Dr. Metablog

"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 a 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 Imogen that her virtuous husband Posthumus 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 Posthumus 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, Imogen (and here Iachimo's rhetoric soars)

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

         While he [Posthumus] 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" 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 hoped that Romeo will "leap to [her] arms."

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

Ramps:

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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 a 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 lowercase "i" or lowercase "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 for 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 equals "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 deluded. 

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 joined them at Vespers at Trinity Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue. The attraction was Ellis Marsalis, who was 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. It didn't hurt a bit. 

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 the novel 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, is flashed onto 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. It'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 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 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.) 

Greek and Latin Basketballese

Now that we've at last come to the NBA playoffs and are heading toward another Warriors-Cavaliers showdown, it's fitting that we reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range.

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. 

Curiously, roundball jargon exhibits a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, simply "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. It used to be that a guard played on the "outside" and a center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players. A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates." Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block an opponent's shot, they "reject" it. In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary signification, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice, but not so in the language of basketball. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate." "Rotate," derived from "rota," the Latin word for wheel, properly means "to turn on an axis, to spin." A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting would not be an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical upgrade for switch would be "revolve.") Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' floppy bloomers. Just last night I heard a TV announcer declare that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality." (I suppose that if he fell to the floor he would have lots of "horizontality"). Players don't score; they "convert," as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert." They don't push an opponent out of the way;  no, no, no, -- they create space (Latin: creant spatium). Although I am not a physicist, I suspect that space is something like matter, and can therefore neither be created nor destroyed. At least not created by power forwards, however potent they may be. How silly of me to object; neither the laws of physics nor the usual constraints of language are binding on punditor basketballensis. OK, game's on; let's see how well they play -- oops, sorry, how well they execute.   

Beffa

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 advanced septuagenarian 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 like 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. 

For a greater challenge, I've begun to study a little Beffa. Beffa is a Kartvelian language with admixtures of Cascagian, Tolossan, Kabardian 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 have a Beffa-speaking dinner with Ismail and his wife Soraya and their three young children. I've also been to some Beffan parties and dances. I sometimes feel odd-man-out but it's been fun. The Beffan community has been very welcoming to an outsider. 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 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 the threat "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 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 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, or spiral.  

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").

For some reason I can't find a good illustration of Beffan typography, but it's similar to Georgian. Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine."

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.

Chalaza

If you asked me to guess what the word "chalaza" means, I'd say, from its sound, that it would have to be an odd cactus-y looking plant that grows only in the Atacama desert and flowers once a decade, or an extinct language formerly spoken in the southern Caucasus mountains, or perhaps some sort of Levantine breadstick. It's an strange exotic word. But if then I told you that you've seen thousands, perhaps many thousands of chalazas (or chalazae) with your own eyes, and eaten as many, you'd be perplexed, even startled. Because you have eaten them.

Anyone who's cracked an egg has noticed two ropey white bands that extend from the yolk and are rooted in the transparent albumen.  

Here's some more information about chalazae which I quote from Tim Birkhead's The Most Perfect Thing (2016), a detailed and most enthusiastic book all about eggs.  "The role of the chalazae is to suspend the yolk within the albumen.... One end of each chalaza is attached to the ovum itself... and the other is firmly lodged in the layer of dense viscous albumen, which itself is attached to the shell membranes at the pointed and blunt ends of the egg. The chalazae allow the yolk to rotate when the egg is turned so that the embryo always remains on top of the yolk and within the inner liquid albumen layers. This self-righting ability is [necessary] because the embryo develops on the least dense side of the yolk. Keeping the embryo uppermost ensures that it is always closest to the parent's brood patch for maximum warmth, but also closest to the inner surface of the shell for maximum access to oxygen."

No chalazae, no chicks.

I'm astonished that although I have scrambled thousands of eggs, and certainly noticed the "ropey strands," I never gave them the slightest thought. How incurious of me! 

Birkhead's book is a revelation. He is the egg man of our times. Occasionally he gets so carried away with his joy in the egg that he veers into unconscious comedy. I adore the phrase, "a renaissance in the study of eggshell pigmentation."  Or, "guillemots are not quite unique in incubating shit-covered eggs."  Or, "tinamous lay the most extraordinary and beautiful eggs."  Or, "there is something sensual about eggs."

About the word chalaza: it's from the Greek meaning "small knot." Nor is it new: it entered the language (in Latinized form) in 1704.

Some practical information: the more prominent the chalazae, the fresher the egg.

News from my Brain

The twins and their older brother came to visit and were playing their favorite new game, "hide the goose." The goose?  a two foot tall hollow plastic replica perhaps originally a lawn ornament, now an excellent child's toy. Easy to find. After the hiding game had gone on long enough, and was just starting to become a trifle rambunctious, I tried to signal to my fellow student of Italian that the time had come for the goose to retire for the day -- but try as I might, I couldn't come up with a translation for the word goose. Later, after the lads had left, I looked in the Italian dictionary for "goose." Oca, it said. A strange, unanticipated word.  

I tried to recall the Latin word for goose. Nothing. But after several hours (and here comes the point of the story) a word suddenly floated to the surface -- anser. Let me tell you now, fans of Dr. Metablog, that I was exceedingly proud of myself. Fifty-five years or so after my last course in Latin, out popped anser. Self-celebration knew no bounds.

After I had stopped crowing about my triumph, I started to marvel at the brain -- not just my brain, but any brain. In what corner of the brain, in what concatenation of synapses, had the word anser been lurking lo these many decades. And what sort of ingenious search program needed only a few hours to ferret it out?  Glaciers have melted, rivers have changed their course, and yet anser remained unchanged, permanently embedded somewhere in my brain. It's kind of miraculous, isn't it?

So how did Italian acquire oca rather than a word descended from anser. Why not *asse, for example. My dictionary of classical Latin offers no alternative to anser, but the Italian etymological dictionary explains that the late Latin word for goose was auca, derived from a diminutive aucellus of avis (bird) and it cites as cognates old French oue and Occitan auca. No doubt demotic auca replaced the "book word" anser sometime in late antiquity.  

The result of this investigation:  next time, I will be able to say, with great authority, "nascondi l'oca."

Sciascian Geography

Years ago, I read, in translation of course, a few of Leonardo Sciascia's Sicilian mysteries. Excellent books: The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta -- 1961)), Equal Danger (Uguale pericolo --1973), The Challenge (Il contesto--1971). Last week I tried to read one of Sciascia's short stories in its native Italian. A good idea, but quite a struggle. Too taxing for my present fluency. Sciascia's vocabulary is enormous, mine is puny. Not to mention Sicilian expressions that would be stumpers and require footnoting even for mainland Italians.

The story I tackled is Il lungo viaggio, (The Long Voyage). Some impoverished Sicilian peasants pay a man whom we would call a coyote to smuggle them into America; he takes their entire savings, takes them on board his ship, and then after ten excruciating days sets them right back down in Sicily. A sad tale of exploitation, not, alas, irrelevant today. 

Sciascian geography: the Sicilians think they are headed for the middle Atlantic coast of North America, where they will find Nugioirsi, Nuovaiorche, and my very favorite, Brucchilin.

A Few Curious Italian Plurals

On the whole, Italian is a mighty regular language. Of course it has its irregularities, but many fewer than, say, English. Plurals, for example, are largely predictable, but with some curious exceptions. The masculine noun bue (ox or sometimes, by extension, a dolt) seems to call for the plural form *bui, but it's not so; it's buoi. Dio (god), becomes dei rather than *dii. The very ordinary word uomo (man), yields the extraordinary plural uomini -- which is strange indeed except to oldsters who remember homo, hominis from their high school Latin class. The word for wing is ala and, if Italian were law-abiding, its plural should be *ale but instead it's ali. Similarly, arma should yield *arme, but doesn't; it's armi. Eco has the plural echi, which seems normal, except that the singular is feminine and the plural masculine, so la eco but gli echi. Some words, conversely, have masculine singulars but feminine plurals: most notably, uovo (egg) which becomes uova rather than *uovi, while dito (finger) becomes the odd masculine dita. Paio (pair) is similar; its plural is paia. Il riso (a laugh) has the plural le risa. There's the same gender switch with the truly curious word for ear -- orrechio becomes orecchie. There are a few words with two slightly different plural forms, many of them words for parts of the body, such as braccio (arm) which can become bracci or braccia;  ciglio (eyebrow) , which has plurals in cigli and ciglia;  ginocchio (knee) which can be either ginocchi or ginocchia, and osso (bone) which can be ossi or ossa.  I'm fond of muro (wall) the regular plural of which is muri (the walls of a house) but also yields the irregular plural mura, which refers to the fortifications or walls of a city. 

Fango

I'm marvelously fond of the Italian word "fango," which translates into English as "mud." "Fango" is expressive of the matter which it describes. To my ear, the word fango sounds slimy and disreputable, perhaps even repulsive, while its English counterpart "mud" is bland and lacks character. And "fangoso" is so much more dramatic than "muddy."  But why fango?  How did fango infiltrate the Italian language? The Latin word for mud is "lutum," which would naturally yield Italian "luto", which, as it happens, is a word that does exist, but, so far, one that I've encountered only in dictionaries. Fango it is, and gladly. Let us revel in fango. 

Fango, according to my bank of etymological resources, appears to be of Germanic origin and a distant cousin to the English word "fen," "a low land covered in whole or part by water." Lots of fango in that there fen, obviously. There's also a rare (my dictionary says 'poetical') French word "fange," for mud, but the more common word is boue. Boue is one of a handful of French words (other than toponyms) that are of Gaulish origin. So that when it came to mud, both the Italian and French languages adopted indigenous rather than Latin words. And for good reason: if there's any substance that is common rather than learned, it's mud.  

"Fango" bears no relation to English "fang." Fang is an oversized tooth, but not in its earliest appearances. Old English fang denoted plunder or booty, "a seizing or taking." The root meaning of grasp or capture is present in the name of Good Master Fang, an ineffectual officer of the law in Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. Yet fang as unquestionably tooth or toothy in Duke Senior's metaphor in As You Like it, where "the icy fang/ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,... bites and blows upon my body."

Even More New Words

Carinate, which sounds vaguely dental, actually describes the shape of a particular kind of ceramic or metal vessel. An object which has a rounded base and inward sloping sides is "carinated." Hypogea, which is drawn directly from Greek under (hypo) and earth (gaia) means, obviously, underground, but in the world of archaeology generally refers to an underground temple or tomb. Catacombs and crypts, therefore, are both hypogea. A megaron was the great hall of a Grecian palace but archaeologists use the word to describe the large entrance room of any substantial structure. An exedra is a semicircular recess set into a building's facade. It think of it, perhaps incorrectly, as a half of a rotunda. A plinth is the base or platform on which a column or statue rests. Ashlar is finely dressed stones, generally in the shape of a cube or a rectangular solid. Ashlar construction is therefore different from rubble masonry, in which walls are made of irregularly shaped or found stones. A tophet is a burial place for children either sacrificed or dead of natural causes; it's a word of Hebrew origin and recalls the valley near Jerusalem n which ancient Canaanites sacrificed children to Moloch or Baal. I'm embarrassed that I apparently never encountered the word annona, which characterizes the grain supply of the city of Rome in ancient times.  Annona, the common noun, is also personified or deified as "a theophany of the emperor's power to care for his people through the provision of staples." Annona, the goddess, is sometimes assimilated to her compatriot Ceres. Acephalous" means headless, and describes "clerics not under a bishop" or lines of verse missing a first foot. In archaeology, it's a decapitated statue. A cist is simply a stone-lined grave or shaft.

These splendid words are drawn from Shepherds, Sailors & Conquerors, Archaeology and History in Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages by Stephen Dyson and Robert Rowland, 2007, which I read with great care, enjoying especially the middle chapters on Sardinia's fascinating nurghagic civilizations.  

Orts

"Orts" is a rare but tasty word. Orts are the bits of bones, gristle, stems, skins, pits and other inedibles that are left on the plate after one finishes eating -- the stuff that is scraped directly into the garbage can. Orts are to be distinguished from "leftovers" which are the uneaten remains of the meal that are carefully sequestered for tomorrow's breakfast. Leftovers good, orts bad.

Shakespeare uses "orts" twice in the plays, both times metaphorically. The first instance is in Julius Caesar, when Anthony tells Octavius how little he values his colleague Lepidus. According to Anthony, Lepidus is "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds/ On abjects, orts and imitations." In this instance, orts seems to be prompted by the word "feed." A second appearance of orts is in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus has discovered that his beloved Cressida has been playing at fast and loose with Diomedes: "The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolved, and loosed/ And with another knot, five-finger-tied,/ The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,/ The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics/ Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed." It's a strong speech and "orts of her love" is a powerful phrase, though rather obscure nowadays to audiences for whom the "ort" is a mystery, which is certainly all audiences.

Whether Shakespeare's first audiences would have required a footnote for orts I do not know. It was never a frequently used word, though the OED attests its presence in the language from 1440 to 1880. I don't know of any recent usages, but once, when I was at lunch with a group of professional Shakespeareans, I asked at the close of the meal, "What do we do with the orts" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant. Rather a specialized audience, however.

Orts should not be confused with Oorts. The Oort cloud is the presumed boundary of the solar system, way out there, ten times further than Neptune, where the comets are thought to reside until they are dislodged from their proper home and come hurtling toward the inner planets. Orts and Oorts are both leftovers, in the sense that they are the remains of an original creation, in the one case chicken pot pie and in the other the universe. Orts are much smaller but more palpable than Oorts. Makes a guy wonder what could possibly be denoted by ooorts. Or oooorts.

Squirmish

Sarah Palin, wordsmith, famous for her portmanteau "refudiate" (a blend of refute and repudiate) has struck again with "squirmish," a coinage which amalgamates "squirm" and "skirmish."  Here's the relevant sentence:

"Those are legitimate questions on both sides of the aisle, and another big question that has to be asked is 'Are we at war?' I haven't heard the president say that we are at war, and that's why I, too, am not knowing: Do we use the term 'intervention'? Do we use 'war'? Do we use 'squirmish'? What is it?"

What, indeed?

I cherish the irony that the Governor is concerned with precision in language and is troubled that our military actions in Libya lack proper definition.

I myself, an admirer of "squirmish," am puzzled by her use of the present progressive "I am not knowing" where a native speaker of English would say, "I do not know."  Is it an alaskanism with which I'm not familiar?  Did they neglect to teach the present progressive at the University of Idaho, where Ms. Palin earned her degree in Communication? Or is she perhaps an imperfectly-trained foreign agent smuggled into the country by the Stasi or the KGB with the mission of undermining the American polity?

Moreover, it is wonderful out of all hooping that "palin" means "backward" in Greek.  As "trump" means "deceive" in French.

Boobs

When I was a boy, a boob was simpleton, a nimcompoop, what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The Three Boobs. There were other related uses of the word;  "booby hatch" -- a semi-humorous appellation for what used to be called an insane asylum, and also the "boob-tube"-- though whether the boob in that doublet denoted the machine itself or the schmendricks who stare at it was never clear to me. But at some point in my linguistic career the word "boob" re-emerged with a new primary signification. It now seems to have become the most common word for the female breast.

I do not like it when a breast is called a boob. It is disrespectful. A breast is soft and nurturing but also erotic and enticing. A boob is neither; it is a denatured object, stripped of its warm associations and joined instead to foolishness and boobery. "Boob" is a deliberately unsexual and undignified term. It is also, as Shakespeare says in a different context, "base, vulgar and popular."

And available. If a person should happen to google the word "boob," perhaps searching for information of an etymological kind, the first, second, third and perhaps hundredth entries that he or she will encounter are for "boob selfies." A "boob selfie," for readers equally as naïve as me, is a photograph which a woman takes of her boobs and posts on the internet. Jane Austen did not do this. Neither did George Eliot. I can't demonstrate that the word "boob' is responsible for such a decadent display of immodesty, but I do note that "breast selfies" or "bosom selfies" are both inconceivable. 

Nor did suicidal Cleopatra say, when bringing the venomous asp to her breast, say "Peace, peace/ Dost thou not see my baby at my boob/ That sucks the nurse asleep."

Sleepers

In the catchment area of P. S. 217, as indeed in my home territory of darkest Flatbush, there was very little immigration or emigration. People stayed put, for the most part, and the students with whom you entered kindergarten were the ones who were likely to graduate with you at the end of eighth grade.

I can think of two outsiders who came not from a near neighborhood but from the rumored "outside world." One was Beryl McLeod, who arrived from Scotland, stayed long enough to engender in me a most powerful and confusing pre-adolescent crush, and then disappeared. Lovely Beryl spoke with a most exotic and enchanting accent, Glaswegian if I remember correctly. And then there was Alan Dean, who dropped in for a year or two from western Pennsylvania. He was a diminutive tough boy, not very bright but competitive on the punch ball field. He also spoke in an dialect unfamiliar to me and which I now judge to have been country or Appalachian. One day in Miss Finsmith's crowded stuffy fifth-grade classroom we pupils were asked to elucidate a picture that the teacher had displayed.  It was a of a young lad with a candle in his hand. I recall very clearly a sentence of Alan Dean's:  "you can see that it's nighttime because he's wearing his sleepers."

Alan Dean's "sleepers" made a lifetime impression on me, not only because I had never heard that specific term before, but because I wasn't until that moment aware of dialectical differences in vocabulary. I knew about soda but I had never heard of tonic;  I knew about pancakes but had never heard of griddlecakes or flapjacks, and I wore sneakers all day every day but knew nothing of tennis shoes or tennies -- not to mention plimsolls. I was not only monolingual but monodialectical, if there be such a word. For someone to employ  the word "sleepers" for an item of clothing that I knew only as "pajamas" was therefore a transformational experience.

And a very sensible word, at that. Much to be preferred to other deplorable dialectal terms for pajamas, as for example the twee diminutive "jammies," or worse, the lazy "pj's" (not doubt employed by the sort of people who would call orange juice, O.J.), or even worser, the infantile reduplicative "jim-jams." 

So I was on the alert the next time that 'sleepers" swam into my imaginative ken, which was when I first became acquainted with John Donne's clever little love poem, "The Good Morrow," in which the poet claims that until he fell in love, he was immature, unconscious: 

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

Who the heck, I wondered, were these "seven sleepers?" Not, in fact, a wardrobeful of pajamas nor (my first guess) a parody of the famous 'nine worthies" of chivalry?  But no, inasmuch as Donne habitually and regularly conflated religion and sex, he knew that the seven sleepers were a group of enthusiastic early Christian converts who were  imprisoned for their faith in a cave near Ephesus, fell into miraculous sleep, and then woke up two centuries later to discover to their delight that their city had adopted and institutionalized their religion. Rips van Winkle of miraculous devotion.  

Of other religious or literary sleepers the surely the most prominent are Thoreau's. In a poignant passage about railroads in Walden, Thoreau recalls that "sleepers" is the demotic names for the wooden ties on which the steel rails are laid. From this suggestive bit of nomenclature, Thoreau elaborates a conceit about the way the new industrialism favors some and crushes others. "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?  Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.” So "sleepers" live on.

I have never heard this sense of "sleepers" in conversation, but then, I don't talk about railroad-making all that much.  Nevertheless, it is not difficulty to endorse the continued pertinence of Thoreau's witty comparison. 

No doubt my regular metablogian readership has been waiting patiently for me to mention that the "sleeper" is the first and easiest trick learned by beginners with the yo-yo. At least, such was the case in the 1950s P. S. 217 schoolyard.  And a spy in a "sleeper cell."  And a dark horse. Surprise.  A film;  in fact, many films.

A lifetime of many and various "sleepers."

September 21, 2015.  Let me add that Sleepers are plentiful in the old West Bradford cemetery, they being one of the first families to colonize the part of Vermont where now I am writing this paragraph.  A quaker Sleeper disrupted a church service in the 1790s, shouting at the congregrational minister, 'Sir, you preach false doctrine."  There's a Sleeper farm right at the end of South Road, just over the line into Corinth.  Never met them, don't know if their family religious enthusiasms have persisted.

Juliet 1595-2015

Juliet 1595:  "My bounty is as boundless as the sea/ My love as deep. The more I give to thee,/ The more I have, for both are infinite."

Juliet 2015:  "My bounty is as epic as the sea,/  My love as cool.  The more I give to you,/ The more I have, for both are awesome."

My Favorite Suffix

Not just my own, but surely every thinking person's favorite word-forming element is "--some," perhaps because It appears in so many cheerful formulations. If you experience a sudden, overpowering urge to transform noun to then  "--some's" the way to go. 

Imagine yourself, for instance, writing a novel and searching for the words to describe your ingénue heroine. She's not just "handsome" and "wholesome" but also "blithesome," "lissome," "winsome" "toothsome," "cuddlesome" and perhaps even "frolicsome."  Could you find a better word? Well, maybe. Perhaps "buxom?" 

Most of these words are of obvious origin but a few are on the obscure side. "Winsome," one of the language's most delightful (or delightsome) adjectives, derives from the now defunct "wynn," meaning "joy". It's a word that apparently hid out in illiterate northern English dialect for a couple of centuries before it was resuscitated, to everyone's advantage, by Burns and Scott. "Lissome," which now means supple or graceful, comes from the old English "lithe" meaning mild, gentle, or meek. "Buxom" is drawn from a stem meaning "bow" and for most of the existence of the English language signified "compliant" or "obliging." "Buxom" began to connote zaftigity only during the middle of the last century. Here's the very best use of "buxom" in its long history.  It's by John Milton -- the young Milton, not yet the epic Milton.

The frolic wind that breathes the spring,

Zephyr, with Aurora playing,

As he met her once a-Maying,

There on beds of violets blue,

And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew,

Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair,

So buxom, blithe, and debonair.

 

Candor compels us to admit that not all "-some" words are quite so bonny. There's also a "--some" underside: "irksome," "loathsome," "gruesome," "meddlesome," "fearsome," "noisome" (which now means "foul-smelling and is related to "annoy"), bothersome. Good mouth-filling words to describe the villain of the piece.

And then there's "fulsome" which for the longest time meant what it seems to mean, then latterly acquired the learned connotation "odious," which it is now in the process of shedding.  And "awesome" which has deteriorated from "filled with awe" to meaning "cool" -- and has become a favorite adjective of praise to an entire cohort or generation of the vocabularially deprived.

No one can say, "unbuxom" or "unblithesome."  Yet we regularly say "unwholesome."

For the record, the "--some" in "threesome" is an entire different "--some,"  as is the "--some" in "chromosome."

"Man" Is Now an Adjective and not a Good One.

I believe that I first heard "man" used as an adjective in the phrase "man cave" -- which is, I believe, a place where guys go to isolate themselves from their wimmen and famly and where they watch boxing on the TV, drink a lot of beer, and puke on the shag rug. But recently I learned about the "man stand." "To do the man stand" is when the husband waits at the door of the dress shop clutching a bundle of packages while the old ball and chain decides between the 10 and the 12 and between the gray one and the green. Sometimes a manstander parks his carcass in a designated "man chair." And now there's a new one:  the "man spread", which describes the way a crude young guy with below-the-waist pants sits in the subway, legs akimbo, indifferent to the gentle ladies and to the tired old geezers who need to relax far more than he does.

"Man boobs," which are nothing more than unsightly fat, are sometimes abbreviated to "moobs."  "Manparts" requires no elucidation.

In each of these cases, "man" is not used affectionately or admiringly. "Man," as an adjective, is anything but "manly." "Man" is primitive and insensitive, an adjective of derogation and denigration. 

January 4:  My great penpalessa, SF, writes that in England the phrase "man flu" has now become popular.  A "man flu" is merely a cold that men (such babies they are!!) make a fuss about.  

Like

Waiting for the train at the White River Junction railroad station, I met a young lady, a graduate student at Dartmouth. We engaged in a brief conversation. I asked about her ambition and plans. She said, "I want to be, like, a college professor." Like yikes. Like double yikes. 

Fuffa -- Fluff

Fuffa is a "cosa inutile, ciarpame" [a useless thing, trash] according to Federico Roncoroni in Sillabario della Memoria (Milano, 2010).  It's a dialectical (probably Milanese) word not found in most Italian dictionaries. Roncoroni tells us that his aunt Evelina called the tiny balls of material that sometimes form on the surface of socks "fuffa."  She likened them to "furuncoli" [pimples]. The etymology of fuffa is obscure. Roncoroni proposes that it might be merely onomatopoeic, related to English fluff which signifies, as he says, "lanugine o peluria" [fuzz or nap]. But fluff, fuzzy stuff in English, derives from Latin vellus [fleece] or "villus" [hair].  It's most commonly used as a verb ("to fluff a pillow'). In theatrical jargon, a person can fluff or flub his lines. Fluff is also a horrid marshmallow-like confection that appeared in my childhood (though it dates to the 1920) and put me off sweets for years. As far as I can tell, the meaning "a light woman" as in "a bit of fluff" is not present in the Italian "fuffa." I doubt whether "fuffa" and "fluff" are linked, unless "fuffa" also descends from "vellus."

Translation Conundrum

Some years ago, I was doing time at a world-famous research library.  One of the other inmates posed a problem to the assembled denizens. A Frenchman, he was translating an American novel into his native tongue and there was a passage in the book that he could not understand. He thought it might be a joke but he couldn't make heads nor tails of it. He read us the passage. "Two men are in a bar. The first man asks, 'What do you do with a giraffe who has three balls on him.' The second man answers, 'Walk him and pitch to the elephant.'"

As I remember, everyone in the room "got it," but no one could suggest a good solution to the translation problem. Word-for-word wouldn't do and an equivalent was impossible to indentify. I don't know what the poor fellow decided. Something elegant, I hope.

Terpen

Before there were dikes there were terpen.

I was disgracefully ignorant of terpen until I read Robert Van de Noort's North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2011). Van de Noort devotes many pages to terpen, which are artificial islands constructed between 500 BC and 1000 AD in parts of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. The earliest terpen were simple mounds on which a house was built; later several or more would be joined together to form small elevated villages protected against high tides and flooding. They might be as much as forty feet high. With the coming of dikes (c. 1000-1200 AD), terpen ceased to be constructed.

Here's a terp, viewed from above.

And here's another, photographed from ground level.

 

I've been to the lowlands and might have seen these peculiar topographical features with my own eyes, but I certainly didn't register them. Even if I had, I might have confused them with the grave barrows or tumuli that are common in Scythian Bulgaria, or even with drumlins, which have a similar look to the uneducated eye -- although drumlins are natural rather than man-made.

I love it that "terpen" retains its ancient plural, along with words such as oxen and brethren. There aren't many such words in the language (children is a reduplicated plural, the original "-er" plural supplelmented by an -en plural -- and some day to be superseded, I predict, by "childrens").

Van de Noort's book is fascinating reading for those who like terpen and bronze-age sewn plank boats and such. It's rich in detail but might have been even richer if the author hadn't felt the need to waste space by calling the seashore a "place of liminality" and shipboard "a heterotopia sailing upon the Deleuzian ocean" -- and also indulge himself with many unconvincing  speculations dependent on such peculiar,  modish, transitory vocabulary.

When it comes to odd words, give me the old ones every time. Here are some satisfying lovely words that were as new to me as terpen: saltern (an area in fenlands set aside for salt manufacture); cofferdam (a temporary dam), thwart (a seat in a rowboat), leister (a two-pronged spear for fishing), dromond (a medieval galley) and broch (a dry-stone tower).

Reposted: The Sculpin, Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond,  The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs.  The big, plug-ugly, bebarbelled brute gobbles frog-egg globules.   

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names.  Take the brown bullhead, for example. It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister. Minister?  To whom, or under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch. The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon.

 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names. The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction: it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a predatory denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.