Tag Archives: word tasting notes

skedaddle

Posted on April 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

If there’s been sculduddery and you’re skittish, don’t dawdle – scat. Scatter. Skedaddle. Put departure on your schedule. It’s no time for beer and skittles – let’s get out of here! Scoot, kiddo! Scat, laddy! Scud, daddy-o!

Skedaddle is a particularly American-sounding word, isn’t it? It’s from the same folks who brought you absquatulate. Well, not the exact same folks; this one seems to have shown up first about a half a century later than absquatulate, during the American Civil War. The first hit that’s been found in print for it is from the New York Tribune in 1861: “No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they ‘skiddaddled’, (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger).” 

It caught on quickly enough, without need of a skilled tattler; fleeing was a popular activity at the time, and not just for soldiers but for others in the way: in 1862 we see a quote from the Illustrated London News, “I ‘skeedadled’ from the capital of the dis-United States.” It has that skidding, skittering sound, and a certain resemblance to some other words – scoot, scat, scatter, and an assortment of ones you may not have heard. Wiktionary reaches far and wide with an etymology by sound (which may or may not be sound etymology):

Possibly an alteration of British dialect scaddle (“to run off in a fright”), from the adjective scaddle (“wild, timid, skittish”), from Middle English scathel, skadylle (“harmful, fierce, wild”), perhaps of North Germanic/Scandinavian origin, from Old Norse *sköþull; or from Old English *scaþol, *sceaþol (see scathel); akin to Old Norse skaði (“harm”). Possibly related to the Ancient Greek σκέδασις (skédasis, “scattering”), σκεδασμός (skedasmós, “dispersion”). Possibly related to scud or scat. It is possibly a corruption of “Let’s get outa here”.

I am skeptical of the Greek links, but am open to the influence of “Let’s get outa here.” I am at least as interested in Wiktionary’s list of synonyms:

flee, vamoose, skitter, scat, skidoo, take off, make tracks, beat feet, kick rocks, get lost, hightail

The only thing I’ll add to all that is that to me, this word has a less-than-completely-serious sound, notwithstanding its belligerent origins. “We gotta skedaddle” is a thing you’ll say at the end of a party or when you risk being late for your bus; it’s perhaps not a thing you’ll say if a tiger is stalking you or gunfire is erupting suddenly in the restaurant where you’re dining – well, unless you’re trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation. 

Which, I suspect, is partly why it caught on in the Civil War: its application to opposing soldiers has a certain mocking tone. But perhaps its frantic tone had more impact at the time – after all, unlike for me, it wouldn’t have been a word they were most used to hearing as kids from their Dad.

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hoodoo

Posted on April 15, 2025 | 1 comment

In the gloom and gloaming, hooded forms gather and loom in the amphitheatre, tall and peaked, inspiring terror. Who do you think they are?

As your eyes adjust, you see that the stony gazes are stones that you gaze upon, spires in terraces, not so much uncanny as in canyon. Hoodoo: you think they are?

The hoodoo is clear evidence of our propensity to see something more and other than is there – in this case, to enrich the sedimentary mentally into the eldritch. The striped reddish rank and file, so timelessly unmoving, were at one time very moving to the early white settlers in Utah and Wyoming, who referred to the area as “the goblin land.”

I grew up seeing hoodoos regularly; some are visible from the highway into Banff. They do, it’s true, have something vaguely creepy about them, as though, looking to an empty lot, you spied Lot’s wife. They present a vague semblance of a human form, greatly magnified, but rather than rising smoothly into the sky like a spire, they typically stand barely apart from a cliff, rough in shape as though clad in an ancient frowsy pilled woollen overcoat. It has long been thought that this is why they are called hoodoos: by association with hoodoo, magic, spiritual practices maintained by enslaved Africans – generally assumed to be a variation on voodoo.

There’s just one thing, though, that doesn’t quite make that figure. That hoodoo, also spelled houdou, is from Louisiana Creole, and the practices it names are spread throughout the coastal south of the US and in the Caribbean. Hoodoos, the stone pillars, are characteristic of high and dry mountain lands – like those Ebenezer Bryce and his wife settled in in the 1870s. Bryce set up right near a canyon that he described as a “helluva place to lose a cow,” with its labyrinths of stone pillars. Other people started calling the place Bryce’s Canyon, even though he not only wasn’t the first person to live near it (not by ten millennia) but wasn’t even among the first white settlers to be near it… and by 1880 he had left for Arizona.

The people who already lived near this canyon, which has the world’s highest concentration of hoodoos, were the Paiute; before them various other cultures had lived in the area, including the Anasazi. The Paiute had no connection to African culture or to Louisiana Creole – of course – but they did have a response to the stone pillars that seems near-universal: they saw them as like people who had been turned to stone (by Coyote, the trickster, of legend). According to the National Park Service, they named them with a word for ‘spirit’ or ‘scary thing’: oo’doo.

They also, of course, had a name for the place we call Bryce Canyon: Unka Tumpi Wun-nux Tungwatsini Xoopakichu Anax, which means ‘Red Rock Standing Like a Man in a Hole’. It’s safe to say that the name itself would scare off more English speakers than the place, which is a popular spot for tourists who can find the time to make the trip.

But anyway, we have these things that look like people but aren’t, named with a word that looks like another (semantically as well as phonetically similar) word but isn’t, found many places but most emblematically in Bryce Canyon, which has hardly any reason to be named Bryce… and also no proper reason to be named Canyon. A canyon is formed by erosion from a river or stream flowing at its bottom. This place was formed by a more general erosion from top and bottom (plus many freeze-thaw cycles every year). It is, in technical terms, not a canyon but an amphitheatre – or, really, several amphitheatres.

And those who do have the chance to visit it will scarcely believe their eyes.

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deem, redeem

Posted on March 31, 2025 | Leave a comment

Redeem appears in a couple of contexts: (1) saving souls and (2) savings bonds (and other similar coupons and fiscal tokens). In the first instance, your saviour redeems you – pays for your sins, preempting your punishment at the final reckoning and getting you an exemption from the dumpster of doom. In the second case, you redeem your savings bond or coupon – or is it that your bank (or chosen emporium) redeems it? Anyway, you bring it in and hand it over and get your money for it. The obligation is discharged. Either way, it’s redemption! And you come out ahead.

So the question is, if that’s re-deeming, what is deeming? 

Well, what do you deem deeming to be? That’s up to your judgement, in a way. If you deem something worthy, are you making it worthy or just estimating that it already is worthy? What kind of reckoning is it? 

In fact, we use deem to mean judge in both senses, ‘appraise’ and ‘pass sentence’ – and both senses date all the way back to Old English.

OK, but then, if deeming is judging, why is redeeming re-deeming? Is it a second estimation? A revaluing? Is it from a sense of deem meaning ‘ascertain value’? And also, does that mean that any act of deeming is demption? 

If I were you, I would think twice before buying any of that, but, you know, caveat emptor – “buyer beware.” 

Oh, do you see that emptor? That’s the word that means ‘buyer’; it comes from Latin emo ‘I buy’, and not because shopping is an emotional experience (emotion is not related – it’s from e- ‘out’, a variant of ex-, plus the same root as motion, and the original sense was to do with stirring or disturbing). This emo – em-o, the root is em- – appears in emporium, and the empt version (which is unrelated to empty) shows up in English words such as exempt (from Latin roots meaning ‘buy out’ – because ex- is ‘out’), preempt (backformed from preemption, ‘buying first’ – i.e., before someone else can), and redemption.

Yes indeedy! But then if emption is buying, what is red-? Does redemption mean ‘buying with something red (e.g., blood)’? 

You know it doesn’t. Redemption means ‘buy back’ – because re- is ‘back’ (it doesn’t always mean ‘again’). The d shows up just because re- is red- before vowels (like e- vs. ex-).

So, yes, when your eternal soul is redeemed, it is because your debts incurred by your misdeeds have been paid – bought back. And when you redeem a bond, it’s… well, originally it’s that the bank is the one redeeming, technically: they’re buying it back. But since the transaction is redemption, the sense acquired a reversal of direction.

And where does that leave our verb deem? Out of the question altogether. It’s from an old Germanic root for ‘judge, decide, believe’ – originally applied to literal judgement done by literal judges, who were there to sentence – to deem – but not to redeem. They were the deemsters! Or, with shortening of the vowel and an added p thanks to voicing pre-assimilation, the dempsters. 

Yes, that’s right, it’s the dempster who dooms you to the dumpster of death. And yes, doom is from the same root as deem and dempster – the heavy eyes ee of the judge who may deem are swapped for the popped eyes oo of the person facing doom… unless they are redeemed. Which may be possible, but is not etymological.

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pernickety, persnickety

Posted on March 24, 2025 | 2 comments

There are some pervasive misconceptions of editors. The humble word midwife is pictured as a kind of sneering, snickering, prickly, pernicious nitpicker, peering down every grammatical snicket in search of perfidy with a prurient, almost pornographic concupiscence for impertinent solecisms, enforcing pure lexical trickery purely for the purpose of putting poor scribes in the nick. In short, editors are thought of as persnickety.

Or should that be pernickety?

Hmm.

First of all, I must protest that it’s not true: a good editor is not a grammar numpty. A decent verbal massage therapist is in no way a textual Torquemada. Good editors are kind people who want the author to do as well as possible. (Yes, there are bad editors, but they are very much the minority. And those people who freelance unsolicited with markers on signage are rank amateurs, and pretentious creeps at that.)

Now let’s move on to the word – or words – of the day. Perhaps you have only ever seen one of the pair, or perhaps you have seen both; you more likely than not have at least a preference. But which one is the right one?

Ha. Both are established and accepted. I will brook no pernicketiness or persnicketiness about this. If you accept that we have both person and parson, both vermin and varmint, both further and farther, then you can accept that we have both pernickety and persnickety.

Which came first? That we do seem to know: pernickety was seen in print as early as 1808, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, while persnickety is known just since 1885. Also, pernickety started in Scotland and still prevails in Britain, whereas persnickety seems to be predominantly North American.

It’s not entirely clear why the s appeared. Some have suggested influence from snicket, though the first sighting of snicket as such was not until 1898 (it’s a narrow passage between buildings, in case you’re not sure – and it is not obligately lemony, either). Others have suggested that it’s just a substitution of snick for nick, which, yes, OK, but what does that mean? Well, snick could be an alteration of sneck, which is a Scottish word for – not snake! – ‘cut, notch’… which, as you may connect, nick also means.

Of course, nick means a number of things. You could be in good nick with Saint Nick, or down in the nick with Old Nick. But while Nick comes from Nicholas (which comes from Greek for ‘victory’ plus ‘people’), the other nicks come ultimately from the same nick, which, as noted, has to do with a notch, possibly (you’d think) related to nock as in the place at the back of an arrow where the bowstring goes. That in turn is… apparently not related to various similar-sounding words in various other languages, such as German nicken and Swedish nicka, which both mean ‘to nod’.

OK, but what about the per- and that rickety -ety ending? As far as we can tell, this is the same per- as in perfidious and pernicious and perseverant and even perhaps: a Latin root meaning ‘through’ that has gotten all through our language, even mixing with non-Latin roots (like hap). It seems perfect for the task. And the -ety certainly has a somethingness to it, but to some extent this word is responsible for that. It’s suggested that the -et- comes from -ed, as in the past participial suffix. The -y is the usual adjectival suffix, as in funny and happy (oh, hi, hap, what luck to see you again).

And it all comes together nicely enough. And frankly, the sound of it happens (happens!) to work with it too, in its polysyllabic way: per(s)nickety is to fussy what discombobulate and absquatulate and copacetic are to break and scram and fine – it expends needless additional energy in a punctilious display of painstaking conscientiousness, like some wanton nitpicker seeking to make a victorious mark on public signage. It presents itself as fastidious by being slow and tedious. But it’s plenty of fun to say.

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calamity

Posted on March 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

What do you get when calm amity is alarmed by calumny and a call to military arms? Why, calamity, Jane.

Calamity names a bad thing – just about the worst – but it sure has an appropriate sound. To me it’s like a metal pot and lid falling to the floor, or perhaps an alarm bell on the wall in the hall ringing us all to panicked action.

But what is a calamity? If a house burns down, is the calamity the fire, or the loss of house and home? Or was it the match and the wooden timbers awaiting ignition? Per the Oxford English Dictionary, in English, at least, calamity was the effect first, and after that the cause: by 1490 calamity meant “the state or condition of grievous affliction or adversity; deep distress, trouble, or misery, arising from some adverse circumstance or event”; by 1552 it also meant “a grievous disaster, an event or circumstance causing loss or misery; a distressing misfortune.” So the loss of home is a calamity, and the fire that causes it is a calamity; but then we could also say the fire-prone conditions in presence of loose matches were a calamity, since they were the cause of the fire.

And, perhaps, so on. “Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity,” as Publilius Syrus is often quoted. This is not to say that bad luck comes in threes, but at least it’s either none or more than one. But can you separate cause from effect? Does not one carry within itself the seeds of the other, and the other on its branches bear the seeding fruit of the one? Thought, word, and deed come in order, but deeds lead to more thoughts, and so to words… Once you start the cycle, it keeps going – enough is never enough. Better to break the cycle… if you can. 

Can you? And how? Hamlet had thoughts:

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

That seems piercingly drastic, though. Why not simply elect to say enough is enough? If you go into one undiscovered country, after all, there may be more to follow. Laozi (Lao Tzu) – if there was such a person; he may just be a convenient fiction for the assembly of truisms – in his Dao de jing (Tao Te Ching; number 46) wrote,

禍莫大於不知足；
咎莫大於欲得。
故知足之足，常足矣。

Which can be translated variously, but Mary Barnard rendered it this way:

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.
He who is contented with contentment is always contented.

And John C.H. Wu made it this:

There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough.
There is no evil like covetousness.
Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.

Calamity in both translates 禍, huò, which can also be rendered as disaster or catastrophe; 禍 is formed from a radical 示 that, to quote L. Wieger’s Chinese Characters, has the sense of “influx coming from heaven, auspicious or inauspicious signs, by which the will of heaven is known to mankind” – it was formed from two horizontal lines signifying heaven and three vertical lines representing what is hanging from heaven (the sun, the moon, and the stars). The other translations of 禍 give us some pictures: disaster is from Latin for ‘bad star’ (like Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers – as Friar Laurence said to Romeo, “Thou art wedded to calamity”); catastrophe is from Greek for ‘down-stroke’ or ‘overturn’. But calamity? 

There’s the respect that makes calamity of etymology. For, you see, calamity comes from calamitas, which means ‘loss, damage, harm, disaster, misfortune, et cetera’, but we’re not sure what calamitas descended from. Latin writers seemed to think it had something to do with calamus ‘straw, cornstalk’, but their explanations were a bit of a shipwreck. More modern scholars have reckoned it comes from calamis ‘damaged’, which seems right, but the problem is that it’s really *calamis – it’s a deductive reconstruction of a word that has not actually been seen in historical sources.

Meaning it came from somewhere, but, as with many a calamity, we’re not entirely sure where. The chaos of linguistic history is like the chaos of climate or of myriad other things: a butterfly flapping its wings – or a cornstalk breaking – might set in action a chain of events that lead to history-altering calamities. Or, on the other hand, it might simply be absorbed in the quotidian noise. And who knows which will eventuate?

Perhaps fortune does. …wherever fortune comes from. And as Darius Lyman’s version of Publilius Syrus’s Sententiæ says, “Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.” The Latin original for which is…

…nonexistent. Sorry, you can (as I did) go at length through the original, searching and searching, and you won’t find a Latin equivalent of that. It turns out that Lyman was, hmm, fortune’s fool, or anyway fooling with fortune. The point is that he managed to include various verses in his version that can’t be traced to the source. They’re just convenient fictions, it seems, spontaneously generated.

Well, at least they’re true. Or are they? They’re sententious, but, you know, “words, words, words…”

Or, as the Duchess of York (the woman who gave birth to Richard III) said in Shakespeare’s Richard III, “Why should calamity be full of words?” And, I suppose, for the sake of conversation, why the converse as well?

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canny, canty, uncanny

Posted on March 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

You know uncanny, of course. It’s sort of like what you experience when your grip on reality is tested – when your even-canning factory is offline so you just can’t even. But can you say what canny is? And, for that matter, do you know what canty is? Allow me to descant on this triad.

You probably haven’t encountered canty, though if you say it’s the opposite of canny, you’ll oddly be about right. Naturally, you would expect the opposite of canny to be uncanny, and at one time that was true – though not any longer – but it does not follow at all that canty is a synonym for uncanny. In fact, there is a clear line that can be drawn between the two (unless one is uncannily canty, which would be a real edge case).

Let’s start with canny, can we? The can in canny is not beyond our ken; it is and is not the same can as in Yes, we can. It is not, in that can is now a modal auxiliary conveying ability (that other can, the container, is a whole other can of worms, etymologically unrelated); it is, in that the auxiliary can comes from the same source as canny: the Old English verb cunnan, ‘know how, be able to’. If you know German, you know cunnan’s cousin kennen, which has the same meaning – which also reminds us that ken is from the same (d’ye ken? Oh, and the name Ken is unrelated; it’s short for Kenneth, as you may know, and Kenneth is from a Celtic name that has to do with fire and old flames, perhaps from someone’s Barbie).

Anyway, canny can have the sense ‘knowing, astute’, and it’s from that that we get the sense ‘prudent, cautious’, which is the more common usage now (meanwhile, there’s a Scots use of it to mean ‘friendly, pleasant’ – “a canny lad” is a nice fellow, not a cagey one). But the negation, uncanny, has come to mean not ‘unknowing’ or (as it once did) ‘incautious, careless’ but rather ‘unknown’, i.e., ‘beyond ken’ – in that eldritch realm of impoverished knowledge (and so also an uncanny, weird person – or, for that matter, a robot from the uncanny valley – is untrustworthy, opposite to a canny one). Something odd, not right, probably best left, even.

And how about canty, then? Well, that’s not just cant (cant meaning ‘slang’ comes via French from Latin canto ‘sing’, as does descant). But it’s also not just can’t – o, turn away from that apostrophe! It comes instead from the adjective can’t meaning ‘bold, courageous, lively, hale’, and in Scotland also ‘merry, cheerful’ (meaning that a Scot may be both canny and canty – don’t say it cannae be so). This adjective in turn comes from a German and Dutch word kant meaning ‘edge, line, border’ that, purely reasonably I’m sure (and according to a manual), came from Latin canthus ‘wheel edge’. The route from kant to can’t appears to be via senses of ‘neat’ and ‘sharp’. (And we are inclined to think it is also related to cant meaning ‘tilt, bevel’.)

And yet somehow a person who is canty is not edgy, but someone who is canny is! It’s just uncanny how language can do such things, you know?

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drift

Posted on March 3, 2025 | 1 comment

Snow White was a drifter.

OK, you say “ha ha,” but there are reasons I say that beyond the obvious pun. How did she end up with those dwarves? It was a blow of the winds of fate. And snow drifts when the wind blows. But where does it drift? Not so much on the plain, where things are smooth and crisp and even. It drifts against high points and it drifts in low places and it drifts at the edge of shelter; it does not decide on its own, even if it takes a fence. Snow that’s on a peak can be blown off a cornice and land just where it catches enough interference to stop – which may well be a very humble location indeed, such as among the dopey, sleepy, and grumpy. And when we say snow is blown, what that means is it’s driven. Driven by the wind, yes, but driven as surely as if it had been in a car on a highway. 

Snow White was driven out by the queen and driven on by fate, but in more modern times she also could have been driven on a highway on her way to where she would settle down: She could have been a hitch-hiker. And hitch-hikers are by definition drifters. I’ll explain in a moment, though I doubt you doubt me.

Snow White, you may object, was hardly what we think of when we think of a drifter. She was pure as the driven snow!

But exactly. What is the driven snow? It is the snow in drifts.

Drift, you see, is the secret twin of driven. Both are past-tense forms of drive (or of an older form of drive). Drive originally meant (and in some uses still means) ‘send forth, push forward, cause to move forward’. The noun drift names something that is driven – as in pushed forth by the wind. A drift is made of snow or sand that has been caused to move forward – by the wind – and displaced from where it first lay to a new formation, typically at a change in the landscape. We’ve lost sight of that sense when we talk of driving a car because we envision a sort of cybernetic relationship between the steerer and the steered, but you can see it when we speak of a cattle drive – yes, including steers, as in bulls that have had their drive cut, if you catch my drift. Oh, and yes, “my drift” means what I’m driving at – where I’m guiding the sense to (and it’s a turn of phrase we’ve had for half a millennium now).

So yes, the driven snow is the drifting snow. And anything that drifts is driven. Which means that drifters are people who are driven, not by their own inward forces but by the winds of chance and change. And hitch-hikers are, of course, driven. The fact that the first ‘driven’ refers to the way the wind blows and the second ‘driven’ refers to the easy come, easy go riding in a car that is controlled by another person doesn’t really matter (to me).

And Snow White, who was, we all are sure, pure as the driven snow, and who was driven out and driven into cohabitation with miners, at both a low point and a high point in her life (hi-ho!), was plainly a drifter. Snow doubt about it.

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nevigation

Posted on February 24, 2025 | Leave a comment

Neige a neigé! Snow has fallen, snow on snow… We are inneviated. Toronto has not seen so much snow at one time in several years, and the usual approach around here to handling snow is not so functional: push it aside into piles to leave a space down the middle or, if no one really “owns” the section of sidewalk, just let people posthole in it until they stomp it into submission (and what about the streets? oh, of course they plough those… and push the snow from them right up onto the sidewalk, which leaves less space for those walking). And, finally, dump endless tons of icemelt crystals on it, so that until the weather warms up enough to drain it all away, we are left schlepping through a salty muck of slush.

This poses problems for nevigation, plainly.

Nevigation? I hope you’ll permit me a confection here. In fact, like inneviated, I’ve borrowed nevigation from Latin via Italian. But unlike inneviated, I intend it as a sort of play on an English word (also taken from Latin), navigation. In Italian, nevigare is just a variant on nevicare, which means ‘to snow’, from Vulgar Latin nivicare, from nivem ‘snow’. (Believe it or not, French neige also comes from that.) But I think getting around in the snow deserves its own special verb.

Especially in Toronto when it’s snowed heavily. I’ll tell you what, I grew up in Alberta, where it snows like this every winter and goes long stretches without getting above freezing (although at length, at least in southern Alberta, a chinook will blow in and warm everything up and make the snow disappear quite quickly). They don’t dump salt all over everything there. They dump sand and gravel on it, so that you can have traction on the hard-packed snow, rather than seeing it all become filthy slush that ruins shoes and soaks boots. (On the other hand, in Boston, where I’ve also lived, they just ignore it for a day and usually the rain washes it away the next day. And if it doesn’t, they all have heart attacks trying to shovel the stuff, because it’s so heavy wet.) In Alberta, you just put on your boots and rely on decent traction. Even on pathways where no one sands, you can make your way on the pack.

But in Toronto? Ah, no. When it actually really snows, every sidewalk becomes a valley between parallel impassible ridges, and if no one is shoveling the sidewalk, you will have many one-person passages and the occasional dead end. It sneaks around like the etymological derivation of nevigation.

I mean that literally, more or less. You see, nivem comes (with some drifting and clearance) from Proto-Italic *sniks. That in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *snéygʷʰs, which is also – and, frankly, with less alteration – the origin of snow. Which makes a person want to just plough a clear path. Specifically, why not just say snowvigation?

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reckless, wreck, wrack, rack, reckon

Posted on February 18, 2025 | 2 comments

We cancelled our road trip up to Collingwood because of the snow storm. We reckoned it would be reckless, and perhaps not wreckless – if not bringing us to wrack and ruin, at the very least a bit nerve-racking, if you catch my drift. So instead of going in any direction, we played the recluse all weekend.

I’m not trying to snow you under, lexicographically. There’s a sound explanation for all of this, though most of it’s not explained by sound. In fact, while you can right it by writing it, what you hear is neither here nor there: You may notice that you round your lips when saying the wr in wrack and wreck and write, but you also normally round them the same amount when saying rack and reck and rite. That phonetic distinction disappeared centuries ago.

There are five lexical items to reckon with here – yes, five: reckless, wreck, reckon, wrack, and rack. So let’s go backward deliberately, as though reversing to extract ourselves from a drift. You may have noticed I wrote nerve-racking and you may have racked your brains about that: not nerve-wracking?

Well, if you care to be correct, no. Nerve-wracking is used, yes, and has been since the later 1800s – from wrack, as in wrack and ruin, an alternate form of wreck, used for a time (Shakespeare’s life plus and minus half a century) in southern England but otherwise mainly northern – but the older form, by at least half a century, is nerve-racking, from rack meaning ‘stretch’, from the noun rack, originally naming an implement for stretching things… or people. 

Indeed, the figurative use of rack for something causing mental or physical anguish has been around since the 1400s. So something that stretches your nerves to the breaking point is, by history, nerve-racking. It just happens that we’ve leaned towards the w version now, and while I’m inclined to think that there’s a feeling of a crumpled piece of paper (perhaps a road map) from the w, the main reasons for the switch may come down more to the stronger semantics of wrack, as in wreck, and also to a prejudice in favour of less phonetic spellings.

Anyway, that’s how I reckon it. By the way, reckon comes from an old Germanic word for calculating. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant in Germany or Austria, you probably know that die Rechnung is the bill, and if Rechnung seems similar to reckoning, it is; they’re parallel descendants of the same original morphemes. So the next question is, does reckless mean ‘without reckoning’?

Surprisingly not. Historically, reckon and reckless come from different roots. Whereas reckon is related to right (and thus also to the same root that shows up in Latin rect words such as correct, direction, and rectify), reck as in reckless is from a root having to do with caring or paying attention to or being troubled by. So, at root, reckless means about the same as insouciant.

And, as I have already implied, wreck is unrelated to either; it has to do with ruin. The w was once pronounced – modern descendants of the same root in Swedish and Danish start with a v (vrak, vrag). But now we write it twice as much (vv —> w) and say it not at all. (Note that in Old English, a different letter form, derived from runes, was used for /w/; it was written ƿ and was called wynn, but it couldn’t win – looked too much like a p – and when the Continental languages said “double you or nothing” we took it.)

So anyway, seeing the results of the weather, we know we made the correct decision. And now you, too, can rectify your lexical directions. We will make it up to Collingwood later, when the weather is right.

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cremini, portobello

Posted on February 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

How do you discriminate between cremini and portobello mushrooms? A portobello is less portable. 

But the difference is incremental. You see, white button mushrooms (“champignon de Paris”), brown (cremini) mushrooms, and the big barbecuable beasties named portobello are all Agaricus bisporus, and the difference is mainly their age – though the white ones are descended from a mutant variety discovered in 1925 in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania! But they’re called champignon de Paris! Next I’m going to say that the cremini and portobello ones aren’t from Italy.

Yes, I am. Well, to be fair, they do grow them in Italy. But you don’t have to be in Cremona to get cremini; they’re also grown in all sorts of other places in Europe and North America. And the same, of course, goes for portobello; they’re grown in exactly the same places as cremini, just for longer (sometimes cremini are called “baby bella” – though I’ve never seen portobello mushrooms called anything like “cremaxi”).

But they didn’t get their names in Italy. If you ask for “funghi cremini” or “funghi portobello” in Italy they probably won’t know what the heck you’re talking about. You’d have to ask for “prataiolo” or use the French word “champignon.” These names – cremini and portobello – are marketing board inventions. The first use of cremini seems to have been around 1984; it’s based, apparently, on a diminutive of crema ‘cream’, and on what, per their research, sounds good to American consumers. The first citation the OED has for portobello is from 1985; it’s based, evidently, on Italian for ‘lovely port’ and, again, on what sounds good and impressive. They both sound like Italian place names – Cremona, for instance, the name of which traces back to shadows in the mists of ancient time, and, well, pick your pretty port (perhaps Porto Ercole, near Orbetello). And of course we all know that Italian food is delicious.

Well, criminy! That’s kind of incriminating, isn’t it? Ah, yeah, but what the heck. Consider the multiple spellings you can see: both cremini and crimini, and all four of portobello, portabella, portobella, and portabello, the last two of which would be grammatically incoherent in Italian – and yet there never seem to be grammar numpties ranging around with markers to make corrections. (There is, in fact, some uncertainty about which of the variants of each is technically correct. I go with cremini because it’s the more common variant and because it’s creamy rather than criminal, and I go with portobello because it’s the most common variant and because portabella means ‘pretty door’ – which it could be, I suppose – and the other two are, as I mentioned, grammatically incoherent: inflections are supposed to match between nouns and adjectives.)

Do you feel browned off by this? Does it make you not even want to use the words? There are a few other marketing-created terms you would, for consistency, also have to eschew – kiwi fruit, for one, and let’s not get started on the Italianate concoctions populating Starbucks menu boards. And even if you managed to cancel those, more marketing imaginations would sprout up like mushrooms, thriving in any fertile environment – especially one with ample manure. But, yes, you can always call them “brown mushrooms” and, I guess, “monster mushrooms” – actually, people didn’t talk about the full-grown Agaricus bisporus much before they got the fancy name: you can also thank the marketing board for pointing out that they make a suitable substitute for meat, and pretty much opening the door to their common usage with that name.

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