Tag Archives: word tasting notes

afflatus

Posted on September 1, 2018 | 3 comments

We seek afflatus, but they laugh at us, or at most flatter us. But when the divine breath flutters through us, it will inflate us; for inspiration, we must inhale the sacred wind or we will expire. It is not just hot air! We are not just windbags or wind-breakers! …Right? Continue reading →

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Weatherbee, Wetherby

Posted on August 29, 2018 | 1 comment

You can’t ask a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing in English names, but it’s always nice to have some kind of bellwether. Otherwise, you may make assumptions just on principle, such as that something that looks or sounds like something else must be related to it, or that something that looks like it’s said some way must not be said that way because, well, English.

Let me tell you about a matter of principal involving cartoons, insects, towns, juvenile institutions, gravy, getting bent, and sheep farms. It starts with Archie. Continue reading →

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frowsy

Posted on August 26, 2018 | 2 comments

Not all words mean exactly what they sound like they should mean. Actually, most don’t. But some can be influenced by other words they sound like. Language can be messy that way.

Heck, language can be messy in all sorts of ways. Some words have multiple spellings. Some have multiple pronunciations. Some have both. English is especially that way, thanks to its sloppy history. English is that outfit that looks charmingly raffish in the mirror but downright scuzzy when approached from the side in a grocery store. English wakes up with half its clothes on and isn’t even sure what country it’s in, but it reaches over onto the nightstand and perks itself up with a gulp from the half-empty bottle there and rakes its hair into place with the other hand.

English is frowsy. Continue reading →

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wayfaring

Posted on August 22, 2018 | 2 comments

Here, listen to this while you read:

Such a moving song, about being a wandering soul in a strange land. There is a long old history of lamenting travel away from home and using it as an image for the woeful sojourn in this world before going home to heaven. Wayfaring was not seen as a good thing. Continue reading →

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shurt

Posted on August 19, 2018 | 1 comment

I was thinking about washing my running clothes, and about how I separate the shirts and the shorts, and then, as one does to pass the time idly, I started reflecting on how shirt and short are only a typo apart – indeed, the distinction between them is between two adjacent letters on the keyboard. And those letters are I and O, which resemble the international symbols for ‘on’ and ‘off’ and, for that matter, the two digits that make everything digital work, including (of course) the computer that I’m writing this on and the one that you’re reading this on and everything between them.

My mind wanders. It’s peripatetic, just like the rest of me. I go running for exercise but also because I like to travel through places. So it’s only natural that, to shorten the time (especially if I’m feeling shirty), I’ll wander from short to shirt to… well, shurt is the next if I shunt to the left. So, obviously, I look it up. Continue reading →

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torpid, torpor

Posted on August 17, 2018 | 2 comments

The dogged daze of summer is here, the time when it is so torrid you feel stupid. The very air seems to torque with an opalescent, opaque moisture, and even as the empyrean unleashes torrents you are in a stupor. It is torpid, and you are in torpor.

This is not to say that torpidity is native to summer. For hibernators, winter is the season of torpor. But humans are, if anything, estivators. We lie on the beach like canids; we compound our heat intoxication with umbrella drinks and tall cans; we import a purportedly tropical turpitude; we drink of lethe and are lethargic; we are numb, but comfortably so. Continue reading →

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versute

Posted on August 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

“The cabal of the versute gens de condition resorting to social evils necessitates some sui generis safeguards to be inherent in social laws to make up for the nether social position of the wronged person and checkmate the malengine and pravity of the powerful.” Continue reading →

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Ongiara

Posted on August 7, 2018 | 4 comments

Yesterday evening, not too long before sunset, we left the beach. We balled up our towels, collapsed our fancy beach chairs, took up and shook out the big beach blanket, trudged across the sand, and took the boardwalk to the main road. Once we were off the beach and into the greenery, the air was full of the scent of a humid country summer evening, plus a bit of marijuana smoke from someone nearby. As we walked the road between the trees, we could see to the right a lagoon with a quay and several boats tied up to it; to the left, just on the other side of a tall chain fence, the airport with its turboprop planes; and ahead, above the trees, tall buildings and the CN Tower, just across the harbour. And then we got to the ferry dock and waited.

No other city I’ve ever been to has such a sylvan, bucolic retreat just across water from the heart of town. Toronto Island (and its associated smaller islands) is a gem of parkland, carefree and car-free; within a half hour from downtown, with no driving involved, you can be swimming a great lake in cottage-country surroundings. And what makes it so are the ferries.

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Boats that pass in the day

Continue reading →

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opossum

Posted on August 4, 2018 | 1 comment

I saw a scraggy little white dog today, and I said to Aina, “That dog used to be an opossum.”

OK, that was maybe just a teeny bit inaccurate. The dog had actual fur on its tail. It had a face like a dog, or at least more like a dog than an opossum. But dogs and opossums are not opposites. They’re just… like bats and birds. Morphologically superficially similar, phylogenetically distinct, and differing – starkly, on average – on the cuteness scale.

It’s amusing to see descriptions of opossums by early English invaders of North America. In 1612, John Smith wrote, “An Opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignes of a Cat.” This is basically accurate, except for “an head like a Swine.” I don’t know what kind of swine he had, but in my world a possum is a sketchy rat-looking beast from front to back. I think if I had to describe an opossum it would be “Like a big grizzled old rat that just ran a marathon and is trying to decide whether to die or kill someone.” Continue reading →

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tamale

Posted on July 31, 2018 | 1 comment

Tamale makes me think of missing the boat. And discovering something.

When I was a kid, there was a candy I liked, bullet-shaped jellybean-type things flavoured strongly with cinnamon. They were branded as Hot Tamales. (They still exist.) I associate them especially with one summer when my family spent a week (I guess it was a week; everything seems like an eternity and an eyeblink when you’re under 10) at a rustic place on a lake in North Dakota where families stayed in cabins and the adults did… I don’t know, probably Bible or language stuff, given my parents. Kids did things that kids did at such places. Anyway, Hot Tamales were my favourite comestible then and there. They were available and my mom would give me money to buy them. That’s one of only two things I remember about that place. Continue reading →

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