Tag Archives: word tasting notes

lackadaisical

Posted on January 24, 2017 | 4 comments

By my desk, I have a page-a-day calendar. In my email I get a few word-a-day emails (in several different languages, since of course I know all the words in English 😛 ). And on Twitter, I get my lack-a-day: what’s gone missing now? Ah well, so it goes.

Not to be lackadaisical about it, but yeah. When you see a lack, and you lament it, you can say “Ah, lack!” as you might say “Ah, loss!” to a loss. Or, to go with alas for a loss, you say alack for a lack. That’s where it comes from.

But it has grown past that. Once it became a one-word exclamation, it was also available to swap in for woe or pity, or, of course, alas. You could say “woe to the day” or “pity the day” or “alas for the day,” but you could also say – like Juliet’s nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – “Alack the day!” Or, if you’re not lamenting a specific day, you can say, like many people in literature and life since, “Alack a day!”

Or even just lack-a-day. Or, perhaps to match phrases such as ups-a-daisy, you can say lack-a-daisy, like a character named Betty in Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random:

With these words she advanced to the bed, in which he lay, and, finding the sheets cold, exclaimed, “Good lackadaisy! The rogue is fled.”

And from all of that came the somewhat whimsical adjective lackadaisical, first seen spelled lack-a-day-sical by Laurence Sterne in his 1768 Sentimental Journey:

Would to heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or flow of her fever.

Now, lackadaisical doesn’t express a whimsical mood, or at least it’s not supposed to refer to one. And yet there’s something more whimsical, quizzical, even nonsensical, and perhaps musical, than physical or dropsical about it. Or just… slack, lax, and lazy, but with more syllables. Maybe even happy-go-lucky. It sounds like a string burbled by a chickadee looking on a daisy.

And so we see it used often to mean more ‘careless’ than ‘despondent’, more Pooh than Eeyore. Here are some quotes from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, with publication sources cited (they don’t give the article and author):

So, the theory goes, pollinators that drink spiked nectar get lackadaisical about grooming and careen around in a disheveled state delivering unusually large amounts of pollen.
—Science News

The spelling is slightly different, but people were lackadaisical about such things in those days.
—Analog

“It’s easy to get lackadaisical about these things, especially flying domestically. And we shouldn’t, ever.”
—USA Today

To begin with, he was surprisingly lackadaisical about politics for someone who wants to reshape it.
—National Review

The Oxford English Dictionary defines lackadaisical as “Resembling one who is given to crying ‘Lackaday!’; full of vapid feeling or sentiment; affectedly languishing.” That seems a bit strong for the above, doesn’t it? Merriam-Webster (m-w.com) gives “lacking life, spirit, or zest : languid.” But even that is a bit strong for most current instances. ‘Unmotivated’ or ‘unconcerned’ would be more to the point.

It’s as though English speakers just haven’t had the… whatsits… to maintain the original strength of meaning for this word. Not so much that they’re filled with woe and utterly demotivated, or even that they’re making a point of fecklessness, as that it just… doesn’t seem important to them to do so. The word has a more common and suitable use based on what it, you know, sounds like. Not much good old Lackaday! but lots of modern lackadaisical.

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Xanadu

Posted on January 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

O Xanadu, our home and native land…

No, that’s not how it goes, is it? Something more like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Yes: a magnificent edifice, riparian on a flow with a name of beginning and an end in dark obscurity, the unconscious hollows of the planet’s inner mind. A dome like a giant igloo;

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

Yes, a smiling sunny outside, and a frozen inner chamber. Welcome to the Pleasuredome, the ultimate pipe dream.

We think of Xanadu as like Shangri-La. But Shangri-La was invented in a 1933 novel (The Lost Horizon) as a mythical reflex of Shambhala. Xanadu was a real place.

Well, not with the river and ice caverns. Those were dreamed up by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One comes up with what one wants to come up with, and one’s visions are conditioned by one’s experience and expectation – and one’s condition. It is all conditional, and culture-bound.

Xanadu, for instance, said with an initial “z,” is a repronunciation and modification of Xandu, which used x to spell a sound an Englishman would normally spell as sh. Coleridge found it in a 1614 work called Purchas his Pilgrimes by Samuel Purchas. It had this:

In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumpuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

He expanded his description in the 1625 edition. He was drawing on Marco Polo, who wrote in 1298 of his 1275 visit to the city, which Polo rendered as Ciandu and had been translated to English as Chandu (modern Italian versions make it Giandu). The X is of course more exotic-looking. We would, in modern transliteration, call it Shangdu; it means ‘upper capital’. It was the capital of Kublai Khan’s empire until he moved to the city that today is called Beijing. He was, after all, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty of China – the first non-Chinese ruler of China. Shangdu remained his summer capital, as the weather was cooler there.

Kublai Khan died in 1294. Shangdu was destroyed in 1369 by the Ming Army, but there’s still a historical site you can visit, mostly mounds of earth. It’s about a 7-hour drive north of Beijing, in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia (which is the part of China next to the country of Mongolia).

Kublai Khan did have two lovely palaces there. One was a beautiful marble palace with gilding and paintings. The other was a cane palace, made of lacquered cane lashed and nailed, well designed, well built, and able to be taken down, moved, and set up again fairly quickly. It was set up there each summer. Marco Polo was so impressed with it, he dedicated much of his description of Ciandu to structural specifics of the cane palace.

Naturally, nothing of the cane palace has survived the ages. But in the late 1800s a British visitor reported that there were still remains of the marble palace. They have since been taken up, apparently for use by people living in nearby Dolon Nor to use in building their houses. Fragments of artwork can be seen in some structures. Well, why leave a beautiful old thing just lying around if you can make it part of your life? Otherwise it was just a broken, forgotten dream.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a dream. His dream led to a reality… of sorts. After smoking a pipe of opium while staying in the southwest English village of Nether Stowey in 1797, he awoke with the plan for a great poem in his head. But he was interrupted, he tells us. An importunate visitor from the nearby town of Porlock, who detained him for more than an hour on a small matter of business. Afterwards, the remaining lines of the poem were shattered, blown to the wind or drained to the unconscious again; he had kept a poor lock on the door of his mind. Drat that man from Porlock! Assuming there actually was one – Coleridge may have been making excuses for just not being able to finish the work.

So. An Italian visited a Mongol emperor of China and found a lovely town with a marble palace and a cane palace. The emperor was dead by the time the Italian wrote of it. More than three centuries later, an Englishman wrote of the Italian’s travels and slightly changed the name of the place. Nearly two centuries after that, another Englishman digested that report into his own pipe dream, and awoke with visions of a glorious dome and a gorge and icy caverns and subterranean seas, and started to paint it in words. It evaporated with the first interruption, leaving barely more to the ages than an Ozymandias, just some lovely lines and images traced and broken. Meanwhile, the marble of the original Mongol palace is used in quotidian functions, fragments of beauty in walls here and there. The cane is long gone but not forgotten.

Our past crumbles but we keep it and reshape it. Memories go and come, deform and reform. We make our present and break our present. We blame others for our problems, rightly or wrongly. Nothing stays the same, but while our dreams evanesce, beautiful fragments still peek from our walls. All is conditional and conditioned. It was a dream and yet it’s still there, where we live; it dwells deep inside us and in fragments around us and, when we find it, we dwell in it. Our home and native land.

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

And so it ends without ending, at Paradise, our world without end: a mostly-faded pipe dream, glittering fragments of memory, interrupted by daily business.

apropos

Posted on January 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

Apropos of nothing, Zoyander Street (@zoyander) asked me if I’d ever done anything on apropos. Well, I haven’t, but it seems… um… suitable… fitting… to the point… you know, to the purpose.

Which is what apropos is from: French à propos, ‘to the purpose’ or ‘to the plan’ – French propos is from Latin propositum, past participle of proponere, ‘set forth’. So it’s two words in the original. But anyway, nothwithstanding that, inasmuch as we write it as one word, it’s become one word for us now. It just pops in like a couple of firecrackers or a minor éclat of popcorn; it seems appropriate as a single lexeme.

Seems appropriate? Seems like appropriate. It’s almost as though we appropriated it just to have a way to say appropriate while popping in a bit of French – quick frippery for the unprepared. Also, instead of ending stopped short like appropriate, it sustains as it narrows on that final vowel. That vowel, by the way, that diphthong, is one of the good ones for telling what sort of person you’re speaking to: does it begin with the vowel in or (somewhat déclassé), or with the one in above (a bit better), or the one in met (now that’s toffee-nosed)? Does it end with the tongue high in the back (like a colonial) or high in the front (like a nob)? It gives you a way to display your social cachet.

Just don’t be confused by the fact that you can use it two different ways. There’s the way that replaces appropriate, and there’s the way that goes with of to replace in regard to or speaking of. That may not seem to make sense at first, because you wouldn’t say appropriate of. But don’t forget that it’s actually ‘to the point’ or ‘to the purpose’. So saying “That’s very apropos” is very much to the purpose, and saying “Apropos of that question” gets to the point of that question. It’s a nice little bit of apracadapra.

Just don’t use both at the same time. The two most common collocations of apropos in the Corpus of Contemporary American English are very apropos and apropos of nothing, but it would really be to no good purpose to say very apropos of nothing. Unless you were trying to be witty.

But, apropos of wit, you can be a little more pretentious and use the French (put it in italics). You can toss in the phrase à propos des bottes, which would best translate as ‘in regard to boots’ or ‘speaking of boots’ but idiomatically means ‘for no particular reason’ – or, you know, ‘apropos of nothing’. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest citation from a letter by Lord Chesterfield: “À propos de bottes, for I am told he always wears his; was his Royal Highness very gracious to you or not?” A nice conversational whiplash, and high-toned to boot. It’s your choice as to which you find more apropos: French boots or English nothings.

earth

Posted on January 15, 2017 | 1 comment

Earth. The soil, the ground, the surface, the orb of the planet, the world, the full expanse of our being, the people and places of it. All the worth, all the mirth, all that has a birth or a berth, every heart and every hearth, every dear and every dearth and every death, and every tongue and hand and eye and ear: earthlings all, all on the earth, of the earth. Compassed in this short word for the soil that holds us together, five letters but (for most speakers) only two sounds: a sustaining liquid /ɹ/ and a soft dusty fricative /θ/.

Liquid and dust. Water and soil. This is the surface of the earth. But it is also two of the four “elements”: earth, air, fire, water. A heuristic way of conceptualizing, but of course three of those things contain many elements and the other is a process that transforms. The earth, though, this sphere, is what gives us gravity, what holds us together; it keeps the water flowing over its surface, and the air clinging to it so that the fire may burn on it.

Earth: a handful of chaotic organic and inorganic molecules, intensely complex. And a word for the entirety of our realm of existence, save for the distant sun that powers it and the nearer moon that reflects on us and that we reflect on in turn. The earth is the counterpoise to the heavens; the earth is what we can touch. The heavens are simple and ideal and distant; the earth is complex and dirty and here. This earth is like the letters and sounds that make up our language, and the ideas that are played out in it.

And such an utterly English word. Not just the unnecessary spelling. The two sounds are both classic English sounds but generally uncommon in languages around the world. Alveolar approximant /ɹ/ is characteristic of few languages (Irish and Mandarin come to mind), and the syllabic version less common still; voiceless dental fricative /θ/ is so abnormal for speakers of many languages that they just can’t make themselves say it when speaking English, preferring /f/ or /s/ or /t/ instead – as do native speakers of some dialects of English.

It is as ancient an English word as may be found, there from the beginning. Related to Afrikaans aard as in aardvark (in the beginning was the word, and the word was aardvark) and to German Erde and Scandinavian jord. You will find old earth in the first sentence of Ælfric’s translation of the Bible into Old English:

On angynne gesceop God heofenan and eorðan. Seo eorðe soðlice wæs idel ond æmti, ond þeostra wæron ofer ðære nywelnysse bradnysse; ond Godes gast wæs geferod ofer wæteru.

It is eorðe, accusative eorðan. Those are, of course, the famous first sentences of Genesis, best known to Anglophones in the King James version:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

“The poetry of the earth is never dead,” John Keats wrote. Where there is trouble there is poetry, so what Ella Wheeler Wilcox says is true:

Laugh and the world laughs with you.
Weep, and you weep alone;
For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth
But has trouble enough of its own.

Laughter is fire: not a thing but a process that changes things – and helps keep the things warm. But the earth is stoic; ask Walt Whitman:

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough;
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either;
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print;
They are imbued through all things, conveying themselves willingly,
Conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth—I utter and utter,
I speak not, yet if you hear me not, of what avail am I to you?
To bear—to better—lacking these, of what avail am I?

…

The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

It is the ground of our being. We are processes on it, like lightning made by moving clouds of water, evening out again at last with the earth, as it was in the beginning, earth without end.

Thanks to Laurie Miller for suggesting that I taste earth. As he is a rugby player, I suspect that he has tasted plenty of earth in his time.

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culex

Posted on January 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

Look at this cute word. It’s cool – it’s extra cool! It has an excellent shape, rounded at one end and cross-tailed at the other, and winged in the middle with the ascending l. It could be the name of a company. Or it could be some other lexical Lucullan: a relative of ilex, perhaps, or some other lex thing, with a bit of cul in the tail? Is it a cue being called right on 60 (LX)?

No, it’s gnat.

Worse than that, in fact. It’s gnasty. It’s one of the most obnoxious pests on the planet, a vector for viruses and bacteria and parasites.

It’s a mosquito.

Not just any kind of mosquito, though. There are several subfamilies of the family Culicidae, which encompasses all the mosquitos and their ilk. Culex is just one genus. But it happens to be one of the most common (it has more than 1000 species), and it’s the one after which the family Culicidae and subfamily Culicinae were named. It’s known to carry a number of diseases, including West Nile virus and possibly Zika virus.

But not malaria. Malaria is carried by anopheles mosquitoes, which look a little different if you have the mischance of inspecting them up close. They also carry a few other diseases. You’ve probably heard of the anopheles mosquito. Its name comes from Greek for ‘useless’, which is pretty on-the-spot.

You may not have heard of the culex mosquito by that name. People just call them mosquitoes – when they call them anything repeatable. Well, culex is the Latin word for ‘gnat’. Linnaeus pressed it into service for this genus. It seems a bit of a shame – such a word could have a much cooler, sexier use. It’s used as the name of a character in a Super Mario role-playing game, so that’s something. But in the coolness department it doesn’t come close to Skrillex.

Unless it bites him.

munch

Posted on January 9, 2017 | 2 comments

I’m not a peever. There are some usages I’m not too keen on, but I usually don’t dwell on them, because there’s no accounting for taste. There are a couple of words, though, that get some journalistic go-ats exceeding what I can swallow – the sense stretched just too far for me. I am left with hands on face, jaw agape, a bit like a person in a rather famous painting.

Not to say I’m screaming like the figure in Edvard Munch’s famous work is. But just as the figure is surrounded by much thick swirling colour, I’m a bit overcome by rather bold strokes in the word-painting. And some rather overused terms too.

I’ve occasionally joked about making a parody of newspaper food writing; I’d call it Munching Thick Crusty Slabs. But at least in that sentence munching is being used for something that involves an audible “munch” sound, or anyway a very pronounced movement of the jaws. Which are classic components of the meaning of munch, which has been with us, in its imitative formation, since the 1400s.

We know from Chaucer and others around the time that one may munch bread, and from Shakespeare that a donkey may munch dry oats and a person may munch chestnuts. We also know, though, from Thomas Dekker in 1631 that one may munch up cheese, and from Joanne Baillie in 1798 that one may munch up plum-cake, but note that those are both munch up – add the up and it seems to connote ‘gobble’. We also know from Baroness Orczy in her 1905 Scarlet Pimpernel that one may munch grapes. But they do make some sound, do they not?

Perhaps I am being too particular. But I still remember reading a review of some brunch places in a Toronto newspaper and seeing a reference to one patron “munching on eggs,” and thinking, “Goodness, how over-fried those eggs must have been – or did they not remove the shells?” And I can look through articles in The Toronto Star from recent years and see people “munching” on “a charcuterie plate with local cheeses and ethically-sourced cured elk and beef,” “souvlaki, perogies and sangria,” and “sliders” (small burgers, in this case made using meatballs). All of which are soft things.

Well, there it is. Consumption has its risks along with its pleasures. We all munch on the foods and words we choose as we like, and sometimes we are served something that is not quite to our taste. I have opinions about food, too, after all: I like peppers only if they are hot or roasted or both; I like nutmeg only if I can’t actually notice it; I like cilantro only if it is on my wife’s plate and not mine (in exchange I get the “nasty sea insects” she abominates). That doesn’t mean they’re intrinsically bad. I just have my pertinacities, and they are relatively few. I can also get bored of clever things that are overdone – I’m tiring of heavily hopped beers, for instance, and I don’t mind if a fancy meal involves neither smoke nor foam. But on the other hand, I like a good many things that quite a lot of other people can’t abide.

Modern art, for instance. And expressionist art too. Like that bloke Edvard Munch. Poor Edvard, though: he had a rather austere, pietist upbringing, and he lost his mother and one sister to tuberculosis, or, as it was called at the time, consumption – the only kind of consumption he likely had more than enough of. There was also mental illness in the family. As he at one time wrote, “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies – the heritage of consumption and insanity.” It made for outstanding art, but I don’t mind not being him.

So I can hardly complain about a few things I’m not (so to speak) crazy about in the words I consume. And anyway tastes are such tricky things. The name Munch is pronounced like “moonk,” not at all like the nice eating word. I do wonder, if we pronounced our verb munch the same way, whether I would expect different things of its sense. Probably…

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asperity

Posted on January 7, 2017 | 3 comments

It is a season of much asperity.

Yes, there is, as Samuel Johnson wrote in The Rambler, “The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world.” But there is also, as he wrote another time in the same periodical, much “Quickness of resentment and asperity of reply” – if not in our personal daily lives, then certainly in the larger world. (Thanks to the OED for the quotes.) As we traipse through the precipitation, we could aspire to something much more auspicious: prosperity, sincerity, perhaps a party (or parties). Something to leave a better taste in the mouth.

Taste? To me, asperity has a clear taste, and that taste is the taste of Aspirin. Have you every chewed an Aspirin? It is acetylsalycylic acid, and as such is as sour as ascorbic or acetic acid (vitamin C or vinegar), but since Aspirin also contains cornstarch, hypromellose, powdered cellulose, and triacetin, it has a chalky bittersweetness to it as well, and a texture not made for chewing really. So hard to swallow by itself.

And asperity of speech or circumstance is hard to swallow, and is sour and bitter. But I think asperity tastes like Aspirin just because the words sound the same. I could in other conditions have thought of it as poisonous like an asp, or as thick as aspic, or perhaps as poor as the opposite of prosperity. None of which have anything to do with its origin, and their resemblance to its sense is essentially coincidental.

What cool hell has spawned asperity? Like so many other words, it came to us by way of French – Old French asprete, which in modern French is âpreté – from Latin. The Latin is asperitatem, which is taken from the root asper. That may look like a name (indeed, by coincidence it is: Asper is a family name, but not from the Latin), and it may look like it’s related to aspiration, but it’s not. It’s just Latin for ‘rough’. Rough as a rasp.

That’s a good way to think of it. Take up a rasp in your hand and rub it: it is covered in asperities (yes, you can say that: the plural asperities literally names the things that cover a rasp or any rough rugged surface). It has an asperity of feeling. If you rub it against furniture, it makes a sound with asperity. (Here’s Johnson in The Rambler again: “Our language, of which the chief defect is ruggedness and asperity.” Speak for yourself, Samuel.) And when your significant other sees what you have done to the furniture, you will likely experience further asperity. Which is to say, things will be rough between you for a bit.

What can you do about asperity? The world will always have its friction, its roughness, its points. But it will also have its smoothness, and over time roughness will wear more and more to smoothness, even as other things break and become rough. Winter comes and it is cold; the summer comes and it is warmer. And interim we seek such solace as we may find: pastry, parties, art, repast, pay… there’s always something in the mix. And something more to aspire to.

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croon

Posted on January 5, 2017 | 2 comments

The lexis of our language is like a coral reef, full of wonders rich and strange. And, as with coral reefs, one of the threats to its diversity is bleaching.

Coral bleaching is a result of coral shedding algae due to rising sea temperatures. Semantic bleaching is a result of words shedding distinctions of meaning due to overuse, over-broad use, what one might call thesaurusitis: treating all words in a section of Roget’s as fungible. The words are still in use, but they lose much of their distinction of sense, thereby reducing the expressive power of the language. And modern electronic media can amplify this effect.

Expressive power and electronic amplification have much to do with the word of which I sing today, croon. It’s not a new word; it dates back half a millennium in Scotland and northern England, where it has for that long had the sense of a low sound, either (particularly in Scotland) a low, deep, loud, steady sound, or (more broadly) a low murmuring sound or soft quiet singing. It sounds like it should mean what it means. In singing, it’s the opposite of belting. Belting is the kind of singing you do when you have a noisy room and poor (or no) amplification. Once you have a good microphone and good speakers, you can draw the audience in with quiet, smooth singing. You can croon.

Which is what happened in jazz in the late 1920s onward. The first truly famous crooner was Rudy Vallée. His soft voice crept like a lover into millions of living rooms through the radio. Many others followed; the one probably most often thought of as a crooner was Bing Crosby. They all had a gentle, quiet singing style that worked closely with the microphone.

But as one technology giveth, another helpeth take away. Newspapers are written by people who are trained to be allergic to repetition. They seek different words for the same thing to make their prose seem more varied and expressive. We can never forget that a pumpkin is a gourd thanks to them; we are given the idea that every promise, however solemn and formal or not, is a vow; food writers talk of people munching even the softest, smoothest, quietest foods (ice cream? oatmeal?). And every act of singing may be called crooning.

It’s not that the word is always used over-broadly; it has not been utterly bleached. But a quick look through recent New York Times articles finds gospel choirs “crooning” more than once and a jazz singer who “crooned over the trio, belting the 1941 Duke Ellington classic” – yes, crooning and belting as the same act. Even non-singers, we are told, have sometimes “crooned”: soccer fans, en masse in a stadium, “crooned” “We’re not going home”; Donald Trump, at a rally, “crooned” “I love you! I love you!” to his supporters. Every one of these uses is amplified to an unlimited number of eyeballs through the wonder of the world wide web.

As a linguist, I can look at this and just write it down as instances of semantic broadening due to an evident desire for more expressive-sounding vocabulary (with the likely long-term effect of reducing the expressive value it draws on). As an editor and user of the language, however, I would rather resist it, because it ultimately reduces the expressive power. And there can be quite a lot of expressive power in the soft, quiet, focused, and amplified sound of crooning.

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kyle, kylie

Posted on January 3, 2017 | 5 comments

There are some words, like some people and some songs, that you just can’t get out of your head – they keep coming back to you. And sometimes when they come back they mean a different thing each time.

One word like that is kyle. As a noun, it has three different origins and three different meanings. One is ‘sore, ulcer, or boil’, coming from Old Norse kyli ‘boil, abscess’. Another refers to a small iron wedge that holds the head of a hammer (or similar implement) onto the shaft; it’s related to German Keil. The third is ‘narrow channel, strait’; it comes from Gaelic caol (pronounced about like “kale”). If you know someone named Kyle – or if that’s your name – you’ll be relieved to know that the personal name comes from that third sense.

Which is not to say all Kyles are strait-laced. Certainly not all Kylies are. I don’t know about you, but when I see Kylie I immediately come back to Kylie Minogue, the pop star who had a huge hit with her 2001 “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”

Funny thing about Kylie, though. She’s from Australia. And while I don’t know what her parents had in mind when naming her, there’s another word from Australia we need to come around to: kylie. It’s not very common in current use, but it’s still in the dictionary.

What’s a kylie? It’s another distinctly Australian thing: a boomerang. The word comes from Noongar, one of the indigenous (Aborigine) languages of southwest Australia. So it’s fitting that Kylie has had many happy returns.

Just as a little tangent: her family name Minogue traces back to an Irish Gaelic word meaning ‘monk’. Kylie doesn’t seem very monastic… I guess she came around.

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attacca

Posted on December 30, 2016 | 4 comments

This is a good word for New Year’s. Each year proceeds from the previous, attacca.

If you’re looking at a musical score, and at the start of a movement you see attacca, you know you’re supposed to dive right into that movement without pausing from the previous one.

To attack it.

Except no. No and yes, but no.

To attach to it.

Sure, when the next movement comes along, you have a choice to pause for a moment or just to jump on it and keep going. But while a strong attack on the opening note can make quite a statement, the point is just that it’s attached like a trailer to a truck. It’s concatenated: chained together.

Why the confusion? Because the two English words, attack and attach, connect to the same Italian verb, attaccare. I won’t say the Italian is the direct source, but the English words and the Italian word appear to have the same origin – and both English words translate to attaccare. It reminds us that attach or stick (or tack on, if you like the sound) can be active and aggressive, not always passive. Think of a magnet: bring it close enough to the right kind of thing and it just – attack-attaches to it.

The Italian has a broad ambit of senses: according to Harper Collins, senses include ‘attach’, ‘stick’, ‘hang (up)’, ‘attack’, ‘begin, start’, ‘stick, adhere’, ‘be contagious’, and ‘cling’. Attaccare discorso means ‘start a conversation’, and Con me non attacca! means ‘That won’t work with me!’ That’s quite a lot of meaning sticking to one word. But it all seems to work, because it’s all related.

Years don’t need magnetism or a physical attack to roll around, of course. The line from one to another is arbitrary and instantaneous, and the instant passes without tremor (other than percussive sounds from fireworks and champagne corks). In truth, the time it takes to pass from one year to another is more than a full day: the Line Islands, part of Kiribati, are 14 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, while Howland Island and Baker Island, owned by the US – and farther west than the Line Islands – are 12 hours behind it. That means that when the new year first arrives on the planet, it’s only 10 AM on New Year’s Eve in London, and when it last arrives it’s already noon on New Year’s Day in London. It is possible for something to happen on January 2^nd and for people not so far away to learn of it on December 31^st of the previous year.

There are also half-hour and even quarter-hour time zones on the planet (for example, when it’s noon in London it’s 5:30 PM in India and 5:45 PM in Nepal), meaning that the new year arrives a total of 39 times. And, because a day lasts 24 hours, it will be New Year’s Day – or New Year’s Eve, or any other day – somewhere on the planet for 50 hours from when it first arrives to when it last departs.

Time may seem to attack. The year 2016 has one heck of a casualty toll among famous people, for instance (and a far greater one among non-famous people). But as attached as we are to our arbitrary divisions of time, a year has no true discrete existence. Yes, the planet orbits the sun in a regular period, but just where we draw the line to start a new period is arbitrary – roughly 10 days after it reaches perihelion, going by the calendar that will start the year 2017 forthwith (other calendars start other years at other times). We go with it because it works with us. Because we are attached to it.

And while we may make resolutions to turn over new leaves each New Year’s, we mostly just turn over new pages in calendars (if even that). We don’t let go of our attachments. Rather, we sing to not letting old acquaintance be forgot. We go right into the next movement, but it is still attached to the one before.

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