Tag Archives: word tasting notes

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.

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.

umbrageous

Posted on March 29, 2020 | 2 comments

We usually like it when things are clear, when the sun shines through, when we understand the sense without a shadow of a doubt. But language is not always like that. Sometimes it’s outrageous. And sometimes it’s just… umbrageous. Shadowy, doubtful.

The word umbrageous may look like a less certain sibling of outrageous: you see the rage in the middle but instead of being right out it’s just, um, umb. But the rage is an illusion: outrage is taken from French and formed from outre (you may know outré, naming something that is just too extra), which comes from Latin ultra, ‘beyond’. Likewise umbrageous comes from umbrage, which comes from umbra, ‘shadow’. Yes, when you take umbrage at something, you perceive that you are having shade cast on you – and you can also give umbrage, meaning cast shade on someone, figuratively (or literally).

OK, but which is it? Is it umbrageous to cast shade, or to take shade (umbrage)?

Yes.

This word has (you knew it was coming) shades of meaning, and meanings of shade. A large tree with broad branches and many leaves is umbrageous: it casts much shadow. And the area underneath it – like the plants that prefer to grow there – is umbrageous: it is in shadow; it takes shadow.

Likewise, if I throw shade on someone – if, for instance, I say of a chef “His restaurant has excellent butter, and the water is nice and cool,” or if I say of a singer “Her recital was a wonderful expedition in search of the lost key” – I am being umbrageous, and if on the other hand someone is inclined to take offense at something I say – such as the time in my lunkish youth I said of a fellow actor’s shirt, “Oh, Le Chateau, that must have cost a lot,” and he replied “Why are you such an aaarsehole” – they are being umbrageous. (And this latter sense is, I should say, the more common.)

Well, sometimes you cast the shadow, and sometimes the shadow is cast on you. Either way, it is – you are – umbrageous. It may seem odd to conflate the cause of shade with its recipient, but remember that the underside of a tree is also in the shade, and that when, for instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of “The umbrageous loveliness of the surrounding country,” it covered both aspects of the matter.

Of course, people who take umbrage often create their own shade, and so in a way of seeing it are umbrageous in both senses as well – as one L. Hansen wrote in 1802 (thanks to the OED for this, and note the variant spelling), “Most punctilious with respect to forms and Ceremonies: and excessively ombrageous, with regard to the Non-observance of trivial points.”

I am reminded of the word nauseous: on the one hand, it is normally used to mean ‘feeling nausea; queasy; nauseated’; on the other hand, there are people who will inform you crisply that it can only mean ‘causing nausea’, and will imply that you are an illiterate barbarian for using it the way it is nearly always used. Those people, you see, are also umbrageous – in both senses: they take umbrage at the usual usage, and they throw shade at those who use it.

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moble

Posted on March 26, 2020 | 1 comment

We must moble; we must not be mobile; we must not be mob-led; we must be mobled. So may we be both hobbled and ennobled. Wrap a scarf around your face and giggle demurely; peer past the wool or tulle like a vagabond or mobster or some marbled statue; wait for the time when you may again be emboldened.

I’m sure you, like me, know this word first from Shakespeare, reading Hamlet by the firelight: the prince is watching the players rehearse, and one of them, narrating the fall of Troy, says “But who, O, who had seen the mobled queen—” Hamlet (like many a listener) says “‘The mobled queen’?” and Polonius replies, “That’s good; ‘mobled queen’ is good.” None of which helps you to know what it means.

Nor helps you to know how to say it, by the way. I suspect that you, as I, assumed it rhymed with “nobled.” But no. It rhymes with “hobbled.” And, I say with relief, it is (unlike contumely) the part of speech it appears to be: a past participle, pressed into use as an adjective. The verb is moble, a word uncommon enough that your autocorrect will get into a fight with you over the absence of an i between b and l.

And what does it mean? Muffled, scarf-wrapped. I’m sure that wearing a surgical mask counts too. In 1985, A.S. Byatt used it in Still Life: “He remembered this time in very bright, clear primary colours, but all softly muffled, or mobled, as if seen through white veiling.” In 1926, Victoria Sackville-West wrote in Land “How delicate in spring they be / That mobled blossom and that wimpled tree.” And in 1877, the Earl of Southesk was kind enough to use it in Meda Maiden in a way from which the sense may be deduced: “There rested a woman,—close mantled in brown, / Mobled and muffled from sandal to crown.”

Why is said it like it comes from mob? Perhaps it does – one speculative etymology ties it to mob plus the frequentative –le suffix. But perhaps it does not. (Note that mob in turn comes from mobile vulgus, ‘rabble, common people’, and does not show up in English before moble does.) It has a certain kinship with muffle in form as well as sense, and mobble used to be a spelling of it (the one-b version prevailing probably because that’s how it was spelled in editions of Shakespeare and that’s where nearly everyone who knows it knows it from).

Well, some things just show up and no one has the last word on how they got there or how they spread. So it is. But if you don’t want them to spread further, you can stay in your bubble, or, if you must venture out in the mob, you can self-moble. You may feel hobbled, but it is more noble.

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twill

Posted on March 22, 2020 | 1 comment

Take a bit of twill fabric and rub it between your fingers. It is not so smooth as satin, nor even as a plain weave; it is rough, it has ribs, it has traction. Whether it be cotton, or wool, or even silk, it grips. It does not shine, nor does it whiffle like corduroy as you ruffle it, but ’tis rugged and ready: ’twill serve. It is not a thrill from the mill, but it is twill.

How is it made? It starts one way but then skips ahead. Where in a plain weave your weft (cross thread) goes under your warp (long thread) and then over and then under and then over, in twill it goes under and then over and then over again, and sometimes again: a repeat, a three-peat, maybe even a four-peat. Sometimes it goes under more than once before going over. And the next thread is offset by one alternation, so that a diagonal pattern is formed.

Want to find some twill? Skip your suits and head to your jeans: denim is made with a twill weave. It’s not that twill is never used for formal wear – you’ll see some on the couture runways – but it’s more rugged and less prone to showing stains and smirches.

And the name, twill? So many names of fabrics come from places – denim is from serge de Nîmes, satin is from Zayton (the medieval Arabic name for Quanzhou), tulle is from Tulle. But twill comes from two places: Rome and England.

OK, I’m going diagonal; it’s obviously not a blend of those two place names. It’s just that it started as Latin bilix, from bis ‘twice’ and licium ‘thread’, but then it skipped ahead and turned that bi into two to make Old English twili, which became twilly, which became twill. (There was originally a thrili to go with twili, but it’s all just called twill now.) It’s sort of like how we went from repeat to three-peat – and then back to two-peat.

Two-peat? Yes, that’s in use; I wrote about it years ago. You are free to dislike it, but it is in use, especially among a set of people who wear twill more often than satin, and like it or not, it will serve. And if you will call twill twill, as one does, you have one less basis for objecting to word forms developing diagonally… as ’twere.

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finagle

Posted on March 21, 2020 | 2 comments

Finagle: procure by deceit or trickery. Tangle your fingers into it and snag it away. Or talk it out of someone with your gift of the Blarney.

Supposedly finagle comes from an earlier English word fainague, from French roots meaning ‘act’ (feign) ‘sick’ (ague). Never mind that acting sick has to do with indolence, not with procurement. Never mind that I can only find this word fainaigue as the conjectured etymon of finagle. I’m not saying that there definitely was no such word; I’m just saying “Hmmmmmm.”

The first documented use that I (or Oxford) can find of finagle in its modern sense is a 1926 citation from the USA. Google Books gives me further hits that show it was established in use in the USA (though as a colloquialism not familiar to all readers) by the 1930s, though some claimed it came from England. Oxford seems to think it came first from England but doesn’t produce evidence. Wiktionary presents it as American. There are also a couple of variant spellings, presumably from people who heard the word said and spelled it how they thought it was likely written – phenagle is notable, because it shows the cod-sophistic association of ph.

So can we finagle some kind of explanation for this word’s presence in our language?

I should say that there are earlier hits for Finagle in Google Books. It appears as a name in two works of short fiction of the 1800s. The first, in a volume dated 1821, Winter Evening Tales Collected among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland, by James Hogg, makes it the name of a town in the south of Scotland. The second, appearing first in Scribner’s Monthly in summer 1872, in a story by John S. Barry, makes it an Irish family name. The latter, titled “Shane Finagle’s Station,” is as thorough a slander of stereotypes against the Irish as you would ever wish you had not cast eyes on, and it features an assortment of peasant rogues blathering their way through catechism and confessional before ending with a massive drinkfest. But there’s nothing other than bare resemblance of form to link these Finagles to our word finagle.

Also, there’s nothing in those two fictions to say how the names should be said, and one could easily imagine a stress on the first syllable intended – compare Fingal and Finnegan, after all. With our word today, on the other hand, the stress is decidedly on the second syllable, and phonaesthetically, that makes an important difference.

Consider if the stress were on the first syllable. The word would have the same kind of pattern as miracle or risible or any of a number of other tumbling trisyllabic words with various effect. The most important bit would be the fin. But as it is, that’s just a flick of the fingers as they reach to grasp the main business.

And the main business has a –gle on it, one that has a stressed syllable right before. There are many words of that form in English, some with n before the gand some not, but have a look at this selection: boggle, bungle, dangle, dingle, dongle, newfangled, gaggle, gargle, giggle, goggle, gurgle, haggle, inveigle, jangle, juggle, mangle, mingle, muggle, snaggle, spangle, squiggle, straggle, struggle, tangle, tingle, toggle, waggle, wangle. Nearly all of them are formed with the old –le frequentative suffix, used to make verbs referring to repeated action, but there’s something more in many of them: a certain disorder, disarray, loose motion, or chaotic or uncontrolled or messy nature. There are certainly words of the –gle form that don’t match that meaning at all – beagle, eagle, and triangle come to mind – but we form impressions of what senses go with what sounds mainly from general habitual association, and we can always allow exceptions for familiar words.

There is, I am inclined to think, some sense of complication and disorder in what’s meant by finagle. Consider that Webster’s Third New International defines it with reference to other terms that include wangle and swindle, which have similar phonaesthetics (swapping the d in for g does change things a little, but they differ only in the tongue’s contact point when saying them). It’s not to say that the word sprang up just because the form demanded it! But when people confect terms, the ones they choose and the ones that stick tend to have sounds that catch on for a reason.

And often more than one reason. Let’s be honest: finagle does have a bit of an “Irish” sound to many English-speaking ears, doesn’t it? I don’t think it has any real “French” sound, fainaigue be damned. But the idea that some Blarney-tongued dissolute Finnegan might charm something out of someone by finagling– well, it doesn’t altogether run against English-speakers’ easy-minded stereotypes, and it goes with the –gle association too.

I’m not saying that’s where finagle comes from. I’m not even saying these things definitely had an influence on it. I don’t have data to support the conjecture. But if it had to come down to it, I think it’s an easier idea to talk someone into going with than many another might be.

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corvid

Posted on March 15, 2020 | 4 comments

Today I want to talk about corvid (the word and the bird).

This is a corvid. (Photo by Tyler Quiring.)

This is a COVID. (Artist’s rendering, courtesy of the CDC.)

This is neither, though it looks like one and it looks like it’s meant for dealing with the other. (It’s an illustration of Dr. Schnabel, a 17^th-century plague doctor in Rome, by Paul Fürst.)

Corvid is a name for any member of the large family of birds known as Corvidae, which includes crows, ravens, and actually quite a lot of others: choughs (not coughs!), treepies, magpies, nutcrackers, jackdaws (which are really just more crows), and various jays

Corvids have relatively large brains and have been found to be as intelligent as some primates – and smarter than your dog or cat. Crows and ravens are even smarter than raccoons. Which also means that they have an… ambiguous place in mythology. Crows and ravens are thought of as smart – and as tricksters. They’re often associated with death.

On the other hand, corvids come in many different forms, and some of them (magpies) are more famous for stealing and collecting things. Which is quite fitting, because their names have mutated like a virus over the ages, resulting in quite a collection of forms.

The Latin for ‘crow’ is corvus, which has descended to many fairly plainly related forms: French corbeau, Spanish cuervo, Italian corvo, Finnish korppi (stolen from Swedish korp). They all trace back to an ancient k-r-w source… which may or may not be related to the source of crow, since the w in crow is historically comparatively new.

Sounds change, as you can see. The w can become v or b or even p. And the k can become h, and sometimes an h disappears. That’s what happened with hræfn, the Old English word that became raven.

The raven is Corvus corax. What’s the corax? It’s the ancient Greek for ‘raven’ or ‘crow’: κόραξ. And, yes, there’s a k and a r there… and it also seems related etymologically to raven, via an impression of the loud sound the bird makes. But, though they all relate originally to noise, raven and corax are not definitely directly related to corvus or to crow, which, just, come on.

Corvus corax, by the way, is also the name of a musical group that is among the most metal of medieval impressionists.

You may well wonder whether this is also related to some flattened version of curve, since, after all, there’s that k-r-v and corvids have shown they can throw a few curves. The, answer, however, is no… but curve traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root with many descendants, including not just curve but cancer, crisp, crux, and corona, as in Coronavirus. Which seems a little starker than raven.

But corvids have nothing in specific to do with COVID. We don’t even know (at the moment) if they can carry it. They can, however, say what we all want to say about it: