Tag Archives: word tasting notes

nightfall

Posted on November 7, 2015 | 5 comments

Suddenly it is fall. It has crept up on us. And so much sooner every day it is night. I set out from the office as the golden hour of the sun projects stark fame on the faces of the high-rise apartments, and by the time I am awaiting my bus a kilometre farther south the light comes from the thousand electric fires of street lamps and headlights. The sky aches in iridescent ultramarine and at last surrenders to the… I would say to the stars, but in Toronto they, too, lose to the sodium aura from below. The moon holds its cold throne as duke regent, but all it is able to do is shiver albedo.

Nightfall.

The absolute rule of the sun, the glowing solitary monarch, is suspended. Light comes from this point and that point and the other point. Relativism reigns; the angels of the morning are fled and the opposing angles of evening light fight and play with each other. Shadows are darker. The sun has fallen, and the reign of the day has fallen with it. And with that, the night also falls, like a thick curtain with a frayed fringe.

Night. Fall. Two soft, half-whispering words as old as the language, changed only slightly in form by time, now conjoined. Their first date as a couple is 1611, naming fruit that has fallen from a tree during the night. To mean ‘sunset’, the compound is known from about 1700 in the records of the Oxford English Dictionary. The image is surely older.

But how does night fall? Where does it fall from? As we stand on our planet, if we choose to look away from the setting sun, we see that the darkness is growing on the eastern side. The darkness sweeps up and over the zenith and washes at last down the other side. It is not a fall; it is like a blanket pulled over a dome. Pulled by the fall of a sphere.

Only a blanket has weight, just as things that fall have weight. Darkness may seem dense, but it is really nothing. It is not something that is there; it is the absence of something. It is of no matter; it can be anywhere at any time at any speed. It is not heavy. It is light. The sun is heavy: it sinks.

Light has no weight, of course; if photons had mass they could not move at the speed of light. You can’t be heavy and be light. But you can be heavy and be a source of light; indeed, much light comes from heavy things. Darkness, on the other hand, comes from nothing at all. You may use a heavy thing to stop the light and cast a shadow, but the heavy thing is not sending darkness, it is just stopping light. And then there is nothing: night is naught.

Night hasn’t fallen. It hasn’t risen either. It’s just what’s left when the source of light has fallen. Or been turned away from.

Because of course that’s what nightfall is: earthturn. If you go far enough north, you see it more clearly. In the summer, the sun makes a tilted circle and barely touches the horizon; as the year draws on the circle lowers gradually until it is below the horizon most of the time. In Iceland they don’t say “24 hours a day”; they say alla sólarhringinn, ‘all the sun’s ring’. Sunspin.

We may as well think of the sun as sailing away from us over the horizon. The sun leaves and night is what is left.

The sun is glorious, of course. It fuels life. We would be colder-hearted than Pluto without it. But the sun is a bully, a dictator, a satrap. It gives so much light that other lights can’t compete. The stars don’t come out at night; they’re there all day too, but the sun outshines them… because we are so close to it. On a planet circling a different star, our sun will be just another twitching dot visible in the distance only when the local orb is not. The relativity of night is just what was already there but visually indifferent in the solar onslaught.

Well, what was there plus the lamps we light.

Nightfall is not a falling of darkness but just a revealing of what else was there. But nightfall is a fall. The day is like summer, and the light leaves. Which is to say the light is like leaves, and then like leaves it leaves: it turns yellow and orange and red, and is last seen at ground level. Nightfall is fall. The fruit drops and goes to seed. The night is winter. Dawn is spring. And so we play around the ring.

And once again I await the transit.

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ctenophore

Posted on November 6, 2015 | 3 comments

One of those mornings. You awaken planked on your bed, your face drained of colour, your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth. You have clearly consumed too much. When you get up you find that your legs are jelly and you are swimming forward as much by the waving of your hair and flapping of your earlobes as by any limbs. You feel as though your body is almost entirely liquid. One look in the mirror and you know: you’re going to have to carry a comb today. Yes, my friend, you are become a ctenophore.

Ctenophore. From Greek κτενός ktenos ‘comb’ and ϕέρειν ferein ‘bear, carry’. Not that everyone who carries a comb is a ctenophore. No, the word is actually a name for a kind of jellyfish. A small one, plankton-size, measured in millimetres. They move forward by the flapping of lobes and the swaying of cilia (little hairs). Those rows of cilia – eight or more rows – give it the name, since the cilia are short and the rows look like combs. There may be more than a hundred cilia, but note that these are not centophores – actually, cent is from Latin; a proper Greek hundred-bearer would be a hectophore. But these are not that.

Regardless of how opaque their name may seem, ctenophores are transparent and largely colourless. In spite of all that, they are voracious predators. Yes, there are things even smaller than the ctenophores – other little jellyfish, for instance. Read more about them at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cnidaria/ctenophora.html and http://faculty.washington.edu/cemills/Ctenophores.html .

It may be tempting to think of them as like a c swallowing a t at the start of this word. But surprise! (Or not.) In English, it is the c we don’t say, leaving the word sounding similar to “ten-four”… not quite a hundred, but never mind. But in other languages, the c is said as “ka” or just “k.” Of course they didn’t stick a vowel in there in the original Greek.

We may think we can’t say “kt” at the start of a syllable, but there’s nothing actually keeping most of us from doing so except our beliefs about what sounds we can say where. If you can say “pectin” you can drop the “pe” and just say “ctin,” and if you can say “ctin” you can say “cten.” Never mind that this kind of jelly contains no pectin. Your tongue may feel as though it’s sticking to the roof of your mouth when you say /kt/, but think of this: at least you don’t have any ctenophores in it.

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odyssey

Posted on November 3, 2015 | 3 comments

What the word odyssey brings first to my mind: the classic Stanley Kubrick–Arthur C. Clarke movie and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Starting with the opening bars of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. So stirring. So timeless. So cogent.

So brief.

The opening segment is less than 2 minutes long. That’s all most people have ever heard of Strauss’s work. But that’s no odyssey. An odyssey is long and episodic. It is not a single bright sunrise flash. And Strauss’s work is longer, too, over half an hour long. Here, listen to it all:

That is a “tone poem.” It is a poem somewhat as the Odyssey is a poem. A quatrain it is not, nor a sonnet, nor a villanelle, nor a sestina. It is epic. The original Odyssey is a tale of a ten-year journey, a trail of travails with many perilous passages, a detouring tour of possibly more than 8,000 kilometres around the Mediterranean (and to Hades and back) to accomplish a net transit of little over 1000 km by sea (or, now, by road). (I could actually drive from Troy to Ithaca in 3 hours, but that’s the two cities of those names in New York State.)

The Odyssey is the second-oldest extant work of “Western” literature, the oldest being the Iliad. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, ten years of death over one woman. (Helen had “the face that launched a thousand ships”; thus, a Helen is a unit of beauty, that amount of pulchritude sufficient to launch 1000 ships. A millihelen is beauty sufficient to launch one ship. I did not make that up.) The Odyssey tells the story of the return home of one of the surviving Greek “heroes” of the war, Odysseus. His name is of unclear and disputed provenance. It may come from ‘hate’ or ‘struggle’; it may come from ‘wail’ or ‘lament’; it may come from a non-Greek word. It may be a merging of two names and two characters. The Latin version of the name is Ulysses, which derives from the name Οὐλίξης.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus – or Ulysses – makes a dozen stops of various lengths along the way, including enchantment by various women (Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso – with whom he stayed for seven years…), encounters with various monsters, and interference by the usual gods. It ends with his return home to his faithful wife.

It runs more than 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter, and it begins like this:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν

Here is the beginning of Robert Fagles’s translation:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

Only it doesn’t begin at the beginning. It begins in medias res and makes liberal use of recollections. This is different from how we typically think of an odyssey. Compare a modern odyssey, which begins like this:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

This is the start of James Joyce’s Ulysses, an episodic tracking from start to finish of a single day in the lives of a small set of Dubliners (Stephen Dedalus, Leo Bloom, and at the last Molly Bloom) in a variety of literary styles, a journey of 700 pages in less than 24 hours. It is an epic slog for some readers, although I thoroughly enjoyed it (I had already made it through Finnegans Wake, and Ulysses was a romp after that). It starts at the time of rising in the morning.

And Also Sprach Zarathustra is the start of Kubrick’s and Clarke’s odyssey, which begins with the dawn of humanity. Zarathustra may be the beginning of the odyssey, but it is the end of theodicy. Also sprach Zarathustra means ‘Thus spake Zarathustra,” and while Zarathustra is another name for Zoroaster, the prophet of the ancient dualist religion Zoroastrianism, Strauss’s title is taken from the title of the work by Friedrich Nietzsche, in which Zarathustra is like a photographic negative of the Persian original, dedicated to overturning morality, speaking of the Übermensch, declaring that God is dead. 2001 does not make such a declaration, but rather presents, as bookends in human history, monoliths manifesting an alien intelligence. The eldritch curious liaison is underscored with an even more eldritch Kyrie Eleison by György Ligeti:

Lord have mercy indeed.

An odyssey is a recounting of a long journey, but one that ends with a return home – not a home that is unchanged, but a home nonetheless. The protagonist in 2001 ends on Jupiter, living through stages of life in a sterile isolation in a series of mere moments of flash forward, but finally becomes a star child, a new being, gazing at the Earth. Ulysses ends with Molly Bloom remembering the day she said yes to Leo Bloom. The Odyssey ends with Odysseus returning to his long-faithful wife and slaughtering her impertinent suitors. Other stories follow a similar arc, for instance Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

But storytelling, so detailed in recounting the past, has its limits with the future. 2001 was released in 1968, 33 years before the time it foretold. That future is now past. If space exploration had continued on the course it was on at the time, we might well have had a moonbase and a large space station and regular service from Earth to them. We had other things instead, things that may or may not have been any better.

When we retell an odyssey, the episodic travels and travails of a hero over a long time, we retell it in retrospect. We have returned home. Those who do not return do not get to recount their odysseys. When you embark on an odyssey, you don’t truly know whither you will go and whether you will return; you do not know if it will finish as an odyssey. You simply set sail… or take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

This is post number 2001 on Sesquiotica. It has been an interesting journey of a bit more than 7 years so far. And yet I’m always just beginning.

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albedo

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 9 comments

Look at these trees. They exhibit a pleasing play of shadow and light: shadows on the right side, light on the left – a nice moderate light, glowing.

Now look at the buildings behind them. Look at where the light is. Look at the direction the shadows are going in.

The sun is to the right. South-southwest. This is Bryant Park in New York on an October afternoon, and we are facing east-southeast toward the New York Public Library (remember, Manhattan is not truly north-south). The bright side of the trees is the one away from the sun. The direct sunlight is blocked by buildings on the right: just shadows there. The soft glow is thanks to light reflected from buildings on the left.

When I first stopped to think about that fact – how the bright side of the trees was from reflected light – I thought something like “Well, I’ll be…”

I’ll be what? I’ll be doggoned? No. Albedo.

Albedo. Take a moment to reflect on that word. It takes all its time to reflect on you… and on everything else. And from everything. You included.

The sun gives light: as it burns it releases photons. If you stand in the sun, you stand in the path of a small, small wedge of those photons. They don’t make it through you. Some are absorbed; some bounce back off. The number and nature of those photons bounced back depends on the colour of your skin and clothes. If you are wearing a blue shirt, it keeps most of the photons that aren’t blue, and bounces back – gives away – more of the blue ones. This is how we have colour: surfaces keep the colours they don’t show and give away the ones they do show.

Meanwhile, the space behind you, including the back of your head, is not in utter darkness; it is lit by photons reflected off other surfaces – and diffused by bouncing on molecules in the atmosphere.

Albedo is the percentage of light a surface gives away – doesn’t keep. A surface that kept all the light would have an albedo of 0 and would be perfectly black; a surface that reflected it all would have an albedo of 1 (i.e., 100%). The reflection can be directional – as with a mirror – or diffuse – as with paper. Highly reflective but not perfectly flat or even surfaces give a mottled light.

The word comes from Latin albedo ‘whiteness’, from albus ‘white’. You will recognize the root from abumin and albino and Albus Dumbledore (which, in full, means ‘white bumblebee’). Albedo was first applied to the reflectivity of surfaces by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1790. An important current usage is to refer specifically to the reflectivity of celestial bodies – such as the earth.

It is also important for environmental science. Snow, for instance, has a high albedo, but once it starts melting and the water runs away, more and more dirt and dark matter is left, giving a lower and lower albedo, which means it absorbs more and more solar radiation and melts faster and faster. The glaciers of Greenland are currently demonstrating this, and it is a matter of some concern. It becomes an accelerating self-destructive cycle of selfishness, as it were.

Separate albedo can be calculated for each wavelength. Some people have suggested that since a blue surface keeps the light that is not blue and gives away the light that is blue, its real nature is not blue. I do not agree. As you go through life, you receive love and hurt, joy and anger, comfort and pain; you do not give all of it back to the world, but only those things that you wish others to receive. A person who receives hurt and joy but gives only joy to others is not a person whose nature is hurt. We do what we want to do and what we are able to do. Our character is our able-do; it is our albedo.

And in the darkest moments of our life, when the sun seems blotted out, there is still light: the albedo of others.

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enow

Posted on October 26, 2015 | 10 comments

I wasn’t going to do another one from the bookshelf tonight – one a week is enough. But sometimes enough is not enow, and one who floats on the waves of words and images must live in the now. And so, in my jammies, with a glass of wine, on the carpet of my library, I pull from the shelf a book as yellow and foxy in the pages as the library lighting.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, in Edward Fitzgerald’s famous English translation, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac.

Look at these lovely pictures, each on its own separate plate complete with onionskin veil to protect it.

The yearning lass looks rather like Meryl Davis, methinks.

I don’t think that’s Charlie White.

No, these are paintings of Persian love and longing, in a European vision. But their European provenance does not make them un-Persian. The poetry, at least, is part of the Persian dispersion. It is a volume of ruba’iyat, which is the plural of ruba’i. The ruba’i is a Persian quatrain form. The rules are that lines 1, 2, and 4 must rhyme, and that the fourth line must be a high, strong, deep completion of the meaning. There is also expected meter. Fitzgerald has gamely preserved the poetic form in his translation. Number XI is a poem that may seem familiar.

Does it seem familiar yet somehow not right? Let us try that again.

The volume I own, you see, contains editions 1 and 2 of Fitzgerald’s translation. The second edition is different from the first – a whole new essay at the matter, even renumbered. Apparently one was not enough. Are two enow?

Enow.

That is a precious word, isn’t it? Simply a rhyming mutation of enough?

In fact not. Enow, Doctor Johnson explained to us, is the plural of enough.

Does that seem a strange thing to say? In the modern time, it may well, but English words used to have much more thorough sets of inflection. Old English genog became, over time, singular genoh but plural genoge, and those grew to Modern English enough and enow. (It makes more sense if you know that the g’s were fricatives or glides, not stops, and the h was pronounced.)

But in Modern English, once we have learned that one is enough, we take it at its word and stop, and never discover that two are enow.

Remember that, now, the next time someone tells you enough is enough. It may be so, but enow are enow, and two are better than one – especially with that bread, that flask of wine, and that book of verse.

And so there you are. There art thou. There are we. Here we are. Enow. And now?

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trice

Posted on October 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

It’s time for another episode of “from the bookshelf.” But it’s late – I’ve spent the day at a linguistics conference – and I need to be expeditious. So I will quickly pull this volume from the shelf.

I received it for some birthday in my youth, I think. It’s full of Canadian classics, of course. Robert Service was the plucky poet of the Klondike, and there are at least two poems by him that Canadian schoolchildren cannot escape reading (or at least that used to be the case; I can’t say whether it still is). One of them is “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The other one is this.

“The Cremation of Sam McGee” is such an essential of the well-read Canadian mind that I once did a quick parody of it on the easy assumption that all of my readers (Canadian editors) would know it in an instance. And I wasn’t wrong.

There is one word I think of in an eyeblink whenever I think of this poem. It’s a word I first saw in this poem, and have read altogether not thrice, not twice, but just that once – or in just that one place, however often returned to. And yet its sense was, by context, immediately grasped.

Trice.

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”

The “it” is a boat, a derelict as Service calls it. Service says he saw in a trice – a slice of the eye in time, a trick, a quick instant, a moment without trace.

Very well. But what is a trice?

Trice was, first of all, a verb, borrowed from a Middle Dutch word meaning ‘haul’. In Middle English it got the sense ‘pull quickly’, ‘pluck’, ‘draw suddenly’. Its first sighting is in Chaucer. Now when it’s used at all as a verb it means ‘pull or haul with a rope’, but don’t count on anyone knowing it.

But that verb came to be converted to a noun, first in the phrase at a trice – as though saying ‘at a hoist’ or ‘at a pluck’ – and thereafter in a trice. It has a long history of use, threading through Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë. But, at least if you’re Canadian, the telos of all that was its spotlight flash in Robert Service, and all uses since then refer back to that one trace. Now you read it, and in the same second you grasp it; and now it is forever a mirror of that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge.

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anthocyanin

Posted on October 22, 2015 | 4 comments

This is the time of year when the green leaves.

When the green leaves what? The leaves.

It’s the time of year when the green leaves the leaves, and what is left is – well, that depends on where you are, what the tree looks like, and what the weather has been like. But if it’s the right trees and the right weather and you’re in the right part of the country, you are in for a treat: rather than a wan yellow, the leaves the green has left come to be a bright red. They are dying and dead, of course, but they go in a blaze of glory and finally leave dry piles of browning red on the forest floor and parking lots.

Those red leaves owe their colour to something named for blue flowers: anthocyanin. Unlike the yellow, which is what was there behind the green all the time – the yellows are xanthophylls and beta-carotene, and the green is chlorophyll – the red anthocyanin is added: it’s synthesized once about half the chlorophyll is gone. But anthocyanin is a multi-purpose pigment. Just as the same song may show up as bubblegum pop, grunge, symphonic metal, or new country depending on the production values, instrumental arrangement, and accent of the singer, so the anthocyanin shows up as blue, purple, or red depending on the pH level – the acidity. Indeed, you can use it to tell the acidity of a solution, from red at the most acidic, through pink and purple and blue and then green to yellow at the most basic. But it gets its name from a colour in the middle, and from being used in flowers as well as leaves.

You may or may not recognize the anth, from anthos ἄνθος ‘flower’; it shows up in anthurium (a kind of flower) and, yes, anthology, a collection of flowers of verse (and now prose). It is not related to the anthro in anthropology et cetera; that is to do with humans. The cyan should be familiar. It names a kind of blue colour, and it also shows up in cyanide, which gets its name from cyanogen, which was so named for its presence in Prussian blue. It is a convenient coincidence that cyanides are radicals made up of a C and an N, carbon and nitrogen; the CN is reminiscent of cyan. But the name comes from that Greek blue, kuanos κύανος, run through Latin with cy for the κύ.

Cyanide can leave your lips – or those of any anthropos – blue with death. But anthocyanin, chemically unrelated, leaves leaves red with dying. Such a beautiful passing, and not really a death, anyway, merely an exfoliation: the trees persist and will re-green in the spring. (You can read more about what happens and why on Science Daily.)

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vintage

Posted on October 20, 2015 | 1 comment

The three items in this photograph have something in common.

Yes, yes, they all have glass and yes, they can all help you to see things from a more interesting vantage. But that’s not what I’m on about.

They’re all vintage.

Granted, one of them is from about 1954, one is from 1976, and one is from 2013. But all three may be called vintage in the right context. In fact, two of them are far more likely to be called vintage more often by more people in more places. The third one actually is made from a vintage.

A vintage is, first of all, a grape harvest. That is what Latin vindemia means, which became French vendange, which became English vendage, which became vintage under the influence of vinter ‘wine merchant’ (from Latin vinatarius, from vinum ‘wine’; it has now with age gained an n to become vintner).

Some wines are made from juice blended from several years of harvest, just to even things out and use some of the better stuff to make the worse stuff more drinkable (because you lose money if you just pour the worse stuff back in the dirt). Other wines are made from the grapes from a single harvest in a single year. It may be all one kind of grape, or it may be several kinds, even from several different vineyards, but if it’s all from the same harvest – the autumn of the same year – it’s one vintage, and you can put that on the bottle so people know which vintage.

The vintage year matters because for any given area (and producer) the wines are better in some years and worse in others. It also matters because different wines age at different rates. Wines are like people in several ways, and one way is that some of them have their glory days early and then get pretty unpleasant after that, while others are not so great for a long time (though a discerning person can usually identify a promise of the future) but then become glorious. Some have longer glorious periods; others, shorter. The sweet ones often last longer but, unless they’re rich, are seldom held in as high esteem as the more demanding ones. Some, of course, are bad at the start and don’t really get any better. And less discerning people will sometimes hang onto one for a long time thinking it will be great, only to discover at length that even its salad days are over and it’s hardly fit for removing paint. The same is true with wines.

But they’re all vintage, every one that was made with grapes from just one year, be they red, white, or pink. However, as we hear in such places as Sinatra’s “A Very Good Year,” fine vintage wines is a common phrase (or, as Sinatra sings it, “vintage wines from fine old kegs”), and because the best vintage wines are made to be consumed many years thence (the best Bordeaux and Burgundy may peak after decades, while most other quality wines peak within ten years), the common line of thought is that vintage connotes ‘old’ and ‘quality’. (Also, because red wines are more typically made for greater aging, we usually think of red when we think vintage.)

And so vintage has come to be used for other things that are old and, one hopes, of quality. Especially things from a specific identifiable year – cars seem to have been the first non-wine things called vintage; there were already “vintage” automobiles in 1928 (!) – but, increasingly, anything old and desirable is open to being called vintage. Or, for that matter, any old thing at all if the person wants you to think of it as desirable, and to pay more for it. It’s like antique: a word for old stuff that you’re supposed to think is worth a lot more for its antiquity.

Actually, it’s kind of overused in that sense, and, frankly, I’m more than bored with it. As much as I like cameras old and new, I could happily go through the rest of my life seeing old cameras called old cameras and not vintage cameras. You can count on my avoiding using it in that sense.

But you can also count on my not telling you that that sense is wrong. It’s well established, understood by everyone, and it takes part in a very common process of semantic broadening through association and figurative usage. You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to use it, but you don’t get to say it’s wrong. It’s been used for that sense for almost a century. By its own definition, it is a vintage definition.

Well, hey, not everything that is vintage is good. We may like to think we all get better with age, but some old things are not better for it.

And, on the other hand, not all that is not vintage is bad. Obviously with things such as binoculars and cameras the new is expected to have a measure of functional superiority, even if it lacks charm and “authenticity” (whatever that is) and nostalgia. But even with wine, just because it’s not a vintage wine doesn’t mean it’s undrinkable. OK, yes, with most wines, non-vintage wines fall into that faint-praise-damnation bracket called “easy drinking” (or else they’re “plonk”). But among champagnes and other sparkling wines, non-vintage is standard. Vintage is uncommon. Expensive and highly valued, yes (because they’ll only make it if there’s an exceptional year; otherwise it all goes in the blend), but uncommon and not necessary for quality. I’ll happily have a glass – or a bottle – of “N.V.” champagne any day. Especially a day that merits any sort of celebration (such as celebrating having a bottle of champagne on hand). And hey, best to drink it before it (and you) gets any older.

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mote

Posted on October 18, 2015 | 3 comments

Look at this beautiful little cube. Its lines are almost clean; there are just a few irregularities. It could be a thing of beauty or a thing of use.

Or it could be an irritation. Those sharp edges, digging into soft, tender surfaces. Put it in the wrong place and it can be quite uncomfortable. It is small, but it may seem rather larger in contact with sensitive parts. It can be the sort of thing you may want protection from.

Let us call it a mote.

Mote is a word you may or might not be familiar with. If you are, it is likely from the King James Bible – Matthew 7:3, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” – or from some cultural reference to that passage, such as the science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Which does not exactly tell you what a mote is. It’s something that gets into your eye, yes, but… OK, it’s a speck of dust, a grain of sand, some tiny but noticeable particle. The point Jesus is making in the famous line – typically translated in more modern versions with speck – is that one ought not to counsel others on their small faults when one has much larger ones of one’s own (a beam – or, in some modern versions, a log!).

Is mote related to mite? They’re both small things, but it is not, though they both come from old Germanic words. Mote seems like a word for a larger thing, though, doesn’t it? That o tends to go with big, round, heavy things, while i is more common with small things (this isn’t universal, of course, but it’s enough of a tendency that we tend to form expectations of unfamiliar words on this basis). There is a larger thing called a mote: a mound, hill, embankment, or similar natural feature or man-made fortification; the word comes from Latin mota. It just happens that the ‘fortification’ sense was extended to a ditch, sometimes filled with water, and that version is now respelled as moat. It sounds the same, of course. Such is English; so be it. So mote it be.

That’s the other at least modestly current mote: an auxiliary verb meaning ‘may, be permitted to, have the opportunity to’. It has a more archaic and lofty flavour now than may, and it also has fewer uses. “So may it be” or “It may be so” can express doubt or evaluation; “Let it be so” is effectively a third-person imperative. “So mote it be” is (especially in some ceremonial uses, for example in Freemasonry) an equivalent for Amen (which, by the way, does not actually mean ‘OK, that’s the end’). “As mote be” – for example, in “As wicked a person as mote be” – means ‘as could exist’. The Germanic root has grown into Dutch moeten and German müssen, which translate back into English as ‘must’: a command. But mote is a permission, a possibility. Quite the opposite of the obstacle or irritant presented by the other two senses.

Which takes us back to our pretty little cube, a thing of beauty or irritation, of help or harm. How small is it? I have nudged a Canadian nickel (5-cent piece, for my international readers) next to it for comparison:

And yet if you get that in your eye, it could hurt.

Briefly. This cube is a grain of not sand but salt: a good thing as long as it is in the right place and the right quantity. Put it in a moist place such as your eye and it will dissolve soon enough and run away in tears.

So mote it be.

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spathiphyllum

Posted on October 15, 2015 | 9 comments

Some things just are as they are. They justify themselves by themselves for themselves. They exist for their own reasons, but they are exigent. They may be long, they may be complicated, but for all that, they are beautiful. They cut like a blade but caress like a leaf, soft, in liquid whispers. And even when they are done they are not done; they stand statue as a memory of what they were and still are.

Such ones may to their friends and servants seem drama queens – or contrarily peaceful. All is possible. But do not ignore them for too long.

I have two of these plants in the office where I work.

I have quite a few plants in the office where I work, all inherited from one person or occasion or another. They’re mine now; I water them, and if I didn’t they would simply die. There are four poinsettias, growing crazy; two philodendrons, bent on world domination but lacking support; a cactus; a polka dot plant; a phalaenopsis orchid, identical to the day it arrived years ago; a few other plants the names of which escape me; and two plants that I have long called the drama queens.

The drama queen plants grow in a lively shock of stems with hooded blooms here and there. If you forget to water them for a day or two too long, they droop appallingly, mournfully, like a fourteen-year-old who is bored and hot and tired and ugh I am simply going to die. They truly do look dire. But water them and within a few hours they have perked right up again, as though nothing had passed.

I took a photo of one of them and posted it on Twitter, trying to recall its formal name. Sylvia Hunter obliged: it is a peace lily, or, technically, spathiphyllum – not really a kind of lily (less deadly to dogs and cats, for one thing, though you still ought not to eat them).

They are such a romance of a flower. The stems grow long and beautiful, topped with a ceremonial mace or corn cob of a pollen pod, hooded in the most elegant white. So pure, so simple, so desirable. Over time they dry to a sere brown, still wavy and veined, and the pollen pod sprinkles its white dust everywhere like a sentimental chef making dessert pastries. Juxtaposed, a new bloom and an old one seem the phases of life, or a May-December romance, or perhaps that is really what life is, youth and age yearning to be each other. But beneath all this is a tangle of leaves, a wild, winding jungle, hard to penetrate or trace paths in; you will never get all the way to the roots. Without those leaves, it would all die, but the leaves are so… unresolvable.

The peace lily. For the lovely top to be at peace, there must be turmoil below. Turmoil like the millefeuille pastry of the taxonomic name: spathiphyllum. What does that word mean?

We can see that it comes from Greek. We may remember the phyll from chlorophyll and phyllo pastry: it means ‘leaf’. But spathi–? It means ‘spathe’. It is what it is.

Do you know what a spathe is? Does it seem at all self-regarding to define spathi– as ‘spathe’? Will it help if I tell you that spathe rhymes with scathe? No?

Well, then. A spathe is a large bract. Does that help? Wikipedia and the OED both seem to think it will. But perhaps you don’t know what a bract is, because you are not a botanist. I will tell you: it is a modified or specialized leaf. A spathe is a large one that provides a shield or hood. At the beginning, the blossom of the spathiphyllum is entirely enveloped by its bract; at length the bract unfurls to reveal the nude heart, as a cinema starlet unwinds her fur.

So this plant is a spathe-leaf, which sounds marginally better than a bract-leaf. The word spathe comes from a Greek word for ‘broad blade, broad piece of wood, that kind of thing’ that is also the root (via Latin) of spatula. And the starlet, the pollen pod that sends its fairy dust over all as a dying farewell? That is called a spadix.

So the spathe envelops and then unveils the spadix. And then they grow old together, and droop and perk together, and dry together, while other young pairs arise to have their turns.

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