Tag Archives: word tasting notes

omnibus notum, scilicet

Posted on February 28, 2016 | 7 comments

Good scholars always want to add to their skill kits, obviously, but they can sometimes be a silly set too. There are times when levity is the only sensible response to the gravity of the situation – to wit, when there is something that everyone knows, or that follows easily from something everyone knows, but no one has bothered proving. It’s not that citations bring excitation, but there is an expectation that if you say it you can cite a source for it. If it’s notable, it should be footnotable; absence of a note would be ominous. So when you are making a point in a paper, and you get to something that’s important to the point, and it’s an “everybody knows” thing or a “well of course” thing, but you can’t find prior research to support it, what do you do?

What you want to do is footnote it with “Obviously” or “Everybody knows this.” But that seems rather… um… frank. Frankly English, for one thing. This is scholarship, you know! You don’t put “Smith, the same one I just cited,” you put “Smith, ibid.”; you don’t put “Smith, here and there throughout the book,” you put “Smith, passim.” So what do you put instead of “Everybody knows this” or “Obviously”? I’d be tempted to put res ipsa loquitur, a well-known phrase that means ‘the thing speaks for itself’, but it has a specific legal use – to wit: the very nature of a particular accident is evidence of negligence (i.e., that kind of accident can’t happen unless someone screws up).

So I put the question to fellow scholars on Twitter, which in such matters can be an omnibus full of notables. Various suggestions came through. One from Laura Gibbs that I especially liked was omnibus notum. This does not mean a post-it note on a transit vehicle; it’s Latin for ‘known by all’. It can easily be abbreviated to om. not. or o.n. If the reader sees you footnote “An egg will probably break if you drop it from shoulder height onto a tile floor” and says, “A footnote? Are you joking?” you can say “I om. not.”

An even more cogent one could be what Gregory Stringer suggested: scilicet. It’s a term used in various Latin writings; it is actually a synthesis of scio licet, which means ‘it is permitted to know’, but the Romans used it to mean ‘obviously’ or ‘naturally’ or, in a concessive manner, ‘of course’, to be followed with a sed (‘but’) clause. It can be pronounced in the classical Latin way, “ski li ket,” or it can be said in the English way, like “silla set” or “sigh la set.”

The fact that there is an existing English-style pronunciation for it tells us that it is in use as an English word.1 So we’re all set, right? Hmm, well. There are two English usages. One, no longer current, means ‘doubtlessly’ sarcastically: “Should Trump become president, he will scilicet brush up his diplomatic skills.” The other one uses it in another sense available from its construction: ‘evidently’ or ‘to wit’. That is to say, it means ‘that is to say’ – i.e., it’s another way to say i.e. It’s like a clickable plus sign that has expanded to show the extra information. So if you set scilicet the reader may be conditioned to expect just that thing you were using it to avoid: an explanation.

Ah, drat. No rest for the learnèd. However obvious the thing, however needless an explanation seems to be, you can’t always conceal it, or skip it, or hope it’s too obvious for a note. Why not? Because, as Mark Twain wrote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”2 The great advances of knowledge have come from disproving the obvious.3 So you sigh and see what you can set down.

Thanks to Iva Cheung for setting this thought train in motion.

 

1Res ipsa loquitur.

2Actually, this can’t be found in any of Twain’s writings, though he did write “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so” in Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. A similar quote is attributed to Twain’s contemporary Josh Billings: “It ain’t ignorance causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.” This likewise does not appear in Billings’s work. But Billings’s 1874 Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billling’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor has “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” (Thanks to Bob Kalsey, http://wellnowbob.blogspot.ca/2008/07/it-aint-what-you-dont-know.html, for this.) In any case, the idea itself has an intuitive appeal and a certain… obviousness?

3If this doesn’t seem obvious to you, I can’t see why not.

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ablute

Posted on February 25, 2016 | 2 comments

The dirty things we do for money. Lucre is called filthy, but while that’s not ludicrous, it’s really the rolling in the mud we do for the loot that pollutes us. Sometimes our solutions are nothing but soil from a slough. If we wish to ablate it or even abate it, we must ablute it – and ourselves.

Ablute! Does that wash with you? If so, what does it wash you with? Ab initio it has that ab, ‘from’, but how do you play that lute? Can you be resolute? Or is it muddy?

Well. It comes from Latin lutum, ‘mud, filth’. But just as in English you can core and peel an apple, and having done so leave it with neither, in Latin you can mud things and leave them immaculate – luere, the verb from lutum, can mean ‘wash, clean, remove mud’. From it we get ablute, elute, and for that matter dilution and the better-known noun partner to our verb, ablution.

But we also get pollute. What a dirty trick. Mudding can also mean adding mud. It’s like asking someone to dust the room with a feather duster and instead they dust it with confectioner’s sugar. What is the solution then? How do we solve it? Can we dissolve it? Be careful with the dissolution into solution – there is no washing available in that; it comes from solvere, a different root. Absolution for the culprit may involve ablution. But not of the room – that would make a sticky situation; better to sweep it. Then wash your hands.

That’s nice clean work, as it were. Do an absolutely spotless job and you get a blue ribbon. It sure beats flinging lutum in hopes some loot will come your way. That’s a brutal thing to do. Best to abstract and ablute yourself.

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ignorandum, ignoranda, ignorandus

Posted on February 21, 2016 | 2 comments

Some things are best left aside. In the business of daily life, we have multiple memoranda (things to remember) and a full agenda (things to do), and so many people demanding our attention. And if you’re on a social network, some of those people might be real ignoramuses too, but somehow they still think they merit interaction; they may even provoke it. Somehow we need to need to do a triage. Never mind things to get around to. We need to make a list of things not to get around to. Things to ignore. And people to ignore.

So. A memorandum is a thing to remember; the word memorandum is a Latin singular neuter future passive participle of memoro ‘I bring to mind’; it means ‘to be remembered’, as in ‘a thing to be remembered’, i.e., ‘a thing to remember’. The plural is memoranda. Similarly, agenda is the neuter plural or feminine singular meaning ‘thing(s) to do’.

So what would be a thing to ignore?

That’s easy enough if you’re no ignoramus on Latin roots. The Latin verb ignoro means ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know about’ or ‘I ignore’. The first person plural conjugation is ignoramus ‘we don’t know; we ignore’. That word was pressed into service as the name of a lawyer in the 1615 play Ignoramus by Georges Ruggle, and from that has come to be the English noun we all know. (You can’t pluralize it as ignorami because it’s not a noun in Latin.) So if ignoro is the verb, the future passive participle will be ignorandus, ignoranda, ignorandum in masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Since we normally use the neuter – memorandum, originally plural agenda – we can go with ignorandum for a single thing to ignore, and ignoranda for a list of things to ignore.

We can, if we really want to be exact, use the masculine for a single male who needs ignoring: ignorandus (plural ignorandi). This is most likely to be of use on social networking sites, where one may encounter randos – random dudes who just butt in and expect unearned attention to their obnoxious opinions. It works especially well because it is so close to ignoranus. Should that be ignoramus? No, it’s a popular wordplay: an ignoranus is a person who is both an ignoramus and an anus (you may more likely use the English equivalent for the latter). We may say with confidence that every ignoranus is an ignorandus to add to the ignoranda.

And, as an added bonus, the masculine accusative plural is ignorandos, which means that “Just ignore the ignorandos” is actually using proper Latin. The singular dative and ablative are ignorando, so “I want to get away from that ignorando” is also using proper Latin. (The whole declension is on Wiktionary.)

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clarty

Posted on February 20, 2016 | 7 comments

If you’re looking for some clarity, I’m afraid I can’t help you see clear to that this time. Today’s word is a dirty, dirty word, and a rude thing to say. Oh, it’s not crude language; your churchgoing grandmother could say it, and might if she’s Scottish or northern English. But it has a certain unpleasant clatter to it, and while it’s as plain as day, it’s also as clear as mud – and as filthy, too. Clarty means ‘dirty, muddy, sticky, nasty’; it has a related noun clart meaning ‘mud, filth’ and a related verb clart meaning ‘smear with dirty, make dirty’. If you’re in Scotland, you may well hear the word used today, but if you do, it will not be with a positive tone (see this article in The Scotsman). It has been in the language for most of a millennium, but its origins are – sorry – unclear.

If language is a window on the world, it takes only an iota to make the difference between gleam and grime, between purty and dirty, between clarity and clarty. The merest misplacement can make a mess. I’m reminded of a joke – a meta-joke, because it’s a joke about someone telling a joke. A fellow hears the joke “Did you hear the one about the dirty window? Never mind, you wouldn’t see through it.” He thinks it’s funny, so next time he’s at a church social, he tells a few people present, “Did you hear the one about the window you couldn’t see through? Never mind, it’s too dirty for you.”

Which makes me think about the time I cleaned the shower door in our last apartment. We had moved in perhaps a year earlier. I finally got around to using some CLR on the shower door and cleaning all the accumulated minerals off it. Aina came home, looked at it, said “It’s clear!” and, after the briefest of moments, pulled a face of horror and disgust: “Ewwwwwww.” She had thought it was frosted glass. She just realized she had been showering all year next to an incredibly filthy piece of glass (well, minerals, but you know). Its lack of clarity was because it was clarty. And that, ladies and gents, is how you get from pane to pain.

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etaonrish, Etaoin Shrdlu

Posted on February 15, 2016 | 7 comments

Etaonrish, dlf. Cm, ugyp! W b vkx, jqz…

That is a listing of the letters of the alphabet, in descending order of their frequency of use in English. I learned it in grade 5 from a book on cryptography. I memorized it by pronouncing it with a sound sort of like “Eat your own rice, Dolf. Come, you gyp! Will be vexed, Jacuzzi…”

It was knowledge. It was a thing I had learned, a thing I knew, a master key to special understanding. If I was faced with a long and complex cipher to decrypt, I could start by counting the frequency of the letters and starting to work out which was which from that…

In grade 6, one of our exercises in class was actually to decipher a sentence or two that had been encrypted with a simple replacement cipher. You know, something like this: Ksvl smf Koaa ermy iq yjr joaa yp gryvj s qsoa pg esyrt. So right away, I knew what to do: Count the letters! Figure it out from the frequency! Ah, ha!

What was truly vexing was that other students worked it out rather quickly while I was still stuck in the mud. How did they do that? Well, to start with, there are only so many one-letter words in the language, so that gives you an edge. Commonly used three-letter words are also a limited set, and if you see one repeating, that’s a good hint. And so on. Once you’ve gotten a sense of what is a and what is t, h, and e, it gets to be like solving Wheel of Fortune (which, however, did not exist at the time). But I hadn’t approached it like that.

So my knowledge got in the way of actually using my brain. I was using a screwdriver to pull nails.

But still… I knew this thing! It was the real order of the letters! And when, one day in grade 10, a substitute teacher mentioned about how we all knew what etoanirsh was – she wrote it on the board – I was incensed. I didn’t stand up and say something, but I knew she had it wrong. I may have muttered to the person next to me. How can everyone know it? And how can they know it wrong? It’s etaonrish, not etoanirsh! Fool.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring.

Not just that, though. My pride in my learning had turned it into a dogma. It was the One True Way, to be used wherever it could, and I was on the right team. Those who thought otherwise were fools. Fools!

It’s just the same sort of thing you see in politics, and social issues, and religion, and grammar. We use our minds to set the world in an order that gives us mastery over it. It’s not a coincidence that comprehend can mean both ‘understand’ and ‘take in, include’. A comprehensive exam is so called not because it tests your comprehension but because it includes everything. We join this desire to comprehend with a desire to dominate, to win, to be better – basic human insecurity. Many people learn one little thing and use it as an omni-trump card, as proof that others are fools. Ha! We own their sorry butts! Lincoln was a Republican, so the Democrats are the real racists! (I’ve actually seen that argument made.) You can’t tell the difference between discreet and discrete, so you must be an uneducated idiot!

And we join this to our tribal instincts to decide who’s on the right team. Dogma, ideology, tribalism. Some people want to blame all of this on theism, but it’s evident in many spheres that have nothing to with religion: politics, sports, social mores, grammar… We decide what is good and what is bad, and from that who is right and who is wrong, and we make our lives – and the lives of others around us – needlessly worse than they could be. Using screwdrivers to remove nails.

Fortunately for me, I had just enough self-doubt and curiosity to want to find out more about this other version. Well, naturally, your frequency distribution will vary according to your sample. There are different dialects, different genres, different times.

In the 1920s, a well-known frequency listing started with etaoinshrdlu. In 1923, the playwright Elmer Rice gave a character in his play The Adding Machine the name Etaoin Shrdlu.

The Adding Machine is an expressionist play, full of the mindless small talk of repetitive unthinking existence. It’s about a man, Mr. Zero, who has been working adding up numbers in a department store for 25 years. On his 25th anniversary of working at the company, the owner calls him in to talk to him. Not to give him a raise, a promotion, or a pen – just to tell him he’s being replaced by an adding machine. He snaps and kills the owner. He surrenders, goes to jail, is executed. He finds himself in the Elysian Fields, where he meets Etaoin Shrdlu, a proofreader who always tried to live a moral existence, always did just what his kind, sweet, patient mother wanted, never disappointed her, always fought his sinful nature. He tried to run away once and join the navy but she stopped him, so he just went on working the right job and living with her and trying to overcome his sinful nature, until one day when he was going to carve a leg of lamb he slit his mother’s throat instead.

Why are these two murderers in the Elysian Fields, where everything is so nice? Shouldn’t they be in hell? Well, they won’t remain, Shrdlu explains. Only the most favoured remain. Anyone who likes may remain, but only the most favoured do. Who are these favoured people, Zero asks? Shrdlu says, despairingly (that’s the stage direction – despairingly),

I don’t know, Mr. Zero. All these people here are so strange, so unlike all the good people I’ve known. They seem to think of nothing but enjoyment or of wasting their time in profitless occupations. Some paint pictures from morning until night, or carve blocks of stone. Others write songs or put words together, day in and day out. Still others do nothing but lie under the trees and look at the sky. There are men who spend all their time reading books and women who think only of adorning themselves And forever they are telling stories and laughing and singing and drinking and dancing. There are drunkards, thieves, vagabonds, blasphemers, adulterers. There is one—

Zero cuts him off and says “That’s enough. I heard enough.” He leaves. He doesn’t want to stay there “with a lot of rummies an’ loafers an’ bums.” He goes and finds himself an adding machine and works on it until he is told his soul is to be recycled, since he’s just taking up space.

We come up with our knowledge, our ideas, our rules, to help us master the world. But if we’re not aware, they master us. Sure, we’ve put everything in order, but is it the right order? Are we putting it to good use? Or are we just using it to hurt others and ourselves? If we don’t check the basis of our rules, consider the premises and evaluate the results, we may just join the cult of etaonrish and find ourselves with – or like – Etaoin Shrdlu.

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kufungisisa

Posted on February 14, 2016 | 13 comments

“James,” my acupuncturist said once, “you think too much. You need to think less.”

Apparently my brain is sort of like the Macbook Air I’m typing this on: it occasionally overheats. I can be prone to what might be called “binge thinking.” Have you ever had a piece of fish that had lots of tiny bones that weren’t removed, and you’ve spent your whole meal dissecting it with fork and knife to find the bones, and chewing each mouthful carefully and thoroughly and probingly to find and remove any hair-thin bones you missed, lest they puncture your intestine? My thought processes can get like that from time to time.

Not that I think thinking is bad. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can think they ever stop thinking. How can you not constantly be thinking? I don’t mean being lost in thought all the time, but at least always considering everything before, during, and after, and – when nothing else is going on – having lengthy mental dialogues with yourself or imagined others. When is there ever a space where there’s nothing going on? I remember the line from Billy Joel: “Should I try to be a straight-A student? If you are then you think too much.” Ha! If you think you’re ever not thinking, then you’re just not paying attention. Right?

But overheating is bad. Brooding is bad. Fixating. Spiralling. Forming mental centres of gravity that become black holes. It can be a key feature in depression and anxiety disorders.

Which is where kufungisisa comes in. Kufungisisa has nothing to do with kung fu or ISIS or fungus or the Kurfürstendamm. The word kufungisisa means ‘thinking too much’ in Shona, a language (and culture) of Zimbabwe. It’s a cultural view of a particular set of mental disorders – or, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) puts it, “an idiom of psychosocial distress.” If you have it, you’re ruminating on various upsetting thoughts. It is associated with various conditions, including “anxiety symptoms, excessive worry, panic attacks, depressive symptoms, and irritability.” Which means that I, and many of you too, have had kufingisisa. Or would have had I (and you) been Shona.

Mental illness diagnoses are culture-bound, after all. Expression of mental illness can be strongly culture-bound too. Some cultures have names for culture-bound syndromes where, for instance, a person just “snaps” and runs amok – in fact, amok is from a Malay term for just that culture-bound syndrome. Japan has a disorder called tajin kyofusho that is “characterized by anxiety about and avoidance of interpersonal situations due to the thought, feeling, or conviction that one’s appearance and actions in social interactions are inadequate or offensive to others.” Cultures with strong expectations regarding body image will give rise to mental disorders related to those body images, never mind that other cultures – or that same culture at other times – may have entirely different views on body image.

But people are people, and some things are fairly common at the underlying level. Depression, for example, appears to happen everywhere, though not necessarily with the same incidence and certainly not with the same interpretation. The DSM-5 notes that “thinking too much” is a common way of describing certain kinds of mental distress in many cultures. Indeed, “In many cultures, ‘thinking too much’ is considered to be damaging to the mind and body and to cause specific symptoms like headache and dizziness.” In Nigeria, excessive study is thought to cause damage to the brain, “with symptoms including feelings of heat or crawling sensations in the head.”

Maybe it is possible to overheat the brain. Intense thought can be different from ordinary thought, after all, and if there are strong emotions involved, well, this is not exactly some kind of Spock thing. But I rather suspect that much of this is focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause. Brooding doesn’t cause depression; depression causes brooding.

It’s like calling nausea or earache a condition. They’re just symptoms. So is binge thinking. I think.

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scaevity

Posted on February 11, 2016 | 2 comments

And what then if you are left with a word such as scævity? What viatic will you take to vaticinate its sense? Its very presence on the page scatters meaning – ay, evicts it, leaving a vast cavity that you scavenge for sense. You seek perhaps to reap significance, but the scythe cuts from the other side, and it is you who are grimly reaped. How can you get the upper hand? Look up.

Look it up.

But even then you are unlucky. It is not a common word. You can find the main meaning, but nothing will tell you how to say it. Go figure.

Go figure it out for yourself. Here: it comes from Latin scævitas. So if you were saying it in Latin, it would be /ske vi tas/. But you aren’t. It’s no longer a Latin word; the itas is now ity. And I’ll tell you for free – though you might have guessed as much, given the assimilated form – that it was borrowed into English a few centuries ago. In the 1600s, in fact, if not earlier. So the pronunciation will conform to the long-established English way of saying such things: æ like /i/ (“ee”) as in encyclopædia; this also makes the sc “soft,” just like the c is “soft” is cæsar and cæcum. So: /si vɪ ti/.

But what is scævitas? It is a noun form of scævus. Which means ‘left-sided’. And also means ‘awkward’ and ‘perverse’ and ‘unlucky’. Our word scævity (you can consciously uncouple the æ to ae if you wish) means ‘unluckiness’ and also ‘left-handedness’. Which is a rather left-handed thing to say.

Or, actually, not. It’s right-handed, and obliviously so, because why is it so bad to be left-handed, aside from everything catering to right-handed people? Some of the finest people I know are left-handed. Half of the American presidents in the last century have been left-handed, including Obama, Clinton, and Bush senior (not W, though). As far as I can tell, left-handedness increases the odds of a person being interesting. But of course it is in a way unlucky: You have to put up with all those oblivious right-handed people and all their oblivious right-handed stuff. (Try this: Find a camera with the shutter button on the left.)

Thanks to @tonythorne007 for suggesting scaevity.

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dulcacid

Posted on February 10, 2016 | 2 comments

There is something simultaneously sweet and sour about this word. Sweet? Or delicate. Or just dull? Yet somehow lucid, clear like the cacophonous claxon of a cicada. But undeniably acid.

We do like contrasts, so long as they’re well balanced. Nor do the contrasts need to be of things utterly unlike; a simple adjustment can be enough sometimes, like the difference between the shapes of d and ci – just a little erosion. Or i and l. Or between the sound of c and the sound of c when one is before a and the other before i.

This word nearly balances. It has d and d as bookends. In the heart is a, flanked by c and c, and then beyond those l and i – so similar in shape, but not the same. But what disrupts the perfect symmetry of the experience? U, of course. As soon as we see u come into it, it has a skew – but it simply could not exist without u.

Without you. De gustibus and all that, yes; of tastes. Tastes are individual. Every word has its taste, but a different taste for each person, and for each person a different taste for each word at each moment. Nothing stays the same. It cannot be reduced to tidy numbers on a balance sheet: there is no accounting for taste.

But it can balance, even if it is not opposites (the opposite of sweet would simply be not sweet). Pick two extremes and put them together. We taste sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami; you can have sweet and bitter, like Italian sodas or many a romance. Or you can have sweet and sour, to pique and to please.

‘Sweet’, in Latin, is dulcis. ‘Sour’ is acid – yes, acids are sour, and sourness is the flavour of acid. Citric, ascorbic, lactic, you name it: tart. Put them together and you have lemon tarts or many a Chinese chicken dish, and you have dulcacidus. In Latin that was said like “dool ka kee doos,” but it trips differently off our tongues now as this word dulcacid, the English equivalent.

Inasmuch as it trips off tongues at all, that is. It is not much used now. We could use an erudite-sounding single word for ‘sweet and sour’, yes, but somehow this word seems a bit… dull. And acid. To us English speakers, that is. Taste may be individual, but it is also affected by your culture, after all.

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smilax, sarsaparilla

Posted on February 7, 2016 | 1 comment

Sometimes life seems like an impenetrable thicket of brambles. The more you try to push through, the more scratched up you get, and at the end of your efforts you don’t get what you want and you get what you don’t want. What is left for you? Smilax. Vegetate with sarsaparilla.

Smilax. Does that look like a portmanteau for smile and relax? That’s how you say it – there’s nothing tricky about the pronunciation. I suppose you could smile and relax with smilax, but that’s not what it means. It also doesn’t mean ‘smile and use an ax’, though you could do that with smilax. But it would be the smilax that you’re smiting with the ax: it’s a dense briery plant, in fact a whole genus of them. If you want to get to the root of the problem, though, eradicate it – e ‘out, from’ radic ‘root’ ate: pull it out by the roots. And then you may get to the sarasaparilla, if you take roots and make root beer.

Yes, Smilax is a genus with more than 300 species, and they’re all ornery little shrubs, the botanical equivalent of that dreadful project you’re stuck with at work. They include greenbriers, catbriers, prickly-ivys, various plants just called smilaxes, and sarsaparilla. What’s sarsaparilla, aside from a kind of smilax? It’s the plant whose roots give much of the flavour to root beer. Sometimes you’ll see root beer called sarsaparilla.

Kind of a classic-looking name, isn’t it, sarsaparilla? It seems to me to be a cross between a laid-back Southern something-or-other and a truculent simian or towering Japanese lizard. But it’s soft and liquid with a little pop, an ideal name for a carbonated beverage. You might be more energized by the sight of the Spanish version: zarzaparilla. It means ‘little brambly grapevine’: zarza ‘bramble’ and parilla ‘little grapevine’. Does that zarza look familiar? Yes, it’s the same one that shows up in Zarzuela, which is named after a place that’s named after brambles. And where does this zarza word come from? Basque sartzia.

Fair enough. Many are the days one may wish to lie back and bask in the sun with a glass of sarsaparilla and just… smilax. And think of what might have been. Which might have been Smilax.

Smilax, you see, was the name of a nymph: Σμῖλαξ. She was the object of unrequited love by a human youth. He pined for her, but his love was not evergreen; in the end it did not flower, but he did: he was turned into a flower that bears his name. He was Κρόκος; we know him as Crocus. And Smilax, the poor lass, was also turned into a plant, all because she wouldn’t Netflix and chill (or IMAX and climax). But she wasn’t turned into what we call smilax. She was turned into bindweed, a flowering vine. That’s what the Greeks called σμῖλαξ. Somehow more recent botanists managed to switch the name over to a less friendly, albeit tastier, plant.

Poor nymph. Just minding her own business when some random dude she couldn’t care less about develops a thing for her, and next thing she knows, she’s turned into a plant, just because she was pretty. And then she doesn’t even get to keep her name! Think about her next time you think you have troubles. A briery thicket? Pah. It’s nothing. Have a glass of root beer. And as you sip your sarsaparilla, raise it in memory of Smilax.

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kaggerleȝc

Posted on February 5, 2016 | 2 comments

How perverse is it to taste a word that hasn’t been used in about 800 years and that includes a character that’s been out of use in English for half a millennium? That has two morphemes, one of which is not only no longer productive in English but is not even in use, and the other of which is obscure, untraced, and unseen eslewhere? How deliciously wanton is that?

Not half as deliciously wanton as including it in a modern dictionary.

Oh, but this is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the most colossal lexicographic effort available in the English language. It is the output of senseless devotion, of a decades-long Bacchanale in the love-den of the language by the most unrestrained of word nerds. The life they led! And an unled life it was – they were not pulled around by others; they were drawn by their own fascination and linguistic concupiscence. They were esurient for words. When the objects are words through the ages, lust and gluttony, however untoward they may be, are not deadly sins but a waywardness that brings and preserves life in the language. They are prodigal in their promiscuity and promiscuous in their prodigality.

And so we have this word, sitting with the others in the Oxford English Dictionary, like an innocent in the crowd – an innocent wearing two large clogs and an enormous feather and nothing much else to speak of. Asked for its bona fides, its invitation, its affiliation, it has but two citations to show, both from the same book circa AD 1200, and not even spelled quite the same as it. Here’s one: “All þe flæshess kaggerrleȝȝc. & alle fule lusstess.” The usher squints at the cite, then at the word sitting there, and with a sigh hands back the credentials and moves on.

So what is it, kaggerleȝc? It’s pronounced like “cogger like” or “cogger lake” and is made of two bits, kagger and leȝc. The second bit is a suffix equivalent to modern ness; it was usually spelled laik but is seen in the Ormulum as leȝȝc. What is the Ormulum? It is a 12th-century work of Biblical exegesis, and it is a treasure for historical linguists because the author, rather than adhering to old standard spellings, developed his own phonetic spellings and wrote the work in strict meter, all for the purpose of ensuring priests’ ability to pronounce the vernacular appropriately. It thus helps us to know how English was pronounced at the time too.

The OED dropped the second ȝ, presumably because the Ormulum tended to double letters where they were normally singular. But it did not normalize the spelling to laik, perhaps because this word is a hapax legomenon (a one-off), and perhaps because at the time it was collected from the Ormulum its morphology was not understood.

And what is this great feather, this ȝ? It is yogh. It represented a voiced velar fricative. You know the Scottish or German ch as in ach? Just add some voice to that. But it could be weakened to a simple glide like “y.” It was eventually replaced with g and y and other respellings, but sometimes it was replaced with z because the cursive z looked a lot like it, and then that sometimes led to the pronunciation changing to “z.” Names that have this ȝ-to-z change include Mackenzie, Menzies (said “mingus”), and Dalziel (said “deal”). Such wayward carrying on!

And kagger? The context of the quote could help if you understand Middle English. The hints I’ve been carpet-bombing you with might also help. It meant ‘wanton’ – or anyway, that’s inferred; no one ever saw it by itself, only in these instances of kaggerleȝc. And kaggerleȝc means ‘wantonness’.

Wanton, by the way, is another word made of old bits that you can’t get in stores anymore. The wan is roughly equivalent to un as in undone. The ton is a past participle of tee, which means – meant, because who uses it now? – ‘draw, pull, lead’. So: Unled. Untoward. Froward (not forward).

And so this wanton use of dusty ancient lexis is a little self-referential note about the compilers’ wanton use of dusty ancient lexis. It’s like that old book on the shelf you have just because you have it. You keep it for special occasions, and then you pull it out and open it carefully and admire it, and wonder who first set eyes on it.

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