Dr. Metablog

Words of My Life: Provider

I first encountered the word "provider" in its positive sense as a virtual synonym "mensch": "he was a good provider; he took care of his wife and his kids and his aged parents and even his employees" (if he had any).

But nowadays the word has been stripped of its warm associations and has emerged as a cool or neutral term. I encounter the word most often when I need medical attention. A doctor is no longer a doctor; he's been renamed a "provider." I believe this usage to be the invention of the nefarious insurance companies that govern and distort our medical system. "Doctor" and "nurse" are praise-words, rich in significance. "Provider" has no resonance. It reduces your doctor to an index or reference number and is therefore of great utility to the bureaucracy. I can't imagine that a doctor, asked what he does, would be happy to respond, Ir "I'm a provider."   

The word "teacher" has, for many, a positive resonance. I was a teacher; I was not an "education provider" -- nor would I have embarked on a career with the aim of being considered such. 

I believe that nowadays the most common use of the word "provider" occurs in the internet phrase, "content provider."  And so the word continues on its long downward path.

Roux/ Rue/ Rue/ Rubaboo

"Roux" is word that everyone seems to know but me. To the best of my recollection, "roux" had never crossed my personal threshold until last week -- perhaps because I have never taken any special interest in fine cuisine. I've now enlightened myself, but at the cost of blundering into a bewildering etymological thicket.

"Roux," to reprise the obvious, is "a mixture of flour and fat cooked together and used to thicken sauces.... Butter or lard are commonly used fats." But why "roux," with its excrescent French x? Un nom étrange. Roux, if I have it right, means brown, or more precisely, reddish brown (as opposed to "brun" or "marron." In the case of the sauce, roux is an abbreviated version of "beurre roux," or brown butter and, curiously, comes unbuttered into English as simply "roux." Roux derives from Latin russus or ruber, reddish, both of which ancient words originate in the same Indo-European root. I've now learned of a kind of surgery called a Roux-en-Y, probably pronounced "ruin why," which is a kind of "anastomosis"--  or gastric bypass -- in which blood or intestinal vessels are configured into a Y shape. But although one may suspect so, this "roux" has nothing to do with sauces, thank goodness, but is named for the Swiss  physician who originated the surgery, César Roux. I suspect that Roux's roux does not descend from ruber but from rufus, red-headed, as in William II, aka William Rufus.

But then there's the English word "rue." I know it as the common wildflower that we allow to grow in our waterfall garden, and there are cultivated versions as well. This rue comes to English through French and from Latin ruta. The other English rue, as in "rue the day" is, as one might expect, of entirely different origin deriving from Old English hreow  -- "grief, repentance, sorrow, regret, penitence."

 

Exactly like Vivian de St Vrain, William Shakespeare was not familiar with "roux" but he knew and used both rues. Perdita offers the flowery one to Camillo and Polixenes: "Reverend sirs,/For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep/ Seeming and savor all the winter long." Ophelia, in her madness, also distributes rue, known also as herb of grace: "There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference." The botanical rue is referenced by the poetical gardener in Richard II; "in this place/I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:/ Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,/ In the remembrance of a weeping queen." The pun on rue/ruth is etymologically interesting. Ruth means sorrow and it is possible that ruth is to rue as truth is to true; that is to say, formed by analogy. 

 

It would be wrong to leave the subject of roux/rue without a mention of rubaboo, "an American stew or porridge of French and Métis people, consisting of bear grease along with peas, corn and other vegetables."  Rubaboo blends "roux" with the Algonquian word aboo, which, I have been reliably informed, means soup and is therefore  an unusual, perhaps even unique IE + Algonquian formation. 

Can We Hope for a Locative Renaissance?

Here on Walnut Street, we're trying to make more and better use of locatives -- words that have long been underemployed and undervalued. We think that the language (and therefore the world) would be richer and more commodious if others would join with us in this endeavor. But we're not evangelizing, heck no! We honor and respect each and every person's private and personal linguistic choices, locatively-speaking. 

Nor do we refer to the common adverbial locatives, such as homeward, downtown, underground, or nearby.  The locatives that we wish to revive and reinvigorate are the neglected -- even forsaken -- classics of locativity.

Everyone uses the locative where -- the point upon which you metaphorically stand --  but how many of us remember to employ the excellent and useful "to" form, whither, or the "from" form, whence.  It's true that whither and whence sound a trifle obsolescent, but with frequent use the flexible ear will soon accommodate. One might be tempted to say "wither goest thou" or "whence com'st thou", but with a little effort, "whither do you go" and "whence do you come" will sound perfectly natural, I'm sure.

Similarly, we regularly use the word here, but by golly, we have slighted hither (to here) and hence (from here).

Equally neglectful is the abandonment of thither and thence ("to there" and "from there"). Extraordinary useful words, relegated thoughtlessly to the rear of the locative line.

And then of course, there's yon, yond and yonder, all related varieties of "there" but further off than "there." At a distance. Shakespeare, as one would expect, is a most skillful deployer of yons. From Hamlet: "But look, the morn in russet mantle clad/ Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill."  From Julius Caesar. "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous."  From Romeo and Juliet. "What lady's that/ Which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?"

A yonnish locative that is not endangered and continues to thrive is the word beyond. Shakespeare's most remarkable and I daresay most beautiful use of "beyond" occurs in Cymbeline, when Innogen learns that her exiled lover Posthumus Leonatus has returned to England. She is impatient to meet him at Milford Haven; Innogen's speech that begins with the plaintive cry, "O, for a horse with wings" includes the most transcendent barrier-busting locative in the entire history of the English language. Her longing to see her lover is, she claims, "beyond beyond." A superlative locative, beyond anyone's imagination but Will's.  

Words of My Life: Boot

Is there another common English word that exhibits such varied meanings as "boot?" Or one that has shown such continual transformation during my years on the planet?

Like much of my early vocabulary, "boot" entered my life through the medium of radio baseball . In my mind's ear, I can hear the voice of Red Barber announcing that "umpire Babe Pinelli has just given the boot to Leo Durocher." "Given the boot" does not make the claim that Durocher was presented with footwear; it means that he was kicked out of the game as if with a metaphorically-booted foot.

Nor was it only obstreperous managers who were "booted." "There's a two-hopper to third, but Cox boots it" -- meaning that he bobbled it, even though the ball never touched his foot. In baseball, curiously, you can boot a ball with your hand, which is, logically speaking, as nonsensical as gloving it with your foot. 

As everyone knows, a boot primarily protects the area from the shin down to the toes. But there's a second common meaning to "boot": "something extra," as in the phrase "to boot." "He's a great pitcher -- and a good hitter to boot." The shoe-ish meaning comes through old French from a Germanic source; the profit or use or something-extra meaning derives from an unrelated OE (Old English) word; moreover, in latter stages of its development "boot" has also been influenced by its phonological neighbors booty, and, I suspect, butt. 

In order to gain some historical perspective, let us consider the ways in which Shakespeare makes use of the word boot. "To boot" meaning "in addition" is employed frequently, as, for example, when Henry IV swears "by my scepter and my soul to boot," or when Macduff says to Malcolm that "I would not be the villain that thou think'st/ For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp/ And the rich east to boot." A less familiar use occurs in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione, accused of adultery, concedes that  "it shall scarce boot me/ To say 'not guilty.'" Her "boot" means that it will not be to her advantage or profit to assert her innocence. This signification can shade over into gain or even into a coin itself, as for example when Camillo passes money to Autolycus, saying,"hold thee, there's some boot." Contemplating his gain, Autolycus muses, "What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here with this exchange." Just as boot is gain, so bootless means without gain or helpless, as when Henry V explains that he will be powerless to restrain a rampage: "We may as bootless spend our vain command/ Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil."

Shakespeare gets some punning mileage out of the multiple meanings of "boot." Glendower boasts that "[T]hree times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head/ Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye/ And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him/ Bootless home and weather-beaten back. "Bootless" means helpless; but sardonic Hotspur, never noted for an sophisticated sense of humor, cannot resist the obvious: "Home without boots. And in foul weather too."

So a boot can be a shoe, an advantage, an addition, a reward, a help. But look what's happened to the poor helpless word in more recent times. "Boot Hill" is a cowboy frontier cemetery.  Across the waters, a "boot" is the trunk of an automobile. The infamous "Denver boot" is a wheel clamp that immobilizes a vehicle. In the army, a boot is a recruit or rookie: "boot camp."

But then, along came the computer, where one "boots" or restarts one's machine. This use, I'm told, originated with the phrase, to "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps" -- i.e. perform a difficult task at one's own initiative, just as a computer starts itself. There's also the warmboot, which sounds little too much like the old torture device, the Spanish boot and which can also be called a softboot (but not by me).  

In Shakespeare's day, boot was not always distinguished from "booty" as in the case of the Archbishop of Canterbury's famous bees, which "like soldiers, armed in their stings,/ Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,/ Which pillage they with merry march bring home." Booty as pillage survives to this day, but is, I think, obsolescent. Nowadays, booty is more likely to be used in the phrase "booty call" which means (and here I'm relying on the invaluable Urban Dictionary) a "telephone call made to request a sexual encounter." Who would ever have devised or imagined such an innovation?  Does this booty derive from "shake your booty," meaning to move your butt or bottom in a sexually suggestive way?  Not a meaning known to Shakespeare, or at least, not one that the Shakespeare concordance acknowledges.

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Words of my Life: Troll

"Troll" is a word that has strangely metamorphosized in the course of my lifetime. While It once had warm associations; now, not so much.

"Troll" came into my life in the late 1940s at Makamah Beach on the Long Island Sound. My grandmother Sonia taught me how to "troll" for bluefish or sunfish. Here's how you do it. You paddle slowly and let your "shiner" dangle on fishing line a few yards behind the rowboat. "Troll" is very like "trawl." Perhaps the two words are variants; or perhaps "troll" is a distant descendent of Latin trahere, to drag." Troll is related to "trolley," a device used to drag things from place to place, as a trolley does its passengers. "Troll" seems to incorporate the meaning "wander" or "wander into."

From my early interest in northern mythology (a "mythology," by the way, is someone else's religion), I learned that a "troll" is a clumsy ugly monster who hides out under bridges or in cemeteries. Trolls were troublesome, provocative, perhaps even cannibalistic. 

But nowadays, the older meanings of "troll" have been superseded. A 'troll' is now a person who participates in a conversation, usually an internet conversation, with the intention of sowing discord or causing trouble. I am not sure about the origin of this usage, but I would like to guess or hypothesize that it combines the sense of "wandering into" with the malevolence of the Scandinavian figure. A troll is therefore an electronic ogre.

 

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Words of my Life: Hack

I cannot think of a word that has undergone greater change during the course of my lifetime than the plain monosyllable "hack."

"Hack" entered my language, like much of my early vocabulary, through the medium of baseball. "He took a good hack at that fastball;" "he's up there hacking away." A hack was a hard swing, not necessarily a successful one. [There was also Stan Hack, the great Chicago Cub third baseman whose career was just coming to an end as I was becoming conscious.]  In the days of my youth, "hack" was also slang for taxicab and a cab driver was a "hackie." I don't believe I've heard that particular use of the word in decades (except in 1940s movies). In seventh-grade "shop" class at PS 217, Mr. Kaminsky introduced me to the "hacksaw." The hack in hacksaw derives from a medieval word meaning "cut into pieces," but the taxi hack has an entirely dissimilar origin. It comes from hackney, a breed of horse and later the carriage itself that the horse drew -- the name of which then migrated to our big yellow taxi.

When did I first hear the expression, a "hacking cough"?  And why hacking? Perhaps because the noise of a cough is similar to the sound of the short sharp blows when one hacks through a forest or the jungle with a machete. Maybe that's how it originated-- but I'm not entirely convinced.

Hack has another older meaning -- mediocre or failing, or not good at one's trade, as in a "hack writer," or a "political hack." This usage is probably a shortened version of "hackneyed," meaning trite or overused. When you waste time, you're just "hacking around." In such cases,"hack" denoted incompetence.

Nowadays "hack" has come up in the world. To hack into a computer implies not laziness but skill. In this usage, "hack" is also malicious. Hackers may be smart but they're also dangerous; they can cause crashes when they illegally intrude to alter a program. 

The most common contemporary use of "hack," if I'm reading the data correctly, occurs in the recent coinage "lifehack," which is defined as "a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way." I can't be the only person whose junk mail folder is regularly inundated with recommended lifehacks, most of which seem mighty silly or simplistic. 

And then there's an even more specialized use. Here's one that's new to me: "scientists announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently." This usage seems to retain something of the older meaning of cut or slash although it is a stretch to envision a genome being attacked by a sword or a snickersnee. 

Goodness gracious, it's a long road from waving at an inshoot with the old hickory to inserting bits of DNA in the tobacco genome. But here we are.

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

A Few More Unusual Words New to Me

A matamata is a species of turtle found in South America. It's odd looking, even for a turtle.

The word matamata is an example of a reduplicative.  It is of unknown etymology.

 

A kurgan is a tumulus or mound erected over a grave, at first in the southern Asian steppes (4th century BCE) and later throughout southeast Europe. I myself saw many kurgans in Bulgaria, but for some reason never learned the word. A saiga is a kind of antelope. A zander is a European fish similar to a perch. A chillum is a kind of decorated bamboo pipe "often sold in places like Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village." A punkah was, in the late but not-so-great lamented days of the Raj, a large swinging fan, operated by a servant called a punkah wala. Arrack or arac is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of coconut flowers, which sounds delicious but is probably not available at our local liquor store. The astragalus, more often called the talus, is a bone in the human foot. The word's similarity to asparagus is inadvertent but nevertheless amusing. A condyle is "a protuberance at the end of a bone." A swidden is an area of land cleared to farm by slashing and burning. Swidden, a truly lovely word, is derived from an Old Norse verb meaning "to burn"-- as well it should be.

 

Lamellar armor was made from small plates of leather or bronze. Here's a terracotta statue of a soldier wearing scute-like armor. 

 

A guimpe (pronounced gimp, apparently), was a short high-necked Victorian blouse designed to be worn under a low-cut dress. It would take a specialist to explain the difference between a guimpe and a fichu. A tarboosh is a variety of fez.

A bident is a two-pronged weapon, two-thirds of a trident. Here's a statue of Hades wielding one:

Could there be a linguistic relationship between bident and Biden? Not likely, because a "biden" was originally a maker of buttons.

More Words New to Me

Calipash is the "gelatinous greenish material found underneath the upper half of a turtle's shell." Perhaps this word is well known to turtle-fanciers, but it's brand new to me. Calipash is "esteemed as a delicacy" but should not be confused with calipee, which is a fatty gelatinous light-yellow substance found immediately above the turtle's lower shell. Equally delectable, so say connoisseurs. Here's a dish of mixed calipash and calipee. I confess that it does not look delectable to me. Looks repellent, in fact, but each to his own.

The word calipash is a variant of carapace, the turtle's upper shell. The lower shell is a plastron.

Calipash could be served with pilaus, a Kenya spicey rice dish. One might, or might not, add beeswing to the menu. Beeswing is the "filmy translucent crust" that grows on port that has been bottle-aged.

Zenana is a word of Persian origin which refers to the part of a large house reserved exclusively for women; it is therefore equivalent to harem.  Here's a picture of a rich gentleman visiting a zenana.

 

Such a visitor might carry a yataghan, which is a type of knife or saber (a yataghan is sometimes called a varsak). He might also be accompanied by a dragoman or interpreter. And if he were in a generous mood, he might carry a cairngorm as a potential gift. A cairngorm is a jewel of yellowish smoky quartz. If he possessed 36 bushels of cairngorms, he would have a full chaldron of them. Would he also bring with him a narghile, a kind of hookah?

 

A pelisse once referred to a kind of jacket worn by cavalrymen; in this illustration, the pelisse is the furry item slung over Charles Stewart's shoulder.

 

Later, for unclear reasons, pelisse came to denote a fashionable woman's open coat.

 

Charles Stewart might also be wearing a spatterdash, a legging designed to keep the pants clean. Eventually, spatterdashes became smaller and tidier; so did the word for them, which was diminished to "spats." But even so unpretentious as a word as spats should not be vilipended (or spoken of in an abusive manner).

 

A fichu is an item of women's clothes designed to rescue the wearer of a low cut dress from immodesty.

 

A fichu would probably be made of silk rather than camlet, which is a fabric of goat or camel hair. 

 

A drysalter was once a dealer in glue, varnish, and dyes. In even older times, a salter bought and sold salt, while a wetsalter cured fish.

The Ocellated Turkey

Turkeys, I was recently surprised to learn, come in two distinct species. The familiar one is the "wild turkey", Meleagris gallopavo, the big bird that in broods of twenty or so, wanders around my house and garden, eating seeds, insects, acorns and apples and occasionally leaving behind a fancy feather or two. 

They're new to the neighborhood. Until about twenty years ago, I had not seen a single turkey; now, they're everywhere. And bold. Or perhaps just indifferent to me.  

And then there's the second kind of North American turkey. It's rare -- found, nowadays, only in the Yucatan peninsula. It's the "ocellated turkey,"  and it's one heck of a fancy bird.

 

Ocellated? I was puzzled, stymied by this unfamiliar word. But then I remembered that an "ocellus" is an architectural term. An ocellus is the circular opening at the top of a dome, familiar to me from its celebrated use in the Roman Pantheon. "Ocellus" is obviously the diminutive of Latin "oculus," eye. It follows that an "ocellated turkey" is so called because it displays circular markings on its feathers, like a peacock (although none of the pictures of turkeys that I found on the internet revealed eye-like decorations. Many shimmering colors, however.

 

It's remarkable that the range of the "ocellated turkey" coincides with the habitat of the ocelot. Could such a turkey, if attacked and killed by an ocelot, be considered doubly ocellated"? And if, in its death throes, it thrashed and quivered, could it be said to oscillate?

Words of my Life: Spatchcock

I first heard the word "spatchcock" at a Thanksgiving celebration some four or five years ago. The turkey, I was told, had been "spatchcocked." To be absolutely honest, I thought someone was pulling my leg. To my pure and undefiled ears, the word "spatchcock" sounded more than a little obscene. Certainly not something that a civilized person would do to a turkey. Or even to a fellow human being. I admit that I was puzzled: what sort of perverse activity is implied by "spatchcock." And just who would be the spatchcocker and who the spatchcockee?

But further investigation revealed that "spatchcock" is not a dirty joke nor even a slangy neologism. The word has an eighteenth-century origin and it's not sexual but culinary: "to cut poultry along the spine and spread the halves apart for more even cooking when grilled." Moreover, the word "spatchcock," believe it or not, has a sibling of its own: "spitchcock": "to split an eel along the back and then broil it." So spatchcock and spitchcock, yet as far as I know, no "spotchcock" or "sputchcock"-- but why not?  Lots of other land and sea beasts out there to de-spine and roast over an open fire. Spatchcocking, the process, probably dates back to the neolithic, after the taming of fire and long before anyone thought to call it by such a silly name.   

Etymology?  Though there are theories, I'm going to stick with "origin unknown." The common answer is that the word is "shorthand  for 'dispatching the cock.'" An undocumented, out-of-left-field guess, in my opinion. If I were to propose a theory, I would say that the "cock" must be a version of  "cook." I'm not prepared to venture a guess about the spatch. A mystery, unrecoverable. Perhaps a humorous coinage?

I'd hypothesize that "cock" might be related to the second part of common surnames such as Hancock, Adcock, Babcock, Hitchcock or Wilcox. Some say that the cock in these names is a hypocoristic suffix "applied to a young lad who strutted proudly like a cock." I'm skeptical. More credible, once again, is "cook." Hancock is Johan the cook, Adcock is Adam the cook, Hitchcock is Richard (Rich, Hich) the cook, and so on.

The ever-unpredictable Urban Dictionary provides another meaning for "spatchcock": "when you intentionally rub your backpack on a nearby stranger's genitals in an effort to sexually arouse them." What can I say?  Only that I've lived a long life and have never given a single thought to the erotic potential of the backpack. Nor have I ever been spatchcocked either in the traditional culinary nor the speculative contemporary sexual sense of the word (thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon!)

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

mucilage.

 

 

Baseball Vocabulary

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

Cishet

We watched a Netflix series called Feel Good. I suppose that the series title must be taken ironically, because throughout the first two seasons, not one character seemed to feel even slightly positive or healthy. Just about everyone was miserable -- their unhappiness usually linked to romantic or more specifically sexual dissatisfaction. The program introduced many more eccentric varieties of coupling and frustration than I, a vanilla heterosexual, would have imagined. The main character, Mae Martin, played by Mae Martin, is a boyish lesbian; her on-again, off again affair with a womanly young lady is the focus of the story. Lots of obstacles both personal and social stand between the two women and the achievement of genuine happiness. Let's hope that they can figure it all out and find love at long last -- or at least by the end of Season 3. 

There was one scene that I found to be particularly curious and troublesome. A group of teachers assemble for a meeting, but before taking up business, every one of the participants reveals or defines his or her own sexuality. One young woman, surely the least glamorous of the set, refers to herself as "cishet." I didn't catch the word as spoken but fortunately we had the subtitles engaged and I was able to read the word, although in reading I pronounced it to myself as if the sh were a digraph for the lingual palatal fricative as in shut or shun. But I investigated the new word "cishet" -- and sure enough it exists and has become a feature of our contemporary culture. It's "cis" as opposed to "trans" which means not "across" but "this side" -- as the Romans referred to Gaul as either cisalpine and transalpine. In this coinage, "cis" refer to a person who accepts the gender designation assigned at birth by the appearance of one's genitals. "Het" is simply a truncation of heterosexual." "Cishet" therefore means someone who is unambiguously either male or female and is attracted to persons of the opposite sex.

Wow, that's me. After all these years of just thinking I was an ordinary guy, I now discover that I have a designation. I have a community, at tribe, perhaps even an interest group. Hey, I belong,

But I think that it's mighty odd and even oppressive that members of a school community, or any community, would feel that it is necessary or advisable to announce their gender classification before getting down to the business of the day. Shouldn't such information be allowed to remain private. If I want to be cishet, it's nobody's business but my own. But perhaps such formal revelations don't happen in real life -- only in satirical TV series. I sure hope so. 

Not so for Mae Martin, the first paragraph of whose biography reads "Mae Martin is a Canadian-born comedian, actor, and writer based in England. They wrote and starred in the Netflix comedy series Feel Good." So it appears that "she" is a "they" which in current modish jargon doesn't mean that she's plural but signifies that she feels inadequately represented by the simple and specific feminine pronoun. I can understand her motive, but frankly "they" confuses me and sticks in my ear. I appreciate its value as a statement of resistance to the "hetoro-normative" -- but by golly "they" sure throws a spanner into the grammatico-normative works. It would be good if English had a set of singular pronouns that are as gender indistinct as "they," but it doesn't, and to hijack the plural "they" and turn it into a singular is an awkward and I hope ephemeral innovation.  

Sometimes I receive communications from people who are much more up to date than dear old dad -- letters that are signed in the traditional way but to which is subjoined, "My pronouns -- "he his," or "she her hers" (or "they them their"). This habit, I suppose, clears the air and perhaps forestalls some embarrassing or awkward moments, but again, seems unnecessarily revelatory. It's limiting and partial. It seems to me to declare that such guys and gals were acting in the parochial interest of their own tribe or constituency -- much as if everyone appended to his or her name his own religion or nationality. I'm not happy with this innovation. Although it might seem progressive, it is in my opinion ultimately dangerously reactionary.

Therefore I am not so current that I would include my pronouns on any letters that I write. But I would like to append my adjectives,

Yours very sincerely,

Vivian de St. Vrain

(My adjectives:  "wise, upstanding, formerly debonair.")

Beffa -- April 1, 2021

Regular readers of this metablague know that Dr. M. has resumed his study of Italian. Foolish say some, but heroic say others, because to try to master a language when one is an octogenarian is truly daunting. However, native speakers of English, even older ones, can, if patient, slowly acquire Italian. Its sounds are similar and sometimes identical to those of English; the conjugations, only three of them, are on the whole regular; and many of its words have English or Latin cognates. For me, pronouns present a problem, because they're sometimes required when I wouldn't think to use them, and sometimes dropped when I'd prefer them to be there -- and, moreover, they come in slightly varied direct, indirect, and reflexive forms. And then there are the pronomi combinati or double pronouns which are confusing in themselves and which are sometimes but not always attached to infinitives, gerunds and imperatives as enclitics. It's probably too late in the game for me to become a fluent speaker, but I have hopes of becoming a competent reader. I can now read at about the 6th or 7th grade level; I have the grammar under control so it's mostly a problem of vocabulary and idiom.

For a greater challenge, I've begun to study a little Beffa. Beffa is a Kartvelian language with admixtures of Cascagian and Ghetti. Fortunately for me, there's a small Beffan community here in our town. I work with an introductory textbook -- Pathways to Modern Beffa (2012) by Divino Divano -- and with a native speaker named Ismail Kartakov. We meet three times a week when he's available. Sometimes I enjoy a Beffa-speaking dinner with Ismail and his wife Soraya and their three young children. I've also been to some Beffan parties and exuberant dances. I sometimes feel odd-man-out but it's been fun. The Beffan community, reputedly hostile to outsiders, has been very welcoming. And the goat, mountain oyster, and black radish stew is superb.

Beffa is a bit more complicated than English. For example, while English has 26 consonants, Beffa has 56, including a two kinds of glottal stops that sound almost like clicks as well as a voiced glottal fricative that resembles a cat's purr. It also has both a voiced and unvoiced bilabial trill that sound a lot like an English "raspberry," and an unusual, possibly unique lingual-dental stop in which the tongue is pushed firmly against not the upper but the lower teeth. One peculiarity of Beffa is its consonant clusters -- a word may begin with as many as six consonants yoked together before the first vowel appears. Some words have an initial six consonants followed by a vowel and then a cluster of five or six more consonants. This can be strange to English speakers and sometimes I notice Ismail's younger children giggling at my feeble attempts to replicate their plosives. (Voiceless plosives are usually aspirated and one must take care not to insert a schwa between aspirants.) Beffa also has a varied repertoire of vowels, including a number of diphthongs and a couple of triphthongs. There aren't any tones, thank goodness. There's one triphthong the use of which can be perilous, for if you get it wrong the observation "your blue parrot is pining for the fjords" apparently sounds almost exactly like "my knife is longer and sharper than yours."

Nouns have both natural and grammatical gender. Nouns can be masculine, feminine, neuter, ambiguous, common, animate or inanimate. They can be singular, dual, plural, or paucative (i.e. a few). Neuter nouns rarely have duals. Beffa has six fully formed declensions, distinguished primarily by the fact that plurals in declensions 1 and 3 are formed with a prefix, in 2 and 4 by a suffix, and in 5 and 6 by an infix. There are also some fifteen cases, all useful but some slightly unusual. There are the familiar nominative, possessive, accusative and dative (or indirect object). There are also a series of cases that describe motion: the locative ("the ball that is lying on the ground"), the ablative (("the ball that is coming in your direction"); the separative ("the ball that is moving away from you"); the commitative ("the ball that is touching your hand"); the partitive ("the ball that has left your hand"); the terminative ("the ball that has stopped moving"); the superessive ("the ball that is on top of another ball"); the penetrative ("the ball that is inside another ball"); the perditive ("the ball that is lost"); the oscillative ("the ball that is going back and forth"); the thumpative ("the ball that is bouncing"); the plungitive "the ball that has fallen into the water"); the remunerative ("the ball that has been bought or sold"); the joculatorative ("the ball that does not fall to the ground"); the alfactorative ("the ball that stinks like a corpse"); the perplexive ("the ball that has disappeared"); and the insouciative ("the ball that has disappeared and no one cares"). Nouns can be either proximate or obviative; nouns that are central to the discourse (proximate) are declined very differently than nouns that are of marginal importance (obviative). There is also an unusual suffix (at least, unusual to me, for I had never encountered it before) that indicates whether the object specified touches the earth or is removed from the earth. And an infix which indicates whether the object is horizontal, vertical, diagonal, spiral, or invisible.  

Verbs can be singular dual, plural, paucative, or undetermined: active, passive or middle. There are five fully-formed conjugations and apparently remnants of three others that are retained from the past when the language was more fully synthetic. The most commonly used tenses are present indicative, imperfect indicative, past imperfect indicative, future indicative, future imperfect indicative, future perfect indicative, pluperfect indicative, past pluperfect indicative, future pluperfect indicative, future stative, pluperfect resultative, present optative, future optative, past imperfect optative, present subjunctive, future subjunctive, past pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect conditional subjunctive, and future pluperfect optative conditional subjunctive aorist. Curiously, there is no future imperfect subjunctive. Moreover, there are two kinds of vocatives: one when a woman addresses a man; a second when a man addresses a woman or an animal. There is also votive, a tense that was formerly used for addressing the deities in prayer, but is now reserved for tribal chiefs, heads of state or royalty. The votive is very similar to the conditional and the erroneous substitution of a conditional for a votive was formerly grounds for mutilation but nowadays leads only to acute embarrassment, or, in the case of a particularly egregious grammatical lapse, to exile.  

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

.

Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

.

Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.

The Many Uses of "Pandiculation"

I've just learned a new word that and I'm trying to figure out how to work it into the conversation. Some sample usages:

"Have you pandiculated today? How often?"

"I'm not pleased when you pandiculate at the dinner table."

"There were a bunch of kids at the museum today, and half of them were pandiculating."

"I thought that the way he pandiculated was ostentatious and rude."

"Pandiculation can be very pleasurable, especially early in the morning."

"I wasn't aware that many kinds of mammals pandiculate. You'd never see a reptile or a bird do it."

"Not only did he pandiculate during the concert, but he did it noisily."

"I think that people should at least cover their mouths when they pandiculate."

Snobbery in the Verb

Sometime during the hippie period, say the early 1970s, I  was driving the big green Dodge station wagon solo from who knows where to somewhere else, and as was my custom in those turbulent days, I picked up a hitchhiker -- a mighty scrawny young guy. He seemed to be in bad shape -- underfed and dirty. I suspected "speed." Compassionately, I offered him a piece of my sandwich. He turned me down, saying, "I don't use white bread." 

What an effective sentence! In a mere five words,  he managed to claim complete moral superiority over me. I was now dismissed as a "user" of white bread. and therefore clearly an unenlightened conformist bourgeois -- probably a rabid supporter of the carpet bombing of Cambodia. He, on the other hand, was a butterfly, free and liberated and a dissenter from the Loathed Establishment.

But I don't think I would remember this incident if it weren't for his deployment of the word "use." "Use" asserts an equivalence between two habits -- between whatever cocktail of drugs that he might be injecting or snorting or dropping, and the white bread that I was consuming. It was also implied that my addiction was the worser one. My emaciated pal was, in his own mind, doing me a favor, enlightening me about the depravity of my bread habit. 

But let me say a word in defense of the bread -- I don't "use" white bread in the sense of Silvercup or Wonder Bread -- at least not since I left Flatbush neighborhood of origin. The slices of bread in question might not have been made of steelcut handmilled wheat berries enhanced with millet and quinoa and baked in a hickory-fired furnace, but it would have been a perfectly respectable bread and one that should not have been denigrated by a skinny tie-dyed trust fund baby soon to shave his scraggly beard and rejoin his father's insurance business.

But I sure do admire his use of the verb "use."

Here's a more recent incident. On the semi-famous Boulder Mall, not long ago, a panhandler carrying a sign that said, "Anything Helps" held out his hand.  Compassionately, I gave him a quarter.  He returned it to me, announcing, "I don't take coins."

Well, everybody has to have standards. 

Once again, I've been put in my place by a verb. "I don't take coins."  

A third instance: I was in Boston and I wandered into a ragged antique store that sold old and truly ancient Chinese art. The place is a mess but I notice that the goods are museum-quality -- sculptures, mostly, but paintings and even a few bronze pieces -- Neolithic for all I know.  Way out of the range of my wallet or checkbook. Trying to appear knowledgeable, I ask the proprietor if he has any Green Fitzhugh. Peering over lunettes, he says, with aggrieved condescension, "I don't do export."  

Floored again. Put in my place by Mr. Hippie, Mr. Panhandler, and Mr. Antique Dealer -- all of them master practitioners who know how to make a simple monosyllabic verb do a heck of a lot of snobbish work. 

HMT? (How Many Today?)

For two days, I kept track of the initials that I needed to know to make sense of the world. Here they are, all familiar, no doubt: HOA,, MRI, IED, CNN, EPA, FDA, DNA, OMB, ED, NBA, COVID, GPS, AWOL, PTSD, TCM, WTF, BPL, TIA, ETA, MST. Just two days. IK that there's a part of the brain that stores nouns; I wonder if humans will evolve to develop an area to store acronyms. 

Pairings

"Kith and kin" is an excellent example of a "pairing" -- sometimes called a "coordinate pair." A pairing is a linguistic event in which two words join to produce a single meaning.

"Kith" has no independent existence nowadays and only exists as an element of the pair. "Kith and kin" means "family." Originally, back then, "kith" meant "known" and therefore signified  "friends." "Kith and kin" was "friends and relatives." No longer; now it means "family and family. "Time and tide" is another fine pairing; "tide" meant "time" centuries before it came to refer to the moony fluctuation of the seas, although its older meaning survives in "eventide," "Yuletide," and similar words. Now "time and tide" seems to evoke the inevitability of both clock and waves -- both of them joined to wait for no man. "Kit and kaboodle" is also a lovely pairing, because "kaboodle" lacks independent existence. It may derive from "boodle' -- a thief's bundle -- with the "ka" added just for the fun of it. "Dribs and drabs" is more obscure in origin and may not be a true pairing. "Dribs" is probably a variant of "drip" but "drab" was in times past not a small amount of something or other, but an untidy or unchaste woman. It's possible that "dribs and drabs," now a rather neat pairing, is better thought of as a reduplicative like mumbo-jumbo or hoity-toity. "Nook and cranny" is a pairing in which both elements survive independently; "nook" originally a corner of a room, and cranny a narrow space in which a brown recluse might hide. When someone or something grows by leaps and bounds, it's hard to tell which is the leap and which the bound. The same with "hot and bothered" -- the two words simply reinforce each other. Similarly, a person might want to "pick and choose" between alternatives, but to do so requires only one action. "Flotsam and jetsam" is an amusing pairing of uncertain origin. It is often thought that flotsam lies on the surface of the water and jetsam is thrown into it, but such a definition might be merely a folk etymology derived from the words "float" and "jettison." A "hoot and a holler" both refer to shouting, but now they mean "shouting distance." "Stuff and nonsense" is obvious, but what sort of "stuff" is nonsensical? Perhaps it's the very vagueness of "stuff" that it allows it to pair up and reinforce "nonsense."  "Alack and alas" is a weary but euphonious pair. "Wrack and ruin" becomes more transparent when it's remembered that wrack is a variant  form of wreck -- as "beck and call" becomes clearer when it is recalled that "beck" is a foreshortened version of "beckon." The cry in "hue and cry" is obvious; the hue is thought to derive from the OF verb huer (shout). 

Null and void, bag and baggage, prim and proper, vim and vigor, are self-explanatory.

Bits and pieces are sometimes called odds and ends. That's the long and the short of it. Jot and tittle have been thoroughly researched and explicated here.

Is "footloose and fancy-free" a pairing. Yes, I think so. An energetic and imaginative pairing. 

Curious New Words

In his new book on the Vikings, Neil Price uses some words that I didn't know. Some old, some new.

"Haptic" -- relating to the sense of touch. A "byre" is farmhouse in which humans live in contact with livestock. A "volute" is a spiral or scroll-like ornament. An "allodium" is land held absolutely and not subject to feudal duties or burdens. A "skald" is a Norse poet. "Theophoric" refers to words, often place names, that embed the name of a god or goddess. "Futhark" is an early or older form of the runic alphabet. A "quern" is a simple mill for grinding grain and consists of two stones, one on top of the other. A "dirham" is an Ottoman coin; the word derives from the Greek drachma. "Tephra" is fragmental material produced by volcanic eruption. A "sigil" is a symbol used in ritual magic. "Lamellar" is the adjectival form of "lamella," which is a thin flat overlapping scale, in this case used to describe a kind of leather armor. A "hydrarchy" refers to the rule of a piece of land from shipboard, and also to "a pseudogovernmental system of law between pirates at sea." "Emic," a fire-new word, describes the analysis of a culture from the perspective of a member of that culture. And my favorite (how could I not have encountered this word before?) -- an "ogonek" is a diacritical hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel. 

Sarcasm in the News

It's not often that a figure of speech makes the headlines -- as happened this week with the rhetorical term "sarcasm." At a press conference a couple of days ago, the present occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump, whose use of language is occasionally infelicitous, let fly with a giant whopper. He announced that the horrid new coronavirus could be cured by (gasp!) an injection of bleach. When his foolish advice  attracted scorn, he backtracked by claiming that his words were merely "sarcastic."

 

To put the blame on sarcasm is a transparent lie, of course, believed only by one person in the entire universe -- Trump himself -- although no doubt his brek-a-kek-keks of toadies will pretend that his analysis was pure genius.

 

But did he truly mean "sarcasm" -- a trope generally marked by a mocking tone of voice and "a sharp, bitter, cutting or caustic expression, a contemptuous gibe or taunt in which hostility is disguised as humor." Trump seems to define sarcasm rather more loosely: to him in means "I didn't say what I said yesterday and, besides, it's all the fault of the media." What a curious line of defense, and what a misuse of a rhetorical term! 

 

Besides, one should think twice before invoking sarcasm, because the term has a bad name among the psychologists, who consider it a "maladaptive coping mechanism for those with unresolved anger or frustration." There's a class of people who employ sarcasm because they have "certain forms of brain damage as a consequence of lesions in the right parahippocampal gyrus." I have no particular knowledge of Mr. Trump's parahippocampal gyrus, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken a bit of a beating these last few years.

 

Sarcasm has even been banned by Trump's great friend Kim Jong-Un. No sarcasm in North Korea -- a rare instance of a figure of speech being consigned to a firing squad.

 

Besides, Trump is already the master of a number of the tropes of traditional rhetoric. There's enellage, a sentence that ignores the usual grammatical rules and conventions; solecism and tautology, gross violations of syntax and logic; hyperbole, or exaggeration, and its less well-known cousin, adynaton, a collection or list of impossibilities; aposiopesis, the sudden end of a sentence before completion; and paraprosdokian, the unexpected truncation of a clause. But all would agree that the figure of speech that Trump deploys most regularly is prevaricatio.

Frequentatives Perplex Me

Frequentatives perplex me. Even on good days, I can't tell a frequentative from an iterative or what used to be called a present progressive or even from a simple present that expresses a continuing action, such as "he walks to work" -- in the sense that he walks every day or many days, not just once. So instead of struggling with definition and nomenclature, I'll confine these paragraphs to old-fashioned frequentatives formed in the traditional way -- by the addition of an "-er" or "-le" suffix.

"Wrestle" is a gold star, certified frequentative. The verb "wrest" means "to grab" or "to snatch. The verb "wrestle" implies that the grabbing or snatching does not occur in one unique instance, but continues over a stretch of time. Wrestle is therefore the frequentative of wrest. In the English language, such frequentatives were once upon a time regularly produced. No longer, apparently; more's the pity. Frequentative productivity has hit rock bottom.

Frequentatives in "-er" are not always obvious, inasmuch as the "-er-" suffix is also used for agency and for comparison. But frequentatives do follow a pattern: blab yields blabber; gleam yields glimmer; climb, clamber; float, flutter; put, putter; slide, slither.

"-le" frequentatives are more common and more varied. Consider the relation between "fond" and "fondle". '"Fond" meant something like "to be in love, to dote." Somewhere before its first appearance in print in 1796, fond acquired an -le to become "fondle" = caress.  (Fondle in its turn generated "fondlesome" -- a word which went from neologism to obsolete in an 18th century flash, and whose extinction is much to be regretted. Let's revive "fondlesome".) 

Here's a short list of intriguing -le frequentatives: crumb, crumble; drip, dribble; nose, nuzzle; prick, prickle; daze, dazzle; joust, jostle; prate, prattle; spark, sparkle; spit, spatter; stride, straddle; suck, suckle. Not all of these frequentatives are as obvious as wrest-wrestle and some cases must be confirmed with the help of a good etymological dictionary.

Frequentatives have a long history. Why can't they make a comeback? Take a verb such as "jump." Doesn't English need "jumple," a word that would accurately describe the deportment of my twin 4-year-old grandsons. They don't jump -- they jumple. Sometimes they leaple. Other useful suggestions: hit, hittle; throw, throwel; run, runnle; hop, hopple. Scream, scrimmle. The possibilities, obviously, are endless.

The time has come for a Frequentative Renaissance. 

"Vaulting Variable Ramps"

Let me guess that a modern reader coming upon Shakespeare's euphonious phrase "vaulting variable ramps" would be baffled as to its sense. Just WS being willfully obscure, one might complain. But it's not so; it's just that the language keeps on changing, making things difficult for audiences and readers.

The most obvious meaning  of "vaulting various ramps" -- hurdling a miscellaneous series of inclined planes, as in a steeplechase -- won't fly. "Ramps" takes us down a wrong path, because its modern meaning (a wood or concrete construction leading from one level to another) was unknown in 1611. It didn't enter the English language until 1778 -- as a borrowing from French rampe. (The entrance to a highway, as in "take the ramp on the right" is an Americanism dating only to the 1950s.)

A "ramp" is also a vegetable. It's an uncultivated, wild member of the onion family lately celebrated by fad foodies (or food faddies) as a great delicacy. But why Shakespeare would want someone to hurdle an individual ramp or even a field of ramps is less than obvious. Another false start.

Let us therefore examine the context of the phrase "vaulting variable ramps."

It occurs in Cymbeline, the most magical of Shakespeare's last plays. Nasty Iachimo ("little Iago") tries to persuade Innogen that her virtuous husband Postumus has been unfaithful -- that he has, in another splendid Shakespearean phrase, "partner'd with tomboys." The situation excites Shakespeare's exuberant pen. Iachimo embroiders "tomboys" and claims that Postumus has consorted with "with diseased ventures/ That play with all infirmities for gold/ Which rottenness can lend nature; such boil'd stuff/ As well might poison poison." Should she, that is, Innogen (and here Iachimo's rhetoric soars)

         Live, like Diana's priest, betwixt cold sheets,

         While he [Postumus] is vaulting variable ramps,

         In your despite.  

"Ramps," therefore, are the opposite of Diana's priestesses, who live chastely; they are in fact loose women. Ramps who are neither architectural nor vegetable, but sexual and promiscuous. At least, they are so in this instance, because otherwise "ramp" carried a meaning closer to "virago" -- in 1611 an overbearing woman but not necessarily an unchaste one. The word "ramp" in this signification has disappeared but has bequeathed us "rapscallion" (which was earlier spelled both "ramscallion" or "rampscallion.") There is no evidence to support the easy inference that rapscallion combines "ramp" and "scallion."

"Vaulting variable ramps" means "to engage in a series of athletic sexual encounters." 

To vault into a lover's bed might seem to border on the comic but I don't think that it does so in this case. Shakespeare elsewhere seems to imagine intercourse as a vigorous event. A brothel is in his language a "leaping house." And surely it's not comic when Juliet hopes that Romeo will "leap to [her] arms."

The conception behind "vault" and "leap" reappears in the contemporary demotic phrase "jump his/her bones."

Ramps:

• 

   

 

 

 

 

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

Old Words New to Me

A "col" is the lowest point of a ridge between two peaks; a "barmkin" or "barnekin" is a walled courtyard; a "carr" is a fen or wetland overgrown with trees;  a "bauchling" (mostly Scots) is a reproaching or taunting in order to dare an adversary to fight; a "bastle" is a fortified farmhouse; a "cantref" (plural "cantrefi") was a medieval Welsh division or hundred of land; a "skurr" is a shed; a "warble" is a lookout mountain; a "garth" is a dike of sand and pebbles devised to catch fish; a "pele" tower is a small fortified keep or tower, such as this one: 

A "dubb" is a deep hole in a bog; a "pune" is a quasi-legal reprisal short of revenge; a "terret" is a a metal loop on a harness, guiding the reins and preventing snags. Here's a 1st century Romano-British enamel terret:

All of these beauties come from Graham Robb's The Debatable Land (2018), an exploration of the land that lay between the ancient Damnonii, Selgovae, and Votadini and remained a territory disputed by England and Scotland into early modern times.

Nomenclature

If a widow and a widower form a relationship when they're both in their seventies, what is the proper and appropriate name for their relationship?

Legally, they're married, because here in the state of Colorado, if you live together and represent yourself as married, you're married, even if you haven't sought governmental sanction. Yet "husband" and "wife" don't come easily to the lips. They seem too doggone official. And they also seem like words out of an earlier era, especially "wife," which carries irrelevant overtones of a dominant-submissive relationship. "Just a housewife."

But "companion" is only slightly better. To my ear, it smacks of "faithful companion Tonto." "Partner" is even worse; are we associates in a law firm? 

"Girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are clearly ludicrous and inappropriate to persons of mature years. Such words lack seriousness and heft; they trivialize a weighty relationship. So, similarly, does the naked "friend," which in this context is colorless, neutral. "Ladyfriend" is a bit more serious. "Gentleman caller" was last said without irony in Peoria sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century. "Mistress" suggests that the friendship is merely sexual; its counterpart, "gigolo," is even more specific, and seedy to boot. "Lover" is also one-dimensional. 

"Old lady" and "old man" are outmoded hippieisms. So is "significant other." Other archaisms: "main squeeze," "stud," "pal," "steady lay," "fancy man."  "Love-slave." 

"Spouse"? No, too dry, too legalistic. "Consort"?  Disrespectful. "Odalisque"? "Handmaiden." Sexist. "Concubine?" 

It's fascinating that we've had more trouble with nomenclature than with living, eating, working, and sleeping together.

Words of my Life: "Worship"

There are some words which one might read, study, and parse the dictionary definition and yet still not understand -- words for which one has no intuitive or even rational conception. For example, there's the word "heaven." I know that "heaven" can mean "sky," a definition that poses no problem, but when "heaven" is presumed to refer to a place beyond the sky in which the souls of dead people are eternally rewarded, then I'm absolutely baffled. My brain empties out. "Heaven" in such a sense is to me incomprehensible and meaningless nonsense.

Another such word is "worship," a word which has always puzzled me, right from the start, when the church bells of St Rose of Lima would ring on a Sunday morning to call parishioners to mass, leaving me and my brothers to play stickball or punchball all by ourselves. I recognize that "worship" is a word to which communities of English speakers give assent, and I observe that people attend temples, mosques, and tabernacles to perform certain activities, such as kneeling, genuflecting, singing hymns and uttering hosannas. Nevertheless, I can't agree that such activities equal "worship" -- because "worship" presupposes that there is a entity to which these activities are directed. And that entity, like "heaven" in the religious sense, doesn't exist. Just as heaven is a non-existent place, so worship posits a non-existent entity. And therefore the word "worship" has no intelligible meaning, to me.

Perhaps I lack what Charlotte Bronte called an "organ of veneration." Or, alternatively, worshipers are engaged in mass delusion. 

On the other hand, I have an excellent grasp of the word "awe." In fact, I am a great practitioner of awe. I'm regularly "awed" by both the achievements of my fellow beings in art, architecture, music, literature, mathematics and science, and also by the majesty of nature, in the form of grand canyons and in the triumphs of evolution. Moreover, I've felt "awe," in cathedrals and once, in the Church of the Rock in Helsinki -- a magnificent building that melds human ingenuity with natural beauty, -- overwhelming, transcendent awe.  And I can understand that for some people what I identify as "awe" might translate into "worship."  But again, not me. Though I'm awed by Rembrandt and Bach, but I don't worship them or their works.  I'll stick with awe.

I may lack an "organ of veneration," but I have a highly developed organ of wonderment.

Update on "worship."  For the first time in my life, a few weeks ago, I attended a religious service. I was in New Orleans and friends suggested that I join them at Vespers at Trinity Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue. The attraction was Ellis Marsalis, who was to play a few notes for the attendees. A priest or whatever he's called, said a few words, read a prayer, and then elderly, frail Mr. Marsalis sat down at the piano and improvised for a few minutes. It was beautiful and perhaps transcendent. I suppose it was a form of worship. And it didn't hurt a bit. 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Some English Words Incorporated into Contemporary Italian

Italian has the ability to swallow English words whole, not even bothering to Italianize them. Here are a few examples drawn from a 2016 novel by Stefano Benni.

"Freezer," as in diventa rigido come un peluche lasciato nel freezer." ("It became stiff like a stuffed animal left in the freezer.")  "I cornflakes," incorporated as a plural noun. "Ha occhiali rossi da rockstar."  ("He had the red eyeglasses of a rockstar.") "Un overdose."  "La soap opera," entering Italian as a feminine singular noun, no doubt because of the "a" ending of "opera."  "Un popcorn."  "Compriamo un gadget" ("We are buying a gadget.") "Sembra un clown in pensione." ("He seemed like a retired clown"). Gli zoom fotografici." "La mia partner."  "Il controllare piu sexy del mondo." ("The world's sexiest conductor.")  "Ha iniziato con multi okay". ("He started with many okays.) "Jukebox d'epoca." "Old-fashioned (classic) jukebox."  "La famiglia era in relax." ("The family was relaxed)."

Ecc.

Geological Words New to Me

Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years  -- and are novel to me. So "graywacke" --a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" -- a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter"  -- a crust of calcium carbonate; "molfette" -- a vent emitting gases such as carbon dioxide; "coquina" -- a cemented mass of debris of shells; "clint" -- a sharp ridge; "grike" -- a fissure or crack opened by dissolving limestone; "knickpoint" -- a sharp step, up or down, in a river; "gour" -- a calcite ridge formed when water rich in carbonate flows over an irregular surface; "drumlin" -- an isolated mountain; "nunatak" -- a projecting peak in land otherwise covered by ice;  "firn"-- a mass of ice pellets compacted by the weight of snow above;  "cwm" -- a steep rock basin;  "col" -- a narrow pass; "esker" -- a winding ridge formed by retreating glaciers; "pingo" -- a cone, dome  or hump caused when freezing water expands beneath the permafrost and pushes up the earth; "yardang" -- parallel ridges of hard rock.

I'm not convinced that I could recognize any of these phenomena of my own accord. I'd probably need a professional geologist or guide. But the words themselves sure are magnificent.  And this is just a small sample of the wordhoard. 

All You Need to Know about Antres

"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."

Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.

The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."  

"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.

As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.      

Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."   

"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.           

         I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery;  of my redemption thence,

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes?  Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals?  Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of  pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.   

Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."

Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."

If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca.  But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast." 

Do the Dodgers Have an Outfielder Named Bacchus Pederson?

Judging from his spectacularly wonderful name you might guess that Bacchus Pederson is either a character in a novel by Thomas Pynchon or the son of a Swedish father and a patriotic Greek mother. Not so. He's the creation not of eccentric parents or postmodern fiction the but of the voice recognition system that's been close-captioning that 2017 Dodgers-Astros World Series. He's an imaginary being. He does not exist. Except on the TV screen.

There is, however, a up-and-coming not-Greek-but-Jewish on-his-mother's-side left hand hitting center fielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Joc Pederson. And what is the relationship between Joc and Bacchus, you ask?

The other day (and the following morning because the game went on roughly forever), I watched the epic 13-12 Houston win over the Dodgers. A most exciting game. There was bad umpiring by the home plate official, there were balls flying out of the bandbox and onto the short porches, there was some beautiful defensive plays and some costly mental errors. See-saw, back and forth.

And yet more. Inasmuch as my veteran ears are past their prime and over the hill, I now supplement my hearing with "close captioning." I try to catch what Joe Buck and John Smoltz say and then watch as their words, or some approximation of their words, flashes across the screen. It's an activity that is almost as fascinating and much more amusing than the game itself. And it is out of this experience that the fanciful mythological figure of Bacchus Pederson emerges. Smoltz says "a fly ball to center and back goes Pederson." CC writes "a fly ball to center and Bacchus Pederson." No human being would translate "back goes" into "Bacchus". It's nonsensical and not even decent English grammar. t's got to be a machine, an idiot savant machine, that, stumped by "back goes," has located "Bacchus" in its word hoard. 

And similarly, what is an "Amana board?"  Something wooden manufactured in the Amana colonies in Iowa, you might guess. No, it's CC for "a man aboard." 

CC produces all sorts of comic linguistic wonders because it's utterly untethered to common sense. 

When John Smoltz, a human being who knows all there is to know about pitching, said that the left-hander was going to try to "bury it in the back foot," knowledgeable baseball fans would understand exactly what was meant. The lefty intended to throw an unhittable pitch by coming as close as possible to the left-handed batter's left foot. However, readers would have to be mighty clever to interpret the meaningless wild CC phrase "Marriott in the back foot."  

Other electronic locutions were easier. Not much of problem with "hit it into the upper tank" or "rubbing him of a double" or "sacrifice bump" or "Taylor will eat it off."

Some CC flights of fancy require a little more interpretive skill. Will the Dodger manager replace his pitcher with "a fresher god?" Perhaps a "fresher guy." Did the pitching staff "hand out seven rocks?" Seven walks is more likely. Do the Dodgers have a right fielder named Yossi el Pogue?  No, but they do have Yasiel Puig. Was a reliever taken out after "a short student?" Naw, it was a short stint. Did a pitch come "in her half" of the plate?  Who is "her"?  But no, it was "inner half." Is it possible that a batter "applied to center?"  No but he might very well have "flied to center."

Here's one that is Impossible to comprehend: "Turner headset hard." I had to rewind and listen again: "Turner hits it hard." 

Sometimes CC sounds vaguely spiritual. "Flies want to center," says CC. Do they really, I ask. But what Joe Buck said was "flies one to center." 

My favorites, aside from the immortal Bacchus Pederson, are errors that make no sense at all. What does it mean to say that a pitcher is a "shortest writer." And that he "threw his lighter."  The correct locutions: he was a "short strider" who "threw his slider." 

Voice recognition systems are technological marvels, no doubt. But they have a way to go. There's still a place at the table for humans. 

"Enough is as Good as a Feast" or Possibly Better

"Enough is as good as a feast" has become my favorite proverb. Obviously, it's a warning against consumerism, materialism, the excesses of capitalist acquisitiveness. Water in a jelly glass, it says, is as good as wine in crystal. As they used to gloss the proverb, no "avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds."

 

But for a fully "mature" guy like me, the proverb carries not only a figurative but a literal warning, i.e., don't eat too much. Enough is as good as a feast if a feast makes your stomach hurt, makes you heavy-lidded and passive, and if you feel a heck of a lot better when you stop eating before you reach satiety.

 

I can remember, as an adolescent, eating three large, overstuffed hamburgers, the roll overflowing with tomatoes, onions, relish, ketchup, etc. Along with a bottomless bowl of fries. And craving more. Then as a young man, a good portion was two hamburgers. Nowadays, I take a half or split one with a friend. Hold the fries.

 

When my grandmother prepared those glorious blintzes of my youth, eight was my number. Now my number is -- one. And I feel the better for it.

 

Digestion is slower and, I suppose, less efficient. And then there's the embarrassing fact that hamburgers and blintzes and everything else goes right to the enlarged belly, the "front porch."

 

So here's a proverb for this latter age: "enough is better than a feast." Much. 

 

By the way, I first encountered the proverb, believe it or not, as the title to William Wager's 1581 morality play of the same name. And then in Latin in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, where, Sir Nathaniel and the pedant Holofernes come on stage having just completed, ahem, dinner. "Holofernes:  'Satis quod sufficit.'" Perhaps Holofernes paraphrases and simplifies Horace:   

 

Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.
Bene est, cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est manu.

 

(Those who seek for much are left in want of much. Happy is he to whom God has given, with sparing hand, as much as is enough.)