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elative

Posted on December 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

All motion is relative. And all relatives are emotional. Some are easily carried away. Some carry others away easily. When the season demands seeing relations, expect occasional elations along with levity. But while some will choose to be elated, others may find elation less elevating and, as the day grows late, may seek the elative (and perhaps the elevator).

And if those relatives are Finnish or Estonian, then ever the more so will you have their elatives. Elative, you see, is a case in such languages as those – along with illative, ablative, prolative, and translative, and abessive, adessive, and inessive – and instructive, and more. Things we in English do with prepositions and word order, they in Finno-Ugric languages do with suffixes (case endings) on nouns. If something is moving towards, into, out of, or away from something, or is becoming something or staying something – in short, if noun A has some particular relation to noun B – that relationship will be expressed by means of these noun cases rather than by any added words. So in Finnish, Mä otin lasin kaapista means ‘I took a glass out of the cupboard’, with kaapista meaning ‘out of the cupboard’ – the sta part is the ending that says it’s in the elative. The reverse direction is illative.

So why elative? Is it that Finns are very happy to get out of places? I won’t say that’s not true, but in this case the elation is not extreme happiness. It’s just e as in egress and eject and e pluribus unum – it means ‘out of’ or ‘away from’ – and lat as in ablate, translate, relate, and, yes, elate: it refers to taking or carrying. A person who is elated is, etymologically, carried away – or anyway taken away, transported. In the usual sense this means transported to joy, even ecstasy (a word that comes from Greek for ‘standing outside’), but in the grammatical sense it just means what you do to a glass when you reach into the cupboard and take it to go put something in it (which will be illative).

So if you find yourself with relatives who are very taken with you, but you would rather be taken from them, you can simply say “I’m feeling elative!” and leave it – withdraw with your glass for some illation of libation and illuminating liberation.

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Zen

Posted on December 15, 2015 | 5 comments

On the right side of my bookshelf, around where I keep a lot of my camera stuff, I have a section of books on Buddhism and related topics.

That photo is quite yellow. The shelf is lit by halogen lights and Christmas tree bulbs. It looks normal enough in person (well, a bit dark) because my mind adjusts to the colour. But the camera takes it and then we see the picture in a different context and we see the colour imbalance. So I reset the balance on the camera using a blank white sheet of paper – actually the back of an airline boarding pass that I have sitting around.

It’s not that that is perfectly neutral white balance. It’s just that it more closely matches our default bias. There is no such thing as unbiased, perfectly balanced colour, any more than there is such a thing as accent-free speech or an unbiased opinion. There is no neutral act of seeing. You just have to know what balance you want, acknowledge it, balance yourself according to it, just as you have to focus on what you focus on and choose what to have in the frame and outside the frame.

There’s one word that shows up a few times on the spines of those books. I could pull out any of them and feature it. I’ll pull this book out because I want to. I found it quite by chance in some used book occasion. It’s a book from 1960, although the first blank page has “January 1965” handwritten in fountain pen diagonally across the lower right corner. The pages are yellowing and smell of the gradual decay of tree-pulp paper and a bit of the basement it must have sat in for many years.

Here is the back cover.

That is the author. Does he look familiar? Here is his dedication.

The author was a motion picture actor. If you recognize him, it’s probably from The Bridge on the River Kwai. He played the Japanese Colonel. His name is Sessue Hayakawa. Actually, Sessue is a name he took when he started acting in movies; his given name – given at his birth in 1889 – was Kintaro.

Here is the front cover.

It’s his autobiography. The title kind of gives away the ending, doesn’t it? But it’s how he gets there that is of interest. He came from a noble Japanese family. He was all set for a career in the navy when, in a reckless diving misadventure, he burst his eardrum and was rendered unfit. He decided that he had dishonoured his family, and he resolved to do the honourable thing.

He in fact did commit seppuku, also known as hara-kiri (not hari-kari!). But he did not die. He didn’t have anyone to cut his head off at the end. So he was hospitalized with very substantial injury to his lower abdomen.

How do you follow up an act like that? With a visit to a Zen Buddhist priest. Followed by a lot of meditation. And then a career as an actor and more meditation and, well, this book.

I have several books on Zen. I have read much about it. Which is like shouting much about silence.

Whatever you think Zen is, it’s not. I can’t tell you just what it is. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that I am not a Zen master. I have meditated various ways at various times, including with Zen Buddhists, although in recent years my only meditation has been running, which doesn’t quite count. But I have no experience of enlightenment in the Zen Buddhist sense. I think I can see the shadow of a corner of it, maybe. I’m probably wrong.

The second is that you can’t explain silence with shouting.

I can tell you what Zen is. It’s a school of Buddhism, best known in its Japanese version although it also exists in China. Zen is the Japanese rendition of the word禅, which in Mandarin Chinese is chan. The full forms are zenna and chánnà. They come from Sanskrit ध्यान (dhyāna). Which means ‘meditation’.

Zen is meditation. In the plainest sense, that is what Zen is. To quote Sylvia Boorstein, “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

In some schools of Zen, that is it. You focus your mind, you watch the thoughts arise and pass by like clouds in the sky, you taste existence. In others, you strive to break your mind free from the ruts it travels in by meditating on paradoxical ideas.

In the end, you learn that you and the things around you are not many, not two. You come to recognize your position, your bias, your perspective, your focus, your frame. You learn that nothing has permanent existence, everything is changing, and what exactly is this “everything” and what exactly is this “changing” and what exactly is this “is” and what exactly is “what exactly” and

As in all Buddhism, the aim is non-attachment. I have some ideas about what is and is not non-attachment, but I’m not, you know, attached to them. Some people interpret non-attachment as meaning eschewing things of the world, but it seems to me that rejection is no more equanimitous than craving. Enjoying while it’s there and letting go when it’s not seem the best options. Fine words, of course, and badly self-incriminating, as witness the two thousand books I can’t bear to get rid of. Fortunately, like all fine words, they will eventually be forgotten.

The simplicity of Zen spills over into an aesthetic associated with it. But Zen gardens are not Zen any more than bedrooms are sleep.

I would like to eschew all marketing and branding that uses the word Zen. Putting Zen on commercial products is like putting vegan on roast prime rib.

I do remember fondly, though, one business in Toronto, no longer there I think – I used to see their sign in an upper window on Spadina: Zen Travel. I liked that. I imagined a place where you go in and they tell you that you are already where you want to be; you just have to realize it. But it’s how you get there that is of interest. In exchange, you pay them all you have, which is nothing.

But perhaps you will get a boarding pass. Which you can use in place of a blank sheet of paper to set your white balance.

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chevrotain

Posted on December 15, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Google image search for ‘chevrotain’ was exactly what I needed,” tweeted (twot? twet?) Iva Cheung today.

Why would that be? What is a chevrotain? Is it some way of entertaining with a Chevrolet? Or is it a kind of goat cheese? A herb, crossed from chervil and milk vetch? Could there be some other kind of overt chain between the name and the thing? What sort of inert havoc is this?

Ah, Google it yourself and you’ll see. A chevrotain is what is commonly called a mouse deer. It should not be mistaken for a mouse, a deer, a mouseketeer, or a deer mouse. The difference between mouse deer and deer mouse tells you how such English compounds are headed: they’re headed to the right. The first word modifies the second. A mouse deer is, nominally, a deer of the mouse type, while a deer mouse is a mouse of the deer type.

In reality, though, a deer mouse is just a mouse that is rather agile. (It is not axiomatically dead. Nor is a dormouse or door mouse. Actually, it’s doornails that are dead.) A mouse deer, on the other hand, is a creature that looks like a deer but is much smaller. And is not a deer, though it is an ungulate, which means it walks on its nails (formed into hooves). But these are not fingernails and not doornails; they are deernails. No, wait, they’re deer-mouse-nails. Um. They’re chevrotain nails. Maybe we should, for the sake of the French that is in chevrotain, call them ongles, which is French for ‘nail’ and comes from the same root as ungulate. (Ungulate has nothing to do with undulate; I’ll just wave that one away.)

The name chevrotain is, as I said, from French, and means (roughly) ‘little goat’ or ‘goatlet’. I must say that chevrotains look more like deer than like goats, but whatever. They don’t have horns or antlers, in spite of chevrotain being an anagram of active horn. You’ll be lucky enough to see a chevrotain anyway. They’re quite shy, because what they really look like to many other animals is lunch. They can be as small as 700 grams (a pound and a half), though some kinds get up to 16 kilograms (35 pounds). So they hide, and they mostly keep to themselves (with a bit of twisting and swapping the ch and a for an rt you can get introvert from chevrotain), which has helped keep them going as a species for about 34 million years. They get together to mate, which seems to be their main social activity; female chevrotains can be almost incessantly pregnant, mating as little as a few hours after giving birth (which has also helped keep them going) – but what the heck, the kids are standing on their own feet after one hour. But they have one at a time.

The other thing they have is fangs. Two at a time.

Yup, all chevrotains have sharp little fangs that stick out of the sides of their mouths. They may seem like micro-vampire-deer. But really they don’t suck your blood, nor do they crave hot sin (hmm, or maybe they do; see above about mating). Or anyway no one’s seen them doing so. We will overlook the fact that their taxonomic family name, Tragulidæ, is a bit reminiscent of Dracula, and that the suborder name, Ruminantia, reminds us of Romania, where Dracula is from. Or that they prefer the dark. There are no chevrotains in Romania; they live mainly in Asia and Africa. And they’re ruminants, which means cud-chewers, which means plant-eaters. But should you happen to be sleeping in a forest in Kerala, say, and you feel four tiny hooves treading on or near you…

Naw, never mind, they’d still be less to worry about than larger things like tigers or, worse, people. Chew that one over.

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limen

Posted on December 12, 2015 | 6 comments

limen

Follow the left edge of this sidewalk down with your eyes. At what point does it fade into blackness? What is the least light you can see before you can see no light – what is the minimum level of lumens? What is the least sound you can hear, the least touch you can feel? Where is sense no longer sense, feeling not feeling?

At the limen.

This is what psychologists generally mean when they refer to a limen: the line between perception and non-perception, from Latin limen ‘threshold’. It is not necessarily a clear line, a break, a thump. It may be like the moment you fall asleep. Have you ever noticed exactly when you lose awakeness?

But a limen can be another thing.

Look at the woman walking away from the camera. Is she on the flat sidewalk? Or on the faux-brick verge? Or both and neither?

And as you look at her, who is looking at her?

The camera received a share of the light bounced off her, but more a share of the light bounced off around her, so that she is discerned mainly by what she kept the camera from receiving: she is there by not being there; she gives her image by keeping light. The electronic data from my camera’s sensor was stored on my computer, and uploaded to a server, and is now temporarily stored on your computer and represented by an arrangement of light made by your screen. That light strikes your eyes. Your eyes transmit the signal to your brain. Your brain processes it, assembles it, infers a shape from the absences. Your consciousness is aware of this act of seeing. You may not be sure the figure is a woman, not a man, until I tell you so. But who is this you? You know yourself as a stream of thought changing incessantly, aware of the continuity from one moment to the next but leaving behind most of what occupies it. What thoughts passed through your mind over the 5 seconds starting exactly 24 hours ago from now?

We have, then, a string of physical things connecting and connected by processes, like a line passing from L to M to N. What is more real, the things or the processes? If you say the things, what do you make of this process of consciousness that is evaluating this reality? Can the spaces between the letters be more real than the letters? What matters more, the vowels or the consonants? Or the interaction between them? Is the interaction between processes and things the most real thing even as it is no thing at all but threshold between them?

Almost 18 years ago, I finished my doctoral dissertation on Richard Schechner, the founder of performance theory. He produced avant-garde theatre; he brought together insights from anthropology and theatre, and applied them to performance traditions and activities around the world. I am not generally one to focus my efforts on another person’s work, but it was a viable and recommended thesis topic and I enjoyed doing it.

A key concept in Schechner’s work as in the work of those who influenced him is the liminal. Here is a definition from The Ritual Process by Victor Turner: “Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” A liminal place or, by extension, a liminal entity (inasmuch as the entity serves as a transformational space) may be called a limen. Schechner preferred to stay with the adjective liminal, but I found limen a very handy concept and term of reference. I used the word 76 times in my dissertation. Here are some quotations:

We may visualize the individual, the moment of action, of creation, as the limen between the world of pure potential, unrealized, and the world of physical reality, done deeds, things concretized, set into matter. This point is always transforming potential into actuality just as it is transforming the past into the future. This individual, this act, this moment, this limen, is transformation.

The body is the limen between the inner and the outer.

This both/and is a fundamental characteristic of the limen, the transformational space. It is where there is “not this” and “not not this.” The person, the human individual, is the basic point of transformation, and this transformation requires a transformational space between individuals.

Performance is, thus, a thing that is done and yet also reflected on, held apart from the doer. . . . It is a doing into a subjunctive or suspended realm which nonetheless, by means of its signification—i.e., its effects on the inner reality—may be efficacious. It affects the outer reality by means of the inner reality, and yet affects the inner reality by means of the outer reality. It is ephemeral, and yet in the instant of its being is reified. It is both a being and a nothingness; it is, in short, a limen.

This is what this is: being being. We perform our selves performing ourselves. At every interaction, every threshold, every point of transformation, there is a limen. It is like the layers of an onion. But can you see, at any limen, exactly where the transformation takes place? Where one thing stops and another begins, where they merge and emerge? How do you illuminate it? By what process do you eliminate it?

And who are you to eliminate, who are always a process of elimination and emergence?

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alalite

Posted on December 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

I wanted to do something lapidary for tonight’s tasting note. I make no claims to writing gems – I am not much of one for self-spruiking – but at least I am not prone to alalia (speechlessness). So I have found this elegantly euphonious name of a mineral. It may even have something of the animal in it: specifically, a wing – ala – and a light one at that. So I’ll alight on it.

Its initial ala is especially to my liking because those are the initials of someone lovely and likeable (and light) to whom I was wed 15 years ago; today has been our anniversary. But it also has a little alliteration internally with those two licks of the tongue, and to the eyes it seems a specially strong seal of approval, A1 A1. I also like the little light in the middle right, the candle of the i.

But what light of the alalite through yonder window breaks? What colour is this rock? It is, it seems, a light – or not-so-light – green, that loveliest of colours, shade of the forest and of the best eyes. But alalite is a sort of diopside, or perhaps it is just another name for diopside – the sources are conflicting and uncertain on this – and diopside, though mainly various shades of green, can also be blue, brown, white, grey, or colourless. It can also be clear or cloudy. Very helpful, isn’t that? Anyway, it’s MgCaSi2O6. Magnesium, calcium, silicon, oxygen. Four things you are sure to have in your kitchen, but not in purified form, just in foods, supplements, or implements – or atmosphere. And not in this combination.

And where does this name come from? The Ala valley in Piedmont, Italy, where this variety of diopside was first identified. So it is a green stone of a mountain valley, and its name sounds like echoing yodeling. I like it – I delight in it. I do not have the stone, but I have the name, and it is illuminating (even elating) enough.

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amanita

Posted on December 6, 2015 | 3 comments

My late teens were charged with yearning and self-fulfilling prophecies of failure, an arc of desire and disappointment that was accomplished before it began. I felt that I wanted to be someone whose lost potential others would mourn, who had loved better than others and yet to whom others would say “I loved you better.” I was in search of a new version of reality, an altered state, one in which simple truth of feeling would be enough.

In other words, as I have since realized, I was pretty typical in many ways. Except that I was even less able than most to act on my desires, paralyzed from within, so afraid of rejection that I pre-rejected.

I was introduced by a drama teacher to the music of Laurie Anderson. I loved her work instantly. One piece stirred me more than others – and in fact still stirs me, and now I understand a little better what she had in mind. It’s “Gravity’s Angel.” Play it while you read this.

Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s rainbow.

Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s angel.

It’s a reference to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The song doesn’t follow the plot; you may know the song ever so well and still be entirely in the dark about the book. But there is a thematic resonance.

I was curious. A friend had the book. I borrowed it. I found it was very well written – vivid – but also a bit hard to follow, which actually I sort of liked (hey, I had already read Finnegans Wake). But it was too vivid, and it described some things that were hard to swallow. I put it down a third of the way through.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to try it again. I bought a copy.

It’s a darkly (darkly!) comic novel, hallucinatory almost, an alternate reality, full of sex and destruction and desires, version and inversions and perversions and conversions and reversions and other diversions. It’s set during the Second World War. Its opening and focal point is the Blitz in London.

I’ve been wanting for some time now to take this one from the bookshelf and taste a word from it. But what word? Today I finally just grabbed it and opened it and flipped to a page. Nope, not that page. Another. Hmm. A third.

Yes.

There. There is the word I want from this book. A word of hallucination, a word of escape, a key to a Lewis Carroll world of inversions, but a word of a destroying angel, an angel rising above a bombed city, an angel falling in a bomb on a city, an angel eating you from within like unsatisfied desire.

Amanita.

Amanita is a kind of mushroom. In fact, one kind of amanita is the classic toadstool, bright red with white dots: Amanita muscaria, commonly known as fly agaric (the musca in muscaria refers to flies), because it was used dried in bowls of milk to kill flies. But it is also a well known hallucinogen, eaten (and, it seems, smoked) recreationally. It has surely led to the undoing of many flies of more than one kind.

But then – beyond the undone flies – lurks Amanita phalloides, known as the death cap. And different species known as destroying angel: Amanita bisporigera, Amanita exitialis, Amanita ocreata, Amanita virosa. They will be your undoing if you eat them. Not right away – it takes a few days – but by the time you realize something’s wrong, your only hope to live is likely a new liver. Such appealing-looking phallic fungi, not so different in appearance from many table mushrooms, tempting too to those who wish to experience a new reality. Oh, and they will.

It’s a pretty word, isn’t it? Amanita. Like a cross between Amanda and Anita. Perhaps they are cousins of Alice – we should go ask her. It apparently comes from Amanon, a mountain in what is now Turkey. It makes me think of our first microwave oven, an Amana: a very well made machine, a miracle of technology, cooking with radio waves. Amanita could just be a small Amana, a little thing in your hand capable of leaving you fully cooked.

Pynchon’s book is a rainbow of sex and death, an arc with all the visible colours and more, extending into radio waves. It has its destroying angel and it has its angelic young man in an arc of destruction, annihilating at final contact; it has its louche antihero and its picaresque adventures, its half-circle of the demimonde; it has its escape, its hallucination, its alteration. It has its cheap tricks that make you say “Amanita few minutes to absorb this.”

And perhaps you will not fully appreciate what you have let yourself into, what you have let into you, the gravity of the circumstance, until too late. You have swallowed it and it has eaten you from within.

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jentacular

Posted on December 2, 2015 | 4 comments

“It’s… JEN-TACULAR!” You drop your fork on your bacon and eggs and look up at the TV. There, good enough to eat, are Aniston, Lawrence, Lopez, and Garner. Well! This is a good way to start the day. Breakfast TV indeed! Positively jentacular.

Of course, such a scene might be most openly desirable to that sort of gent who is attracted to copious quantities of bacon and eggs. Well, yeah, and the Jennifers, too. But come on. We’re talking about breakfast here.

You didn’t know? Jentacular means ‘of, or relating to, breakfast’. It’s from Latin jentaculum ‘breakfast’, which in turn is derived from jentare, ‘eat breakfast’ (or, for the old-schoolers, ‘break fast’, since breakfast is from break fast, i.e., end the overnight fasting – that thing where you don’t eat because you’re asleep). Of course, in classical Latin, it’s IENTARE; in modern writing, we distinguish consonant i from vowel i by using the extended version of the letter, j, for the former, just as we distinguish the vowel form of v from the consonant form of v by writing the cursive form, u, for the former. We’ve made them official different letters, and they sound much more different in English. But in Latin jentare (or ientare, or IENTARE since half-uncials didn’t exist way back then) was pronounced “yen-ta-reh.”

Quite a difference between a yenta and a Jen, though, isn’t there? As much of a difference as there is between breakfast and breakfast. In some places, breakfast may be fish and soup; in others, it may be sugary processed grains soaked in low-fat milk (because somehow lots of sugar and little fat is better than little sugar and lots of fat?); in others (looking at you, England – please invite me over), it may be bacon, eggs, beans, and fried tomatoes – not gentle, but gentile. Breakfast changes over place and time.

And so does Jen, or rather Jenny. We know that Jenny is not new as a nickname in English; we see it in various usages even in the time of Shakespeare. But somehow in The Doctor’s Dilemma, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1906, there is this:

MRS. DUBEDAT. My name is Jennifer.

RIDGEON. A strange name.

MRS. DUBEDAT. Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.

How do we reconcile this? Is Dr. Ridgeon oddly onomastically naïve? No. In the time of Shakespeare and for centuries after, Jenny was short for Janet or, occasionally, Jane. If you’re wondering how Janet came to be Jenny, you may as well move on to how Richard became Dick, Edward became Ned and Ted, Robert became Bob, John became Jack, and Margaret became Peg. After those, Jenny seems quite obvious for Janet, doesn’t it?

But more obvious for Jennifer. Which is indeed from the same root at Guinevere, which means, roughly, ‘fair and soft’. OK, fair enough, once Jennifer is popular it naturally claims Jenny and Jen. How did Jennifer become such a popular name that Jen is practically the default name for North American females now? I guess a lot of people liked it… starting with those who saw The Doctor’s Dilemma, which – in spite of being one of those preachy, wordy Shavian thinkdramas (which are nonetheless great to act in) – was quite popular. I’m sure the scripted extreme attractiveness of Jennifer Dubedat (and thus of the actresses who played her, starting with Lillah McCarthy) didn’t hurt.

But. That’s a lot to digest before breakfast. I should go more gentle on the gut in what is, for many of my readers who open this first thing in the morning, still an antejentacular hour. I suggest something to settle the stomach. Sparkling wine, perhaps? Ah, that would be jentacular.

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nenuphar

Posted on November 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

Doesn’t this look like the name of some Egyptian pharaoh or Babylonian king? Or perhaps some writing left on a wall by a disembodied hand that was a bit too drunk? (If that doesn’t make sense, look up mene mene tekel upharsin.) Or maybe what Neneh Cherry and Pharrell Williams would be called if they got together?

Or it could just be a nice soft word with white shoulders clothed in light linen. It seems pleasing enough. Even French in its way. To me it does, at least, because the first time I noticed it, it was spelled nénuphar. It was on a bottle of liquid hand soap. The French part. (Hey, we’re in Canada here.)

Twice a year, we go to the One-of-a-Kind Craft Show, and we have some favourite booths we stop at (out of the something like 1000 that are there). I like Peppermaster, for instance – I always taste their latest and hottest sauces. I get my cufflinks etc. from BBJ (Barbie’s Basement Jewellery). Aina buys dresses from if and Dinh Bá. And we buy our hand soap (and hand cream) from Lovefresh. It’s not as cheap as the mass-market stuff, but it’s more responsibly made and it sure is nice.

One of their kinds of hand soap is Nénuphar. Well, that’s what it is in French. In English, it’s Water Lily.

Yes, nenuphar – which is also an English word once you lose the accent on the e – means ‘water lily’. It’s not the kind of soap we buy the most of (grapefruit and lavender and lemon grass are more to our taste) but it’s nice for our smaller bathroom that guests go into. It has that super flowery smell. I mean, lilies, right? It makes me think of that perfume, White Shoulders. Also funerals. Especially if you open the bottle and sniff the great clear mass of it directly, full on. It’s like you’re lying on a bed of flowers. No, not on. Under.

So this word must be Greek, right, with the ph? Unless it’s something like Hindi or Thai? Hmm. Here’s the funny thing: It came to us (via French) from Latin nenufar. Latin got it from Arabic naynufar. The OED says that was probably a “transmission error” from Persian nilufar. Which in turn comes from Sanskrit nilotpala, from nila ‘dark blue’ and utpala ‘lotus’ or ‘water lily’.

Do you notice where the ph comes in? Right at the end. French also had it originally as nénufar. Apparently f just didn’t seem classical enough. Latin has f, but words that are loans into Latin must get ph because Greek, amirite? Maybe the f is just too, um, basic, so they have to adjust the ph balance.

So. From nilotpala to nenuphar – which, in English, according to the OED, is pronounced “nen you far” or “nen ya fer,” thanks to the phonological muscle-wrenching of the English vowel shift.

Well, whatever. It all comes out in the wash. Actually, no, it doesn’t – your hands smell like it for a while.

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Cnidaria, cnidarian

Posted on November 28, 2015 | 1 comment

Look at that pretty thing. It has a rounded cap on it followed by a mess of attachments trailing off, pointing in various directions.

cnidaria

Frozen here but fluid in reality, never quite the same from one instant to the next, and, as you see it, in an engagingly backlit form, though with the contrast a bit stinging. So too the marine life form it names. There are differences, of course. For one, the critter has its sting in its tail and the meat of the subject in the cap, whereas the sting of Cnidaria is in the cap: How, exactly, do you say Cn?

The answer, for most Anglophones, is that you skip the C. You just swallow it. As to the rest, the aria is pronounced like area, and the nid can have either a “short” or a “long” i. The standard American pronunciation is like “I dare ya” with “n” before it, and if you really want to say the C, you’ll probably say Cnidaria exactly as you would say “Can I dare ya.”

Dare ya to do what, now? Hmmm… how about swallow one?

Swallow one what? Cnidarian, of course. Cnidaria is the phylum name, and cnidarian is what we call an individual member of the phylum. More commonly we call them jellyfish, but really they’re not fish – fish are vertebrates. Cnidaria is a whole separate separate set – we don’t just file ’em in another folder or another drawer; we phylum in a whole different cabinet. The Cnidaria also include sea anemones and corals: all critters with squishy bodies and stinging tentacles; some attach to things and some float freely, and some do both at different life stages.

The stinging tentacles are what give them their name. Cnidaria comes by way of Latin from Greek κνίδη knidé ‘nettle’. Nettles are hard and jellies are soft, but if you swallow jellyfish tentacles you’ll wish you had swallowed nettles. I recall reading of a marine biologist who was keeping some jellyfish tentacles in water in a bottle in the fridge, and one of his office mates came in thirsty and grabbed the first bottle of water he saw and took a big gulp. He recognized his error instantly, but too late. He was hospitalized – it was, shall we say, unpleasant. (Life lesson: Don’t drink from other people’s water bottles.)

Between this and the appearance, we get a common name for the floaty things such as we see in aquaria: medusa. I have recently learned from my Finnish word-of-the-day email that the Finnish word for jellyfish is meduusa (double u because it’s a long vowel – but the stress is on the first syllable because it’s Finnish). I’m not sure why that would be a word you would need to learn early on in Finnish, but there it is (where? not in the Baltic Sea, that’s for sure). It’s obviously borrowed into Finnish. Finnish belongs to a different language phylum – it’s Finno-Ugaric, no more related to English than Navajo, Nahuatl, or Na’uruan is – but languages can borrow words. The only way you’re going to integrate a critter from another phylum into the Cnidaria is for a cnidarian to eat it.

Or we could eat the cnidarian. No, no, not the stingy tentacles. The cap. Cooked and chopped up and seasoned, it’s not so different in texture from squid, though the flavour is different and less pronounced. I had some with lunch just the other day. I quite enjoyed it. You may prefer a jelly sandwich, but I don’t mind the odd bit of jellyfish. Can I dare ya to try some?

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petiole

Posted on November 26, 2015 | 1 comment

My bookshelf is a tree. It doesn’t look like a tree, no, but it’s made from trees – the wood of the shelves, the pulp that made the paper in the books – and it has many branches. Branches of knowledge, that is. There’s quite a lot on languages and linguistics, of course. There are also numerous other reference books, many of which acquired at the Oxford University Press sale that used to happen annually. It is a rich tree with many leaves (of paper) on each branch. Some branches are deceptive: on the upper right you see a novel by Irvine Welsh, not a lexicon of Welsh. Some parts of this tree are in the light, some are in the shadows…

…like that book hiding back there. Visual Encyclopedia. What is that, now?

A thick book on glossy paper, richly illustrated and labelled. Its size makes it easy to hold but not so easy to hold open.

You can see that in this book are many branches. This shadowy part of my library tree is quite dense. It is in some ways a microcosm of the shelves around it with their 1200-some books (more than two for each page of this one). Let’s look at the branch of it that has branches.

Plants! Trees and so on. They have branches. There turn out to be quite a few kinds of plants. Let’s go to the gymnosperms.

You see some seeds, of course (that’s what the gymnosperms get their name from: naked seeds). You also see some branches. Let us look at this one from the ginkgo tree, a tree that is supposedly good for the brain. (Does it make knowledge stick to your brain? I’m not sure, but if you live near one, it makes its seeds stick to your feet for a few weeks each year.)

Is that a branch or a twig? When does a branch become too small to be a branch? A branch can have branches, but at some point those little branches are not quite big enough to be branches.

Well, we can draw a definite line when the material changes, anyway. A petiole is not a branch; don’t be misled by its branching. It connects a branch and a leaf – indeed, it’s the thing that connects the leaf and the stem.

The book helpfully tells us that petiole means ‘leaf stalk’. Fine, we know leafs talk: this leaf of paper is talking to us right now.

Oh, yes, right, that’s leaves. Even though leaves talk can also mean ‘walks out on speech’. But this is not walk, it is stalk. I think we have taken a wrong branch. Well, anyway: How, in fact, do you put petiole in speech? The British style has the first syllable as like “pet”; the American style has it more like “pede” (as in centipede). But the French, who gave us the word, say the beginning like our “pate” (rhymes with spate – I don’t mean pâté) and spell the word pétiole.

It may make you think of petal. After all, it is a small branching-off part of a plant; it connects to leaves, which are similar to petals in various ways. But that is another misleading branch (though perhaps there is some cross-influence in the form). The Latin source of petiole, petiolus, most likely derives from the ped and pes root meaning ‘foot’ plus a diminutive suffix, meaning it’s related to pedal. Petal, on the other hand (or foot), comes from an unrelated Greek root for ‘spreading out’.

So. There is your knowledge: branch, twig, stem, petiole, leaf. It is true that petiole seems more erudite, perhaps more polite, or perhaps more specific – a cross between a petunia and an oriole? – but the tree doesn’t care; it’s just there. As is this sub-sub-sub-branch of knowledge we have leafed our way to today. Now we will leave it, but at least you may be relieved that, should you see petiole in future, you will twig what it is.

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