As Aina and I were waiting for a subway train today, we read news headlines on the TV screen above the platform. We saw one about an incident in Florida where a police officer had to wrangle a 3-metre python. Whatever they meant by wrangle. What did they mean by wrangle?
I grew up in ranch country in Alberta, so wrangle is very familiar to me. I wore Wrangler jeans, saw Jeep Wranglers (though pickup trucks are more common vehicles for actual wranglers), and of course saw people wrangling horses and cattle. Wrangling involves an assortment of activities dedicated to getting those animals where they oughta be, but when I thought about that snake in Florida, I thought about the endgame of calf-roping: wrestling the critter to the ground and tying three of its legs together.
Obviously you can’t tie three of a snake’s legs together. You can wrestle with it, though, and maybe get tangled up with it. I mean, the dude could have used a stick and a bag or a pole and a net – in fact, that seems more likely – but to me that’s just, you know, catching or capturing. Wrestle just seems a kindred word to wrangle.
It’s not, though. Yes, it has the same –le suffix, which indicates ongoing repeated action. It also starts with wr. But plenty of Old English and Proto-Germanic words started with wr, and modern descendants of them still do: wreak, writhe, wretch, wriggle, write… No, wrangle is not related to wrestle. It is, however, related to wring and wrong.
Yes, all three words – wring, wrong, wrangle – come from the same old root, with different vowel grades (you know, as in stink, stank, stunk). That root has to do with opposition, contrariety, hostility, and similar things such as sourness. Wrong first meant ‘physically crooked or bent’ and from that gained a more abstract sense. Wring started with the ‘squeeze’ sense and over time gained the specific connotation of twisting (which even now is not absolutely required; a clothes wringer – I mean the machine – doesn’t twist the clothes, it presses them).
And wrangle didn’t first mean ‘control animals’. It comes from a sense meaning ‘struggle’ but, in the form wrangle (as opposed to wrang), it first meant ‘bicker, argue, debate’. Yup, if you see a mention of someone wrangling with someone else, as in arguing, that’s not a figurative reference to cattle; it’s the sense the word has had since at least the 1300s. In usages dating back to the 1600s, you can wrangle someone out of a possession or into a condition. The sense referring to managing horses and other critters dates back only to the end of the 1800s.
So, with that in mind, I get a different image of the officer wrangling with the snake. “Get in the bag!” shouts the officer. “No, you get in the bag!” the snake hissshouts back. “You’re out of line!” the officer says. “Out of line?!” the snake protests. “I am a line!”
But then it gets good, because the officer knows etymology and sees that the snake is crooked. “You’re wrong!” the officer says. And the snake… well, all the snake can do is tie itself up and declare, “I’m knot!” But then the officer can pick it up and wrangle it into a bag.
There is good proximity and bad proximity. There is closeness that makes you purr and closeness that makes you grrr. You may go out (say, to walk the poodle) and find yourself beset by oodles of rude dudes, rushing and brushing and pushing and crushing, and your nerves will curdle and something crude’ll escape your lips and you’ll want to do away with the whole brutal kit and caboodle. So what’ll you do? Maybe go home and cuddle up in bed with your loved one or your pet or both (or maybe they’re the same) and bill and coo like two doves in a nest, cozy and comfy. You will croodle.
What is croodle? Well, true, it’s not a new word, nor a current one, nor one that has ever been especially Canadian or American. It’s more of a Scottish one, and generally disused now. But so what. I like it, I want it, I am picking it up and cuddling it close to me like a crocheted teddy bear.
Croodleis a word for two actions, both of which doves do when they are happily nesting. One means ‘gather close together’ – as in ‘cuddle or snuggle’ or as in ‘cower or huddle’ (as, for instance, to escape the cold) – and is related to the word crowd. The other means ‘make a low murmuring sound’ – as in the cooing of a dove or something similar, quieter than crooning, perhaps even a purr. Yes, I’m sure a pile of kittens would be croodling in both ways… although I must admit the “oo” has more of a high sound to it, a tribble kind of treble.
How are you faring in this chill weather? In Toronto, anyone who rides or drives from neighbourhood to livelihood is in for a brisk experience the moment they step into the outside.
How cold is it? It depends on where you are, of course, but in Toronto it is scheduled to pass –18˚ Celsius within 24 hours. For you Americans, that’s below 0˚ Fahrenheit.
I say “for you Americans” because Americans are pretty much alone in the world in adhering to their non-metric measurement scales. While the rest of us deal tidily in decimal, Americans luxuriate in units more suited to measuring quidditch scores and potion portions at Hogwarts. Continue reading →
It’s that season when the Celsius sits incessantly at unnecessarily insufficient celsitude. But in compensation we raise our spirits – well chilled as they may be – to much more suitable celsitude. And as the last year represented in many ways for many people a nadir, now that we have sung our gloria in excelsis, there is no direction to go but up, excelsior! And may we excel and accelerate.
What is celsitude? Height. And highness. It comes from Latin celsus, ‘lofty, high, sublime’. That root shows up also in excelsis, excelsior, and excel, but not accelerate (that comes from celer ‘fast, swift’ – which, by the way, is not related to celery). We don’t use celsitude much anymore (if we ever really did), and when we do, Oxford tells me, it is mainly for jokey effect. But why not have an attitude of excelling in the highest? No need to sit secluded. Take to the air, rise to the empyrean. To celsitude!
Where, we may hope, it will be warmer than it is now. In Toronto, where I live, the current forecast doesn’t see us crossing above zero for a fortnight at least. One easy hack for that would be to reverse the temperature scale: make freezing 100 and boiling 0. Then we would at least cool ourselves with lower numbers as it got hotter and warm ourselves with higher numbers as it got colder, so that no matter which way it went, something would be getting celsius. Continue reading →
You know what discombobulation means, right? It’s a jokey term meaning ‘upset, confuse, put out of order’. It comes from a 19th-century American fad for fake-highfalutin words. Absquatulate (‘leave, get out’) is another such. Discombobulation starts with clear, well-known parts – dis indicating an undoing, com indicating joining or togetherness – and ends with ation, which makes it clearly a noun formed from a verb of doing or making, and if you know your Latin bits well you may also recognize the probably diminutive ul before that. But in the middle is this bob that is just… um a thingamabob. Probably the same bob as in thingamabob, even. The earliest form of discombobulate, seen in 1825, is discomboberate; in 1834 there’s a discombobracate. But by 1839 we were seeing discombobulation for the noun.
Anyway. The general logic of English derivational morphology tells us that if something can be discombobulated, it was probably previously combobulated, and it may by implication in the future be recombobulated (provided the discombobulation isn’t irreversible). Neither of those latter two is in any standard published dictionary, but so what? They’re no less understandable than discombobulated, and I for one am perfectly gruntled by them. Continue reading →
Drawing out this word in oration is a sure sign of edumacation. It’s a true verbal decoration, not some dull coloration. It’s hardcore and may elude your readers, so ration it like sweets. Use it sparingly like sugar.
Which also, I suppose, means go nuts with it for a short time each year. Well, if there’s an edulcoration time, it’s…
Hallowe’en, frankly, with all that candy, but if you want to draw it out longer, make it Advent and Christmas. Or, if you prefer, use it quickly at Purim or for longer at Hanukkah. Or you could always go with Diwali, I guess…
Edulcorating your diet is fun, but you can also edulcorate your words. Sweeten them, is what I mean. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? Edulcorate comes from e ‘out’ (as in e pluribus unum) and dulcor ‘sweetness’, and originally it meant to bring sweetness out – not to draw it out and remove it, but to bring it to the surface for tasting, just as educate comes from Latin for ‘draw out’. Edulcorate can also mean ‘remove harsh impurities’. Both of these relate nicely to making your words pleasant to eat, always a wise consideration given that you may be the one eating them.
Interestingly, vinegar can be used to edulcorate other things. This is convenient, because it turns out that flies actually love vinegar. But vinegar is not sweet or smooth. Not even pure vinegar. On the other hand, you can sweeten vinegar with sugar and get sweet and sour, which is pretty nice. (Even salt-and-vinegar potato chips have some sweetness added, often using lactose.)
Edulcorate, then, your words, and your times, and your relations… and your palate. Take the festive season and sweeten it to pure pleasantry (perhaps with the aid of a little fun tartness). But go easy; under some influences, edulcoration can get mixed up into a loud reaction that could cloud or curdle your recreation.
I wear glasses. I need them to see at any distance past book reading. But that’s not the issue. If I take them off, the world may be blurry, but it is still bright and dark in the same measure. I lose only the ability to see the edges clearly. And with my glasses on, I can find my way in the dark, especially if the lights have been off for a time.
You probably know the term a dark-adapted eye. If you have gone out to the countryside at night, away from lights, perhaps to peruse the Perseids or, as last night, enjoy the Geminids (two of the meatier meteor showers), you will find that you can see a Carl-Sagantic quantity of stars, and you can also see more clearly the edges of the trees and fences and hills: earth and heaven, still there and yet nowhere, a silent utopia, a dark paradise. And if someone turns a light on, your eyes will water and you will wince. But to an eye fresh from the lit indoors, the stars are mostly invisible, the trees indistinguishable, the fence a blind hazard, the hills a mere border between black and blacker. Your dark paradise is lost in the afterwash of light; you regain your utopia when you regain your scotopia.
Scotopia. That oto may as well be your two wide eyes around your nose, scoping for photons. The start of it is from Greek σκότος skotos ‘darkness’ (related, way back in Proto-Indo-European, to shadow). You may recognize topia as in utopia, meaning ‘land, place’, but that’s not this; if you see that, you have the edge wrong. This is the opia in myopia and presbyopia (both of which I have), referring to eyes and vision. If you are in the land of darkness, you need dark-sight or you will go only by feeling. You need scotopia.
Light levels are relative, of course. Our eyes are made to handle a certain range, but they do adjust. If you are always surrounded by bright whiteness, you will be confounded by blackness until you have stepped in and away and adjusted your eyes. If something has always seemed too dim or obscure to be approached, a gradual reduction of the light levels may lead you to adjust and find many things you can discern. If the lights go out abruptly, at first you are lost, but at length perhaps you can find your way thanks to scotopia.
Some people are not so able, though. Turn off the lights and everything is flat and uncontrasting. And no matter how able our receptors, we still have our pupils dilated fully, which reduces sharpness and depth of field. A book I can read quite well in good light may prove too much of a challenge for me in dimness. Even if you are well endowed with sensitivity, lack of focus can lead you to lose definition and fail to see boundaries. You need the edges to see the things.
We are now in a time when scotopia is very useful. It is useful at all times, but the light is at its least in this season. Let your eyes adjust. But be aware: there is still much to resolve, and I don’t recommend going only by feeling.
There are words we learn from songs; they rise out of the music and appear in our ears. Sometimes they’re completely new words to us, words we have to figure out from context. Boogaloo in “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy” was one such for me. Sometimes they’re words that are so reasonable in form we may not realize we haven’t heard them before. The Beatles were good for that for me: I easily accepted Blackburn, Lancashire in “A Day in the Life” even if I didn’t know its exact location, and hogshead in “For the Benefit of Mister Kite” even if I didn’t have an exact mental image of one.
And sometimes they’re not actually real words at all. There are no naspritus trees in Tripoli; no one is going, now or at any other time, into a Classiomatic. Welcome to the wide world of mondegreens, misheard words that lie in wait in lyrics and seize and drag away your mind as a leopard seizes and drags away a hare.
Music is an especially fertile field for mishearing because it interferes with our usual way of identifying sounds. We recognize vowels and consonants by the resonances they create in our mouths. Every sound that comes from our larynx has not just its base frequency (its pitch, in musical terms) but a number of harmonics above it (resonances that are some multiple of the base frequency), and the ones that come out the strongest are the ones that echo at just the right frequency for the size of the cavity they’re resonating in. Your tongue, as it constricts the air flow to make speech sounds, makes an angle that creates two resonating chambers, one at the back and one towards the lips, and the smaller each chamber is, the higher the resonances that dominate. The one towards the lips is also smaller than the one at the back, so you have two sets of resonances that can be variously closer together or farther apart, and their relation tells us what sound we’re hearing. There are some other, even higher sets of resonance that also come into play, but they mainly help us hear things like the difference between a vowel with a retroflex /r/ and one without it, or a vowel that’s nasalized (representing a following /m/, for instance) and one that’s not. Those sets of resonances are higher and not as strong as the main two sets. You can read and hear lots more about all that if you want.
Anyway, the thing is that singing can interfere with all that at least a little, and distract from it too, and the instruments accompanying the voice can add to the confusion, and the lyrics are very often not the kinds of strings of words we usually heard, and they’re not said with the usual speech rhythms. So I can listen to “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and think I’m hearing “Hit me with those lettuce and beans” when it’s actually “Hit me with those laser beams.” Why “lettuce and beans”? I dunno, man, I assumed it was some Cockney rhyming slang.
And that’s the thing: we do a lot of our language learning by abduction. I don’t mean by kidnapping; I mean by observing an instance (or what we take to be an instance) and inferring a rule on the basis of it. It’s the reverse of deduction, which is where we know the rule and work out the instance. It’s backfill: we make a decision and create assumptions to justify it.
Remember, too, that we don’t hear words as discrete items in our sound stream. We have to work out where the divides are. And we don’t always work them out right. That’s how a norange and a nadder became an orange and an adder, but that’s a whole nother thing.
But today I’m talking about a lepress. And Africa.
You know “Africa,” right? The ’80s hit by Toto? I’ve always liked that song, and I can sing you all the words. It has a few slightly overworked images, true, but the music is so nice. One line that has always seemed just a little pushed for me is “I know that I must do what’s right, sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress above the Serengeti”:
Rises like a lepress? I guess that means it sits like a female leopard, soft, dappled, muscular, ready to take whatever it wants to have. I never spent much time thinking about it.
If I had, I might have thought, “Wait, a lepress isn’t to a leopard as a lioness is to a lion. That’s not quite the right derivation. Leopard comes from leo, a root we all know refers to lions, and pard, which is from a Greek word for panthers. There’s no basis for deleting the last d. That should be leopardess.” Which in fact is true. A female leopard is a leopardess, if you insist on using diœcious terminology that treats the masculine as the default and the feminine as the marked.
But he’s clearly not singing leopardess. I mean, singers can mispronounce things – heck, Tom Cochrane sang Somalian as “soma-lion” in “White Hot” – but there sure ain’t no [d] in there. So what’s a lepress? Could it be formed from leporine? Isn’t that the adjective for leopards?
No, it’s not. It’s the adjective for hares. If lepress were formed from leporine, there would be a great big lady Bugs Bunny rising above the Serengeti. (Bugs Bunny may be called a rabbit but is obviously – by body shape, ear length, etc. – a hare. They’re not the same thing.)
Of course, following the model of seamster and seamstress, or mister and mistress, or matter and mattress, a lepress is a female leper. (OK, lay off, I was only joking about mattress.) And this is true: the dictionary entry for lepress – if your dictionary has one, as the Oxford English Dictionary does – tells you first that no one uses it anymore, and second that when they did it meant a female leper. As in a girl or woman affected with leprosy.
There is exactly no reason for a lepress to be rising above the Serengeti in that song.
I’ve been mishearing and misconstruing it for years. And by “for years,” I mean the whole time between when it came out in September 1982 and today, December 10, 2017. I only found out because I’m not the only one who was hearing lepress, and one of the others commented on Twitter about it: https://twitter.com/jamesfraleigh/status/939900206635773953
If you don’t feel like clicking, I’ll tell you: the real words are “sure as Kilimajaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.”
That makes more sense than a lepress, doesn’t it?
Sure, but why would I think Olympus? I mean, it’s just, you know, a byword for a high, noble mountain. But not one in Africa per se, right? Look, we just heard “The wild dogs cry out in the night as they grow restless longing for some solitary company,” so my mind’s on animals. And leopards have a greater affinity in my mind to Kilimanjaro than some Greek mountain does. And it’s not like I see the word Olympus all the time. Well, OK, I literally carry a camera made by Olympus in my pocket every day, but, uh, I didn’t in 1982, or for years after.
It’s those higher resonances. I just wasn’t getting them right. I mean the resonances of the lofty idealized mountain of Greek gods, yeah, but also the ones that would have told me that I was hearing a nasalized vowel before the /p/ and not an /r/ after it. Remember how I mentioned that those higher resonances are more easily drowned out?
What was drowning them out? I dunno, man, the wild dogs crying out in the night, maybe? All I can say is that once something like that gets set into my head, it’s gonna take a lot to take me away from it.
On a snowy Saturday seventeen years ago, in a Scandinavian Modern A-frame church, I married the love of my life, Aina Arro. We’re celebrating that now with a long weekend out of town.
Seventeen may not seem like a significant number, not like 20 or 50 or whatever, but it seems to show up suspiciously often in my life – or at least I notice it in significant connections. My birthday isn’t on the 17th of its month, but my brother’s is, and so is my niece’s, and so is my sister-in-law’s, and so are the birthdays of some of my longstanding friends. And there are pairs of birthdays in my family that are separated by 17 days. I turned 17 when I was in my first year of university (and twice 17 – i.e., 34 – when I was in my first year of marriage). The longest I have ever worked anywhere is 17 years (and some months).
I could find significant things about other numbers, of course, but 17 cuts a figure. It has a presence in our culture too: it’s the last year before technical adulthood. It’s peak youth, epitomized by the magazine Seventeen. It shows up as such in quite a few songs and movies, too. You may think right away of the first words of “I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles: “Well, she was just seventeen.”
I think more directly of one of my favourite songs of all time, “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks. A great song with a driving beat, steaming with the angst of late adolescence.
Seventeen is a prime number, and it’s tempting to say that at 17 you’re in your prime. But you’re not. You’re only beginning to enter your prime; you’re at the edge of adulthood, commencing maturity, with a long way to go. Consider the poem “To Critics” by Walter Learned:
When I was seventeen I heard
From each censorious tongue,
“I’d not do that if I were you;
You see you’re rather young.”
Now that I number forty years,
I’m quite as often told
Of this or that I shouldn’t do
Because I’m quite too old.
O carping world! If there’s an age
Where youth and manhood keep
An equal poise, alas! I must
Have passed it in my sleep.
Perhaps that poised age is 34, when you’re old enough not to be treated like a kid but young enough still to be youthful (in the eyes of everyone but naïve youths). Seventeen more years, at 51, you’re undeniably mature – in years, at least. You should be in full flush of your career. At 68, you may have wound it down; at 85, you may be winding yourself down. Few people make it to 102.
Seventeen is an interesting number in other ways too. It’s made of the number of completion or top quality (10) and the “lucky” number (7). It’s the longest of the teen numbers to say and the longest to spell out, but arguably the easiest to write as a figure. Like eleven and twelve but unlike any other teen numbers, it uses only one vowel letter, e (though it uses it four times, like two sets of side-eyes). Note that all three – and all other numbers involving 7 – are also the only ones containing v. Like eleven it includes the word even, though of course neither of them is even. Like every number from seventy to seventy-nine, it includes the word event. Like all the teen numbers, you say and spell its two parts in reverse of how you write the figure (since the 1 is the teen because it’s stands for ten).
And the quirky, questioning letter Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. So seventeen seems like a number for wanting to know more.
I must say I’m looking forward to getting to know Aina even more over the next seventeen years.
Fasten your fascinators and let us festinate to the feast and festival! Our finery will be infested with festivity and will foster neither fasting nor fustian fussiness. Oh, make haste! There is mickle shopping to do and so many people to party with. Molecules may be slowed by cold, but the advent of the cool dark (and the cool dark of Advent) causes the bodies on sidwalks and in malls to bounce and vibrate ever quicklier. Yes, festinate!
Not that festinate has an etymological relation to feast and festival. Those latter words are from a Latin root meaning just what they mean, while festinate comes from the Latin verb festinare, which means ‘make haste, go fast’ (as does festinate). But our word fast meaning both ‘speedy’ and ‘fixed in place’ (see also fasten) comes not from that but from a Germanic root. So does our word fast meaning ‘don’t eat’, but a different root. Fascinating, eh?
Well, whatever. I hardly need to hasten you to your innate festive inclination to get mixed up in it and taste fine and eat finest – and to hop to the shopping, so that you may give and get. Or, if you are observing Hanukkah, to have a fest in eight days. Or, if you hold to no holiday, just to hurry around so you can enjoy a little break, if you get to – because if you don’t, you’re sure to be festinating because of others’ festing. But in that case, may I suggest you follow the Italian advice and festina lente: make haste slowly.
Sesquiotica 