Tag Archives: word tasting notes

cantabank

Posted on May 26, 2016 | 3 comments

“Why can’t a bank job be good enough for you?”

“Oh, mother,” Mark said, stepping down to pavement level, “I can’t abide it. I’d rather sing for my supper.”

“Why not go back to Cambridge,” Mark’s father said from the other side, “and become a scholar of note?”

“There shall be no Cantab ankh of immortality for me,” Mark said. “I am a scholar of notes.” He cleared his throat perfunctorily and hummed a couple of foreshortened notes. Then he mounted the bench again and started into a melody: “Like a song I have to sing, I sing it for you…” He paused, smiled down at his parents, and identified the source: “U2.” And at the same time, he said “You two” and “You too.” He straightened up and continued the song: “Like the words I have to bring, I bring it for you.”

His father looked over his shoulder nervously, then tugged on Mark’s coat. “Do stop, there’s no one around.”

“There will be.” Mark smiled.

“It all seems so… shady,” his mother said, looking down as she nervously kneaded the top of her oversize purse.

“Like a mountebank?” Mark said, stepping down again. He sat on the bench and propped his face on his fist as he lifted an eyebrow towards his mother. “Some charlatan hawking nostrums? A veritable saltimbanco? But the quality of what I give is not concealed. It is experienced first, then paid for. If you are not enchanted, you simply decamp.”

His father pursed his lips in a lemony moue and folded his arms. “With such a vocabulary, why don’t you do better than a street singer?”

“But that’s exactly it,” Mark said, looking up and then standing up. “I am a—” he sprung up once again onto the bench “—cantabank! Cantambanco! One who sings on a bench!” And again into song: “Volare! Ohh! Cantare… sul banco!”

“If you’re singing for your supper,” his father said, looking around again, “you can’t have much of a banquet awaiting.”

“Well, if it keeps me lean, then it keeps me leaning, and I so am banking one way or another.”

His mother reached into her purse and somehow presented a melon. “Have this.”

“Cantaloupe! Thank you, mother.” He took it and set it on the bench. “Can I sing for it?”

“No, just take it as a message, mister cantabank. If you can’t bank on a decent income, you also can’t elope with your girlfriend.”

Mark raised his eyebrows, took a breath, exhaled. “She has decamped. Recanted. Abandoned me…” he tilted his head… “for a banker.”

Then he stood at the canting edge of the bench and began, his eyes upwards: “E lucevan le stelle…”

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capybara

Posted on May 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

Toronto is thrilling right now to the news that two huge rodents are on the loose. Huge. The size of dogs.

Well, I suppose that’s better than having two chupacabras on the loose. Much better, in fact. But these creatures at least have a similar name: they’re capybaras.

How is capybara pronounced? /kapɪˈbɑːrə/ – sort of like it should be the coffee bar at the Copacabana. I’m tempted to say that two of them are gone because the first one escapyed and the second one was a capycat, but that’s trite. You can read more of the saga in this Toronto Star article, “Fugitive High Park Zoo capybaras duo elude search party after morning escape.”

The word capybara comes to us probably from Tupi, a language of South America; it appears to mean ‘grass eater’. The Latin name for these beasties is Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, which is a Latinization of Greek for ‘water pig’ – twice. (They’re not pigs, true, but neither are guinea pigs, which are capybaras’ closest relatives.) One way or another, they’re tailless things that seem generally inoffensive. Here’s a pet capybara repeatedly doing something like what the High Park duo may have done:

Well, if the door is open, they’re capyble of using it…

My first introduction to the capybara came thanks to the cartoon character The Tick, a prodigiously stupid superhero who, in one concussion-induced daze, encounters a capybara and adopts it as a pet:

Good luck for the capybara that The Tick wasn’t looking for a low-carb lunch. Its meat is eaten in some places, and in fact it can even be eaten during Lent by Catholics in some parts of South America. It’s not threatened – there are lots of them (capyous numbers?), so hunting is quite legal.

But where do you look if you want to find a capybara? Start by looking for other capybaras. They’re very gregarious animals. And where do you find the other capybaras? Down by the water, eating grass, of course. You haven’t forgotten the etymologies already, have you?

We can only assume that when the High Park duo are finally found, that is where they will be. The only problem is that there’s a lot of water and grass in High Park, so it may take a while…

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scenicest

Posted on May 23, 2016 | 3 comments

“It’s not the scenicest day,” I said to Aina, looking out the train window at a cloudy sky as we headed to Niagara for some wine and walking.*

Or perhaps I should spell that scenic-est, so you know I wasn’t saying it like “see nicest,” even though what is scenicest is nicest to see.

“Is that a word?” you may be thinking – or perhaps typing in an email to me. Well, I used it and you understood it, so yes. But is it a well attested word? No. You can find a couple hundred hits for it on Google, but it’s a safe bet most of them are – as I was – self-consciously using it as an awkward construction rather as Lewis Carroll used curiouser.

Why wouldn’t I just say most scenic? Because I like playing with words. Now it’s your turn: Tell me why scenicest shouldn’t be allowed. It’s a two-syllable word, after all, and it’s quite common to append –er and –est to one- and two-syllable words. The selection of those for which more and most are reserved is almost random-seeming. At the very least, the distinction is not black and white. For some words, it is a matter of personal taste which to use: beautifuller and beautifullest were formerly common enough, but now it seems we see the two-word version as the more beautiful.

I do think that what we see is part of the problem here. For assorted historical reasons (mostly to do with palatalization before front vowels in Latin and Romance languages), c “softens” before e and i. But the sound /k/ does not have an actual allophonic alternation with /s/ in modern English. We just retain the rule about c because of our borrowings from French and Latin. This makes a problem when we have something that sounds fine but runs into a spelling issue. Take chic. Lovely word, stylish, smart. Borrowed from French. By borrowed I mean adopted – actually I mean stolen. Anyway, it’s treated like an English word: it’s one syllable, so instead of saying most chic we often just add the –est and make it chicest.

Which looks horrible on the page. And chic-est looks at least as bad. And you can’t add or swap in a k because chikest would look completely wrong and incomprehensible and would conduce to yet another inaccurate pronunciation, and chickest is chick plus est. Somehow the chicest word to say is one of the unchicest (let’s say least chic) words to write.

Well, what do we expect? It should be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

Am I the only one who feels certain that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious should be two words? Normally, morphologically, we can add only other suffixes after a suffix, not a whole new root, let alone a prefix plus a root plus a suffix. And yet that’s what appears to come after the the ic in supercalifragilistic. Another bit of evidence to marshal for its being two words is that the spelling would seem to require a pronunciation like “–listi sexpi–,” which is clearly wrong.

Which takes us back to our problem of the orthographic scenery. Now, –ic words often used to be spelled with a k, as in musick and magick. So could we borrow on that and make it scenickest? Hmm. It looks a bit of a snickerfest. It may also tempt a person to shift the accent onto the second syllable because of the “heavy” consonant ck.

Or we could just keep using it and writing it and people will get used to seeing it and saying it. That’s how a lot of things in English have come to be as they are.

We ought not to be distracted by looks, anyway. A cloudy day may be warm and lovely. Indeed, when the sun is out and it looks most scenic, you are at greater risk of getting burned.

 

*It was not a reference to the fact that we would not be taking in a play at the Shaw Festival, even though scenic referred to the stage a century before it referred to the natural environment – it comes from a Greek word for a stage.

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ket, ketty

Posted on May 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

You may not keep these words in your kit, but they could be a cute addition. Not cute like a kitty, though – these are not words to pet, even if they could be petty words. They are better suited to a kettle of fish, and not a fine one either.

I have an instant association with ket, but it’s not an English one. It’s from a set of lessons in Breton, which is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, France. (If Breton and Brittany sound like Britain, it’s not a coincidence: the people in question were, a long time ago, Britons, but they were driven across the channel by the Anglo-Saxon invaders.) The dialogue includes this classic line, which you can even hear spoken on the page at Kevarker.org: “Ac’h ! N’eo ket gwin !” Which means “Ecchh! That’s not wine!” The ket is the second half of a two-part negator (French has ne…pas and Breton has ne…ket). So it’s negative. And in the dialogue in question, it’s rather disgusted.

That is not where the English ket comes from. Rather, you should turn to Scandinavian languages: Swedish kött, Icelandic kjöt, Faroese kjøt, Norwegian kjøtt, Danish kjød or kød. They’re all from the same origin as ket. In those languages, it refers to flesh or meat. But in English, it’s gone downhill a bit. It’s raw flesh, thence carrion, and rotten meat, and by extension from that trash or rubbish. And ketty means… let me quote the Oxford English Dictionary for that: “Having bad flesh; carrion-like; rotten, foul, nasty; worthless. Of soil: Soft, peaty.” So… disgusting.

It’s kind of a pity, isn’t it? A cute word like this one, so crisp, even a bit rakish. Its overtones are not nasty: kit, cat, cot, cought, cut, pet, kitty, jetty, cutty, kept, kex… Why would you want to cut this out of your kit? Other than the fact no one will understand it, of course. But if you want to slip in some petty cutting remark, it’s there for recourse. “This is a fine ket of beef you’ve served.” “Oh, there’s your little ketty cat.” And it’s less crude than some other ***t and ***tty words.

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ping-pong

Posted on May 16, 2016 | 3 comments

我們打乒乓球吧!

That’s Mandarin Chinese for ‘Let’s play ping-pong!’ It’s understandable to imagine that ping-pong was invented in China, since they dominate the game now. Have a look:

And then there’s that name. The actual ‘ping-pong’ part is 乒乓, pronounced just like we say it in English (but with level tones, which we usually don’t use). It looks just perfect, doesn’t it? As though it was invented for it. The characters together look like a ping-pong table with a net. (They also kind of look like squared versions of eyes with lines under, perhaps tired from playing too much ping-pong…)

In truth, the original Chinese character those characters come from is 兵, which is pronounced “bing,” means ‘soldier’, and is derived ultimately from a representation of two hands holding a short weapon. From it came two onomatopoeic words, 乒 and 乓. They didn’t come from it for the game, though. They showed up during the Ming Dynasty to represent the sounds of a fight. In fact, 乒乒乓乓 is idiomatic for consecutive percussions, as in a gunfight, a ruckus, or – these days – a ping-pong match.

Ping-pong, however, was invented in England (or perhaps by British in India) in the later 1800s. It was popular as an after-dinner parlour game among the upper class. The various equipment was still evolving at first, of course, as was the name. Ping-pong was an obvious onomatopoeia, imitating the percussion and using the i/o alternation to indicate back-and-forth, here-and-there. And it was in common use as a name for the game in 1901 when J. Jacques & Son came out with a proper high-quality kit for playing it… and trademarked the name. They sold the US trademark to Parker Brothers. This is why in official tournaments, including the Olympics, it’s called table tennis.

Various improvements to the equipment have been made over the years, but the play itself is pretty simple. Especially if you’re just playing it with friends and none of you are all that good at it. It’s the sort of game you can just kind of play without, you know, keeping score. As I have on various occasions at such places as a friend’s country house.

As we did this past Saturday at a friend’s birthday party at a ping-pong club. Yes, that’s right. Ping-pong tables, bar service, platters of meat and cheese and so on, and a guy going around with a nifty device made from a modified tennis racket on a stick with which he picked up balls by the dozen. Once we saw him do that, we stopped bothering to pick them up ourselves.

You can play singles ping-pong.

You can play doubles ping-pong.

You can even play with a beer in your non-racquet hand.

Maybe you won’t always hit the ball with your racquet. But what is this, the Olympics? Name another actual sport you can play in a normal-sized room while holding a beer. And not care about keeping score. And not worry too much about getting injured. Because those balls are pretty light. They weigh about the same as a half teaspoon of beer. Meaning that a big bucket’s worth of 200 will weigh the same as the beer in a pint glass. And, the way I play it, will take about as long to get through.

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salix

Posted on May 14, 2016 | 2 comments

As I stroll through the neighbourhood where I work, I see mostly apartment blocks and trees. I like the trees; they are calming, anodyne. There is one tree that is especially salient. It rains green on the lawn between a road and a building; none of the others around can match its winsome nobility. It is an elixir for the eyes.

I am told that if I were to lick its bark, I might be absolved of pain temporarily. I think it’s better to leave that extraction to others. But this tree, this regal green-duster, is a salix. It is from its bark that we derive salicylic acid. If that has a familiar sound, it is because its acetate – acetylsalicylic acid, also called ASA – is the active ingredient in Aspirin.

I like this word, salix. It starts with a curve and ends with a cross, and in the middle there is a tree or perhaps two. The word as a whole is slick, even slippery, but crisp.

Perhaps you don’t see the word too much. It names a whole genus, comprising some 400 species. Do they have other names? Some are called osier; some are called sallow (a word that is cognate with salix); but as whole, and for most individual species, they are known as willow.

Yes, willow. That famous tree of love and longing, of wisdom and wind, of weeping and whomping. The usual word is soft as a pillow, liquid and gliding, and in shape so willowy with the w and w fairly dripping with leaves and the ll reaching above. It is a tree of pain and relief, of despair and perseverance: where there is a willow, there is a way. But why not, as the occasion allows, use the Latin word, which has been formally adopted into English as well, though not often used? Why not call it salix? We can call holly ilex if we want, and there are other plants that also carry a Latin name for dropping into conversation. We may, if we will, wallow in willow, but I will on occasion elect to relax in the sunlight under a salix.

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tenebrity

Posted on May 12, 2016 | 5 comments

Times are dark, thoughts are dim. The current tense celebrity of some shady figures tempts many to ebriety in hopes of managing at least some glow in the turbidity to match the afterglow of retreating brightness. How may we frame the situation? How do we see ourselves in this tenebrity, overshadowed, benighted? Are we left to pray in the dark hours?

That might seem suitable; tenebrae is the name of a Christian service held in the dark hours before the last three days before Easter. It is marked by the extinguishing of candles, leaving the congregation in the gathering gloom. But tenebrity refers not specifically to this but to darkness more generally, not only of the earth and firmament but of the mind and mood and spirit and heart. Its Latin etymon is tenebræ, but in Latin that just means ‘darkness’.

But what is darkness? Are you now, as you read this, in darkness? If not, is there anywhere that is brighter? If you are inside, you are not in the brightest circumstance you could be in; step outside into daylight and you may squint at first. If it is after dusk and before dawn, however bright your surroundings, they are still too dim for high-quality photos from many a camera. If you are in darkness, how do you read this? The glow from your screen is bright, yes? But if it is like my computer or my phone, the screen adjusts its brightness according to context. Sit where there is light on the screen but not on the camera and the screen will seem excessively dim. The truth of tenebrity is that there is almost nowhere that brightness is ten out of ten. We simply adapt our eyes to the dimness. It’s all a matter of how you frame it.

Consider the photo above, taken by the elevators in the building where I live. I am in the dark, little light reflecting off my face, my eyes almost vanishing in the well of shadow. If it were not for the glowing frames of the repeating mirrors, there would be nothing at all. And yet that’s true anyway: without a light source, whatever wherever, we can’t see – our eyes don’t reach out and grab objects to perceive; they await the light, and they adjust to its level.

And sometimes they adjust too well. And sometimes we adjust our view too much to try to bring the truly bright down to an acceptable level so we can see its contours better. When I am standing at those mirrors, I can see the surfaces of the lights and yet I can also see myself well: the hallway is not dim but quite acceptably bright. But when I point my camera at the mirror, it adjusts its narrower dynamic range to the brightness; my face, quite clearly lit to the eye, shows in the image as badly overshadowed.

Tenebrity is relative. What light level is shadow in one place is a bright spot in another. Likewise in our minds and our lives: we know tenebrity by contrast. If we adapt too much to the brightest lights, all else will seem unduly dim. The truly dark will always seem dark, but there is much else that could be bright if we would let it.

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laryx

Posted on May 10, 2016 | 4 comments

Does this word seem to be missing something? Is it sticking in your throat? If you’re undecided, let me needle you a bit. I first came to know this word as the name of a run at Sunshine Village ski area in Banff. Like so many of the black-diamond runs at Sunshine, it’s just a quick steep plunge from a moderate slope above to a nearly flat runout below, and there are few trees in sight – few but not none.

Did they misspell it? Surely it should be larynx, no? No. In the end it is voiceless. It is named after something you might happen to get a glimpse of while you’re there. Is it a rock, like onyx? Or a wildcat, like lynx? Or an ungulate, like oryx or ibex? Or a furry little critter, like hyrax (or its Seussian reflex the Lorax)? Or part of a bird, like syrinx? Or a shrubbery, like ilex? Well, you’re getting closer.

How close? Let me put it this way: If you’re busy trying to spot some elusive creature while skiing down Laryx, you might just run right into a laryx. And you would probably be hospitalized if you did.

It’s a tree.

It’s not a shrubbery. It’s the larch.

What is a larch? It is a tree with needles – like a pine or spruce – but ones that fall off every fall: it is deciduous. When I was a kid, we would hike every fall to Larch Valley, above Moraine Lake near Lake Louise, farther up the highway from Sunshine, to look at the larches as they changed colour and dropped their needles, and to eat cold Shake ’n Bake chicken roughly the colour of those needles.

At the Lake Louise ski area, they have a much larger run (and a chairlift) named Larch. Not at Sunshine. Sunshine Village, which for me has always had the most classic ski-bum-hippy vibe of the Banff areas and which is probably the most family-friendly area there, has managed to insert an uncommon Latinism into its trail map. And an uncommon spelling at that. The normal spelling is larix. The y version is just by analogy with… well, see above for words that might have influenced it. As you may have suspected, larix and larch are etymologically related.

They are quite similar words. And yet there is something of the lurch and starch and large in larch, while laryx seems a curious spry item sitting tensely in wait in its lair or at least relaxing rakish and sparkling (perhaps like a cup or its contents – a calyx or pyx). Larch, naming one of Louise’s most popular wide blue-square intermediate freeways, is a common word. Laryx, naming a short, steep, lightly trafficked slope off the back of Standish abutting the boundary of Sunshine, is a rare small jewel. And it is an expert run, black diamond – perhaps there is onyx there too after all. But more likely you will find the skier’s white elixir: powder snow.

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pluvious

Posted on May 8, 2016 | 5 comments

On a pluvious day, having neglected to pack a parasol and wearing pervious clothing, I elected to persist a half hour longer in the Art Gallery of Ontario. I do not think modern art is dry, but I do think modern art museums are dryer than rainy streets. They also add more life and show more ways of seeing. Pulverous they are not.

I normally carry at least one camera with me, and when I’m in the AGO I tend to use it. Not on the art – go see that for yourself – but on the architecture, some (the most interesting) parts of which are by Frank Gehry. And occasionally there are people in it too. And views. Buildings across the street, seen through the rainy windowpane.

People (seated rather than supine) sleeping off the storm or the slow friends and family.

In Toronto, you can often look to the west and get a feeling from the sky where the weather is going, because that’s where the weather is usually coming from.

But when I want to know whether it’s raining at the moment, if the windows are not dripping, I look for one thing: parapluies.

An umbrella is a parasol, right? Well, the sol in parasol is for ‘sun’, but yes, it holds back the rain, and after all, the umbr in umbrella is for shadow. If I say parapluie it may seem pretentious (because French) but at least it means it’s for rain. Because the pluie refers to rain.

Because there’s always more (plus) rain to come? No, because ‘rain’ in Latin is pluvia, and that’s where French got it from. The via has nothing to do with ways (as in Via Appia and impervious) or life (as in French vie), and yet rain is a way of life. And a view of rain is also a portent of petrichor, especially in springtime.

I hope you pardon the purple prose and the mostly monochrome photographs. Everything is more beautiful after rain: the colours are more saturated, as is the chiaroscuro, as is the soil, and the shirts too. In a pluvious cityscape, I may not want to soak in the raindrops and puddles, but I do want to soak in the scenery.

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nacre

Posted on May 6, 2016 | 1 comment

We spend our lives seeking pearls of wisdom, rare gems of insight acquired at great price. We will plough an acre of racinated soil in hopes of finding one shiny stone; we will sluice and pan a creek in hopes of sifting the nugget that will settle our debts with enough for a bottle of Cognac remaining. But this is playing the lottery: it loses a lot. If we want hard truths now, we would do well to alter our perspective.

Look down, for instance. At your shirt. What holds it on? Those buttons – how they iridesce. What colour are they? What colour aren’t they? If, as buttons and some other things sometimes are, they are made of nacre, they will be hard, durable, pieces of some bygone bivalve’s shell, shining in elusive phantasms of colours. If you do not see the colour you want, look another way. If you do see the colour, it will shift in an instant. It is all soft, glowing, never too vivid. It is a durable reminder that what you see often depends on your position. And that things perceived are not always so – and can at the same time be quite different when seen from another perspective. Such is the mother of wisdom.

Mother of wisdom? Mother of pearls of wisdom. Mother of pearl. That’s what nacre is: mother-of-pearl. It comes from the shells of various molluscs: oysters, mussels, nautiluses, various others. Not all molluscs make nacre, but some of the most ancient lineages do.

Why does it shimmer and glow and shift its colours so? It is made of stacks of plates of aragonite held together with elastic biopolymers, producing a very strong material. The thickness of the plates is similar to the wavelength of visible light, and it causes interference with light rays differently at different angles. The shimmering colours are not intrinsic to the material; they are an effect of its arrangement and interaction with the surrounding. Shine a light on nacre and it will simultaneously reflect many different colours at many different angles, but you will only see what is in your angle of view. This is not the one true colour, but it is not a false colour either: it is what you see, and it came to you through light reflected from what you’re seeing, as colours do. Without reflection there is no seeing.

In this way is nacre like our minds, our personalities, the world: reflecting many things in many directions at the same time, and what another person perceives depends on their angle. And because it is a material in a shell, it helps protect the tender being inside. Shells have their uses, after all.

So nacre is the mother of wisdom: when we learn that what we see depends on our angle, we are one step farther forward. And then we can enjoy the light show for what it is. And why is nacre the mother of pearl? Pearls are made with nacre too.

Pearls, those very precious pieces, are made when an irritant intrudes inside an oyster’s tidy shell, a little flaw in its serene world, and the oyster encloses this irritating flaw in the shell material – the nacre. Gold is gold, and is as scarce as it is, but pearls are just a special arrangement of common materials – not even like diamonds, which are highly disciplined carbon; pearls are made of the very same calcium carbonite structures as line billions of shells. But because we want just the pure sphere, we seek it and kill countless other less irritated oysters in the course of finding it. The great price of pearls is the cost of the hours of slaughter required for finding one. We are obsessed with finding the perfect flaw.

In our own lives, we may often be as happy as clams, but we are never as serene as unslaughtered oysters. Life is too irritating, and we gain our own flaws and wounds that we coat with hard shimmering layers to make cherished things of beauty. After all our sea-changes, each of us grows as many pearls as a whole bed of oysters. But most remain hidden from sight, even our own.

And so, looking outward, we still toil to seek the pearl, shuck an acre of shells and chuck the nacre because it’s not in the form of our desire, while the same shifting shine, unnoticed, lines our shells and holds our shirts on.

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