Tag Archives: word tasting notes

lapsonym

Posted on March 30, 2015 | 4 comments

Kathryn Schulz, @kathrynschulz, tweeted on March 10, “Making up a word because I need it: lapsonym — a word whose meaning you forget no matter how many times you look it up.” She added that her lapsonym is nugatory. It is amusingly ironic that one of the meanings of nugatory is ‘useless, futile’. (The more common meaning, inasmuch as there is one, is ‘of little or no value or importance; trifling’ – and this is how I remember it: nugatory sounds like nougat, which, like trifle, is a dessert – but it’s a rather little one generally, just a nugget. Don’t confuse it with negatory, which is army jargon for ‘no’.)

Is the word well formed?

Well, we know that the -onym is an acceptable and productive combining form for a word, as in eponym, toponym, pseudonym, synonym, antonym, and so on. It has the same Greek root ὄνομα as onomastics and traces to a Proto-Indo-European root *nomn-, which has descendants in pretty much every Indo-European language, from Gaelic ainm to Czech jméno and, of course, all those words that sound more or less like name.

And the lapso- part? I will not make irrelevant mention of Lhasa apso, a breed of dog. No, lapso- is from the Latin noun lapsus, ‘slip, fall’, which shows up in lapse, as in mental lapse. If a word keeps slipping your mind, then of course it’s a lapsonym. Do you object to mixing Latin and Greek? It’s actually quite common in English; such words may be called macaronic, though they make me think as much of mixing meats in meatballs, which can produce very good results. (Also, macaroni these days in Anglo culture doesn’t have a huge mix of different ingredients, as it did in an earlier time and place.)

So this is a word that seems intuitively as well as etymologically to match its sense reasonably well, and it’s a word that’s been needed. (There’s a word for ‘a word that’s been needed’ – I’m trying to remember what it is. Speaking of which, we also need a word for a word you can remember the meaning of but can’t remember the actual word for. I hereby appoint myself neologist for that: I dub it lethonym, from the Greek root λήθη ‘forgetfulness’. Schulz has also invented one for a word that you can’t remember how to spell: orthonym. I think its etymological appropriateness is less secure; it seems to be a clipping from orthography, but ortho– normally means ‘right, correct’.)

And what is my personal lapsonym? My personal lapsonym is also, at least at this moment, a lethonym. That is to say, I am with @JosephHucks, who replied to Kathryn Schulz, “I can’t remember mine.”

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bucolic

Posted on March 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

I grew up in bucolic surroundings. But until sometime in my adolescence, I wouldn’t have thought so. Not because I didn’t think where I lived was rural, pastoral, etc. – no, that much was obvious. It was just that before I learned what the word bucolic meant, it would not have seemed to me to mean what it meant.

Just look at it: does it really seem so pastoral? I mean, I suppose you might think of Buford, a stereotypical rural hick name, or a calf with colic, or some young buck, or a cow lick, or something like that. But you could as easily think of a baby with colic, or something abusive or belligerent, or for that matter osso buco, or a belt buckle, or a back alley, or even Lauren Bacall…

As @wettbutt on Twitter put it, “bucolic is the most thesaurus outing adjective ever. it doesnt sound like what it is at all..it’s a bullshit trap word crafted by pranksters.” In response, @GalaxyDogg said, “it always makes me think of uncontrollable vomiting for some reason”; @Austin_H2O said, “sounds like a disease for rich babies”; and @Krinkle8 caught another overtone with “bucolic plague.” Not everyone agreed, of course. But you can see the problem.

The big problem is that when you encounter an uncommon word, you probably hope it will at least sound appropriate to the sense. You may like the crispness of crepuscular, but it hardly sounds like twilight, does it? You may hesitate to use pulchritude because it sounds more appropriate to ugliness than to beauty. Dazzling, brilliant things may be called fulgurant or coruscating, but those words, gah, hardly produce the best effect! And so on. There’s a sort of phonetic “You don’t belong around here.”

So why do we have this word? Well, we got it from the Romans, and the Romans got it from the Greeks. The Greeks had a word for ‘cow’, βοῦς bous, which comes through Latin to us in words such as bovine. They also had a word for ‘watcher’ or ‘keeper’, κολος kolos. From those they got βουκόλος, ‘cowherd’, and the adjectival form of that was βουκολικός, which became Latin bucolicus. I’m sure it all sounded perfectly reasonable to them.

In fact, if we called a cowboy a bucolos, I doubt too many people would find that a phonetically inappropriate word. The sounds are pretty similar between cowboy and bucolos (more so with the plural bucoloi – though if we went with the Latinized version it would be bucolus and bucoli), and cowboys do often wear belt buckles, after all.

But bucolic has not transferred to the cowherders in English. Nope, it’s transferred to the rural setting. Places where cows are herded. The opposite of urbanity. And it partakes in our stereotypes and ideals: these rural places are sleepy, quiet, calm, laconic (there’s another sound match), maybe a bit backwards (hmm… back, buc). Happily isolated. People used to write bucolic poetry, even.

Well, if you go somewhere bucolic right now, in the early spring, you may hear a quiet countryscape, the wind, some tractors, a few cows, and some tweeting. But the tweeting may not agree with your choice of adjective…

isopropyl

Posted on March 28, 2015 | 2 comments

This word has a sharp smell for me. A smell of sharpness, in fact.

Isopropyl alcohol isn’t the only isopropyl, but it’s the one I know. It’s common enough. We keep a squirt bottle of it in the kitchen for disinfecting surfaces: to disinfect blood and formica on the counter, or the same for fat and wood on the cutting board. My wife uses it more often than I do. When she’s used it, I can smell it quite a distance away.

And when I smell it, the inside of my elbow prickles. Or, well, I have a memory of sharp sensations on the inside of my elbow.

Isopropyl alcohol, for me, has its strongest association as the disinfectant used on an area of skin about to be punctured with a needle. I don’t know if it’s what is always used now, but I do believe it was when I was young.

But is isopropyl really a sharp word, memories aside?

Its crispest sounds are /p/ and /p/, which are more flat-blade consonants to my mind, not acute like /t/. It starts with /s/, which may seem cold like alcohol, or hiss like a snake with needle fangs, but is not really sharp per se. The other two consonants are liquids, /l/ and /r/. The blood flowing out to fill the syringe or sample bottle, or the isopropyl alcohol? Maybe a bit of a stretch. And the echoes of the word are more like ice (cold like alcohol) and propeller and perhaps even eyes and popular.

And the etymology? It’s the same for fat and wood.

What? Is that all Greek to you? Well, it is all Greek.

The same: iso, from ἴσος ‘equal’. Chemically it has two of the same CH₃ group.

For fat: pro, from προ ‘for’, and pion, from πίων ‘fat’, but the latter trimmed down in this form to just p, just as we trim the fat off the meat. Propionic acid is the first in the fatty acid series, and gives its name to isopropyl.

Wood: yl, from ὕλη ‘wood, material’ (see ylem). In chemical names it denotes a basic chemical formed of two or three elements.

So, etymologically, this word has less to do with the sharp feeling I experienced due to needles in the arm, and more to do with the sharp sensation the meat on the cutting board probably doesn’t feel, but would if it could. And the sharp smell that comes after, if my wife decides the cutting board needs it. (I just use soap and water.)

And chemically? Isopropyl alcohol is C₃H₇OH, or CH₃CHOHCH₃ – which looks a bit like an ancient Aztec word. Or perhaps the sound I made when I was a child having a needle stuck in my arm.

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squicky

Posted on March 26, 2015 | Leave a comment

This is an adjective. Just looking at it by itself, do you have a sense of what it means?

Don’t bother looking in your dictionary. It’s not in Oxford, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Dictionary.com… Too recent. But people use it. More often than many words that are in those dictionaries.

What does it have a taste of? Sick, quick, squeaky, squawk, slick, ick…

Let’s have some context: “I can’t look at dermatology journals. The pictures make me squicky.” “Ted Cruz’s smile is, um, squicky.”

How about a bit of etymology?

Yes, there is etymology for this. The bad news is that it’s just that squicky comes from the word squick, which can be a verb or a noun: “That picture gives me squick.” “That picture is a squick.” “That picture squicks me.” “I squick at that picture.” As you can see, both causative and resultative senses are in use.

The exact sources of squick are subject to some speculation. A sound effect? A portmanteau of squeamish and ick? Perhaps just a word that sounded right for the situation and was used in a context where it caught on among a small group and gradually spread farther?

Either or both of the first two may be true, but that last one is pretty reliable. The word squick first showed up in some Usenet news groups around 1994 – possibly alt.sex.bondage, or possibly fanfiction, depending on whom you ask.

The word seems like a fairly impressionistic sound slap to express, in some self-consciously inventive way, the concept of ‘disgusting’ or ‘sickening’. But this is one instance of an impressionistic word where an explanation of the definition helps, because there is an important distinction between “that disgusts me” – or “that makes me sick” – and “I have an automatic queasy or repelled physical response to that”: the latter implies no moral judgment on the object.

And that’s the thing. If something squicks you, if it’s a squick, if it’s squicky and makes you feel squicky, if – in brief – it participates in a squickening, that means simply that it engenders a reflex. Imagine watching someone perform dental surgery: cutting and peeling away the gums, drilling into the – Stop? Yes. If you’re like me, dental surgery is a horrible squick. Writing that made me shudder. But it’s not morally repellant. Likewise, there are many activities and foods and so forth that some people enjoy that others find utterly squicky. But that doesn’t mean those others condemn it, or that the foods or activities are in any particular way worthy of condemnation. (They may be, but that’s a separate issue.)

How, if this word is not in the standard dictionaries, can I have all this information about it? It’s not because I did a lot of in-depth primary-source research. It’s because there are a couple of dictionaries that have it: Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. They are crowd-sourced and much more responsive. They are not utterly reliable, of course. But you can get useful information and confirmation.

In particular, the most upvoted definition at Urban Dictionary for squick is a well-written one posted in 2004 by Ian Osmond. He notes the following: “Stating that something is ‘disgusting’ implies a judgement that it is bad or wrong. Stating that something ‘squicks you’ is merely an observation of your reaction to it, but does not imply a judgement that such a thing is universally wrong.” And he adds, “In general, distinguishing between ‘squick’ and ‘disgust’ is an important part of living in a tolerant society.” Many people, he contends, mistake squick for disgust and thereby condemn things as wrong on the basis of distaste.

Either ironically or appositely, people who mistake distaste for infallible moral judgement squick me a bit. But mainly they just irritate me. The most recent true intense squick reflex I’ve felt was when I made the mistake of doing a Google image search on impetigo. (Don’t. Just don’t. You know they always show the worst cases.)

numpty, nudnik

Posted on March 18, 2015 | 10 comments

For once and for all, let’s stop using the term grammar Nazi.

The Nazis were not just people who got all up in your face about small things. Do I even need to tell you about them? Are you really OK with using Nazi as a synonym for meanie or taskmaster or martinet or pedant?

Sure, we need a term for people who can’t seem to resist being dicks about other people’s grammar. But I don’t think we need to call them grammar genocidal megalomaniacs. There’s a better term, much better, that was drawn to my attention by one of the language gang on Twitter, @mededitor, who tweeted a flow chart made by David Bradley: “A simple flowchart to avoid becoming a grammar numpty.”

Ah, yes, grammar numpty. As @mededitor explained, “‘Numpty’ is a UK pejorative, meaning chowderhead.” It’s actually a fairly new word; it seems to have started showing up in the last 30 years. It’s likely derived from numps, a much older word (around since the time of Shakespeare) also referring to a stupid, silly, foolish, or ineffectual person, and possibly formed from the name Humphrey; numpty is quite possibly modelled on Humpty-Dumpty (which may also come from Humphrey – way to Bogart that name), gaining effect from echoes of numbskull and dumb and the effect of the dull “uh” vowel and the soft nasal consonant. And, for the grammar pickers, an echo of “harrumph.” It can be a noun or an adjective.

I should say that David Bradley (who, by the way, is British) is not the first person to use grammar numpty. I found a tweet from last November, for instance, directed at the Twitter account of a company that sells grammar-checking software (a company that also published an appallingly stupid article supposedly “correcting” “mistakes” in a popular novel series – mainly presenting style choices as rules, and making some truly cack-handed recommendations – so I won’t be naming them); they picked on a headline with what was probably an intentional error for the sake of humour, and @onekind (who is Australian) tweeted at them, “IT’S A JOKE YOU GRAMMAR NUMPTIES”.

Now, admittedly, people who I may want to call grammar numpties (because they’re needlessly prickish about other people’s usage) might well feel inclined to call their targets grammar numpties, because it is somewhat subjective just who is a numpty. Therefore, I do have an alternate available for those who would like one: grammar nudnik.

I like the word nudnik because it’s more specific. It’s not like numpty, which just means that you think the person is obtuse. Nudnik refers to a pest. A person who is boring, a person who buttonholes you and tells you inane details at length, a person who picks at you incessantly. A person who is like slimy celery leaves clinging to your finger. It’s less goofy-sounding than numpty; it has that sharp prick of ik at the end, suitable for dickish behaviour. The u is as in noodle, not as in dump, so it’s more focused and tense (like a lurking version of needy), but at the same time it has the lowest resonances of any vowel (if you want to know more about those resonances, read “The world speaks in harmony”).

Where does nudnik come from? Yiddish. (And I do think I’d rather have a word from Yiddish than one – Nazi – naming the people who murdered millions of Yiddish speakers.) It comes from the verb nudyen ‘bore’ and traces ultimately to Proto-Slavic. Although it has (for us) an echo of rude, it doesn’t automatically connote rudeness, though it allows it. Mainly it just means the sort of person who soon has you thinking, “Will. You. Shut. Up.”

So you have a choice of two. When some twit starts picking at others on small points of grammar that he or she may or may not even be right about, you can call the twit a grammar numpty or a grammar nudnik. And you don’t need to use that other word at all.

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carnauba

Posted on March 16, 2015 | 5 comments

I first became aware of this word in conjunction with car wax.

Advertisers and marketers know that if you can add in a little extra detail about something, it makes it sound special, even if that detail is trivially true. I sometimes eat breakfast in a restaurant that makes sure to say that certain egg dishes are served with “off-the-bone baked ham.” Well, I sure don’t expect to see a big ham bone in the middle of my plate with the eggs, but it somehow makes it more vividly appetizing to paint the picture. Likewise, when my dad used to take the car to get washed, we would be given the option of adding carnauba wax to the drying. Not just wax, eh, but carnauba wax. Because that sounds like something special.

It also planted in my youthful mind an association between carnauba and car. Well, why not? In fact, I wondered if carnauba might just be an elaborated form of car, like super-duper is of super. It has a hint of carnival and nubile and maybe jubilee, and it has that soft rhythm of a word like gazonga.

Anyway, one thing was sure: carnauba was the name of a wax you put on cars.

A few years later I was looking at a box of Smarties. (For the Americans here: everywhere but the US, Smarties are like chocolate M&Ms, but flatter like Reese’s Pieces. For non-Americans: in the US, the brand Smarties is used on little coloured sugar pills in a roll. I’m not talking about those. We call those Rockets in Canada.) I looked at the ingredients, because that’s what there is to read and I was curious (you get to be a little smartie by reading what’s in your Smarties). I noticed, at the end, “carnauba wax.”

What the heck! I was eating car wax? Was it balling up in my stomach?

Well, it hadn’t hurt me so far. Let’s polish off the rest of the box and see.

Nope, seems OK. Better have some more to make sure.

In fact, carnauba wax is used for quite a few things. It’s a hard, glossy polishing wax, sometimes mixed with softer waxes to make it more manageable; it adds a shine to quite a few things, and it’s burned in some candles too (use it in the hard wax around the outside that helps cup the softer wax in the middle so it burns up rather than running down). Many pills have it on them to give them a glossy shine. But it’s only a hundredth of a percent of the weight of the pill – or the Smartie. So in a 40-gram box, you have about 4 mg of wax. The sugar will get to you long before the wax does. They put carnauba wax on some fruits, too, to make them shine.

Where does this word carnauba come from, then? From the name of the tree that the wax comes from, the carnauba palm. It grows in northeastern Brazil, and the Portuguese word carnauba appears to come from the Tupi word karana’iwa. The leaves are the source of the wax. Apparently the fruit is edible. I doubt they bother putting wax on it, though.

Anyway, it has nothing etymologically to do with cars and, in spite of being from Brazil, nothing to do with carnival either. But carnauba wax still sounds like it’s worth more than just plain wax.

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pirr

Posted on March 15, 2015 | 1 comment

I’ve turned again to Robert Macfarlane’s article on landscape words. Here is one that is worth a peer, a word that truly purrs:

Shetlandic has a word, pirr, meaning “a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water”.

A cat’s paw. A purring cat’s paw, to be sure. It’s not enough to rrip the surface; it’s just as much as may be exhaled after the /p/ in /pɪr/ or /pʌr/. How much is that? Take a saucer of water – or milk if you wish; you can give it to your cat after – and hold it up to your chin. Then say pirr. It will make a little wave just after the puff on the /p/ – not as much as if a cat’s paw had swatted it, unless it’s the paw of a cat you had as a child and that still follows you around in spirit, purring in your mind, though long out of its body. Just the ripples of tiny feet, which will quickly dis-a-pirr. I am put in mind of e.e. cummings’s “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond,” which concludes,

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

And as rain has small hands, so a pirr has small feet. Paws that refresh. And pirr the written word has the little paw waves of the rr, perhaps caused by the little paw of the p.

Is pirr in the dictionary? It is, if you have a really good one. It seems that our word pirr – which can also mean ‘a state of agitation or excitement’ – comes from pirrie, which can mean the same thing or can mean ‘a squall, a sudden blast of wind, a storm’. Either way, its origin seems to be imitative. There is also a verb pirr, which means ‘flow swiftly’ or ‘blow gently’. Again there is an opposition of sense. Perhaps to unwind these turns we need a pirr review.

There is another word pirr, by the way: it is an onomatopoeia for the cry of the tern, and is also used to name the tern itself. If the word has a tern in its sense, then it’s no wonder it has turns in sense.

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skeevy, skeezy

Posted on March 14, 2015 | 1 comment

Neither of these words is used very often. Nonetheless, even if you haven’t seen either at all, I suspect you’ll have a sense of the meaning. And yes, they both mean largely the same thing. If I give you a sentence context you’ll understand the general intent. Here are a couple of quotations, obligingly supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Zevon has built a career on well-crafted pop songs that tend to be either smartass and sensitive or smartass and skeevy. (Newsday, 1991)

He has the requisite erotic credentials—drugstore musk cologne, underarm sweat rings, skeezy tattoo, outer-boroughs grammar. (Los Angeles Times 1995)

Words like this are conditioned by phonetic profiling: what else they sound like. And what do they sound like? They both start with the /sk/ that is found on extensive and/or displeasing two-dimensional things: sky, skin, sketch, scum, scab, skank; they also have elements of sleazy, peeve, skivvies, skive, wheeze, sketchy, cheesy, easy, skeeter, and – for comic strip fans – Skeezix, a character supposedly named with a word for a lost calf, but it seems that the word skeezicks (the closest real-world spelling) was actually generally used to mean ‘rascal, rogue’.

So these words fall in line with sketchy and sleazy and skanky, with that thin wheedling /i/ vowel (which works well with pulling your mouth wide and the corners a bit down in revulsion), the fuzzy buzzing /v/ or /z/, and that hard, flat /sk/ onset. Were they just made up out of thin air because they sounded right?

Not quite. It starts with Italian (Tuscan) schifare ‘loathe’ and schifo ‘disgust’. Note that sch in Italian is pronounced /sk/, and in some versions of the language an f between vowels is said /v/ (a common transformation that, a millennium ago, was also the rule in English). These, at least in South Philadelphia, were borrowed over to English – quite possibly abetted by the sound resemblance to words of similar sense – to become skeevy, which was attested in print by the mid-1970s. Once that word became widely known, it was expectable that it would be modified to match the sleazy echo, especially since /izi/ endings are more common than /ivi/ ones in English. And, after all, this is an expressive word, with a sound-sense relation that is not seen as altogether arbitrary, so it’s more natural to change the sound to match what you feel. So by the early 1990s, we had skeezy, which is also a bit easier to say: you just take the tongue back to the tip, no need to involve the lips.

Is there a real difference between skeevy and skeezy? Aside from the one sounding closer to, say, evil and the other sounding closer to, say, easy? Well, Oxford adds “disreputable or immoral, esp. sexually” to – can you guess which? – skeezy. But dictionary.com specifies “not respectable; immoral” on… skeevy. Both agree that skeezy is sleazy, but Oxford says skeevy is too. Frankly, the whole thing seems a bit too… nebulous… you know… um, shady.

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gorm

Posted on March 12, 2015 | 2 comments

I really wanted to start with this nice reel (Irish dance tune) I remembered. I thought it would be easy to find a version of it on YouTube. But no, it’s not. And the thing is, I have the music for it, and I have a tin whistle (several of them, even), but I’m not sure how well I’d play it with minimal practice, and I am sure that if I were to try recording it now at half past 11 I would be counselled very quickly on the risks of disturbing the crusty neighbour lady. So. I’m a bit out of feck. Here instead is a link to the sheet music and a playable MIDI file: abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=www.oldmusicproject.com/AA2ABC/1201-1800/Abc-1301-1400/1399-PrettyBlueSeagull/0000. The MIDI file is about as soulless as you can get but it will do, I suppose, for those who can’t quite picture the tune from the notes. Just try to imagine it done with a proper fiddle or whistle and, you know, some sense of merriment.

Oh, why am I linking to this reel called “The Pretty Blue Seagull”? Erm. Couldn’t even find something with the proper Irish Gaelic title. Really I’m just a bit of a schlimazel here. The Irish for that is “An feilionn deas gorm” (which I feel compelled to say is pronounced something like “a fail yin jass gorum”).

So yes. Gorm. This is our word of the day. I’m out looking for gorm and coming across gormless, gorm maith agat. (Sorry, in Irish that sounds in casual speech just like go raibh maith agat, “gurramahagut,” which means ‘thank you’. More literally gorm maith agat would mean ‘you have good blue’ or ‘good blue to you’ or, exactly, ‘good blue at you’.)

Well, this is my day to be lacking in good judgment or perhaps good sense. Which is what gormless means. I remember playing a gormless Yorkshire lad (and his identical triplet brothers) in the play One for the Pot some 25 years ago in Edmonton: my first experience of the word. This gorm of which one is -less is apparently from the obsolete word gome, which means (per Oxford) “heed, attention, notice, care.” It comes form an Old Norse root.

So it would be good, then, to want some gorm, right? To be – what is it? Gormy? Gormful? Gormed? As @ivacheung declared today, “I’ve always wanted to be well gormed.” I mean, that doesn’t sound quite as appealing as well formed or well groomed or… well, gorm sits towards the back of the mouth until it closes with that soft ending on the lips, and so it lacks a certain brightness. It’s glum, gloomy, maybe a bit gory. Like a name for some gormless character in a Terry Pratchett book (RIP). Someone who does bugger-all because he can’t do bugger-all.

If the contronymic character of that last sentence pleases you, you’re sure to like what Iva subsequently found in Oxford: there is a noun gorm, but it means “an undiscerning person, a fool.” In other words, someone who is gormless is a gorm.

Um.

What gormless twit came up with that.

Well, I did just go on about how gorm seemed like a name for someone lacking in feck. I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed. The word gormless was around nearly two centuries before this gorm showed up, but it was inevitable, I suppose. Suitable sound combination is noticed standing around near sense… is pressed into use with sense. It’s like some gormless security guard being pressganged into helping the bank robbers. Of course you know he’ll be kicked to the curb in the end… Sitting there feeling blue…

(That was the bit where I circle back to the beginning, because gorm is Irish for ‘blue’. Not sure if I was obvious enough about that. Well, I guess by explaining it now I’ve kind of killed it. Never mind. Valar morgormless: All men must feck off. Um, was that too obscure too? It was a reference to a phrase from Game of Thrones and to feckless as similar to gormless and… ah, bollocks, never mind. I think I’m experiencing, as @rgodfrey put it, the perfect gorm.)

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jill

Posted on March 10, 2015 | 5 comments

The sea is as still as gel in a Petri dish. A small boat moves idly along, mills about, sending smooth, even ripples in the glassy surface: |||| . It is on a booze cruise, perhaps, hopping from half-pint in one port to half-pint in another, or perhaps it can’t even be bothered to do as much as that. It’s just some lad and lass on it, and one of them cleans a fish and both have a glass of white wine to sharpen the appetite. And still the little swells follow, breaking up a bit from |||| into jill.

Jill? Without a capital j: jill. A verb for a boat moving idly about. It may come from the verb gill, pronounced the same, which in its time referred to doing a pub-crawl with just a small drink at each, or perhaps to having a little bit of white wine before dinner – so Oxford tells me. That comes from the liquid measure gill (same pronunciation again) equalling a quarter pint (thus a half cup, which is four ounces, eight tablespoons, or two dozen teaspoons).

But then there is another verb jill, a variant of gill meaning ‘clean a fish’. And of course there is the noun jill meaning ‘girlfriend’ or ‘sweetheart’, taken from the name Jill, as in Jack and Jill. There are other more recent uses (noun and verb) of Jill too, as female parallels to uses of Jack; some of them are about as impolite as their Jack counterparts.

The name Jill is usually short for Gillian (or the same with a J) or – dictionary.com tells me – Juliana. But just by itself, in its ripple shape on the page and its jarred liquid sound in the mouth, it stands apart a bit. And it has some associations for me, of course, as it likely does for most people. It’s a name just common enough that a person may know one or two Jills, just enough to give a clear character. The first Jill I knew, as a pre-teen, was a girl a bit older than me, daughter of some family friends; she had blonde hair and seemed a paragon of sensible prettiness. The second Jill I knew, in high school, was also, come to think of it, a blonde paragon of sensible prettiness. There was a third I knew, briefly, in university, a tall ash blonde from England, elegant, sensible, pretty. You see a pattern. (I haven’t met any new Jills lately, though.)

What has this to do with moving idly about, drinking in half-cups, and gutting fish? Hmm… Jill-squat, probably, other than coincidence. But can’t you picture some lucky Jack spending a pleasant afternoon with a sensible pretty blonde jill (named Jill or not) lolling in a boat jilling about on a jelly sea? It almost makes me jillous.

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