example – but name me a word that, in saying, imitates the gesture of the thing it names.

Name me another word, I mean. Because today’s word is the obvious example. Yes, you can say “moue” without making a moue; you can even say it with your lips barely parted. But if you really emphasize the gesture, you moue. And if you make a moue and try to say something while doing so, the word you’ll say is most likely moue. It’s like if we called an air kiss a mwah (which sometimes we do).

A moue can be any sort of expression that causes the lips to purse outward: duck face, a grimace of pain at a blow to a sensitive part or of sympathy at seeing someone else receive such a blow, the face some wine tasters make while slurping the wine in their mouths so they can declare that it tastes like leather, tobacco, wet gravel, or cat’s pee. But most often it refers to a pout, often a playful one.

Of course it’s a French word. Making a pouty face playfully is on page one of the French gestural phrasebook. And in case it’s uncertain, I will assure all and sundry that moue is pronounced exactly the same as English moo, even when a French person says it: moue is the French way to spell the sound that in English is spelled moo.

And so you might expect that moue arose when some writer, lacking any more arbitrarily formed word, decided to describe a pursing of the lips with a gestural imitation. You might not expect this word to have an etymology that connects it to other, not identical forms.

So sorry to disappoint you, then. Don’t pout! The forms are similar. The Old French ancestor is moe, and that came not from Latin but from Frankish, a Germanic tongue, where the word (still meaning ‘pout’ or ‘grimace’) is conjectured to have been mauwu. That, in turn, is expected to have come from Proto-Indo-European *-mewH meaning ‘push away’.

So perhaps – perhaps – the word originally did not come from the gesture. Perhaps! But when you have a word that is close enough in meaning, and so well represents a particular sense, it is reasonable that the usage might have shifted and/or narrowed to match what seemed most suitable. It’s a thing we do from time to time.

And now, to make up for any deficit of charm, here is the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé that made me think of this word today.

Rien, au réveil, que vous n’ayez
Envisagé de quelque moue
Pire si le rire secoue
Votre aile sur les oreillers.

Indifféremment sommeillez
Sans crainte qu’une haleine avoue
Rien, au réveil, que vous n’ayez
Envisagé de quelque moue.

Tous les rêves émerveillés,
Quand cette beauté les déjoue,
Ne produisent fleur sur la joue
Dans l’œil diamants impayés
Rien, au réveil, que vous n’ayez.

Here’s a translation of sorts, not trying to keep the rhyme (translations are always imperfect… sorry!):

Nothing, on waking, you never have
Considered with a sort of moue
Worse if the laugh should shake
Your wing upon the pillows.

You sleep indifferently
Without fear a breath would admit
Something, on waking, you never have
Considered with a sort of moue.

All the amazed dreams,
When this beauty foils them,
Do not give a flower to the cheek
In the eye diamonds not paid for
Nothing, on waking, you never have.

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