Once More With Feeling

I'm heading off to New York in a few hours and will probably not be posting anything for a week or so, not that anyone would notice, given my recent spotty record, but I leave you with this:

I was writing something else yesterday and used the word "tautology" and, well, what's the deal with that? It looks like "taut" plus "-ology", but it obviously can't be related to "taut", and what can possibly make sense in light of its meaning ("the unnecessary repetition of words expressing the same idea", sometimes used to comic effect as in Dr. Zoidberg's reference to "the murdered body of Amy's dead, deceased corpse")?

You'll never guess. Or maybe you will, but I didn't. It's actually three Greek words shoved together in such a way that the breaks are disguised by vowels: "to" plus "auto" plus "-ology". And now it makes sense: "auto" means "self" or "same" ("automobile", something that moves by itself instead of needing an animal to pull it), so a tautology is the saying of the same thing. Twice. Or five times, if you're Dr. Zoidberg.

A Stone's Throw

Yeah, it's me again. I don't know what the deal is. I can't seem to work up enough umbrage to rip apart some avoidable mistake that someone committed to print, I can't get really worked up about any etymology (I tried with "spinach" but my heart just wasn't in it), I haven't discovered any particularly captivating side roads of the English language, and those are really the only three things I ever talk about. I'm mostly just working and production-knitting (more hats to sell, and I won't get rich but a few extra bucks before Christmas will be nice) and reading and that's just about it.

Well, let's have this, anyway. It's better than nothing.

I ended up at the website for Fire Mountain Gems somehow, and I don't quite remember how or why and even if I did it wouldn't be that interesting, but pretty soon I was reading about Swarovski crystals on this page and saw this:

and what I thought was "'Greige'? What is that, some cheap made-up portmanteau of 'grey' and 'beige'? Typical copy-writers!"

But then I thought about it a little more, and it occurred to me that I had seen the word "greige" before, and that it was an actual word, which, in fact, it is. A second's thought will suggest that it sounds rather like Italian "grigio", as in "pinot grigio", a word which means "grey", which the rock in question clearly is. And this turns out to be correct: "greige", not entirely unlike "beige", is an adjective describing unbleached, undyed (and therefore greyish) textiles.

So maybe there's a lesson in this about not jumping to conclusions. Probably not, though.

Not Again

Wise old Henry Fowler rightly despised what he called "elegant variation", in which a writer, terrified of repetition, will crack open the thesaurus and use, in subsequent clauses or sentences, "automobile" and then "vehicle" and perhaps in desperation "conveyance" instead of "car".

There's nothing wrong with a certain degree of repetition in good English, though it has to be carefully balanced so as not to give the impression of a limited vocabulary: you may need to repeat a noun, but you don't usually want to use the same adjective three times in one sentence (unless repetition is in the service of a specific stylistic end such as anaphora or epizeuxis).

What is most irritating about elegant variation isn't its mere existence: it's when a writer uses it and gets the variant wrong. Here's the headline and sub-head from a recent Salon television column:

The headline, "So your marriage is like an inflamed bunion", is followed by "Whose isn't? On 'The Good Wife' and 'Dexter,' rotten betrothals make for great drama".

A betrothal is not a marriage. A betrothal is a promise to marry: to plight your troth (etymologically related to "truth", which is to say in this case "fidelity", being true to someone) means that you will pledge faithfulness to the one you intend to marry. After a period of engagement, you presumably wed that person, and then the marriage ensues. Whoever wrote that sub-head didn't want to use the word "marriage" again, so they hunted around for a word that seemed to mean the same thing, and flubbed it.

I'm pretty sure the writer, Heather Havrilesky, isn't the one at fault here, because writers don't often write their own headlines and less often the sub-heads and such flotsam. But someone at Salon is to blame. As usual.

Missing in Action

Two whole weeks! Tsk. But I've been busy, reading and working and writing stuff that isn't this blog and production-knitting (those kids' hats shaped like pumpkins and cupcakes and strawberries don't just knit themselves, you know).

What have I been reading, you ask? A book which I borrowed from a co-worker, Daniel, and here are a couple of paragraphs:

In his youth, Augustus had had (but why? To this day, nobody knows but him) what you might call a moral crisis, a crisis so alarming that cousin of his, a naval man, in fact an Admiral, afraid of blowing his brains out in a fit of anguish, distraction or illumination, got him to do a six-month stint on his sloop "Flying Dutchman", aboard which Augustus was taught a harsh but invigorating job, that of cabin boy.

On coming out of his psychological convulsion, which was in truth so profound that his circumnavigation didn't totally fulfill its function of curing him, Augustus was to fall for a charlatan (or quasi-charlatan), Othon Lippmann, who had, as a soi-disant yogi, a charismatic gift that would transform many of his faithful into fanatics.

The author is Georges Perec, a French writer after my own heart, one who loves to construct long but entirely comprehensible compound-complex sentences larded through with commas and clauses. The book, written in French as "La Disparation" and translated into English as "A Void" by Gilbert Adair, has a gimmick, which I am guessing that you, if you don't already know, would not be able to figure out from the passage I've quoted, so masterfully written and translated is it; the entire thing is done without the use of the letter "e", the most common in both French and English.

This poses a number of dreadful problems, one of which is that articles ("the", "le"), verbs ("to be", "être"), most compound verbs (many infinitives in French end in "-er" or "-re", and past perfect in English is extremely hard to do without an "e"), and overall a large portion of the vocabulary is barred to you. (German has it worse; Daniel and I speculated that it would hardly be possible to translate the book into that language, since "e" is even more prevalent in it and pretty much every infinitive ends in "-en", but we has underestimated human ingenuity and were wrong: it was translated, almost ten years before "A Void", as "Anton Voyls Fortgang".)

After contemplating a novel without "e", it is natural to wonder if anybody ever a novel using all the "e"s that Perec left out of "A Void", and it turns out that, unsurprisingly, Perec himself wrote it: "Les Revenentes", which uses "e" as its only vowel; this has also been translated into English, as "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" . Another French writer noted that the existence of these two books made possible a third book which used none of the words in the other two, a book in which every word contained an "e" plus at least one other non-"e" vowel. These books are examples of what is called constrained writing, text which has a formal structure imposed upon it: each word's length is that of the digits of pi, for example, or the entire piece is a palindrome, which reads the same forwards as backwards. There's even a book called "Never Again" in which no word is used more than once; a moment's thought will suggest that such a thing places a terrible strain on the writer, who can't repeatedly refer to any place or character by name, but take it from me: it places an even greater strain on the reader.

Some of these constrained writings are mere tricks, arch clevernesses, and consequently not very good, but some of them, such as "A Void", are not only well written but force you to consider language in a new way, and isn't that one of life's pleasures?

Nation-Building

As I believe I have mentioned before, a guy named Fred Clark is masterfully deconstructing the dreadful "Left Behind" series a few pages at a time--he's up to page 104 of the second of twelve volumes--and it's essential reading. In this week's entry, a commenter had this to say about a word Clark used:

'Botswanan' is incorrect. Mwangati Ngumo is the Motswana president. He is not the leader of the Botswanans, but the Batswana.

All that is very interesting, and doubtless true in Botswana, but in the English language (which I cannot help but note the commenter is using), "Botswanan" and "Botswanans" are correct, for one simple reason: "Botswana" is an English word, and follows the rules of English.*

You hear this sort of thing from time to time. I knew someone of Greek parentage who said that "pi" is not properly pronounced as we always do in English, "pie", but "pee", to which I responded, "Well, what's the capital of France?" "Paris," he said, and pronounced it, of course, in the English manner, "par-iss". But if you're following his rule--that a word can only be properly pronounced as it would be in its country of origin--then the capital of France is "par-ee". And you'd better roll that "-r-", too.

"Pi" is properly pronounced "pie". "Detente" doesn't require the accent ("détente"), although you are welcome to use it if you like, and it takes the indefinite artlcle "a", not "une". "Moscow" is spelled that way rather than either the Romanized ("Moskva") or the Cyrillic (approximately "Mockba") versions. All these these things are true in English, because those are English words. Every language does this, English perhaps more so than others if only because it has more adoptees than any other language. A language's users need to talk about place names in other countries, or they find a gap that can be remedied by borrowing a term from another tongue, but they don't import all that tongue's grammatical rules and spelling niceties and pronunciation quirks along with it: they take the word, naturalize it, and then do with it whatever they would do with any of their own words. This is as it should be, and more, it's as it is, always, everywhere. A moment's thought would reveal that it cannot be otherwise: are the speakers of any language expected to memorize every possible form of every word describing every nation and its inhabitants in that country's languages?

*The Wikipedia page for Botswana has this to say:

The official languages of Botswana are English and Setswana. In Setswana prefixes are more important than they are in many other languages. These prefixes include "Bo", which refers to the country, "Ba", which refers to the people, "Mo", which is one person, and "Se" which is the language. For example, the main tribe of Botswana is the Tswana people, hence the name Botswana for its country. The people as a whole are Batswana, one person is a Motswana, and the language they speak is Setswana.

This is tremendously interesting, but it has no application to English, of course (though doubtless it is a feature of Botswanan English, since that is one of the country's two official languages and it lives cheek by jowl with Setswana). But living languages are not carved in stone, and it's not inconceivable that such grammatical features could filter into Standard English: if Botswana became globally important and its representatives requested that the country's words be used in news reports, for instance. For now, though, we're following the rules of English, and if you asked pretty much any English speaker outside that country what the language or the people of Botswana were called, you know what they'd answer.

Placeholder

There's a new--well, newish--movie out called "Surrogates" and the reviews are on the whole pretty scathing so we decided not to go last weekend, but I got to thinking about the word "surrogate" and deconstructing it in my head, because that is what I generally do, and it seemed pretty obvious that it was constructed out of "sub-" plus some form of the English word "rogation" (most likely from a Latin verb, probably "rogare", which had a familiar ring to it), which is to say a very specific sort of entreaty or supplication, in this case to a deity asking for divine mercy (and generally in regards to crops or fields), most usually seen in English as part of the phrase "Rogation Day".

Well, all of this turned out to be correct, and all that was needed was to nail down what "rogare" meant and where it came from, and the answer is this; "rogare" means "to ask", because of a rather complex series of metaphors that began with Indo-European "reg-", "to straighten; to move in a straight line", and from there went to mean "to stretch out", and then "to stretch out (the hand)", and from there to "to ask".

"Surrogate", then, was originally someone acting in the stead of someone else who wishes to ask for something (sending a proxy to beg for clemency from the Emperor or some such, I would imagine), and eventually just someone who acts in the place of someone else, period.

I just noticed "proxy" now after having written it. Where can that have come from? Latin, natch: "procuratio", "management", which led to Anglo-French "procuracie", and then to the mashed-together Middle English "prokecye".

Hard and Soft

It took some digging, but I finally tracked down the etymology of "osteomalacia" for you. You're welcome!

Yeah, I know. You'd probably never even heard of osteomalacia before now. I hadn't, either, until I followed a Pharyngula link to a Huffington Post page full of medical quackery regarding H1N1, aka swine flu, and every time I look at "H1N1" I can't help but pronounce it "heinie". Anyway, the HuffPo doctor recommends homeopathic remedies, so you know he's talking out his ass: homeopathy doesn't work and can't work, and I'm not going to get into why; you're on the Internet, you can do the research.

At any rate, the doctor used the word "osteomalacia", which means "softening of the bones", and of course you know that "osteo-" is Latin for "bone", as in "osteoporosis", porous and therefore brittle bones. But what of "-malacia"?

It really did take a lot of digging, but I eventually surmised, and then discovered for a fact, that the meaningful part of "-malacia" was a very productive Indo-European word stem which is actually "mel-", "soft", but which often shows up in altered forms as "-mol-" or "-mal-" or even "-mil-".

Some other mel- words: "mollusk", which is soft and squishy inside its hard shell; "melt", which is to say "become soft"; "emollient", "having a softening effect"; "mild"; "smelt", to melt down metal; and "enamel", a melted-down porcelain paste. But not, unfortunately, "malleable", which, though it means "soft", actually means "able to be beaten into shape by a hammer", since the "mal-" of "malleable" is related to "mallet", from Latin "malleus", "hammer".

Sound Effects

Have you listened to that aria yet? Because you should. I can't get it out of my head. I have decided that it is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in my life. Suddenly I understand a story told of the legendary castrato Farinelli: "during ten years, until the death of Philip V, he sang four songs to the King every night without change of any kind." Jaroussky could sing me that song every night for the rest of my life and I would never tire of it. I mean, as long as he brought his orchestra with him.

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Last night just after I went to bed I got hiccups. After waiting a minute to see if they might subside on their own--they never do, I don't know why I bothered--I got up to cure them. My Newfoundland grandmother's sure cure for hiccups wasn't a teaspoonful of sugar, or a sudden fright: it was nine glutches of water.

"Glutch"! Don't you love it? Isn't it fantastically vivid and onomatopoetic? It's even better spoken with a proper Newfoundland vowel, just halfway between "ah" and the more usual "uh", which is to say a short "-u-" with the jaw dropped a little.

The word was likely brought over to the island by British settlers. The OED neglects to mention it, but, rather surprisingly, Dictionary.com has a listing for it, noting that it is both a verb ("to swallow") and a noun ("a mouthful"). The Dictionary of Newfoundland English lists it, of course, and in fact repeats my grandmother's sage advice verbatim: "If a person has hiccups and wants to get rid of them he can do so by taking nine glutches of water." "Of uncert. origin," says Dictionary.com, but I think Dictionary.com is just not willing to go out on a limb, because "glutch", like "gulp", is one of the most obviously onomatopoetic words imaginable.

The nine glutches did their trick, the hiccups were stayed, I went back to bed, and all was well. I mean, until three hours later when I woke up to use the conveniences and could not get back to sleep and so got up and began writing this. But that is the usual state of my life.

The Unkindest Cut

Now, I believe I promised you "kes-".

It is an Indo-European root meaning "to cut", and since you know that cutting is a fairly basic concept (which means that the root is likely to spawn plenty of variants) and that "castrate" comes from it, you might be thinking that some other cutting words are from the same source, and you would be right, but you would probably not guess what most of the words are.

How about "chaste"? Yes, really. Latin "castus", "cut off from", gave rise to "caste" in the mid sixteenth century, a word meaning "a race of people", which is to say "people of pure stock", people cut off from contaminating outside influences, but much earlier than that (in the early days of the language, actually, the first part of the thirteenth century) it had sprung up as "chaste", from that same sense of purity.

How about the word "castle", a fortress heavily fortified and cut off from the outside world, and also place names ending in "-caster" or "-chester" such as Winchester and Doncaster? Same source. (And also the town of Cheshire, known for cheese and cats. A cat, anyway.)

Here comes a big tangle. "Quash", "to crush, to suppress", is from the Latin frequentative "quassare", "to shatter", from "quatere", "to shake", through French. ("Squash", with an almost identical meaning as "quash", is from "ex-" plus "quassare".) These come from, or are related to, Latin "cassus", "empty, void", in turn related to "castus", presumably because the...empty container has been cut off from its contents? I don't know, but the etymological link is sound. Bizarrely, "cask" and its (presumed) diminutive "casket" seem to be related through an uncertain chain of etymologic alterations; the stream of meanings is apparently something like "shattered - potsherd - pot - helmet - skull - container - container for wine". Though probably not quite in that order. Though who knows?

You would think that the verb "to cashier", which is to say "to dismiss", would somehow be related to the cashier who rings through your purchases, and yet they are from two completely different sources. The noun is from French "caissier", in turn from "caisse", "money-box", while the verb is from "casser", "to discharge", also "to break", from Latin "cassus", "void", in the sense of an annulment.

A Cut Above

Now, here's what I wanted to get to yesterday before I was so pixilated with grammar:

You really need to watch this Youtube video, a Vivaldi aria by a countertenor named Philippe Jaroussky. Maybe you don't like opera, maybe you don't like Vivaldi, maybe you don't like countertenors, but you ought to listen to it anyway, because it is the most perfect thing of its kind ever. The orchestra is playing rather desperate staccato figures over which the singer's voice floats in a plangent song about love which is about to be lost:

Vedro con mio diletto
l'alma dell'alma mia
Il core del mio cor pien di contento.
E se dal caro oggetto
lungi convien che sia
Sospirero penando ogni momento...

What pleasure it will give me
to see the soul of my soul
the heart of my heart
filled with happiness.
And if I must be parted from the one I love
I shall spend every moment
in sighing, and suffering...

I am obsessed with this. I have listened to it dozens of times in the last few days. I've heard plenty of countertenors and enjoyed some of them, but Jaroussky has a glorious tone, never forced or squally, even in the uppermost register. I do not think any living being of either sex could sing it more beautifully.

In Renaissance times, women were not allowed to sing in church, so boys whose voices had not changed and occasionally men who could produce a good falsetto sound sang the highest parts. Eventually it became the practice to castrate boys to keep their voices from changing by forestalling puberty; as their bodies matured, their chests, ribcages, and lungs expanded, but their vocal cords hardly lengthened or thickened at all, making it possible to continue producing a high sound, but with the power and intensity of a man's voice.

"Castrate" comes from Latin "castrum", "knife", which in turn derives from an Indo-European root which I can't believe I haven't done yet, and which I will have to get to tomorrow, because it is time to get ready for work. You know what I'll be listening to on my iPod on the way there.