Cephalogenic

Surprise

2012-01-27T07:36:00.001-04:00

Back in 2002 I was living in Halifax, which had and still has a stand-alone cinema, the Oxford, one of a dying breed, although it manages to chug along somehow. It wasn't quite a repertory cinema, but they showed lots of small, sometimes obscure movies, the kind that will stay open for a week or maybe two in an average-sized city. (It's where I saw "Requiem for a Dream" and "Himalaya". On the other hand, "Titanic" played there for something like three months, which I guess pulled in enough profit to keep the theatre running for another year or two.)

This poster showed up in the Coming Attractions outside the building, and how could you not want to see that? So I did. In the opening sequence of "Secretary", which I watched last night on Netflix, a twentyish woman, clearly the secretary of the title, walks into an office, staples some papers together, takes another sheet of paper from a typewriter, gets a cup of coffee, walks into her boss' office, and, since her hands are full, kicks the door shut. She's conservatively dressed in a high-necked white blouse and a knee-length black skirt, but the scene is completely sexual in the most arresting way, and as soon as you see it you know you are in the hands of someone who has a masterful control of tone.

The studio tried a number of ways to advertise the movie, and I think this is the DVD cover, which perhaps unnecessarily highlights the word "secret", though it naturally enough got me to thinking: is the word "secretary" related to "secret"?

My guess was that although "secret" must be related to "secrete" somehow, "secretary" (obviously Latin or French, because of that "-ary" suffix which comes from either Latin "-arium" or its descendant, French "-aire") might come from somewhere else, because I couldn't think of any way that the words might be related.

And I was wrong. "Secretus" is the Latin adjective for "set apart", so a secret is something that is hidden: "secretion", from which "secrete" is a back-formation, is something set apart from the main body. (The other verb "secrete", "to hide a thing", is derived directly from "secret".)

You wouldn't think a secretary is someone who hides things, but in fact an original meaning of the word was a synonym of the noun "confidant", someone who can be trusted to keep a secret. The modern sense of someone who takes dictation and keeps records is almost as old: they date from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, respectively.

Eye of the Beholder

2012-01-25T06:50:00.051-04:00

Pajiba is a website devoted mostly to film reviews and other pop-cultural criticism, but they also like to throw us other tidbits every now and then, such as this hodgepodge, which contains among other things a link to a list of someone's idea of the 100 most beautiful words in English.

It seems very random. "Assemblage"? "Brood" (the verb, not the noun)? "Incipient"? There's something I'm not getting, obviously.

Lexicographer Wilfred Funk (of Funk & Wagnalls) once produced a list of most-beautiful which was on the whole a little closer to the mark, including such undeniable beauties as "halcyon" and "anemone", although I think he was swayed a little more by the words' meanings that I would have been: I would prefer to consider also their flow and euphony. Not that he didn't: he also included such enchanting words as "cerulean" and "mignonette", but then he mucked up the list by including "tranquil" and "bobolink", which, whatever associations they may conjure up in your mind, have no music in them at all.

Word collector Willard R. Espy had the cheek to include in his own ten-best list, along with Funk's "gossamer" and "lullaby", "gonorrhea", which may be going a little too far in the other direction.

As for mine, well, I have grazed against this subject before (six and a half years ago!), and my opinion hasn't changed: if you ignore the meaning altogether, I cannot think of anything lovelier than "irremediably", a limpid, meandering brook of a word.

The Centre of Attention

2012-01-24T20:36:00.001-04:00

No, this is not me. Alas.

Over on my other blog I've just written about a scent called Nombril Immense. A nombril is a navel, otherwise known in English as the belly button, and would it surprise you to know that "nombril" exists in English? We do have a way of multiplying words: even when we already have a perfectly good one, we want more more more.

We don't actually use it to refer to the belly button, though. "Nombril" is used in heraldry, a topic which is so deeply uninteresting to me that I can't even be bothered to tell you what it means (it has something to do with the fesse on a shield, which is perverse, because "fesses" are haunches), but you can, of course, look it up for yourself. A great many heraldry terms are French, as far as I can see, so it doesn't surprise me that "nombril" would appear there as well.

The word itself is related to Latin "umbilicus": it was the similar "ombril" at one time, but, says The Online Etymology Dictionary it changed from "l'ombril" to "nombril" through the process of dissimilation, in which one instance of a repeated sound in a word changes or vanishes (the first "-r-" in "February" disappearing in spoken English to become "Feb-you-ary"), although I do wonder if in a variant of junctural metanalysis "un ombril" simply got blurred into "un nombril" over time, since the two are indistinguishable in speech.

"Navel" comes to us almost directly from Indo-European "nobh-" via Germanic "nabalan". (It showed up in Old English as "nafela", which once again shows the intimate relationship between the "f" and "v" sounds: they have identical mouth positions, and so have on occasional come to replace one another, as in "fox" and "vixen", or "vat" and archaic "fat", as in "wine-fat".)

Dear Diary

2012-01-17T06:23:00.034-04:00

You might think that after a lifetime of reading and most of a lifetime of looking, really looking, at words, I would have figured out all the basic ones by now, but they still have the power to surprise.

Yesterday I was reading some posts on Manhunt Daily (pretty definitely not safe for work)

when I noticed this graphic in a sidebar:

And I thought, "'Diario'! Well, that looks just like 'diary'! So wouldn't that be like 'Manhunt Diary'?" And then the light bulb flicked on and I realized that "diario" could very well mean "daily" in Spanish, because the word "diary" almost certainly comes from the Latin "dies", "day, because a diary is something you write in daily. (It's descended from "diarium", originally a daily allowance, later a daily journal. The "-rium" later became the suffix "-aire" in French, which English adopted as the suffix "-ary", "pertaining to", often used as a combining form to denote a collection, so an aviary is a collection of birds and a bestiary is a collection, in book form, of beasts.)

Maybe this is obvious to people who studied Spanish, but it wasn't to me because I never did: the French word for "daily" is "quotidienne", so I never ran across "diario" before.

Anyway, "diario" does in fact mean "daily", and every day is a day in school, if you're paying attention.

While I am at it I might as well look at the etymology of the word that "diary" is most often confused with and/or mistyped as; "dairy". "Dairy", on the surface of it, is completely unparseable: where could it have come from?

You'll never guess. "Daege" was an old, old English word meaning "maid" or "female servant": it seems to be related to "dough" in that the servant in question was the one who kneaded the dough for bread. Eventually "daege" was shortened into "daie" and then "dae", and with the French suffix "-erie", which turns a noun or a verb into (usually but not always) a place, it became "daie-erie" or "dairy", the place where the maid (presumably the milkmaid) went about her milking and butter-making business. (The other English "dae" word is "lady", the first half being a compaction of Norse "hlaf", "loaf": Old English hlaefdige was the lady of the manor, but literally the one who made the bread, the loaf-kneader.)

Oh, and speaking of butter-making and the suffix "-erie", transformed to "-ery" in English (as in "refinery" and "bakery"), do you know what a buttery — the noun, not the adjective — is?

Trick question. It isn't a place where butter is made or stored or anything else: it doesn't even have anything to do with butter. It's actually a storeroom for bottles of liquor, coming from French "boterie" and somehow having a vowel corrupted in its travels.

Card Games

2012-01-16T17:54:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I got a comment, not on
this posting specifically but on a topic that lies at the intersection of my two blogs. Vanessa wrote,

I was recommended to approach you with my question about the meaning of the word "OLFCARTOPHILE". Is it - as my research suggests - a lover of perfume cards (pre-scented or otherwise):

I came across this term while researching the history of perfume cards on a French website, and assumed it would work in either language.

It's a neologism, something invented to fill a perceived lack in the language; but it's pretty close to being a nonce word, which is unlikely to enter wider circulation because it's so idiosyncratic and, let us face it, not especially useful, not an everyday word even for a perfume fanatic.

If it serves a purpose, all well and good: but I could never use it, because it's not very well constructed. It is obviously a portmanteau — a macaronic, in fact – of Latin "olfacere" (the source of English "olfaction" and "olfactory"), French "carte" (because it appears to be a French coinage), and Greek "-phile", a lover of something. Therefore, it would certainly mean "a lover of perfumed cards".

But I don't think you can trim "olfacere", or its English "olfaction/olfactory", down to "olf-", because that isn't how the word is made: it's composed of "olere", "to emit an odour", plus "facere", "to make". If you want to deconstruct the word into reusable pieces, you really need to keep those pieces intact, which would give you the unwieldy but more defensible "olfactocartophile".

I think it's a nonce word because Googling it gives only 37 unique matches, and a lot of those seem to refer back to one another. It appears on this page of coinages related mostly to perfume, so I'm guessing that someone was just having a bit of fun with the language, in the same way that some people like to devise far-fetched phobias (some of these are silly, and many of these are patently ridiculous: who on Earth has geniophobia, an all-consuming and irrational fear of chins?). It hasn't caught on because it's not essential or even particularly useful. If you think you could get some use out of it, I'm not going to try to stop you, and I don't think anyone else will, either. But it really isn't a very good word.

Sing For Your Supper

2012-01-10T06:34:00.053-04:00

Last night for the second time in three days I watched "Tosca", one of my three favourite operas ever*. First was the Metropolitan Opera version with Hildegarde Behrens, who was a terrific singer but perfectly happy to jettison a beautiful sound in favour of dramatic truth: after she's stabbed a man through the heart (going against everything she believes in, but he was about to rape her) and is screaming at him to hurry up and die already, it's not a pretty sound, but it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to make your hair stand on end, and by god it does.

Last night I watched an Italian broadcast version from the Teatro Carlo Fenice in Genoa (there are eight others on the site: the "Salome" is particularly good). Even though it's sung in Italian, it's subtitled, which is only fair: when I'm watching an English opera, I want subtitles, because when the words and the music duke it out in opera, the music always wins.

I had only ever watched "Tosca" with English subtitles, but I didn't really need them this time around because I knew the story well enough: still, I didn't mind the Italian subtitles, and it was a novel experience to see the words that were being sung rather than a translation. Early on, a priest says, "Il paniere e intatto," which means "the basket [of food] is untouched."

"Paniere" is instantly recognizable as a relative of English "panniers" (taken, as so many fashion words are, from French), sort of the opposite of a bustle (which augments the form of the buttocks), worn under a dress to exaggerate the width of the hips to cartoonish proportions, as you can see.

I had known this for years. But in Tosca, when the priest holds up the basket and the subtitle says "paniere", I understood instantly that "paniere" was essentially the same word as "pannier", and that both of them meant "bread-basket", because French "pain" and Italian "pane" mean "bread".

The Tosca in the Genovese production was Daniela Dessì, and Italian opera-goers, a committed lot to begin with, sure know how to treat a hometown girl: after she finished her big number, "Vissi d'arte", they went insane and wouldn't stop cheering and applauding until she broke character, acknowledged them, and agreed, encouraged by the conductor, to sing the number a second time.

You won't see this in North American houses, whose patrons consider breaking character, or any sort of intrusion into the opera, to be bad form. (There was sneering when Anna Netrebko did it in her triumphant "Anna Bolena" at the Met last fall.) Though the repeat has a long history, I didn't even know it was still done in Italy, but there's the proof. And just to show that they don't discriminate when it comes to local talent, when the Cavaradossi, Fabio Armiliato, also from Genoa, sang his big number, "E lucevan le stelle", they screamed and clapped and wouldn't stop until he agreed to sing it again, too. It was awesome. I wish I had been there. I told Jim that if we ever go to Italy, then we are going to an opera, and he said, "Obviously."

European audiences don't shout "Encore!" when they want a rerun, even though "encore" is French for "again". They shout "Bis!", which means "twice", naturally enough, because "bi-" words in English mean two of something: bilateral symmetry involves two mirror-image sides, a bicycle has two wheels. And can you think of a common English word that uses "bis"?

Right: "biscuit". "Cuire" is the French verb for "to cook", "cuit" means "cooked", and "biscuit" literally means "twice-cooked", just as in Italian "biscotti", which are made by forming the dough into a loaf, baking it to firm it up, slicing the loaf, and then baking the slices a second time. German "Zweibach" is made the same way, and means exactly the same thing: "twice-baked".

* The other two are "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "Salome". I could listen to them and watch them again and again, and do, and never get tired of them, because they are so effective at doing what opera does best, which is bypassing rational thought and going straight for the limbic system. You will feel pity, horror, sadness, revulsion, because the music really leaves you no choice.

Earthly Pleasures

2012-01-09T04:14:00.000-04:00

This has nothing to do with my usual line of blogging but I really, really want you to watch it anyway (or if that pasted video should fail, watch it here):

Five people. One guitar. I am speechless. It doesn't hurt that the song (originally by a singer-songwriter named Gotye) is lovely. But the laserlike focus of the five performers (I guess you would have to focus on something like that, just to keep from banging into someone if nothing else) is riveting: it sounds like a stunt if you hear it described, but when you watch it and listen to it, it's intoxicating.

Oh, very well then, my usual line of blogging: the guitarists are a Canadian group called Walk Off The Earth, and you may know that "Earth" is related to the German "Erde" (via Proto-Germanic "ertho"), hence the name of the all-knowing, all-fertile Earth goddess in Wagner's Ring Cycle. The French word for "Earth" is "monde", related to the English word "mundane", from Latin "mundus", "world, universe".

Germans also have "Mond" in their vocabulary. It can't mean "Earth", since that space is taken up by "Erde". So what do you suppose it means? "Moon", of course. You know, just to keep you on your toes.

And "Monday" literally means "Moon's Day"; in German it's the exactly parallel "Montag". And while we're at it, the French for "moon" is "lune", as in "lunar" and "lunatic" ("moon-sick"), and their word for Monday is "Lundi": also "Moon's Day".

In Indo-European, "meses" or "menses" meant both "moon" and "month", because the earliest and most logical way to mark out a span of time larger than a day (if you are willing to play jiggery-pokery with the calendar) is by counting from, say, one full moon to the next. The word in IE, in fact, is thought to be descended from "me-", "measure", because of the way the moon measures out time.

English kept this tradition, with "month" deriving from a descendant of "moon" (Old English "monað" or "monath"), and the German word for "month" is likewise "Monat": this is generally true of the Germanic languages. The Romance tongues on the other hand kept "menses" for "month" (Italian "mese", French "mois") but used some form of "luna" instead for "moon": "luna" is related to "luminous", because the Moon is by far the brightest thing in the night sky, so brilliant that before people knew that the Sun is a star and the moon a pebble, they thought that the Moon emitted light in the same way that the Sun does. Predictably, English, never content with one word when three will do, has a Latinate word for "month": "lunation".

Don't you love knowing things like this?

Throwing Shade

2012-01-06T12:30:00.000-04:00

For an upcoming post over on my other blog I am writing about a scent which contains galbanum, an intensely green-smelling resin. Now, as it happens, galbanum is an umbellifer, which, you may know, denotes it as part of a family that also contains angelica, Queen Anne's lace, and dill. What do these plants have in common, you ask? Well, you tell me:

That's right: they all have flowers that are big and poofy at the top. (Other members of the umbellifer family include chervil, anise, parsley, and carrots and parsnips: you can look them up yourself, or you can just trust me that they likewise have big poofy flower tops.)

Now, "umbellifer" looks sort of like the word "umbrella", doesn't it? And the big poofy top (technically an inflorescence) of those plants sort of looks kind of like an umbrella, doesn't it? And therefore you might logically think that the words "umbrella" and "umbellifer" are related, mightn't you?

You might. And you would be right. Latin "umbella" meant a sort of parasol, from "umbra", "shade": they lost the "-r-" when they made it a diminutive, but we shoved it right back in there (where it may rightly be said to belong anyway) when we implanted the word into our language around about 1600. When we needed a word for a family of plants with big poofy tops, we compared them to umbrellas and took the Latin word, naturally tacking on the "-fer" suffix which means "bearer"; the umbellifers carry their own umbrellas, and how cute is that?

One Thing Leads To Another

2012-01-05T15:14:00.000-04:00

I love love love discovering something that I didn't know and then discovering that in fact I did in a sense know it: I just didn't know I knew it.

Yesterday I was reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation on the bus to work (you can dip into it here — god, I love Google Books so much) when I ran across this sentence from American President Garfield's commencement speech to his alma mater in 1880:

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure — the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

"Throw the plummet into"! That means that "plummet" can be used as a noun, and not just a noun derived from a verb (and therefore synonymous with "a fall" or "a drop"), but a solid, objective sort of noun, a noun that names something you can touch and feel.

I did not know this. But a moment's reflection brought me down this path: A plumb is a weight of a sort, the name deriving from Latin "plumbum" (as I already knew, having written about it some time ago), which is their name for "lead" (the metal, that is) via French "plombe", which they to this day use for the metal. Therefore, "plummet" can only be the diminutive form of "plumb": "plumb-ette". Therefore (and you will have to imagine my immense delight at realizing this fact), the verb must have derived from the noun which until a few seconds ago I never knew existed!

The noun "plummet" is very old indeed, dating from 1388 (as "plomet"). The verb meaning "to plunge rapidly", on the other hand, first entered print in 1939. And yet somehow in that short span of time, a few human generations, the verb has entirely taken over the word's life, and the noun has receded to the point that in all my forty-odd years of reading I have only just encountered it.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I might as well point out that "plumber", as will be obvious as soon as you think about it, derived from "plumbum", because pipes used to be made of lead, and likewise the system of pipes that carry our water is called the plumbing.

Whipped

2012-01-03T14:35:00.001-04:00

A few days ago — that's me, always ahead of the curve — there was a Gawker article called These Words Are Now Banned From The English Language. If only! Some of them I don't mind so much: "amazing" held the number-one spot, and I can see how it might get kind of old, but I think it still has some life in it. Most of the others, though, I would love to see forcibly hauled off to an island and dumped into a volcano: "baby bump" is just disgusting (and although it didn't make the list, the British-journalist "yummy mummy" is even more revolting), "ginormous" is all used up, and "man-cave" is stupid and insulting.

But of course most of them are going to disappear in short order anyway, volcano or no. That's the way with slang: young people make up hundreds of new terms, most of which deservedly die as they age (the terms, not the people), and new words and usages rise up to take their place.

Last night for something to do I watched the Marilyn Monroe vehicle "How To Marry A Millionaire" on Netflix. (I'd never seen it and figured I might as well.) It was pretty bad, but it did contain a sterling example of slang that was so baffling, I couldn't tell if it was actually a term people used at the time or if the writer was trying to deliberately insert it into the popular culture*.

The first usage is perfectly normal:

"The [car] they sent for me had gold trim. Smooth, huh?"
"Creamy."

Ordinary everyday agreement-by-elaboration, like responding to "Isn't he the best?" with "The very bestest". But then a little while later, when someone is describing an upcoming get-together:

"Sounds creamy to me."

What? That's really jarring, if not actually kind of creepy, because it sounds as if "dreamy" was intended instead. And then it gets worse:

"I saw a picture in Harper's Bazaar of a mountain shack. It was creamy."

(That isn't even the same character, so it's not as if one person is just using the term in an idiosyncratic manner: everybody who uses it and hears it acts as if it's entirely normal.)

And finally, in reaction to one character's upcoming wedding:

"Congratulations! We read about it on the plane. Just creamy!"

I just can't convince myself that people actually said this in the fifties.

And there's more. Look at this:

That's a Google ngram for the word "creamy" in published books from the beginning of time (okay, 1500) to the present day. Look closely at 1950: the word "creamy" begins a rapid plummet in usage. This tells us nothing about spoken English, of course, but it does clearly show that the usage of the word fell precipitously in the early 1950s and didn't recover until the present day.

There is only one possible explanation. "How To Marry A Millionaire" was released in 1953. The moviegoing public — and that would be a lot of people, because it was the fifth most popular movie of the year — were so horrified by the attempt at enforced slang that they made a pact never to speak or write the word again, and not until that generation had passed the baton to the next could the word be used in polite society.

*This rarely works, even in fiction. In the movie "Mean Girls", one member of a clique is trying to coin the slang word "fetch", as in "fetching": after a number of attempts, the queen bee snaps, "Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! It's not going to happen!" Beth in the TV series "Newsradio" is slightly more successful: after she invents and employs the hilarious "bitchcakes" just to see if it would catch on (it's an adjective meaning "psycho", as in "She went totally bitchcakes"), her boss uses it just as if it had been in the lexicon for years.

Fresh

2012-01-01T21:10:00.000-04:00

I'm back!

Did you miss me? I missed you.

There's a sketch on the British comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look (series 4, episode 1, if you're interested: it's on Netflix) in which a small-business owner shoots all of his employees, one after another. when he discovers their little mispronunciations and errors in usage during a staff meeting. I can sympathize: hearing someone say "pacifically" instead of "specifically" or "expresso" instead of "espresso" makes me grit my teeth, and it's just as well I don't have access to a Luger, I suppose. But after almost seven years of blogging, I simply ran out of bile, or at least redirected it.

So it's time for a do-over. What I'm still interested in is etymology, and so I think that unless something really chaps my hide or otherwise distracts me, I'll be focusing on that. Let's have some now, shall we?

The French word for "citrus" is "agrume", and both of these words are at first glance a bit of puzzle; you can make out from the "-us" ending that "citrus" must be Latin, but otherwise, how baffling! "Citrus" may come originally from Greek "kedros", "cedar", but as is so often the case, nobody is absolutely sure: but neither is anybody proposing that citrus fruit grows on cedars. The link seems to be that the Greeks came across an African tree with fragrant wood and lemon-like fruit and, rather than using the native name for it, just named it after a tree they already knew that also had a fragrant wood.

"Agrume", on the other hand, is of certain etymology, and it too is Latin: from Late Latin "acrumen", "sour fruit, a sour thing", from Latin "acer", "sharp". And a number of other English words derive from or are otherwise related to this, all of them having some sense of "sharp" or "sour. "Vinegar" is a direct steal from French "vinaigre", "soured wine", and another name for vinegar, "acetic acid", derives both its parts from "acer": "acetic" is the adjective and "acid" (derived from "acidus") the noun evolved from "acere", "to be sour". "Acerbic" and "acrid" are both relatives (as is "exacerbate", literally "to make sharper"), and words somewhat farther afield such as "acrimonious" are kin, as well as, most unexpectedly, "acrylic", not having anything to do with paint but being originally a chemical term derived from Greek "acrolein", "sharp-smelling".

A word that both English and French use for the smell of citrus fruit, a word mostly used in the perfumery biz (which as you may know I have a passing interest in), is "hesperides". Anybody familiar with Greek mythology knows that word: the Hesperides were the nymphs who tended the orchard in which those troublesome golden apples grew. "Hesperides" means "from Hesperus", which was another name for the planet Venus, long associated with beauty, and a descendent of the word "Hesperus" is (via Latin) "vesper", which originally meant "the evening star" (another name for Venus) and a century or so later came to mean "the evening", with "vespers" being the Latinate name for evening prayers (beautifully rendered in native English as "evensong").

Dead Letter

2011-10-19T20:12:00.003-03:00

For such as might care: I got my flu jab yesterday and it was quick and painless. (I am completely unafraid of injections and phlebotomies, although I don't actually like to watch the needle going into the skin for some reason: yesterday the doctor was done almost before I knew she'd started.) Let's hope the coming flu season is not a repeat of last year's, or a real-life playing-out of Contagion.

I mostly ignore Facebook but I do play a few games on it, desultorily; I spent way too much time on Frontierville (which now apparently is Pioneer Something) but gave it up cold turkey, and haven't had any interest in allowing anything to fill to void. Having played The Sims quite a bit since its first incarnation (they're up to The Sims 3 and want $50 for the new Pets expansion pack, which is not gonna happen), I started playing The Sims Social, but soon hit a brick wall; like all the other social games on Facebook, you can't make any progress unless you start pestering other people to supply you with things, and I couldn't be bothered.

There never were any typos in the original Sims (pretty sure I would have found them), but there were a few in The Sims 2 and quite a lot in the third version. Apparently, the online edition is going to take after its immediate predecessor, because just look at this screen capture:

"Write epitath"?

Jeez. You don't even have to manually run a spellchecker any more — the software will underline suspect words — and still this slipped in? I'm guessing the software is being farmed out to Croatia or Bangalore or some other such place where programmers abound and English is not the first language, although we make plenty of our own stupid mistakes right here in North America. (I could also point out that the word "skill" is duplicated on the bottom line — a mistake that only a human could catch.)

Anyway, "epitaph" is self-evidently Greek (as essentially all "epi-" words are, not counting such newer macaronics as "epicentre" and "EpiPen"): the first half is, as you surely guessed, a prefix, in this case meaning "on" or in this case "at", and the second from "taphos", which means "funeral rites" or "tomb" and shows up in English in one other word, "cenotaph", "empty tomb".

The Eyes Have It

2011-10-18T06:56:00.002-03:00

A friend in Toronto threatened to send out a search party, so I'm back. But no promises. I don't have that much to write about these days, because the pleasurable sense of outrage and scorn is gone: Slate and the Globe and Mail can print as many stupid, senseless typos as they want, and I just shrug.

However, there is still etymology to hold my interest, and here is a particularly juicy one which I can't believe I never noticed before.

Earlier this year I had a horrific, unending bout of flu, or a cold, or both at the same time, that brought me down for weeks. I had gotten a flu shot the two years previous, but didn't last year, and look where it got me. So I'm heading out for one later today; I don't need a repeat of that hellishness.

Now, what we call a shot and what the British amusingly call a jab is medically called an inoculation, and that is a very strange word, because the prefix is obviously Latin "in-", which makes sense because it's something put inside your body, but the middle, "-ocula-", cannot possibly be what it looks like, because it seems to be related to "binoculars" and "oculist", which is to say that is has to do with the eyes, which is clearly impossible.

Ah, but there is more than one kind of eye. Potatoes have eyes, too, and this sense is the ocularity of an inoculation. Inoculation originally referred to the grafting of a plant bud, or eye, into another. Say you have a tree with a particularly strong root system but indifferent fruit, and another with excellent fruit but some other inferior quality which makes it unsuitable for growth and survival: you can implant a bud (called a "scion", originally a plant twig or budding, later offspring in the form of a son) from the weaker tree into the stronger, and get the best of both.

And you can also produce a weakened version of a disease, inject it into a person to kick-start their immune system, and so prevent them from getting a more virulent version in the future. This is what Edward Jenner did after he proved that deliberately infecting people with cowpox immunized them against the related but far worse smallpox. Implanting a living bud into someone or something and having the union of the two produce something stronger than either: that's inoculation.

Package Deal

2011-09-17T03:56:00.003-03:00

Does posting once a month still qualify as keeping a blog?

The English/French package is the one with the typo: the English/Spanish package (different product, same company) is clean. Do they just not pay as much attention to items aimed for the Canadian market, or do they just not pay proofreaders? (Although even a spellchecker would have caught "comfortabley".) It would have been even better if the French version had had a matching typo — "conefort", maybe.

No spellchecker will tell you that "steel" and "steal" are not the same thing, but common sense might tell you that "stainless steal" is not a thing, and if it doesn't then you've got no business writing copy for a commercial product.

Keep Calm and Carry On

2011-08-19T06:08:00.005-03:00

I thought I thought of this myself but as you can see, someone else beat me to it

Yeah, I'm still alive. My perpetual state of umbrage at a world filled with typos, egregious misspellings and grammatical errors seems to have abated, possibly because I'm basically a pure carnivore* these days and as everybody knows, eating colossal quantities of meat turns you into a dreamy-eyed pacifist. (It's the vegetarians you have to watch out for. They're brutal.) My Blogger archive is studded with literally dozens of drafts, which is to say abandoned posts, because I started to write them and then realized that I just didn't have enough fury in me to even bother finishing them.

This is what prompted me to post, a BoingBoing bit called "Muphry's Law: The Inevitability of Typos in Discussions of Proofreading" (which they got from here):

1. if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;

2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;

3. the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and

4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

It's not completely true: if I'm going to post complaining about someone else's typos you can bet that I'm going to proof my own text over and over again so as not to give anyone a stick to batter me with in turn. But it's near enough to the truth.

*Not really. But after two months on South Beach, virtually no carbohydrates but tons of meat, eggs, and low-fat cheese plus bucketfuls of salad greens and other low-glycemic-index vegetables, I'm down almost twenty-five pounds, and people have started to notice: "Your face is narrower!" And my blood pressure is down from 130/80+ to 120/78 (last time I checked). Also, is there a polite, discreet way to say that my, uh, how shall we say, gastrointestinal...activity...in the form of flatus is drastically reduced? This thing works.

Presented Without Comment

2011-07-13T10:01:00.003-03:00

(From Failblog, bien sûr.)

Suck It Up

2011-07-01T20:30:00.003-03:00

Homer: Hmmmm.
Lisa: I don't think they're giving enough information, Dad.
Homer: I'll figure it out. I'm gonna use all the power of my brain.

Sometimes you just don't have enough information, even if you use all the power of your brain.

Today I vaguely considered whether I wanted to dye another batch of yarn using some green and yellow dye I have (I decided not to), and I remembered that the last time I'd used that yellow, it was all absorbed almost instantly into the yarn, leaving the dye bath what they call "exhausted". And then naturally I tried to figure out where "exhausted" might have come from. I could see that all the common uses of the word had overlapping meanings: a dye bath can be exhausted and so can a person, meaning they have nothing left in them, and the exhaust of a vehicle is the remnants — what's thrown away after the useful portion of it has been utilized.

But as it turned out, I didn't have enough information, because the root of the word (obviously Latin) is so rare in English that it has no other common relatives, with, as far as I know, only one other tiny group of words employing it.

That root is "haurire", "to draw up", which specifically referred to water in Latin. The addition of the "ex-", "off", to the beginning gives it the sense of completion: all the water has been drawn off or out of something, leaving it empty — exhausted, which is what a person is when they have no energy left in them (or a dye bath when it's out of dye molecules).

The other little batch of English words is from the field of biology, and includes such useful terms as "haustorium", a tube which a fungus uses to siphon up nutrients, and "Haustrum", a genus of sea snail that drills through its prey's shell with a feeding tube.

Weight Loss

2011-06-28T12:40:00.002-03:00

As you know if you're in or past middle age, getting older has many, many downsides, one of which is that, for reasons simultaneously too complicated and too boring to get into, your weight tends to go up. Mine certainly has. Despite working on my feet for thirty plus hours a week — no desk job for me — and walking everywhere I go (because we've never owned a car), my weight has risen steadily for the last few years, so in a desperate attempt to do something about it, I've embarked on the South Beach diet, and I promise you I am not going to bore you endlessly with the details. (Well, except for this one: apparently, a loss of ten pounds or more is usual in the first two weeks, which sounds extreme, but it's almost all water, because, as a consequence of deliberately depleting the supply of glycogen in your liver, you are constantly peeing for the first week or so. Like every hour or two. And you're encouraged to drink lots and lots of water to mitigate the effects of increased protein intake on your kidneys. Good luck getting enough sleep.)

Anyway, I just finished reading a book called Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes; I had gotten a Kindle sample of his previous book (on the same topic) and was intrigued. After I finished the book, I wanted to read critical reviews of it, which haven't changed my mind about having to do something to lose weight, and carbohydrate reduction seems to be the way to go, at least for now. One of the critical reviews used a word I had never seen before: "sarcopenia".

Let's see if we can unpick that, shall we? (It will help if we have read a lot and know some Latin and Greek roots.) The first half, "sarco-", we have seen before, in the word "sarcophagus". A sarcophagus is a stone coffin, and "-phagus" is clearly related to the "-phage" in such words as "macrophage", another name for a white blood cell, which is large ("macro-") and which devours intruders into the body ("-phage") and other things it would be better to get rid of, so we might logically then guess that a sarcophagus is a corpse-eater*, and that "sarco-" refers to human bodies.

"-Penia" is, we might guess if we are particularly imaginative, related to English "penury", or poverty.

And so "sarcopenia" is literally a poverty of the body, or more specifically the wasting away of the flesh; it is used to refer to the characteristic loss of muscle mass that is seen in the elderly, yet another way in which getting older sucks.

*Literally a corpse-eater. We might imaginatively think that it's because a sarcophagus swallows up the body placed inside it, but in fact the word refers to a kind of limestone used to build the coffins, which was was thought to actively decompose the body.

Sorcery

2011-06-25T19:30:00.005-03:00

A big-ass thunderstorm is roiling about us and who knows? Perhaps the power will go out. So I'll just get this onto the screen and be done with it.

I beg you to listen to this song, an a cappella version of Ben Folds Five's "Magic", a radiantly, painfully gorgeous song about (I think) watching someone embrace death after a terrible illness:

If you want to listen to the (also gorgeous, though perhaps slightly less numinous) original:

It has been running through my head for, oh, ten hours now. I don't mind. I welcome it.

"Magic", since you might have been wondering and since I might as well attempt to tie this into my usual line of inquiry, is related though (of course) Indo-European "magh-" to the words "might" (both the noun and the modal verb, which, if you think about it, have an overlap of meaning: "to be able") and "machine" (a device with the ability to perform a task). I could go into more detail but, you know, thunderstorm.

Lost in Translation

2011-06-21T20:39:00.005-03:00

Have you seen Bad Translator? It takes the core idea of sites like Hanzi Smatter/Engrish Funny, which is that it's hilarious to watch people arrogantly using languages they're not fluent in, to a whole new level by repeatedly running user-supplied text through machine translation (Google Translate, of course), into and out of the various languages (in alphabetical order), always running back into English so we can track the changes, and for maximum hilarity. I haven't managed to create any knee-slappers, but it's easy to see how tiny errors that creep in can reverberate throughout the generations in completely unexpected ways, in a sort of online version of the children's game called (in North America) Telephone (and the UK, Chinese Whispers).

One important thing you need to know about Google Translate, if you haven't encountered it already, is that when it runs across a word it doesn't know, it won't make an attempt at translation (and flag it as such), but will simply paste the word untouched into the translation.

Here is a sentence I happened to be reading at more or less the same time I discovered Bad Translator —what? I read more than one page at once, I can multi-task— from the latest edition of Fred Clark's minute, epic deconstruction of the Left Behind series:

There’s a vast and thriving cottage industry of this sort of thing in the evangelical subculture, one that has existed for decades on the traveling-speaker and seminar circuit and in recent years has proliferated online.

And here is the result of fifty translations from and to English:

Last year, travel, language laboratories, important industry in Saint Florian, the Bible, the Internet is everywhere.

The big question is, "Where did Saint Florian come from?" The fifth word, "thriving", was translated as "flourishing" on the trip back from Finnish, and survived in that form until Haitian Creole turned it into "florissante", from which there was no return: the translation into English couldn't make any sense of it, so "florissante" it remained in and out of tongue after tongue, until the translation from Italian, apparently assuming it was a name, capitalized it, and then all was lost. Japanese phonetically turned it into "Florian Santo", and there it remained for a few iterations until, mysteriously, it came out of Malay as "Saint Florian" (the mystery being why it didn't happen sooner), and there it remained until the end of the process.

Languages that use alphabets other than the Roman are where many errors pop up. "I want an apple" turns into "I want an apology" on its way through Korean, though "apple pie" survives unscathed, presumably because the phrase is a more or less universally known unit. (The equally unitary, but idiomatic, "Dutch door" almost instantly becomes "Netherlands".)

"Proliferated online" turning into "the Internet is everywhere" is charming, and the way stations are revealing: from "proliferated online" to "outbreaks online", then "the spread of the Internet" (since, I assume, an outbreak is the spread of a disease), and then "Internet penetration" for quite a few iterations, which rapidly becomes "the Internet is widespread", which stays in circulation for a while until "the Internet is everywhere" replaces it and never goes away, suggesting that such a basic construction (article-noun-verb-adjective, made of common words) can be very durable across languages.

It depends on the languages, though. "The sky is blue" quickly becomes "Blue sky" (in Arabic); "The dog is hungry" is sturdier, but even that eventually turns into "Hungry dog" (in Indonesian). I played around for a while, but I couldn't find a sentence that kept its identity to the last translation. ("Apple pie" might survive, but "Give me an apple pie" becomes, delightfully, "Apple of my pie.")

Still, I imagine it would be fairly easy to formulate a paragraph that comes out of the whole Bad Translator process more or less unscathed, lots of straightforward assertions and basic constructions. I know it would be simple to destroy highly idiomatic phrases, because I tried a bunch of them. One example: "It's raining cats and dogs" survives a few iterations, until it's replaced by another idiom, "it's pouring down in buckets", and then it's a series of missteps; "pour into buckets", "into the barrel", and then, disastrously, "in the tube", which predictably turns into "in the metro", and then "in the subway", "the subway", back to "Metro", and, charmingly, "England", where it remains in one form or another to the bitter end.

Tissue? I Hardly Know You

2011-06-13T09:23:00.008-03:00

The French word for "fabric", I noticed yesterday, is "tissu", which is obviously the source of or a relative to the English word "tissue"; the French word is the past participle* of "tistre", "to weave", which is from Latin "texere", with the same meaning and obviously the progenitor of English "textile". The Spanish word for "fabric" (or also apparently "canvas") is "tela", which is related to French "toile", which is also a kind of fabric in English and which also means "canvas" in French; "tela" is also Latin for "web". (The fabric known to every bride as tulle is unrelated to these words: it's the name of a French town in which net-based lace was manufactured.)

While Jim and I were in New York, we went to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that McQueen was a genius and a visionary, and I am grateful to have been able to see his work so close. Not, perhaps, as close as I would have liked, considering the unbelievable crowds at the place (it's the best-attended clothing exhibit in the Museum's history), but close enough.

I don't know a whole lot about clothing — it falls on the continuum of "Potentially Artistic Things I Know About" with perfumery (quite a lot) and food (just about enough) on one side, architecture (not very much at all, really) and cars (virtually nothing) on the other — but I know art when I see it, and McQueen was an artist. A great one. Just look at this dress, the first thing you see when you enter the exhibition:

I wish you could see it from a couple of feet away. It is astounding. It puts ideas in your head. It is made of ideas. Even not knowing much about clothing, I can see how the following ideas and contradictions pile up and fight with one another in this piece:

1) It is superficially in the form of a dress, but it is made of razor-clam shells, so it is unwearable. (You might be able to walk down a runway with it on your person, but you couldn't actually wear it.) It's clothing, but not-clothing.
2) The shells look like fingernails, or claws: it's a dress made of weapons.
3) The layering of the shells resembles that of the feathers on a bird, and McQueen also used feathers** in his work; but where feathers are light and airy, shells are heavy and born of water.
4) It's made of what is essentially waste —clamshells found on the seashore, then cleaned up—and yet it is couture, and art.
5) It's clearly armour.
6) Though it calls to mind weapons and armour, it is also incredibly fragile. The show's notes say that the model who wore the dress on the runway "trashed it", surely through no fault of her own***; presumably it was reassembled for display. Look at the trail of shards:

Did it cut her as she tried to walk in it? Did she give her blood for art?

McQueen might have liked that, unfortunately. He was not a nice man. Geniuses so rarely are.

*Hedging my bets here: as far as I know, regular French verbs that end in -re have a past participle that ends in -u, though of course there may be exceptions, and sometimes these words show up in English: the pp of "fondre", "to melt", is "fondu", hence English "fondue", and "pursue" is from the old verb "porsivre", which was turned into "poursuir" and then anglicized into "pursuer". It would be amusing to think that through some tortured etymology, "ecru" was the past participle of "ecrire", "to write", but of course this is not so: it is of course French, but initially from an intensified version of Latin "crudus", "raw", and refers to an unbleached white colour usually known in English as "eggshell".

**Speaking of feathers, look at this astonishing, horrifying object:

The skirt is of feathers that shade from blood-red to black, a disturbing progression that in this context makes me think of someone bleeding to death, especially considering that the bodice is constructed of medical slides, bored with tiny holes to string them together and hand-painted red. Does that not create all sorts of dreadful associations in your mind?

***Actually, I later found a video of part of the show, and she does kind of smash up the dress, clutching at the shells and crushing them in her hands. I assume, then, that it was re-created at some point, possibly for the exhibition.

Cat Got Yer Tongue

2011-06-02T16:52:00.003-03:00

I have been variously busy with work and knitting and reading (actual books, not online) and also preparing for an upcoming trip to New York, and consequently have nothing to offer in my usual line of edification and condemnation, but it occurred to me that you might not ever have seen this piece of whimsy, a parody of Blake's "The Tiger" by A. E. Housman, its especial genius being that once you have read it you can never again read the original with a straight face (because if nothing else when you read "brain" in Blake you will immediately think "bray"), and even if you have seen it, it never gets old, and so I share it with you.

O have you caught the tiger?
And can you hold him tight?
And what immortal hand or eye
Could frame his fearful symmetry?
And does he try to bite?

Yes, I have caught the tiger,
And he was hard to catch.
O tiger, tiger, do not try
To put your tail into my eye,
And do not bite and scratch.

Yes, I have caught the tiger.
O tiger, do not bray!
And what immortal hand or eye
Could frame his fearful symmetry
I should not like to say.

And may I see the tiger?
I should indeed delight
To see so large an animal
Without a voyage to Bengal.
And mind you hold him tight.

Yes, you may see the tiger;
It will amuse you much.
A tiger is, as you will find,
A creature of the feline kind.
And mind you do not touch.

And do you feed the tiger,
And do you keep him clean?
He has a less contented look
Than in the Natural History book,
And seems a trifle lean.

Oh yes, I feed the tiger,
And soon he will be plump;
I give him groundsel fresh and sweet,
And much canary seed to eat,
And wash him at the pump.

It seems to me the tiger
Has not been lately fed,
Not for a day or two at least;
And that is why the noble beast
Has bitten off your head.

Em Barrassing

2011-05-31T05:52:00.001-03:00

Here is a recent Slate article about the em dash, which I use all the time, or at least a dummied-up version of composed of two hyphens. I don't, however, use it as much as the piece's author, who has so liberally and, I assume, jokingly studded her article with them that I found it unreadable.

If you are going to use the em dash in the middle of a sentence, to insert a thought into the flow of words, then you have to use a pair of them, just exactly as you would use parentheses: most of the time, when I use a pair of em dashes in this manner, it's because I've already in my opinion used up my allotment of parentheses. And yet here are a couple of sentences from another Slate piece about counterfeiting and its possible positive effect on sales of the real thing:

With policing severely curtailed, counterfeiting took off in 1995—Qian estimates a nearly 100-fold increase in the production of fakes within just two years.

That's how you use a single em dash, if you want to tack two clauses together without using a semicolon or a colon. Perfectly valid, although Strunk and White disapprove. But look at this:

The copies of low-end items—produced with cheap fabric on cheap, locally made machinery, were scarcely different from the real deal, which were also produced with cheap fabric on cheap machinery.

Wrong wrong wrong! The parenthetical "produced with cheap fabric on cheap, locally made machinery" is inserted into the middle of the sentence, and has to be bracketed with em dashes. The comma at the end is insufficient.

You'd think someone would have noticed that before it went to print, but this is Slate we're talking about. They don't notice much of anything.

A Steal

2011-05-30T10:22:00.003-03:00

A few days ago I off-handedly mentioned what looks like an issue of plagiarism in the handmade-jewellery world, although as April Winchell of Regretsy notes, it isn't that cut-and-dried, because nobody seems to know who came up with the idea first, as is fairly often the case with simple, obvious-in-retrospect ideas. (One commenter suggests that the basic concept is at least as old the mid-eighties.)

And then as usual the word "plagiarism" (or my preferred version, "plagiary"), haunted me, because I realized that I did not know where it came from. It suggests the French "plage", "beach", which is stupid, because the words are so obviously unrelated to one another. So where did it come from?

From Latin, it will not surprise you to learn. To the Romans, a plagiarius was someone who took something not belonging to him--specifically a kidnapper, but also a seducer, and, later, a thief of someone's words, the most usual meaning nowadays (although it can also, as in the case of the jewellery, refer to a thief of intellectual property).

"Plagiarius" is from "plaga", "net", from Indo-European "plag-", "flat, spread-out", which is also the source and the approximate meaning of, yes, French "plage", "beach". To my complete astonishment.

"Plagiary" is of course unrelated to "plague", which is evidently from "plangere", "to strike; to lament (signified by the beating of the breast)", the source of English "plangent", referring to a sound with a deep, possibly loud, and generally mournful quality. "Plangere" late in the history of Latin became "plaga", unrelated to the "net" sense, meaning a wound inflicted by a strike and then to a pestilence such as the plague.

Superiority Complex

2011-05-29T06:50:00.002-03:00

Ordinarily I am pretty forgiving when it comes to Facebook updates and blog posts and e-mails and comments: nobody is expecting you to write like Faulkner, and a certain degree of hurried inaccuracy is going to creep in. There's no excuse for really terrible spelling and grammar, even if you're just jotting down a shopping list, but I try not to be too judgemental. Grammar Naziism, or at least grammar-wanking, is colossally irritating, in an online context: someone makes a comment with a single misspelling, someone else corrects them, and soon the whole comment thread has devolved into a tiresome slurry of recrimination and insult.

But this thing here? This is kind of genius.

So genius that it could be faked. But even if it was, it's still genius, and if it wasn't, then kudos to Daniel, and a suggestion for Lindsay and her family: Back to school for you lot. Or at least slow down and think about what you're writing before you hit the Publish button.

In fact, it's a lesson for all of us: Don't write angry.

By the Book

2011-05-28T04:41:00.003-03:00

I got a Kindle recently, sorry to keep bringing it up but it is magic, and the software I use to manage my books is called Calibre (which is excellent, and which the website spells "calibre", lower-case). A co-worker also uses it--she has a Kobo--but she pronounced it "cah-lee-bray", and we had a small and friendly disagreement about how it ought to be pronounced. (I'm fairly certain it's pronounced exactly like the English noun.)

But her pronunciation got me thinking a couple of things. One is that the name is a play on the French word for "book", which is "libre", derived from Latin "liber", which is related to English "leaf" (another word for the page of a book) through, probably, Indo-European "leubh-", "to peel" The second is that the "liber-" in "liberate" and "liberal" and a clutch of other words that have connotations of freedom looks the same as the "liber" that is a book, but could not possibly be, right?

Right. That "liber-" just happens to look the same, but emerges from Latin via another Indo-European word, "leudho", "people", which exists to this day in German "Leute", with the same meaning. In Latin, "liberalis" was an adjective referring to free men (as opposed to women, children, and slaves), and its offshoots in English also have related meanings.

+

A couple of days ago I read a Boingboing piece about Urban Outfitters, who, and not for the first time, are selling a product that is evidently a rip-off of an artist's work: in this case, little necklace pendants in the shape of a state, with a heart punched in them. Not my kind of thing, but someone's, clearly.

The Boingboing article links to a piece about the controversy in an online magazine, I guess, called Business Insider, containing the following sentence:

Even accusing a corporation of plagiarism can get you nabbed with a liable suit, as happened recently to an Australian bikini designer.

And naturally, I thought, Oh, you have got to be kidding me. A writer who doesn't know the difference between "libel" and "liable"?

And then I thought, okay, there's obviously no way those words are related, surely? And there isn't.

"Liable" is clearly the French-originated fusion of "li-" plus "-able": the only question was what the "li-" stood for, and that turned out to be the "li-" in "ligature" and "ligament", from Latin "ligare", "to bind", because "liable" means "bound to or obligated to by law".

"Libel", on the other hand, originally meant in English a written statement of charges by a plaintiff, taking a few hundred years to accumulate its modern meaning of "writing which harms a person's reputation" in the mid-1600s. "Libel" is derived from Latin "libellus", which is the diminutive form of, yes, "liber", "book".

Small world!

+

And as a bonus, a commenter on the Boingboing piece wrote the following:

Being a business oriented blog, which might touch on legal things, I would have expected them to know the difference between "liable" and "libel".

Now, I do not generally rag on comments and their makers, because comments generally have no edit function, so typos and other little mistakes are likely to appear and then be set in amber forever more. But if you are going to make a comment disparaging someone else's grammar, spelling, or usage, then yours had better be perfect.

This one isn't. We have a reference problem, a very common one: the sentence as it stands could be reconstructed to read, "I, a business-oriented blog, would have expected...." The fix is easy: "As it is a business-oriented blog, I would have expected...."

Leaders and Followers

2011-05-19T11:11:00.002-03:00

What happened to me? A KINDLE HAPPENED, that's what. I was thinking about buying one but I was gonna wait until we got back from New York and then a co-worker was reading hers at work and let me play with it and dammit, I had to have one, and now I do, and I have a LOT of books on it--you can get SO MANY for free at Project Gutenberg--and now I am just reading reading reading all the time, on the bus at home at work (during breaks), more than I have in years, probably, and my knitting is falling by the wayside and my blogs are being ignored (by me, I mean) but at least the household chores are getting done, so I'm not completely a lost cause.

But I'm still listening to the Cleopatra audiobook (might as well use it up), and late into it the author used the word "formidable" to refer to the queen, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I did not know where it might have come from, and also that it was really a very strange word, because can you think of another English word that might be related to it? I couldn't, except possibly "formicidae", the family of insects that are the ants, and also therefore "formic", as in "formic acid", which is found in the bites of ants and which is colossally interesting stuff, because in quantity it apparently smells like ants, like an anthill, and because it substitutes for hydrochloric acid in the stomachs of anteaters, who devour so many ants that the formic acid in their bodies does the work of digestion, and also because it decomposes (in the presence of heat and other acids) into water and carbon monoxide.

But "formidable" is obviously not related to "formicidae", is it?

No, it is not. But the two words, thanks to their related sounds, evolved from words that are likewise similar to one another. "Formidable" is, as "-able" words generally are, from French, and the French naturally enough got it from Latin: in this case, "formido", which means "fearfulness, dread, terror", making "formidable" another excellent example of that class of words in English that has shed its original connotations of horribleness and come to be a mere intensifier: "terrible", "awfully", "dreadfully". "Formido" in turn seems to have emerged from Greek "mormo", a goblin, through a process called dissimilation, in which sounds are mutated sometimes beyond recognition.

"Formic" and "formicidae" are also from Latin, obviously, from "formica", their word for an ant, which was more or less accidentally re-coined for commercial purposes a century ago from the words "for mica", since the product was originally intended to be a substitute for mica in electrical insulators. Latin "formica" is from Greek "myrmex", "ant", through the exact same process of dissimilation, and "myrmex" may still be seen in English "myrmidon", originally a warrior, now usually taken to mean an unquestioning follower.

Illogical Punctuation

2011-05-13T23:59:00.002-03:00

I tried to post a couple of days ago, but Blogger was read-only, for some reason.

Anyway. Here are three articles from Slate. The first is an object lesson in the power of good writing: a well-written negative review will have more of a positive effect than a badly written positive review. As I never seem to tire of saying, there is a lesson in this.

The second article is about something I've had reason to deal with in the past: so-called "logical punctuation", in which the usual American habit of invariably putting terminal punctuation marks such as the comma and the period inside the quotation marks is jettisoned in favour of putting them where they most reasonably ought to be put--inside the marks if what's inside the marks stands on its own, outside otherwise. (A commenter once snottily informed me that I was doing it wrong.)

The third article has nothing to do with grammar or punctuation: it is a review of an American fitness chain. But it contains these sentences:

"There are thousands of average Jane's and Joe's for every big lifter. Many of those Janes and Joes are intimidated by grunting and 50-pound dumbbells. So, they decided to cater to the thousands at the expense of a smaller segment. It seems to be working quite nicely for them."

How did that even happen? How did someone, a paid writer, decide that the plurals of "Jane" and "Joe" require apostrophes (which, for the record, plurals in English do not), and then, in the very next sentence, decide the opposite? And how did that slip past an editor, assuming there was one, which clearly there must not have been?

The Grimly Inevitable

2011-05-05T23:36:00.002-03:00

I just realized that reading Slate is like watching a horror movie through your fingers with the assumption that something awful will lunge out at you when you least expect it. You'd think I'd read Slate a sense of miserable resignation after all these years, but no, it's like Samuel Johnson's definition of a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience.

Parallel structure is not that hard to master, but we still end up with ghastly sentences like this one from a story about the Tony Awards:

Margaret and Jackie are stubborn, proud, and cling to a sense that they are good people, even when they aren't.

The rule is simple: if you compose your sentence so that a verb is explicitly used for the first element of a list and then implied for the second, then by god you have to imply it for the rest of the elements in the list, too, and if you can't do that, then you have to recompose your sentence to introduce the new verb correctly. Like so:

Margaret and Jackie are stubborn and proud, and cling to a sense that they are good people, even when they aren't.

Now how hard was that?

And this gem from a piece about the new Jodie Foster movie:

In the production notes for The Beaver, the film's "austere palate" is mentioned.

Unless the movie eats like an Anchorite, I am willing to bet that the production notes mentioned instead the film's austere palette. I have been over this palate/palette/pallet mixup before, and as I said the last time, "it's always Slate, isn't it?" And it always is.

Broken

2011-05-04T07:03:00.003-03:00

A few weeks ago I was snarking about writers who mistake one word for another even though they ought to know better and the words are completely unrelated, and now look at this mess from a recent edition of The Onion:

"Breech" is hardly ever seen by itself in the singular but often encountered in the phrases "breech-loading" or "breech birth": when it stands alone it's always the plural "breeches", "trousers", frequently countrified to "britches".

The word the Onion writer was making a stab at is "breach", which is the flip side of "break" and has more or less exactly the same meaning. (In English we often see this soft "-ch-" or "-sh-" or "-s-" sound paired with a related hard "-k-" sound: "drink" and "drench", for example, or "haunches" and "hunker".*) "Breech" may or may not be descended from "breach", but it is not the same word.

* An amusing variant of this is "flacon", which in English has a hard "-c-" but in French is spelled "flaçon", with a soft "-ç-": the related word is "flask", but we also have "flagon", which is midway between "flacon" and "flaçon" and seems like a half-hearted attempt to soften the middle consonant without completely mushing it up.

Fertility Treatment

2011-05-03T06:02:00.006-03:00

Well, let's see. I was looking at the clevernesses on Must Have Cute when I saw this:

and I know the Japanese come up with some amazing things, but eggs with shaped yolks? How could this be?

With the Magic Egg Shaper, which, not to keep you in suspense, is a cluster of tubular wells with shaped inserts: you separate eggs, pour the whites into the tubes, insert the pegs to leave space for the yolks, dunk the whole thing into boiling water to cook the whites, wiggle out the pegs, pour in the liquid yolk, and boil the whole thing again to set the yolks. Slice 'em and you're done, and won't everybody be impressed?

At the bottom of the page was the usual "Other Products You May Like", one of which was this:

Nice! And no messy dirt to cope with. It's actually simpler than that. You mould a little slab of water-impregnated gel, sprinkle seeds on top, place it in the frame, and leave it to its own devices.

Here's a screen shot from the product's page, which is in French but which I can read:

"Graine" means "grain" or "seed", which, when you think about it, are nearly the same thing, except that "grain" can also mean a small, seed-sized particle of something inorganic such as salt or sand. But what caught my eye was the verb, "semez", obviously the imperative "[you] sow".

And in my usual geek's joy at discovering an etymology, I realized that "semez", its presumed parent verb being "semer", must be related to English "semen", which is to say "seed". And it is!

But there's more. We may have gotten "semen" from Latin, but the verb "to sow" comes from the Germanic tongues, who extracted it from Indo-European "se-". The Latin tongue took the word in another direction: "satum". As soon as you see that word, it is hard not to think of its appearance in English in the botanical name of the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa. And "sative" is an English word, too: it means "sown: propagated by seed". There are other satives in the world of the flora: saffron comes from Crocus sativus (the masculine form of "sativa"), arugula is Eruca sativa, and the oats we eat are Avena sativa. (If you spend any time in a drugstore you may have noticed a product with the brand name Aveeno, which contains skin-calming oatmeal and which is obviously related to "avena", the "-e-" doubled so you'll pronounce it properly. The French word for "oatmeal", by the way, is "avoine".)

The only question I couldn't find a definite answer to was what exactly makes a sative a sative--how Oryza sativa, rice, might differ from some other kind of rice. The only thing I can think of is that sative plants are sown from seed as opposed to, say, propagated by stem grafting or through runners. I know that garden crocuses are planted as bulbs, so I figure saffron crocuses must be planted as sown seeds. If I'm wrong, it won't be the first time.

It Stinks

2011-05-02T07:04:00.002-03:00

Is it real? Don't know. Is it funny? Heck yes!

But whoever's responsible for it might want to get a copy editor to explain subject-verb agreement to them.

Via Win!

Little Details

2011-04-30T00:08:00.003-03:00

Over on the A.V. Club there's a little news article about some British actor named Rob Kazinsky leaving the set of "The Hobbit", and since it would be very hard for me to care less about the movie, I wouldn't have ever bothered clicking the link if the thumbnail headshot they posted didn't suggest that the actor in question was exceedingly attractive indeed, as a little further research proved to be the case.

Unshaven redheads? Yes please!

And, the A.V. Club commenters being what they are, someone raised the issue of "dwarfs" versus "dwarves" (since this is Tolkien we are talking about), and someone eventually wrote a long and involved reply that I am quoting here in full because I was so intoxicated by it.

Here's the thing. There are basically two classes of English nouns ending in f. You have ones like leaf and roof and wolf, which are older in English and derive from Anglo-Saxon and tend to morph the f into a v when pluralized. Then you have ones like proof and brief and chief, which derive from Romance languages usually keep their f in the plural form.

Of course, people don't generally remember where words come from, so over time these classes got mixed up. Belief is Anglo-Saxon, but it only changes to believes when it's a verb: nobody ever talks about their personal believes. Because dwarf and elf aren't as common in every day speech as leaf and roof, the older forms plural forms were forgotten, and dwarves and elves became dwarfs and elfs.

Tolkien thought this was bullshit, for a number of reasons. First, he hated to see words mangled by the passage of time just because people forgot how they were supposed to be pronounced or deemed the old-fashioned way "archaic." As far as he was concerned, elf and dwarf were as old and Germanic as leaf and roof, and deserved their v's to show it. Furthermore, in writing the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings he made a deliberate effort to avoid words of Latin origin, and his eyes "dwarfs" was a Latinized bastardization of a thoroughly Anglo word. Obviously, it's impossible to write prose of any length in modern English without using ANY words from Latin, but his sense of style and the setting of the story made him heavily biased against them. Given the choice between a word from Old English and an import via French, he almost invariably went with the former.

Actually, Tolkien showed considerable nerd-restraint in using "dwarves." Dwarf in Old English was dweorh, which was pronounced with a guttural sound at the end: it changed to f in Middle English in the same process that altered the sound of words like enough. The "proper" plural was dwarrows, but Tolkien decided that it would be too jarring for any reader not thoroughly versed in the philological history of the word. If anything, he was enraged at the way his publishers disregarded what he must have felt was an artful compromise.

Well then!

Intended

2011-04-29T23:38:00.001-03:00

I was reading Slate a few days ago, and over in the sidebar was a link to a Washington Post story about Prince Harry, and even though I honestly don't give a toss about the marriage of his brother, like him a hereditarily rich and powerful person, to the woman he's been seeing on and off for the last few years, I clicked on the link anyway, because Harry is mildly interesting, because without the pressure of being groomed for kingship he appears to be doing something with his life, and also for the obvious fact that unlike his brother he looks quite literally nothing like either of his parents, and is almost certainly not the son of Prince Charles, but instead of James Hewitt. At any rate, the story had some pointless video about wedding dresses captioned as follows:

As London prepares for Britain's Prince William to marry commoner Kate Middleton, bridal shop owners are prepping for the rush of bride-to-be's who may want to copy the soon-to-be princess's style.

What the hell?

What English speaker doesn't instinctively feel that the plural of "bride-to-be" isn't "bride-to-be's", which is wrong in two ways, but "brides-to-be"? What kind of idiot wrote that? And what other idiot let it be published?

In English, it is true, the matter is not completely settled on how to pluralize a compound noun, and never will be: the most usual tack is to pluralize the noun itself, even when the word isn't hyphenated--"passersby"--but Shakespeare wrote "son-in-laws" instead of the more usual "sons-in-law", and some seemingly parallel nouns are pluralized in different ways: "attorneys general" is considered the correct form, but so is "brigadier generals", though they have exactly the same structure. The reason is that "general" is a military title, and in a title such as "brigadier general" or "major-general", both halves are considered nouns rather than one being an adjective as it is with say "governor-general", and the "general" part is the more important and therefore is the one pluralized. Some people disagree with this, so you don't need to take me to task for it if you're one of them, and in fact I don't care which plural you use. I don't even really care if you like the non-standard "passerbys" or "man-o'-wars". If I were your editor I would probably red-pencil them, but in day-to-day use? Do what you like.

Just don't ever, ever use "bride-to-be's". EVER!

Holy Cow

2011-04-24T18:57:00.006-03:00

I was poking around the Internet with the help of Stumbleupon when it fed me 21 Reasons Why English Sucks, which is a list of sentences containing words which are spelled the same but pronounced differently:

3. The dump was so full it had to refuse more refuse.

17. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

As the computer people like to say, that's a feature, not a bug. We often pronounce identically-spelled words differently to indicate their different parts of speech, rather than having to use endings. There are a great many pairs of words in which the stress on the first syllable indicates one part of speech, usually a noun or an adjective, and on the second a different part of speech, usually a verb, such as "refuse" up there, plus "record", "invalid", "desert", "minute", "annex", and lots of others.

English being English, though, there are no hard and fast rules. Some other words, out of sheer perversity, are pronounced the same: noun and adjective "mobile", for instance. Sometimes we'll have two nouns or verbs but will still pronounce the vowels differently to distinguish them: "primer", say, or "read". "Abstract" is another special case, because it serves as three parts of speech, so the second-syllable stress serves as usual for the verb while the first-syllable stress denotes both a noun and an adjective, and depends on context to make its meaning clear.

Still, beyond a doubt, that has to make English tricky to learn, especially if you speak a language that doesn't rely on stress patterns. I don't think it's reason enough to say that the language sucks, though.

+

It's Easter Sunday, which I don't celebrate, not being Christian or any kind of religious, because my opinion of religion, not that it matters, is that it's based entirely on wishful thinking: all our enemies get punished for eternity (the Abrahamic religions), we all have latent superpowers (Scientology), we don't die (the hopeful origin of most religions, actually), we can live together in peace and harmony except for gay people (Baha'i). But that doesn't mean I don't know anything about religion. In fact, in my experience, atheists generally know more about religion than religious people, because atheists have to defend their position while religious people have the "Because God says so, that's why" fallback position.

I am in the middle of reading--actually reading, not audiobook-reading--"Filthy English" by Peter Silverton, which is a sort of history and etymology of swearing in various languages, mostly English, and not really as good as I had hoped (it could have used a good editorial pruning: not every anecdote and derivation is fascinating). but I was seduced by its joyous cover.

It could have used a copy editor, too. Here are a few sentences from page 168:

...there are two possible views of the Virgin Mary's immaculate conception. One, that she really was impregnated by an angel--via the ear, if I remember my catechism right. Two, that the virginity of HolyMaryMotherOfGod--as the same catechism taught me to refer to her--was conceptual and symbolic. The immaculacy of her conception was a way of desexualising maternity, of taking the fucking out of motherhood.

I suppose it's safe to assume that Silverton is Catholic*, but if so, how can it possibly be that he does not understand the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, one of the four guiding principles of Mariolatry, or devotion to HolyMaryMotherOfGod**?

The Immaculate Conception (see second footnote) is not the same as the Virgin Birth, which is the doctrine that Jesus was born of a virgin who was impregnated magically by God himself and not through messy carnal intercourse. I will never cease to be amazed at the number of Catholics--for whom this is pretty much the cornerstone of their faith--who don't know this.

*He may have said, but I've been reading the book in three- to six-page chunks, and I don't remember, and I don't feel like going back over the preceding 167 pages to find out. I could be wrong.

**If you must know, they are the belief that she was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ and therefore existed in a state of Perpetual Virginity; that she, being the mother of Jesus, who was part of the trinity of GodTheFatherGodTheSonAndGodTheHolyGhost (to use Silverton's formulation) and therefore is God, must therefore actually be the Mother of God; that she, to be a fit vessel for the Saviour, must have been born, unlike every other living human, without the stain of original sin, and therefore was the product of an Immaculate Conception; and finally, that, being without sin, she did not have to be judged after death, but was simply Assumed Bodily Into Heaven.

Precisely

2011-04-21T08:43:00.003-03:00

As I believe I may have mentioned, I'm listening to a lot of audiobooks these days, mostly at the gym and on the way to and from work. (Their existence is probably the only reason I haven't bought a Kindle yet.) Right now it's Cleopatra: A Life by Stacey Schiff*, which is fascinating, and beautifully read by Robin Miles.

However. It really threw me when Miles pronounced the word "unguent" to rhyme with "pungent". I had never, ever heard it pronounced any other way than "un'-gwent".

But guess what? Apparently rhymes-with-pungent isn't actually wrong, which is to say that I located a dictionary that allows it, specifically Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, which I'm not linking to because each page has an auto-start video which I find terrifically annoying.

I still don't like rhymes-with-pungent, but there is precedent, for some reason.

+

Speaking of Merriam-Webster, read this sentence from an A.V. Club piece about home taping**:

Since my Hee Haw problem was the first time I’d had a Macrovision issue with my TiVo, I’d hesitate to call this a huge crime against the consumer, but it’s definitely aggravating.

Nothing wrong there, you might think, and you would be right. But some really prissy protectionists of the English language, aka prescriptivist grammarians, say that "aggravating" is a barbarism in this context, because "aggravate" literally means "to make worse" . Well, no, actually it doesn't: if you want to get right back to the beginning, it means "to make heavy", from Latin "gravare", "to weigh down", also the source of "gravity" and "gravid", which is to say "heavy with child". But prescriptivists like Fowler, bless him, were and are given to making such pronouncements as, "To aggravate has properly only one meaning -- to make (an evil) worse or more serious."

Here's the thing, though: "aggravate" took on Fowler's meaning at the end of the sixteenth century, and not even three decades later had already acquired its most usual modern meaning, "to irritate or exasperate". It's meant that for some four hundred years now: surely we can admit it into the family as full kin and not some bastard pretender? (I suppose I should say at this point that due to an overzealous teacher in my past and a small hard nugget of prescriptivism in my soul, I don't in fact love "aggravate" in this context, and never use it, preferring instead to use one of English's massive collection of finely nuanced synonyms: "vex", "trouble", "bedevil", "annoy", "bother", "gall", or "infuriate", to name just a few.)

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage has a lot to say about "aggravate", so you might as well read it if you have nothing better to do.

*Whose name through no fault of her own is the same as that of the fictional best friend of the fictional and hilarious Libby Gelman-Waxner, former movie reviewer for Premiere magazine and alter ego of Paul Rudnick, about whom I am forced to say that he writes great jokes but terrible, terrible screenplays.

**Remember that old industry ad line, "Home Taping is Killing Music"? One of the commenters parodied it as "Home Fucking Is Killing Prostitution," which is delicious. Not original, but still a great joke.

Memory Lane

2011-04-18T01:25:00.006-03:00

Remember when The Onion had sharp, on-the-ball writers and copy editors? Yeah, those were the days. Now we get things like this:

Don't get me wrong—I love my job and I enjoy working my ill-informed fans into a frenzy by tapping into their deep-seeded, ignorant fears of people who are different from them.

We may be losing "decimate" and "hoi polloi" (apparently a lot of people think it means "the upper crust" and not "the [common] people"), but the expression intended above is "deep-seated", and ought to remain so. (College Humor knows what's what.)

+

Remember when Failblog was excellent? Now they'll put up anything: you can stick a soft-core porno movie on the kids' DVD shelf at your local video store and take a picture of it and they'll post it. And they'll also post things like this:

Have we actually lost the euphemism "four-letter word" as something that means "swear word or otherwise bad thing"? Are there actually people who don't know what it means, and take it literally?

I guess so.

+

At least we've still got Ugliest Tattoos, where you can see treats like this:

Funny may be a matter of taste, and fails may not be what they used to be, but ugly tattoos are forever.

Change or Die

2011-04-14T10:41:00.002-03:00

I suppose you've already read this piece that was published last week in Slate about changes in word usages over time and when we ought to throw in the towel?

Some of the words and phrases are already lost causes, of course. "Decimate", despite an etymology which points to its original sense of "to kill one in ten", now means "to destroy the larger part of". "The lion's share", from one of Aesop's fables, once meant "the entirety [of]", but now means "most [of]". (I would perversely argue that it always meant "most", because, wild animals being what they are, sneaky carnivores such as the jackal are going to skitter in and grab what they can get while the lion isn't looking.)

Some of the words it will be a real shame to lose. I think many people wouldn't know the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested", but the former has a specific meaning--"partial in judging to neither side, and therefore presumed to be fair"--which is useful, and in no way connected to the meaning of the latter. (Another similar pair of words is "unused" and "disused", the latter of which is generally disused these days.)

+

It's always hilarious to hear people talk about the purity of English, as if the language was now or ever had been at any point some sort of beacon of polish and refinement instead of the linguistic version of the North Pacific Gyre, sucking in flotsam from every part of the globe where it may commingle, most of it sinking from sight and the remainder forever being circulated and altered and recombined.

I am not opposed to change in language, of course, but I like the idea that words mean something, that they're not just interchangeable parts: I am opposed to the descriptivist notion that near enough is good enough. I don't expect English to remain unchanged, but there are changes and then there are changes.

Here is a sentence from a movie review on Something Awful:

It's used to illicit emotional responses from audiences when you can't do it with story or characters or acting

and here is another

At this point, the very words "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan" illicit groans and cries of "Oh, fuck that!" in cinemas everywhere.

Two different authors, the very same mistake. Three possibilities:

1) They're the same person writing under different aliases.
2) An editor who doesn't know better got his hands on both pieces.
3) Mistaking "illicit" for "elicit" is a very common error.

The words aren't even related, for god's sake. "Elicit" is the the fusion of "ex-", "out of", and "lacere", "to draw out, to lure" (the "-lace" of "shoelace", in the sense of "a cord for tying", is kin). "Illicit" is formed of "in-", "not", plus "licitus", "lawful", from "licere", "to be allowed" (seen in "license" and "licentious"). They sound the same, but they are not the same.

Mistaking "illicit" for "elicit" is exactly the same as mistaking "they're" for "their" or "there". Such errors mark you as undereducated, sub-literate. They're a badge of shame.

Sew Confusing

2011-04-05T12:51:00.003-03:00

I honestly don't know what's worse: people who ought to know better making an obvious mistake, or people who ought to know better making a mistake that might or might not be a mistake, and you can't tell from the context whether it's right or wrong, and you rack your brains trying to figure out if they know what they're doing or not.

Here is a description of a new scent from indie perfumer Dawn Spencer Hurwitz:

Vert pour Madame opens like a wind of Persephone and dries down to the elegance of Demeter. Inspired by the utterly chic and sophisticated style of the late 1970's and early 1980's classic green floral chypre, Vert pour Madame has power but more than that, she has depth. She's achieved it. As well, Vert pour Madame is the perfect harbinger of Spring with notes of hyacinth, jonquil and lily of the valley sewn into the earth with cedarwood, patchouli and moss.

Now, some people are going to read "sewn into the earth" and think it's a poetic turn of phrase. Other people are going to think, "Huh--she obviously means 'sown', because you sow seeds to get plants, so she doesn't even know the difference between 'sewn' and 'sown'!"

Me? I don't know what to think. Maybe she did mean "sewn": maybe she was being clever. Or maybe she just doesn't understand that "sown" in the obvious context is not the same word as "sewn", or maybe she just mistyped it and didn't bother to have a knowledgeable proofreader look over the copy.

And it drives me nuts!

If she wanted use, and meant, "sewn", which is actually possible as a turn of phrase ("sewn into the earth" is rather pretty), then she ought to have set up the word by establishing the notion of sewing, or couture, or weaving, or any sort of stitchery at all. Instead, she's got me, and probably not just me, wondering if her education has a gap in it.

If nothing else, we have another sterling example of my eternal refrain: for the love of all that is holy, before you publish anything, especially if you are selling something to people who might actually be turned off by bad grammar or usage, let someone else have a look at it. Someone literate. Please.

All Over the Place

2011-04-01T08:22:00.002-03:00

In English, we don't have a huge amount of leeway in where certain words get placed, not like those languages in which grammatical case takes the place of word order. If you have suffixes which tell you which word is the subject and which the object, while at the same time one adjective has a female ending and another a male, then you really have a great deal of freedom as to where those words are placed in a complex sentence, because it will be instantly obvious how all the words relate one to another. In English, since we don't have those features (and good thing, too, I think), we have to be careful how we structure our sentences.

This aspect of the language makes a certain type of joke possible which wouldn't work in many other languages, such as this Groucho Marx classic:

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.

The reason the joke works, of course, is that 1) we generally put adjectives, adverbs, and adjectival and adverbial phrases as close as possible to the noun or verb they're modifying, but 2) our brains seamlessly and unnoticeably deduce that "in my pajamas" must refer to me and not to anything else, so it's a surprise when we discover that it doesn't.

When we don't put a modifying phrase next to whatever it's modifying, we get messes like this, from Slate's slideshow on Google logos:

Google paid tribute to the invention of the first laser on May 16, 2008, with this illuminating display.

Even though the reasonable assumption is that we have an adverbial phrase, "on May 16, 2008", which must refer back to the verb phrase "paid tribute", it is also possible that the sentence may be read as referring to "the invention of the first laser on May 16, 2008". I had to read it twice to make sure that I hadn't somehow read the date wrong, and only then--and only after figuring that the laser was a lot more than 3 years old, since I had a CD player in the eighties--could I be sure I had understood the sentence correctly.

All it would have taken was a quick rearrangement to make it as clear as could be: "On May 16, 2008, Google paid tribute to the invention of the first laser with this illuminating display." Now how hard was that?

Not Today

2011-03-31T07:20:00.002-03:00

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, and though I am not a prankster, I enjoy reading about them, as will you: here are a hundred classics.

Probably my favourite of them is The Guardian's 1977 San Serriffe advertising supplement, which must rank as one of the most elaborate and thought-out April Fool's Day pranks ever. The only thing they didn't think about was the public response: their offices were flooded with calls from curious holiday travellers and travel agents who refused to believe that this beautiful, unspoiled semi-colon-shaped pair of islands wasn't theirs for the despoliation. (Anybody who knows anything about typography will get the joke immediately: the islands of San Serriffe are called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, the capital is Bodoni, and one of the languages spoken there is Caslon.)

Another classic is that perpetrated by Discover Magazine in 1995 with their brief story about the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer of the Antarctic, which tunnels up through the ice, melts the snow beneath penguins, and devours them. The researched who discovered these creatures was a Dr. Aprile Pazzo, which is a joke not quite as obvious as San Serriffe: "Aprile pazzo" is Italian for "April fool". (A further joke in in the piece is that an explorer named Philippe Poisson was apparently done in by the borers: "poisson d'avril" is the French way of saying "April fool".)

And fictitious Dr. Pazzo got me thinking that in Italian, the plural of "pazzo" is "pazzi", and this sounds just like English "patsy", which is to say a dupe, a sap, a sucker: and therefore "pazzi" must be the source of "patsy". So obvious! The most obvious thing in the world!

You'd think that, wouldn't you? But apparently you would be wrong. I was. The Oxford English Dictionary says the etymology is uncertain, and I guess they'd know, but when you have a word in one language that means exactly the freaking same as a word in another language (plural, but still) and is pronounced identically, the inference is naturally that the words are related. But language is not always so straightforward, I guess. Still, I am going to my grave believing that "pazzi" is the source of "patsy".

Something else I believe is that, like expletive "bastard", "patsy" is specifically a word that refers to men. I don't know why some words have these iron-clad connotations for me: I don't usually attach gender to what people generally think of female-gendered words like "nurse" and "whore", but "patsy" and a few others ("schmuck" comes to mind, although it could be because that's Yiddish for "penis") are irrevocably male in my mind.

Seeds of Doubt

2011-03-27T03:51:00.004-03:00

The first copy of Spy Magazine I ever bought was the December 1987 issue: it had been in existence for about a year, but had never showed up on my city's newsstands before then. I proceeded to read it cover to cover, repeatedly over the years, and buy every issue that came out. I even knew what day it would hit the racks. It had a good six-year run, but it started to slowly go down the toilet in late 1992 (right around the time it began resorting to cheap Photoshops for its covers) and kept publishing, unfortunately, for another six years, irrevocably tarnishing its legacy. But those first six years were pretty good!

It hasn't aged as well as I would have hoped, mostly because every issue was so firmly anchored in its time and place: who even remembers "bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord" except former Spy readers? still, there's lots of great writing, investigative journalism, and graphic design to enjoy, and although not every issue is currently available, you can read most of them on Google Books, with more issues being added all the time.

One of their signature gags was "Separated at Birth?", which juxtaposed pictures of (usually) two celebrities to (usually) comic effect--they got an entire book out of the premise--and in this spirit I offer you wedded-to-his-surfboard wuss-rock chanteur Jack Johnson

and wedded-to-Reese-Witherspoon talent wrangler Jim Toth

(he's the one on the left).

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You're reading Regretsy, aren't you? It's a gloriously mean site devoted to finding the very worst of the online craft market Etsy and ripping it to shreds. This

is a gross little necklace you're supposed to give your daughter when she gets her first period, and the writeup is full of new-agey ickiness which the Regretsy writer meticulously deconstructs.

I share her revulsion with the spelling "womyn" (or "womon", or "wimmin", or what have you), and add to the pile by noting that you can't hear the difference in speech, so why even bother? It's like trying to reclaim "cunt" by spelling it "kunnt". If you cannot bring yourself to employ the word "man" or "men" in the service of a longer word, then use another word. Make one up, if you have to, or go back to the earlier days of English and use "quean" or "wif", or, better still, just deal with the fact that we have an ancient word which it does not belittle you to use.

However, the only reason this is even an issue is that one of the commenters noted that

the “Womyn” bullshit comes from the chicks that feel the need to erase all words with the term “Man” or “Men” in them. Also the same fucknuts that think we shouldn’t call it a semester, but rather an “ov-ester” while in college

and while I usually cut commenters all kinds of slack in spelling and usage and such, it bothered me that "ovester" was completely wrong, because "semester" has nothing to do with "semen", being instead essentially formed from the Latin for "six months", the "-mest-" being related to "menses", and therefore a word that feminists might embrace. The word the commenter was thinking of was "ovular", which was in fact repurposed by some feminists to replace "seminar", which is related to "semen", though probably not in the way that they think. "Ovular" is actually an adjective, not a noun, and is the adjectival form of "ovule", which is a small or immature ovum. I am very much in favour of working with the language to make it more equitable, and of filling gaps in the language through the creation of new words or the repurposing of old ones, but I like there to be some reason for doing this.

"Seminar" is a fairly new introduction into the language from German, only about 125 years old, and is related to the much older "seminary", which started life as Latin "seminarium", "botanical nursery", hence a place where young and green seedlings are brought to maturity: the leap to the idea of a school for training priests or other young students is a very small one, and from there it is an equally small leap to the idea of a seminar, at which students are taught by an older and more learned instructor. In its ancient roots it is descended from the same idea as its etymological brother "semen", but it has nothing to do with older men shooting their spunk all over impressionable young women, or whatever it is that leads some people to discard the word in favour of a rather silly replacement.

Just The Facts

2011-03-25T00:15:00.006-03:00

Knut was a polar bear born in the Berlin Zoological Garden in December of 2006, rejected by his mother, and raised by zookeepers. He was a hugely popular attraction at the zoo. "Knut" is the German version of "Cnut", also known in English as Canute, the name of the king of England, Norway, Denmark, and part of Sweden, who legendarily and no doubt apocryphally told the ocean to stop rolling in, not, as popular belief would have it, because he was so grandiose that he thought this would happen, but to demonstrate to his fawning courtiers that however powerful a king might be, he still had no control over the natural world. Knut's name--the bear, that is, although also the king--was not "Kunt". Proofreading is very important.

From Failblog After Dark. It's a goldmine. (This could, of course, be a fake, as was that Rachel Ray magazine cover. But it's completely plausible.)

Toast of the Town

2011-03-24T10:34:00.004-03:00

Etymology in English is so twisted and convoluted, so multifarious and indiscriminately, almost promiscuously, tentacular that however large your vocabulary, unless you are specially and lengthily trained, you are forever presented with words that you cannot make out the provenance of.

Yesterday I couldn't figure out where "destroy" came from, but that was mere carelessness. Today I was confronted with another pair of words related to destruction (as well I might be when reading a book about a great fire): one of them I cleared away in short order, but the other eluded me, and with good reason--it is as misleading as a word can be.

"Conflagration" is pretty easy: the ubiquitous "con-" means together, and "-flag-", or "-flagra-", really, is also seen in "flagrant" and the middle word of the familiar phrase "in flagrante delicto", and means "blazing, glowing with heat", from Latin "flagrare". Something that's flagrant (a sin, usually) isn't just obvious, it's burning so brightly that it calls attention to itself, and "in flagrante delicto" means "caught in the act", literally "in blazing offence".

"Combustion", on the other hand, threw me completely. There's that Latin prefix, again, with en turned into em before a labial consonant for ease of pronunciation. And then...what? What is that? "Bust"? As in "burst"? Did it burst into flames? No, that's ridiculous, but...what?

The verb "urere", "to burn, to singe", that's what. You've probably never heard of it, because it doesn't have much of a presence in English. "Urere" shows up in just one other not particularly common English word: "urticaria", otherwise known as hives, from Latin "urtica", "nettle", because stinging-nettles cause such a rash (as can many contact allergens, including, in my case, cardboard, unfortunately).

But even if "urere" had had all sorts of offspring in English, "combustion" doesn't show any sign of it because of a tangled etymology. "To burn all about" was logically enough formed in Latin as "ambi-urere" and reasonably shortened into "amburere". When someone decided to intensify "amburere" by adding "com-", which literally means "together" but also acts as an intensifier, they hacked the word apart incorrectly and ended up with "am-" plus "burere", giving the demonstrably incorrect (but now-we're-stuck-with-it) "comburere", "to burn up". The verb "comburere" was turned into the noun "combustionem" by the usual rules of Latin, and there you go: "combustion", as well disguised as any word I know.

Building Code

2011-03-23T11:33:00.003-03:00

As I mentioned, I am listening to an audiobook called "A Crack in the Edge of the World", and of course the word "destroyed" cropped up, and although I am paying close attention to the book, it did occur to me that I didn't know where the word "destroy" might have come from, which seems like kind of a gap in my knowledge.

I knew that the French verb "detruire" meant, and on reflection must clearly be the source of, "destroy", but beyond that I was lost. If only I had bothered to think about the noun form! But no, I was fixated on "destroy", which was, I could see, composed of "de-", a negating prefix, plus...what? I couldn't make sense of it. Can you?

As it turns out, the root of it is the Latin verb "struere", "to build, to make a pile". Of course! To construct something is to build it up (literally, together): to destroy it is to do the opposite. And if I had thought of "destruction", I expect that the "-struct-" root would have been obvious to me. But it wasn't. Perhaps you had better luck.

"Struere" will also make you think of "construe", which is only right, because that is its root: to construe is to analyze or make sense of, literally to build up the meaning of, and to misconstrue is to misinterpret--literally put the wrong construction on--an action or intention.

Shakeout

2011-03-22T12:49:00.002-03:00

I have been listening to audiobooks recently, and I have come to the realization that "author" is not synonymous with "voice actor". I understand that a writer might think he or she is the best candidate for the job, since who knows the work better? But committing a book to audio isn't just a matter of reading what's on the page: it requires treating the words as a kind of script, making notations as to what is particularly important, what is linked to what else, what might be tricky to enunciate--in short, drawing a road map through the text.

Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" is fascinating stuff, but he honestly ought not to have been permitted to record his own work, because one would almost think he had never read it before: he phrases things in a bizarre manner, taking pauses between words as if he were inserting invisible and unnecessary commas, stressing some words that shouldn't be stressed while swallowing others that should be emphasized, and overall making the work a bit of a trial to sit through. If it hadn't been so engrossing, I would have given up long before the last chapter.

Some writers, though, were born to it (or studied and worked at it, which is even better). Simon Winchester's "A Crack in the Edge of the World", about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, is on the surface of it a dry bit of work: halfway through the thing, and he hasn't even gotten to the earthquake itself, instead setting it all up with long, sometimes densely worded divagations on plate tectonics, the history of the American west, and the formation of the Earth itself. But he is a tremendously skilled reader, and the audiobook never flags even for a minute.

One of the words Winchester uses, in a passage about the Colorado River, is "debouched", which I think I had never heard before, and isn't it a beauty? Rudimentary knowledge of French will immediately tell you that it is derived from "bouche", "mouth", and clearly refers to the emptying of a river into a larger body of water.

This, interestingly, is not quite how the French use the word: instead of the sense of something pouring out of a mouth (of a river, in this case), there is the sense of unblocking, clearing, or uncorking--the removal of something from a mouth to permit an outflowing, rather than the outflow itself.

"Debouch" inevitably calls to mind the word "debauch" (or probably the better-known "debauchery"), even though obviously the words could have nothing to do with one another: "debauch" means "to seduce into sensual pleasures: to destroy the moral purity of." In fact, nobody is absolutely sure where "debauch" comes from: in what looks very much like a confected etymology, it began life meaning "to entice away from duty", being related to "balk", which once meant a sort of beam, the idea being that a debauchee would be lured from the carpentry workshop with promises of sin.

Well, Obviously

2011-03-17T13:34:00.003-03:00

From Failblog After Dark, as you can see.

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A sentence from a story in The Onion:

"Since my wife lost her job, we've had less money coming in, but we still make due," said computer programmer Paul Keimel, who cuts corners by always keeping an eye out for cheaper, shittier crap.

I'm speechless. It's not a typo. An actual writer actually thinks that the expression is "make due" instead of "make do", an I-would-have-thought-self-evident contraction of "make it do", as in "It's not exactly what we wanted, but we will have to make this inferior thing serve the same purpose."

Am I expecting too much when I assume that writers will understand that the various idioms of the English language actually have meaning, and aren't just strings of sounds and letters cobbled together?

If Music Be The Food Of Love

2011-03-08T12:00:00.003-04:00

I grew up in a very musical family: we sang a lot, we were all in various choirs and music groups, all played the piano, and some of us (not I) also played the violin and the ukulele (really), among other instruments. Here is a piece we used to listen to, Heinz' Kitchen Symphony, for piano, trumpet, and an array of kitchen implements, whatever you happen to have around, really. We toyed with the idea of learning it, but none of us played the trumpet (though my father for some reason had a clarinet or an oboe or something in the basement: I'm quite sure he never played it, so I have no idea where it came from, but the house was kind of full of inexplicable objects, so that was just one more).

I hadn't heard it in certainly thirty years, but it all came back to me. You really ought to listen to it: it's a little dose of charm and joy in your day. Thank you, Youtube!

There's nothing odd about the fact that we have such a load of words for the kitchen and its arts in English: the language revels in multiplicities. But even though I knew that "kitchen" was Germanic, plainly related to "Küche", and that "cuisine" was obviously from French, I could not place "culinary": it looks as if it might be French in origin, but what was its source?

Well. My first surprise was that "cuisine" is from Late Latin "cocina", and that hard consonant in the middle means that "Kuche" must surely be related, and by golly, it is. "Cocina" is from Latin "coquina", "kitchen", from the verb "coquere", "to cook", and you are ahead of me in realizing that "coquere" is the source of "cook" in English, so the German, English, and French words are all intimately bound up together in their Latin origin.

"Culinary", though, even though it seems as if it ought to have some connection with "cuisine", however tenuous, doesn't make sense. And yet the connection is there, even though it is tenuous: the Online Etymology Dictionary claims its source, "culina", to be an "unexplained variant" of "coquere". Good enough for me!

But there's more. "Culina" gave English another word: since it once meant not only "kitchen" but also synecdochally "stove", it led to the word "kiln". Who'd have thought!

P.S. About that title: an artsy friend once told me the story of a production of Twelfth Night--I recall him saying that he'd seen it, though it might have been just an anecdote--in which the actor playing Orsino began, "If FOOD...." Where do you go from there? Pretend you didn't say it and power ahead? Slink off the stage? Pause and start over?

Illnesses

2011-03-07T01:28:00.003-04:00

Often if you should happen to look at the timestamp on one of my blog postings, you may fairly assume that it's a complete lie (I might have started it at one time, which the autosave then preserves as gospel, or I might have deliberately changed it for reasons known only to myself), but this time it's the truth: I'm sitting here writing this at 1:30 in the morning because I have a vicious case of insomnia brought about by a nasty little flu bug which set itself to work on me Thursday last and will not let up. I made the mistake of going in to work on Sunday because I was feeling better, which is to say "better than I was feeling on Saturday", which isn't difficult because I felt pretty dreadful on Saturday, what with the coughing and sneezing and muscle aches that to me always feel like horrible little shivers of electricity running beneath my skin, and since Sunday wasn't that bad, I went in and proceeded to get worse and worse and worse. Lesson learned! And I certainly do apologize to all my co-workers whom I probably didn't expose to my germs but still theoretically might have, and likely grossed them out anyway with all the coughing and hacking and so forth.

I suppose we all know that taking macrodoses of vitamin C isn't going to help a cold or the flu or whatever it is I have, but I still do it, because I figure it's cheap and you really can't hurt yourself--it's water-soluble, so you're going to get expensive pee but nothing worse than that, and hey, it could help, right? (I am also downing hopeful spoonfuls of honey to try and soothe my tormented throat: not really helping.)

I was reading a book in bed tonight while I was trying and failing to lull myself to sleep, and that book is Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (using the Kindle app for the iPod), which is much more interesting than you might think, giving you an insight into what life might have been like in an upper middle-class British household in the middle of the nineteenth century. (And she died young, too, contracting child-bed fever while giving birth to her fourth, at the age of 28, which gives you another insight into what life might have been like.)

Here is a sentence I chanced to read tonight, from the section on The Lemon:

Its juice is now an essential for culinary purposes; but as an antiscorbutic its value is still greater.

"Antiscorbutic"! You have but to see the word, even if you've never seen it before, to immediately guess two things:

1) The "-scorb-" in "antiscorbutic" must obviously be the same as the bulk of the word "scurvy", meaning that an antiscorbutic drug (from Latin "anti-, "against", plus "scorbutus") must be a scurvy-fighter, which we know vitamin C to be, which is why English sailors were called "limeys"--from their reputed habit of bringing limes with them on sea voyages.

2) The scientific name for vitamin C, ascorbic acid, must obviously come from the same source--"a-", "not", plus "scorb".

Both of these things are true.

I am reading a whole lot of what looks like contradictory information about the adjective "scurvy" (meaning various shades of "filthy" and "despicable", usually seen in the piratical phrase "scurvy sea dog") suggesting that it is actually unrelated to the disease, being instead a variant of "scurfy", but I am very tired (though not sleepy) and uninclined to go root through the OED, so it will have to wait for later. Sorry.

Forgot One

2011-03-02T14:53:00.003-04:00

Everyone knows it's "druggie's".

I am actually a little impressed at "Sport's Nut's", which displays an admirable commitment to apostrophization. (I am, however, a little disappointed that "Jesus" doesn't have an apostrophe. I mean, it does end with an ess.)

I had to think about "high fullutent" for a bit before I figured out that 1) it's the first half of a two-line phrase and 2) it has nothing to do with tents or their fullness.

"P.K" stands for "Preacher's Kid", in case you were wondering.

He should just have labelled this "People I Don't Like Because They Are Probably Better And/Or Smarter Than I Am, And Almost Certainly Having More Fun."

Courtesy of Jesus is Love.

Hard

2011-03-01T05:30:00.001-04:00

I don't know about you, but I actually had come across the word "marmoreal" before, as I did last night in an article about some steroidally hyper-developed bodybuilder, and somehow had never even bothered to look up its definition. Did I just gloss over it? How could I have gotten though a paragraph containing the word "marmoreal" and not actually understood what it meant? Because whenever I see the word, I get this image in my head of some freakishly large-eyed creature like a tarsier

so I am guessing what happened is that somehow in my head the words "marmoset" and "arboreal" got jammed together. Don't you think?

But "marmoreal" has nothing to do with animals in trees. It actually means "having the quality of marble". The Latin word for "marble", see, is "marmor", which the French somehow turned into "marbre" (which they still use), and the English marble-mouthed into "marble".

Straight and Narrow

2011-02-28T02:32:00.000-04:00

I actually wrote the first four paragraphs of this back in January--it's dated the second--but somehow it got saved as a draft and never uploaded. What was I thinking? It's still pretty interesting, even a couple of months later.

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From a Slate.com article arguing that Champagne should be an all-around beverage and not just restricted to celebrations:

But here's where Champagne's powerful identity becomes its straightjacket.

So did this thing happen when I wasn't looking? Did "straightjacket" become an actual acceptable word that writers would use without being ashamed of themselves? (I notice with some disgust that my spellchecker doesn't even flag it, which I would consider part of the problem if I weren't already sure that Slate writers don't use spellcheckers and so it wouldn't have made any difference anyway.)

"Straightjacket" is wrong. It's not right. It doesn't mean anything. The word is and always was "straitjacket", the first half of which is "strait", an adjective meaning "narrow: close", because a straitjacket is close-fitting and deliberately restrictive, meant to keep its wearer from hurting himself or others.

"Strait" is from Latin "stringere", "to bind": "restrict" is related, believe it or not. "Straight", on the other hand, is related to "stretch", and isn't from Latin at all, but is a relative of a bunch of Germanic words that also have that meaning. (They both stem from Old English "streccan".) They may sound the same, and they may have vaguely related meanings, but they are not the same.

Sweet Spot

2011-02-27T13:40:00.003-04:00

Bird Call

2011-02-26T00:03:00.003-04:00

So here's this science, or sciencey, story from MSNBC:

Neanderthals plucked the feathers from falcons and vultures, perhaps for symbolic value, scientists find.
This new discovery adds to evidence that our closest known extinct relatives were capable of creating art.

Scientists investigated the Grotta di Fumane — "the Grotto of Smoke" — in northern Italy, a site loaded with Neanderthal bones. After digging down to layers that existed at the surface 44,000 years ago, the researchers discovered 660 bones belonging to 22 species of birds, with evidence of cut, peeling and scrape marks from stone tools on the wing bones of birds that had no clear practical or culinary value.

"The first traces on the bones of large raptors were found in September 2009," said researcher Marco Peresani, a paleoanthopologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy. "After that, we decided to re-examine the whole bone assemblage recovered from that layer."

These birds included red-footed falcons (Falco vespertinus); bearded lammergeiers (Gypaetus barbatus), a type of vulture ; Alpine choughs (Pyrrhocorax graculus), a relative of crows; and common wood pigeons (Columba palumbus). The birds' plumages come in a variety of colors — the gray of the red-footed falcon, the orange-shaded slate gray of the bearded lammergeier, the black of the Alpine chough, and the blue-gray of the common wood pigeon.

"We know that the use of bird feathers was very widespread and that humans have always attributed a broad and complex value to this practice, ranging from social significance and games to the production of ornamental and ceremonial objects," Peresani told LiveScience. "Reconstructing this usually hidden and poorly known aspect among extinct humans is one of the aims of our research."

Scientists can't figure out why the wingbones of birds with colourful plumage have chip marks on them, therefore art? Seems like kind of a stretch to me. Although the article does have a very nice artist's rendering of a Neanderthal man bedecked with feathers.

But check this out! The Latin name for a relative of a crow is Pyrrhocorax graculus. And does that remind you of anything?

"Graculus" sounds pretty much it must be the Latin version of "grackle". And so it is! Both words sound pretty obviously onomatopoeic: the Romans' name for the jackdaw (a corvid, which is to say a relative of the crow) was "graculus", which is clearly based on the sound that birds in the family make. (But a grackle is not actually a corvid: apparently someone just thought it did.)

"Pyrrhocorax", by the way, is the genus name for choughs, which like crows have black feathers but unlike them have bright-orange legs and feet: "pyrrho-", related to "pyro-", means "flame-coloured", and "corax" means "raven" (another member of the corvids) or "crow".

"Corvid" may look familiar to you if you know the traditional Scots balled "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") or if you know that in French, "crow" is "corbeau". "Crow" is not descended from the French, being instead another onomatopoeia, based again on the sound of the bird's cry: the Old English word for the bird was "crawe", a vivid word I wish we had kept, because it is pretty much exactly the way they sound.

I could go on in this vein for quite a while (I could, for instance, tell you where "craw", as in "throat", comes from--it's not "crawe"), but I think I'm done for now.

The Wonders of Science

2011-02-25T03:32:00.004-04:00

I'm on Yves Rocher's mailing list because I buy some stuff from them from time to time, and I got a mailing touting their new product, Micellar Cleansing Water. Doesn't that sound all scientific and technological and advanced? Why, it has the word "cell" in it!

It doesn't, though. "Micelle" is derived from the Latin "mica", "particle" or "crumb" (related to Greek "micro-", "tiny"), and the diminutive "-ella", so a micelle is a little bit of something--in this case, a minuscule clump of surfactant molecules. Which is to say soap. Which is to say that "micellar cleansing water" is soapy water.

Not so sciencey now, is it?

The stone known as mica is oddly named, since it isn't usually encountered in the wild in particles, but in sheets and flakes. See?

Pretty!

Its name is thought to be influenced by the verb "micare", "to flash, to glitter", presumably because tiny bits of things, including pulverized mica, which to this day is used in makeup, are what glitter and sparkle. See?

Also pretty!

Grab Bag

2011-02-24T06:59:00.004-04:00

The other day I was watching a film on Netflix, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, which you may remember is a film noir parody carefully constructed so that scenes from old black-and-white movies can be edited into it, complete with dialogue, and have the whole thing make at least some sort of sense. At one point, star Steve Martin puts on blonde-lady drag so he can be in a couple of scenes (as Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Deitrichson in "Double Indemnity") with Fred McMurray. He drenches himself with a perfume called "Fondle Me", and of course at that point I had to stop the movie for a minute while I pondered, and then looked up, the etymology of "fondle".

It certainly looks like a frequentative: "fond" plus the usual "-le" suffix. But "fond" isn't a verb! How can it be the source of a frequentative verb?

The obvious answer is that "fond" once was a verb, way back in the late seventeenth century: it meant "to dote upon". Its frequentative therefore meant "to perpetually treat in an affectionate manner", and only a hundred or so years later came to have its current meaning, "to caress", which is not much of a stretch. As an adjective, "fond" started out meaning "silly" (it may have an etymological connection to "fun"), and only later came to its current meaning, which is, approximately, "made foolish by affection".

"Fondant", of course, is unrelated, being the French adjective from the verb "fondre", "to melt", the source of English "foundry".

Language Barrier

2011-02-23T01:56:00.001-04:00

Or, Slatism Of The Day, although I suppose we can't really blame Slate altogether, since this piece is evidently from the Financial Times, though someone should have vetted it, so there's no excuse in the end: someone has to take the blame, so I propose we divide it evenly among the FT, Slate, and the author.

In this article about opera being broadcast on the big screen, writer Laura Battle refers to the English National Opera and the Royal Opera putting 3-D productions in the cinemas, Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia and Bizet's Carmen respectively, and then goes on to say,

It is no coincidence that ROH and ENO are both launching their 3-D initiatives with 19th-century Italian classics.

This will come as a great surprise to the ROH, Bizet in his grave, and generations of opera-goers, all of whom are reasonably certain that Carmen was written, and is usually performed, in French. It's a Frenchman's idea of Spain, by a French composer, to a libretto by two French authors, from a play by another French author, for god's sake: it could only be less Italian if it had been written in German.

But that's not all! Here's a paragraph from further down:

Napier admits as much. "We haven't got to the point yet where [filmmakers] are proscribing what the repertoire will be," he says. "It's still a case of 'this is what's coming up, what can we cherry-pick from it?' But we are nevertheless aware that certain titles are more conducive to the more populist cinema medium."

Once again, it's hard to know where the blame lies: did Napier say "proscribing", a word which makes no sense in the context--it means "forbid, denounce, banish, or condemn"--or did Battle mishear or mistype "prescribing", which is clearly intended? At any rate, someone, somewhere should have fixed it, even if that meant correcting a direct quote, unless the intent was to humiliate Mr. Napier by making it look as if he can't tell one word from another, in which case mission accomplished.

If it weren't for Christopher Hitchens, Emily Yoffe, and a few others, I wouldn't read Slate at all. Their error level is just shamefully, inexcusably high.

Middle of the Road

2011-02-22T02:14:00.003-04:00

I saw him face-to-face once while shopping. He's even more spectacular in person.

This is going to blow your mind. Select two or five or twelve pictures from a group of people who range in appearance from not-bad to let's be kind and say unfortunate, a little software wizardry averages out the faces, and what happens? Astoundingly, the result is almost invariably more attractive than any of the faces is individually. The averaged face isn't average at all: it's very, very nice to look at.

The reason is counterintuitive at first but obvious once you think about it. Broadly speaking, an attractive face has two qualities: it's symmetrical overall, and the proportions between its parts adhere to the Golden Ratio. (There is much information and many photos of extremely attractive people on this blog page, if you can ignore the severe hideousness of the page design.) When you average out multiple faces, you are losing the various asymmetries, blemishes, and individualities that may make a specific face less than absolutely beautiful, and retaining the overall symmetry that the faces have in common.

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Where might the word "average" have come from? To look at it you can guess it's French: that "-age" suffix that turns things into nouns (haulage, passage, steerage) is very French. But what about the rest of it?

Not what you'd think. The OED suggests that the word originally came from French "aveir", "goods", from Latin "habere", "to have", which is all well and good, but does that even make any sense given the word's modern meaning? It does if you think in terms of shipping: if a ship or the goods within were damaged, the French had a word for that, "avarie", and the original meaning of "average" in English was the financial loss that such damages entailed. Eventually, the word broadened to mean the share of a financial loss that investors in the ship's voyage would take, and from there it was a very short step to the sense of something equally apportioned, evenly divided--averaged out.

Surprisingly, "have" is not descended from French "avoir" or its forebear Latin "habere", though you'd think, wouldn't you? Instead, it's a sibling of German "haben", with the same meaning. Yes, "have" really does look like the Latin, and no, it really isn't related, unless you go all the way back to Indo-European, when all the words have the same source, "kap-", "to grasp": but they split apart and went their separate ways before "have", from Old English "habban", showed up. ("Habere", "to have", is related to "capere", "to seize", which is obviously the source of English "capture", and less obviously "capable", which probably deserves its own writeup.)

Head to Toe

2011-02-18T09:34:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, Jim asked me if I thought "dishevelled" was descended from French "déshabillé", "sloppily or incompletely dressed". ("Habillé", "dressed", is also the ancestor of the English word "habiliment" and a distant cousin of "habit".) Instinctively I said "No," but it isn't a ridiculous question, because it takes no imagination at all to see how the French original could be turned into the English word over the course of a few centuries, and the meanings of the words overlap to a considerable degree, the only real exception being that "dishevelled" is often used to describe the state of someone's hair, while "déshabillé" refers only to clothing.

And with good reason! "Dishevelled" is actually descended from the French "chevel", "hair" (plural "cheveux"); a state of dishevelment originally referred to untamed, undressed hair, and a hundred years or so later--in the early 1600s--began to be used to describe a state of disorder in the clothing as well as the hair.

Now, "habit". In an interesting coincidence, "habit" refers to both clothing and behaviour, and so does the related pair of words "custom" and "costume": you may think of it as being that someone's costume is what they are accustomed to wearing, and likewise their habit is what they are in the habit of wearing. Nowadays, of course, "habit" as clothing refers only to the habiliment worn by nuns and monks, and "costume" refers to clothing worn on special occasions, but when the words originally entered the language they were much broader.

"Habit" is from Latin "habere", "to have", and pretty much from day one in English it meant the things that someone would have on or in their person or their personality: their dress, demeanour, manner of doing things. That hasn't really changed much, has it? Only one thing about it is really new: the sense of "addiction", as "drug habit", which isn't much more than a hundred years old.

The Impossible Dream

2011-02-16T23:28:00.003-04:00

Okay. First, your life will not be complete if you don't listen to this insane, amazing thing.

Ignore the title: it isn't "Death Waltz"* (because a waltz is 3/4 time and this is four on the floor). No, what this is is a piece of music transcribed for piano, but it is completely unplayable by a human being: it's done with a synthesizer, because otherwise you'd never hear it. It looks innocuous enough at first, a bit tricky but otherwise manageable. Then around forty seconds it starts to get hairy, with what looks like more than five notes to be played simultaneously with a single hand: but pianists are resourceful people, and there are likely to be ways to get around that. (There's a story told of a Mozart piece, impossible at first glance, that has notes played at both ends of the keyboard and a single note in the middle: the middle note is played with the nose.) Around 1:20, it really starts to go to hell, with massive clusters of notes that self-evidently would take more than ten fingers to play, more like ten fingers on each hand, and rapidly moving fingers at that. But maybe a two-pianos-four-hands situation would make it playable. A little breather at 1:55 lulls you into complacency, until 2:25 rolls by and the whole composition just makes a lunge for sheer dementia and stays there, the page often a black smear of notes (that somehow still all sound like music): I think it is safe to say that not only could a person not play this music, no number of human beings could coordinate themselves enough to play it, which is what makes it so wondrous--although for all I know some really stubborn pianists out there have already proven me wrong, humans being what they are.

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If you had to hazard an etymology for the word "impossible" (the prefix "in-", "not", plus "possible"), and (this is important) you were me, and at work, what might you surmise? "Possible" calls to mind "possess" (which I remembered was from Latin "possidere", with the same meaning), since they start with the same syllable, and you might well think that "possible" was a form of "possess-able", and therefore that something possible was something that you could hope to attain. Perfectly sensible: an absolutely logical etymology.

And so, so wrong.

"Possible" is actually from Latin "posse", "to be able", which in turn is from the verb "potere", "to be powerful", which is, as you will have guessed by now, the root of the word "potent".

* There is a thing called "Death Waltz", but it's a joke, not meant to be played: it's a parody of music, and it looks like this (click to embigulate):

Acts of Shame

2011-02-14T18:32:00.003-04:00

Having an instinctive eye and brain for typographical errors and the like is a double-edged sword.

The blessing: If you can find someone to hire you, you make a really top-notch copy-editor. A photographer friend of mine gave me the text for a brochure she's producing, and one of the the phrases she used was "mature photography", which sort of sounds like it means pornography. I had to ask her if in fact she meant "nature photography" (which she did). This sort of error is so easy to commit--the two letters are side by side on the keyboard--and so easy to miss, because no spellchecker will catch it, no grammar-checker could, either, and only a reader with at least a little distance from the piece is likely to notice it.

The curse: Sometimes it's just about impossible to read something (for pleasure as opposed to work), because it's so full of errors that you can't concentrate. Case in point: This Slate piece (of course) about movie actors.

First mistake, in the third paragraph: Or think back to the godfather of these performances, as Bale himself made clear with his shout-out to De Niro at the Golden Globes last month: De Niro's turn as Jack La Motta in Raging Bull. Last I checked, his name was Jake, not Jack. Since the author of the piece, Tom Shone, is British, perhaps he can be forgiven for not knowing the name of an American boxer: but there are supposed to be editors to keep this sort of thing from happening.

I was almost willing to overlook this, because mistakes do happen, but then I found the second mistake, in paragraph 5: Movie stars had transformed for their roles before, of course—Lon Cheney in the Wolfman movies.... It's Chaney, not Cheney.

By now my brain was completely primed to take nothing in the article at face value, so I was not surprised when I found a third mistake, in the same paragraph: But De Niro's performance in Raging Bull was something else again, another level of centrifugal force, pulling the entire drama into his orbit.... Now, I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that centrifugal force is not responsible for pulling anything into an orbit--it's experienced as an outward force, away from the centre of rotation (a rapidly spinning merry-go-round will fling you off). What the author meant to say was presumably "centripetal force", and I'm not even entirely sure that that would pull something into orbit, but as I said, I am not a physicist. And even if it isn't a mistake, or is a loose usage of the term, the two previous mistakes made me extremely disinclined to trust anything the author said.

And so that is that point at which I stopped reading. A man can take only so much. There may be more mistakes in the article. I don't want to know.

A mistake may creep into a piece of writing, because nobody is perfect, but an editor is supposed to be there to catch it. Two mistakes may show up, but their presence suggests that the writer is really not paying attention. Three mistakes? Inexcusable. Unreadable.

Book of Love

2011-02-13T06:25:00.005-04:00

As soon as I saw this BoingBoing article about an artist who makes gorgeous 3-D text and images by folding the pages of disused books, I knew what the comments were going to be like: "OMG he destroys books how can he books are precious and magical aaargh!" And there were fewer of these comments than I expected, but there were a couple.

I love books. Crazy about 'em. Own way too many. Heaven must be an infinite library and all that. But the fact is that most of the books in the world are not particularly valuable. Sturgeon's law, as always, obtains: ninety per cent of everything is crap, and that includes books. If a publishing house has released fifty thousand copies of a pop star's hastily ghostwritten biography, I think we can all agree that that's at least forty thousand copies too many, and why might not some of them be ennobled by being turned into art?

Books are a fetish item for some people, who (not completely irrationally) fear censorship and book-burning and the like: but with a few exceptions, mostly books that have come to us through the ages and are as valuable and irreplaceable as paintings and sculptures, books in themselves are not precious--it is the ideas they contain, surely. If I want to scour my local used-book store for tedious histories and worthless science-fiction novels and boring corporate picture-books, books that nobody wants, and turn those into something like art, something greater than they were, why might I not do so with a clear conscience?

You don't have to damage books in any way to turn them into an artwork, of course: artist Chris Cobb rearranged the entire contents of a bookstore to turn it into this:

Anyway, the artist whose work is depicted at the top, Isaac Salazar, doesn't destroy the books, just folds their pages. As far as I can tell, they're still intact and readable, if you trouble yourself to unfold all the pages--thereby, I suppose, destroying the work of art into which the book has been made, and if you do so, who has committed the greater crime?

These artists, though. They really wreck the books that form the foundation of their art. I love so many of these pieces, and not once did I cringe at the horror that was inflicted upon the books. They're better off now.

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The word "book" is, if you know even a little bit of German, obviously related to or descended from "Buch", with the same meaning; but did that word just sort of spring up out of nowhere (as words sometimes do), or does it have an ancestor?

It does indeed. The German word for the beech tree is "Buche", and "Buch" evidently once referred to a beechwood tablet onto which words were carved. The sense of a set of pages or documents bound together between covers is newer: in Old English, "boc" meant any kind of written document.

Fascinatingly, the French word for "log" is "bûche", and this is not descended from "Buche", but instead from "bois", "wood".

Sad

2011-02-12T15:35:00.003-04:00

This is me sitting at home writing and not at the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast. What gives?

Fortunately or un, I listened to the broadcast of the Met's February 2nd premiere of the opera, "Nixon in China", which was first performed in October of 1987 with James Maddalena as Nixon: I remember watching the original Brooklyn Academy of Music telecast on PBS in I guess 1988. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Maddalena is singing the role at the Met, and it gives me no pleasure to say that his voice is worn to tatters. In his very first aria in the first act, his voice cracks and crumbles: you can hear him clearing his throat in what sounds like a desperate attempt to force it back into some kind of shape, but it is to no avail. Throughout the first act, his voice is in pieces, the lower notes often rubble and the occasional high note just a squeak. I couldn't tell you which emotion was dominant in me: embarrassment for him, anger that he and the Met thought this was what paying audiences deserved to hear, or horror that a voice could be so ruined.

Maybe he improved during the opera, or after his premiere, unlikely though that seems. What I heard was bad, though. Some critics tried to be kind to Maddalena: Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times said that

Over the years Mr. Maddalena’s voice has lost some body and richness. Making your Met debut in your mid-50s must be both gratifying and high-pressured,

which is either the kindest imaginable way of saying "His voice has aged dreadfully and he can no longer control it," or delusional. Others were more to the point, such as the Opera Tattler:

James Maddalena's performance was that of a singer whose best days are clearly behind him. He had evident vocal problems, especially in his first scene, and sang with overly darkened diction and a hooty, wobbly vocal quality. The principals in most of the opera were heavily amplified, and the amplification did not serve Mr. Maddalena well, with his audible cracking and throat-clearing. Although he acted the part well, capturing some of Nixon's physical stiffness, his dramatic achievement could not compensate for his inadequate vocalism.

Some of the problems in the production can apparently be traced to composer/conductor John Adams' requirement that all the performers wear wireless microphones (often used in stage musicals but rarely in opera), as this Financial Times review points out:

...Adams' insistence on (over)amplifying the voices creates grotesque distortion....The cast looked terrific, acted with ardour and, thanks to the microphones, sounded pretty awful.

After listening to the first act, I knew I couldn't possibly sit through the entire production in the theatre, and pay for the privilege as well. Instead, I'm staying home and watching the 1990 Met "Götterdämmerung", in the first act of which Christa Ludwig makes some ravishing sounds--and her in her sixties!

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If you think about the surname "Maddalena" for a little bit, probably not more than a few seconds, it will occur to you that it is almost certain to be the Italian version of "Magdalene", and if you think a little further, it will also occur to you that the French given name "Madeleine" must also be a version of this. Both these things are true. (The wee butter cake known as the madeleine was named after a pastry chef, Madeleine Paulmier.)

It may also amuse you to know that the English word "maudlin", "tearful, often sentimentally so," is a corruption of "Magdalene", because Mary Magdalene was often shown in art weeping in repentance after being forgiven by Jesus.

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

2011-02-08T13:38:00.003-04:00

I don't know if I have one single favourite food, but if I do, it's cheese. I love it immoderately. I'd eat it with every meal if that didn't mean I'd be a 400-pound sphere with every artery richly clogged. Havarti is probably at the top of the list, with its buttery, voluptuous sapidity, its hint of earthiness and tang. Then old cheddar, the older the better, crumbly and crystalline. Gritty parmesan and pecorino. Luscious goes-with-anything cream cheese. Red Leicester, which I buy every time I'm in England, like crumbly cheddar but tangier. Voluptuous Brie. Pungent Camembert. I love them all.

Every now and then I decide to do something I've never done before just to see what it's like, and a couple of weeks ago, I thought, "I should try making basic cheese*: I've read it's not very hard." So I got all the ingredients and supplies that I would need--there aren't many--and set to it. When the finished product had finished draining and I had turned it out into a bowl, three thoughts entered my head in rapid succession:

"Well, how about that. You can make your own cheese!"

"I can make my own cheese!"

"I MADE MY OWN CHEESE!"

And here is how you can make it yourself. To make about a pound and a half of cheese, you will need:

4 litres whole (3.25% fat) milk
2 lemons
Some vinegar, just in case
Salt

A large pot
A wooden spoon
A colander
A clean tea towel or a couple yards of cheesecloth
A yard of heavy string
A way to hang a 2-pound weight over your sink
A large bowl

Bring the milk SLOWLY to a boil in the pot: this will probably take half an hour or more. Stir it frequently, every few minutes at least. In the meantime, juice the lemons and measure out 100 mL: keep the rest aside should you need it. When the milk is just barely at a boil, remove it from the heat and pour in the lemon juice while slowly stirring the milk. It will rapidly coagulate into cottony curds and almost-clear whey. If the whey is opaque, then it's still milk: add the rest of the lemon juice (lemons vary in acidity so this is not science) and keep stirring until it's reasonably clear. If you run out of lemon juice and you're still not happy with the whey, stir in a little vinegar. The finished product will not taste lemony or vinegary--promise (as long as you don't add, I don't know, four cups of the stuff). Cover the pot and ignore it for a few hours.

When the curds and whey have cooled until you can touch them, line the colander with cheesecloth or a tea towel and pour the mixture into it. You can save the whey for use in soups and such: despite being stripped of most of its milk protein and fat, it still has some nutritional value. (I didn't bother on my first go-round.) Stir until most of the whey has drained off, pressing down with the spoon: then gather the cloth up, tie it at the top with the string, and hang it over the sink. Squeeze out whatever whey you can, and then leave it to hang for a while: a couple of hours will probably do.

Turn the cheese out into a bowl--it's cheese now!--and work in a tablespoonful or so of salt, breaking up the larger lumps into small curds. You can use less salt if you want, but I started with a half-tablespoon and it just wasn't enough. A whole tablespoon really amps up the flavour without actually tasting salty.

Cover tightly and refrigerate. It should last at least a week: it will be a little rubbery at first, though still delicious, but it will become tenderer and mellower as the days go by. It is gorgeous smushed on a bagel and broiled a little to heat it through. It won't melt like ripened cheeses, but by god it is cheese. And you made it yourself!**

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"Fledgling" is one of those words that demonstrates how a dictionary definition is sometimes not enough--that a word can carry connotations that you have really be deep into a language to understand.

"Fledgling" comes from the verb "to fledge", which is descended from a relative of the German verb "fliegen", "to fly", and the suffix "-ling", used to turn a noun, verb, or adjective into a word referring to a person or animal: "Earthling", for example, or "hatchling, or the sadly archaic "youngling". Feathery "fledge" and "fliegen" are all tangled up with the word "fletcher", an arrow-maker, and its back-formed verb "to fletch", which means "to attach feathers to an arrow", descended from French "flêche", "arrow".

As an adjective, "fledgling" might be defined as "young, new, or inexperienced", and this is reasonable. But it isn't enough, because the word is true to its source: it originally meant a bird which has just fledged--grown its flight feathers--and is about to try, or has just tried, flying for the first time. The implication here is that the fledgling, though not very good at first, is going to become better and better with practice and experience.

Therefore, I would not call myself a fledgling cheesemaker--although in a literal, dictionary** sense that is just what I am--because "fledgling" implies that I've just started out on a journey that will see me steadily improving, growing in skill and ability. I don't think that's going to happen. I'm not going to start storing wheels of ripening cheddar in the broom closet. I'm probably not even going to make any more in the near future. But the startling fact remains:

I can make my own cheese!

*I already make my own ketchup. Really.

**It has a texture very like ricotta, so I would think you could use it wherever you would use ricotta, although I never got around to cooking with it. It's also not awfully high in fat: 4000 mL of 3.25% milk means the whole 24-ounce batch has about 130 grams of fat, about 5.5 grams per ounce, so you have about 110 calories to the ounce, 50 of which are from fat (assuming all the fat from the milk gets bound up into the curds and doesn't remain in the whey--I don't know, I'm not a food scientist). I bet you could use lower-fat milk if you wanted, and I bet you could use 18%-fat coffee cream, too, or work a few ounces of heavy cream into the finished product to enrich it. Experiments for another day.

***Not every dictionary, though. The OED, as one might expect, is more thorough: they define the noun as "A raw and inexperienced person, one just starting on his career," with the obvious implication that the person in question has begun something which will lead to improvement and mastery.

Cloudy with Chance of Snow

2011-02-03T21:20:00.000-04:00

Here are a few sentences from a Slate article on the British artist John Constable:

Constable painted the first of his pure cloud studies on Sept.13, 1821, with the notation: "One o'clock. Slight wind at North West, which became tempestuous in the afternoon, with rain all the night following." Constable was understandably proud of his achievement in these paintings. "You can never be nubilous," he told his friend Archdeacon John Fisher in 1823. "I am the man of clouds."

Now, maybe you get out more than I do, but I had never seen the word "nubilous" before, and I love it. I think it's a word I won't get to use often, if ever, but I love knowing that it exists.

"Nubilous" comes from Latin "nubes", "a cloud", and it has a relative in English that you may not be expecting, because I wasn't. No, it isn't "nebulous", which also means "cloudy" (more or less) but is from a different Latin word ("nebula") and from a different Indo-European root altogether ("sneudh-", "fog", and "nebh-", "cloud", respectively). "Nubilous" is related to "nuance", because a nuance is a shading from one colour to another which clouds the distinction between the two.

Where Is Thy Sting?

2011-02-02T05:20:00.002-04:00

Here is a sentence from a Slate review of a video game called Dead Space 2:

He is no space marine fighting off a horde of vespine aliens, but, rather, a humble, pudge-faced engineer making his way through a massive spaceship for initial reasons no grander than repair.

"Vespine." Isn't that a lovely word? I had to look it up!

I shouldn't have had to, but it's 5 in the morning and I'm not firing on all cylinders yet. "Vespine" means "wasplike", from the Latin "vespa", "wasp", and you have certainly heard the word "Vespa" before, because it is the name of a brand of Italian motor scooters, named for their narrow-waisted shape and for the buzzing sound they make.

I think unless you are writing a particularly scholarly piece, you get to use one word per article that will send the majority of readers to their dictionaries. It's good for us! Any more than that, though, and you risk looking pretentious or unreadable.

Unpalatable

2011-01-29T18:13:00.003-04:00

There are two types of people in the world, that is clear: the kind who either don't notice typos and errors of usage or do notice them and just don't care, and the kind who notice these things and are enraged by them.

It is not a secret that I am one of the latter types, and I do not expect the former types to understand or sympathize. They probably, in fact, think that I am insane, or at least too thin-skinned. But I was reading a most interesting article in Slate--it's always Slate, isn't it?--about chicken meat, slouched way back in my very comfortable office chair with my right leg extended across my desk, when I read the following sentence:

In fact the chicken industry has already started courting Mexico and China as well as Eastern European, Latin American, and smaller Asian nations with a similar palette to the Russians.

I whipped my leg off the desk and propelled myself upright in my chair while thinking in a white heat of fury, and I am not exaggerating, "Oh no no NO they did not just write that!" But they did write it.

The palate is the thing in your head that, though containing no taste buds, is synecdochally associated with a sense of taste (think "palatable"). A palette is the thing painter use for arraying and mixing their colours. While we're at it, a pallet is a broad wooden platform on which goods are secured for shipment. These words do not mean the same thing. I don't understand how professional writers mix them up. There is no excuse for this.

The reason such mistakes are so dreadful is that they haul the reader--or at least some readers, or at least me, which in the end is all I care about--out of the text and into a mindspace of questioning the author, doubting one's own understanding, thinking of a number of things which are not related to what's being read and not conducive to further reading. How am I supposed to follow an argument when I am distracted--or worse, exasperated--by a stupid, avoidable typo, a grammatical mistake which makes me wonder if the writer understands English, a misusage which casts doubt on the whole article? This is not trivial: if you cannot even use the language properly, if you cannot be counted on to edit your work into a shape fit for your readership and take every effort to see that it is free from errors, why should I trust what you're trying to tell me?

Three Thousand Words

2011-01-24T19:50:00.004-04:00

I just figured out how to get pictures out of my camera-equipped iPod, and now you're going to be sorry.

Factual Errors

2011-01-20T07:41:00.002-04:00

If you have an iPod or an iPhone, then you know how seductive apps can be: you poke around in the App Store looking for, I don't know, a decibel meter or a game that lets you throw birds at pigs, and pretty soon you've downloaded twenty little programs you didn't know you needed, and probably don't, but hey, most of them were free.

An app suite is a very useful thing to have: it collects many tiny applications in one place, meaning that instead having thirty things to keep track of, you have one. Here's a good one, AppBox Pro, full of little things you use all the time, or could: currency converter, tip calculator, battery gauge, translator, et cetera et cetera. 99 cents, very nice and professional-looking, works like a charm.

Here's another one, Appzilla! It has even more stuff, and some of it (of course) is perfectly useless, but as is generally the case with these things you can hide from view the ones you never use, and there are lots of things you will use: my favourite is a clever kitchen timer that is actually six timers, one for each of four burners and one each for the two racks in the oven, all laid out to actually look like a stove so you know what's what.

There's a trivia collection called Amazing Facts in there, too, and I am not kidding when I tell you that this is the very first Amazing Fact that showed up when I tried it:

First of all (we will draw a modest veil over the use of "your" where "you're" was meant), "centurian" isn't even spelled correctly: it's "centurion". Second, a centurion was the leader of a group of Roman soldiers--not actually 100, but usually somewhere in the eighties. The word that was lunged at and missed here was of course "centenarian", which has the same root--Latin "centum", "one hundred"--but is more or less a direct take from Latin "centenarius", "of or relating to 100". (Late Latin "centenarius" gave English "centenary", "a period of 100 years", in the early 1600s; two and a half centuries later, someone tacked on the usual "-ian" ending that creates a word referring to a person with that quality or trait.)

Perhaps I'm asking too much of a 99-cent application, but it seems to me that if you're going to head a piece of information with "That's a Fact!", then that thing should actually be a fact.

Question Time

2011-01-17T09:52:00.003-04:00

Q: How do you get down off an elephant's back?

A: You don't. You get down off a duck's back.

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Q: The "down" in the first part of that joke isn't in any way related to the "down" in the second part, is it?

A: No, it isn't. The preposition "down" is, most unexpectedly, related to "dune", which is to say "hill", and is an abbreviated form of "ofdune", "[down] from the hill". (Just as unexpectedly, the adjective "down" meaning "depressed", though it sounds rather slangy and probably sixties-ish, is over four hundred years old.) The noun "down" is probably from Indo-European "dheu-", "to fly about like dust", which, as you know if you've ever tried to transfer eiderdown from one sleeping bag shell to another, is a pretty good description of just what happens.

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Q: All right, then, what about "eiderdown".

A: It's from the eider duck, and its name is a pretty good indication that the word "eider" must be Germanic or Norse or something, which it is: from Old Norse "aethr".

Oh Come On Seriously

2011-01-09T19:17:00.006-04:00

I signed up for something, probably on my iPod, some German-language podcasts or something, in a presumably futile attempt to once more, and once and for all, learn German before our trip in 2012, and so I get frequent e-mails from them trying to entice me to send them some money for something or other. Today I got an e-mail promising the first month's whatever at a price of only $4.89, which is $20.11 (get it?) off the regular price, and I was slightly tempted, so I clicked on the link, and this is what I saw:

You can click on that to see it bigger, but what's relevant about it is the headline and the first three sentences:

News #45 - This is the Year You Finally Learn Germany!

This is it! Lucky 2011 is the year you stop procrastinating and finally learn Germany. And not just a few lines like “Hello” and “Sorry, I don’t speak Germany” but REAL Germany. You’re going to learn how the locals speak, perfect your pronunciation, grow your vocabulary and learn about Germany culture so you’re totally ready for that trip to Germany you’ve been planning all these years.

I'm speechless. Did nobody actually notice that someone had written "Germany" instead of "German" five consecutive times?

I mean, I'm not even selling anything, I just write up my little blog posts for my own amusement and theoretically that of anyone who might happen to stumble across them, and even I proof-read. If I were trying to make money, you had better be damned sure I'd spell-check and proof and re-proof. What I get out of that up there is, "How can I trust them to teach me German when they can't even be counted on to do English properly?"

(P.S. I did get some winter boots yesterday, extremely boring black ones with lots of tread. As a present to myself for enduring the hell of shoe shopping--how do women do it, how do they buy all those shoes and actually seem to derive some enjoyment from it?--I got some more Yves Rocher orange-chocolate shower gel, clearance-priced at $2.50, three bottles, because I don't want to run out any time soon.)

Stream of Consciousness (With Caps) (And Boots)

2011-01-08T06:08:00.003-04:00

It's WINTER and do I have boots? I DO NOT. I must have thrown out last year's pair in a rare spasm of cleaning, probably because they didn't fit all that well and I'd buy a new pair this year, which I TOTALLY FORGOT TO DO until of course it SNOWED LIKE CRAZY last night. I don't know what the DEAL is with me and boots. I JUST HATE THEM. If I ever go to my mother's in the winter she's in a STATE OF DESPAIR because I'm not going to have any boots with me, and then how am I supposed to shovel the ENDLESS MOUNTAINS OF SNOW they get up there in her part of the world? So I have to borrow my stepfather's and they don't fit all that well.

So this morning Jim says to me, "We're going to have to buy you some new boots today," and I guess we are, because we are in EASTERN CANADA and it is WINTER and by god it is going to SNOW and SNOW and SNOW SOME MORE for the next week.

"FINE," I said, "but they're going to be GLAM AS FUCK with eight-inch platforms and TONS OF FUCKING SEQUINS."

"No, they're just going to be regular boots. Probably from Wal-Mart."

And they are. I was JOKING. Not all gay guys want glam and sequins! Some of us have THE MOST BORING taste imaginable and just want to be WALLPAPER, and I am one of those people. As long as I smell good and am decently covered, I say whatever to clothing.

Looking at the word "boots", you'd think it would be one of those Old English things that just kind of fell out of someone's mouth and stuck around, like "dog"--it's not like they didn't already have two perfectly serviceable word streams, the Germanic ("hound", from "Hund") and the Latinate ("canine", from "canis"), but NO, not good enough for the Old English! Gotta have a whole 'nother word!

Not "boots", though. It's related to French "bottes".

God, it's TOO FUCKING EARLY. I have to go back to bed and try to IGNORE ALL THIS SNOW.

Social Disease

2011-01-01T08:46:00.005-04:00

I didn't see many movies in 2010, but I did see the newest offerings from my two favourite directors, David Fincher ("The Social Network")* and Darren Aronofsky ("Black Swan")**, and loved 'em both.

Two of the characters in "The Social Network" are a pair of twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who come across as entitled but otherwise principled and decent people who got screwed over by Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook. They sued him and won $65 million, which is an ungodly sum of money, far more than the huge majority of people on Earth could ever imagine seeing in their lifetimes. They are two good-looking and wealthy men who were given a flattering portrayal in one of the most popular movies of the year (and played by a man who's even better-looking than they are, which is even more flattering). But you know what? It isn't enough for them. No, Zuckerberg is influential and insanely wealthy, and now the Winklevosses have decided that they want more of his money and reflected glory.

Now, I want to show you something from the comment section of the Gawker story about their new lawsuit:

From guestofaguest.com's Publisher profile:

Cameron Winklevoss is an American Olympic Rower and Entreprenuer.

They forgot "He is also an entitled dumbass who clearly got into Harvard through family connections, not actual intellectual achievement, since he CAN'T EVEN SPELL "ENTREPRENEUR" CORRECTLY IN HIS OWN FUCKING PROFILE, ON THE SITE HE STARTED AND OWNS.

Don't tell me: that's Zuck's fault, too, right? What a fucking douchebag.

This is how important correct spelling is. A lot of people might not even notice, but some will, and those people will judge you, and whatever your merits, they will think ill of you because you didn't even take a few minutes to run a spellcheck and make sure that the text image you present to the world is coherent and correct. If you're decent, people's opinion of you will drop, just a little bit. If you're an entitled dumbass, they'll think of you as a fucking douchebag.

Don't be that douchebag. Whoever you are, whatever you're writing, always run a spellcheck. The more important your communication, the more important it is to make sure it's letter-perfect. If you're writing a blog post, double-check it for errors. If you're writing a résumé, spellcheck it and then have another person proof it--two people is better. If you're running for political office, have everything spellchecked repeatedly, have a fact-checker go through it, have a copy editor go through it again, and then run it under another set of eyes just in case. And pay these people well--they're your image.

* I knew I'd go, because it's Fincher and I've seen all his movies, though I thought it sounded like kind of a boring premise for a film, but this was a thrilling piece of machinery. Also, buy the soundtrack: it's amazing.

** I knew I'd go, because it's Aronofsky and I've seen all his movies, though I hated his previous flick, "The Wrestler", but this was a hot, sticky fever dream of a movie, throbbing with repressed sexuality and dark doppelgangers and Cronenbergian body horror.

A Whale of a Year

2010-12-31T15:15:00.005-04:00

You were expecting some kind of end-of-the-year wrap-up? Expect again!

Today we have a word that poses a question that poses further questions and so on into some sort of infinite regress which I eventually managed to put a stop to.

We start with this awesome thing

which is available on craft-market Etsy and, being charming, was featured on Must Have Cute instead of Regretsy, which is where you find Etsy's misconceived, badly executed, or simply misspelled handicrafts, such as a greeting card which reads "Let Is Snow Let Is Snow Let It Snow" (two typos in nine words--very impressive), but which you can no longer see (on Regretsy, anyway) because its creator is humourless, self-important, and highly litigious, such an attractive combination of characteristics. (I wonder if she'll find this and threaten to sue me for slander. I wonder if she understands that being listed on Regretsy actually leads to more sales, even if those sales are to people who are buying the thing to laugh at it rather than simply enjoy its excellence. I wonder if she understands that such distinctions are irrelevant, because sales are sales and money is money.)

Anyway, narwhal. Wouldn't you think it ought to be "narwhale"? Where do you suppose that "-e" went?

It was never there to begin with. "Narwhal" originally a Scandinavian word, "narhvalr", which is a compound of "na", "corpse", and "hvalr", "whale". (The "corpse" part is from the colour of the animal, which is the same dead bleachy white as a human corpse.) Through the process of metathesis, the "-r-" drifted from the end into the middle of the word and turned it into "narhval", which is clearly the source of "narwhal".

Now, when you are looking into the word "whale", you are going to discover that the German word for this is "Wal", and there is no way you can see that and not think of "walrus", am I right? And what exactly might walruses have to do with whales? Nothing, exactly, except that--and this is so great--there was an Old Norse word for a whale, "hrosshvalr", which became in Old English "horschwael", which is so much like "horse-whale" that the Dutch had the very same idea, and since in their tongue "walvis" meant "whale" and "ros" meant "horse", they jammed the words together (in, it must be noted, a folk-etymological way, since horses never actually enter into the equation) into "walrus", which we eventually adopted, as we did with so many of their oceanic and seafaring words.

Now, when you consider that in English the letters "wh-" at the beginning of a word are, if you enunciate, pronounced "hw-", you might assume that there are lots of English words that used to begin with "hv-", and there are, and "whale" is one of them: in Old English it was "hwael"--all the letters there, but scrambled in a way that, fascinatingly, makes no difference whatever in pronunciation. "Hwael" stems ultimately from an ancient Germanic word, "khwalaz", which seems pretty likely to be related to the Latin word "squalus", which was a large fish.

And that is inevitably going to suggest at least one other English word, and for me it conjured up two, the first of which (perversely, since it not the obvious one) was "squalene", which is a fatty biochemical found in, among other places, human sebum, and I could not for the life of me imagine how this might be related to fish, until I learned that it is also found in shark-liver oil, and there's your connection with "squalus", because a shark is a large fish, is it not?

The other word that "squalus" will call to mind is "squalid", and here the etymology is extremely dubious, because there is no obvious connection between "large fish" and "demoralizing filth", except that Latin "squalare" used to mean "to be filthy: to be covered with a rough scaly layer", and that second part would seem to describe a fish pretty well, but who knows?

I'm Telling!

2010-12-28T11:29:00.003-04:00

My output for this blog would not be significantly diminished if I just called it "Slate Fuck-Up of the Day".

Here's a sentence from one of Slate's two(!) advice columns:

It's Lisa and Tim who are your old friends here and therefore command your loyalty—not Vincent and Laura (the potential victims)—so I'd leave the tattle-tailing to someone else.

Now, the word "tattle-tale" (or, if you like, "tattletale") means someone who tattles on another by telling tales. Couldn't be more obvious. If you are determined to turn it into a gerund, which is probably not a good idea, then it would be "tattle-taling". Emphatically not "tattle-tailing".

Rejoice

2010-12-25T10:01:00.004-04:00

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, happy holidays (because there certainly are a bunch of them around this time of year) to those who don't. We don't here in my household, but we're happy to have a few days off with good food and plenty of time to relax.

I was brought up in a household where Christmas was Kind Of A Big Deal, To Say The Least, and so naturally I developed an affection for many of the trappings of the holiday, including the music. Here--and there will be a point to this, I promise--is my list of Top Eleven Christmas tunes, in no particular order.

1) "Angels We Have Heard on High," Amy Grant. Too many versions of this carol sound rather begrudging, but whatever Grant's problem in the very highest register, there's no doubt that this song sounds ecstatic, as it ought to. The Roches' a cappella version is a close second.

2) "Carol of the Bells," The Barra McNeils. This Canadian group breathes fresh life into the familiar Ukrainian carol with an exciting Celtic spin (and a misleading time-signature change).

3) "But who may abide the day of His coming," Messiah dir. Nicholas McGegan. Everyone else wants to hear the Hallelujah Chorus or perhaps the joyous "For unto us a child is born," but for my money, this is the highlight of Messiah: countertenor Drew Minter does it right, handling the vertiginous coloratura with aplomb and making the arrival of Jesus sound terrifying.

4) "Home on Christmas Day," Kristin Chenoweth. We've seen her live and she's tiny, but Chenoweth has got a big set of pipes: here she dials back the sheer size (well, somewhat) for an intimate, melancholic song to someone who can't be with her for Christmas. It is radiantly beautiful.

5) "Elf's Lament," Barenaked Ladies with Michael Bublé. Funny, charming, subversive, clever little song from the point of view of Santa's elves.

6) "From a Distance (Christmas version)," Bette Midler. God, I am such a sap, but even this once overplayed song, when reorchestrated and slightly re-worded, with snippets of Christmas carols ("O Come All Ye Faithful", "Silent Night", ""Angels We Have Heard on High") tucked into it, turns into something lovely.

7) "December Will Be Magic Again," Kate Bush. Not a Christmas song, exactly, but it fits the season perfectly, by turns moody and joyful. When Kate sings "See how I fall....like the snow!" the second time around, you really feel as if December is magic.

8) "The Coventry Carol." I can't even tell you who performs it, but it's from a compilation called "Christmas Kids' Classics" put out by (I'm pretty sure) EMI. You know how it is: these days you rip all your CDs, and eventually you sell them or lend them out, and then you don't have the packaging or the liner notes or anything, and sometimes with an obscurity like this even the Internet isn't much help. I don't see how "The Coventry Carol" is a kids' song at all, because it's all about killing babies and so forth; but this a cappella version, with a fearsome basso line like the voice of doom ("All young children to SLAY", indeed), is morbidly thrilling and very Olde Englysshe.

9) "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," 101 Strings Orchestra. I know--how bourgeois, how grandparents. But someone rewrote the classic Christmas carol as a fugue, of all things, in the style of Weinberger, and it is deliciously unexpected.

10) "Santa Baby," Kylie Minogue. Of course we are all supposed to think Eartha Kitt's version is the best, but I have never heard a better one than this, which perfectly balances sex-kitten cooing and calculated greed. (We will not speak of the ickily Betty Boop-ish Madonna version, ever.)

11) "O Come O Come Emmanuel," Enya. Make fun all you want ("South Park" did), but with her glowing corona of multi-layered vocals, she finds the numinous in an often drab carol.

I see that I have managed to pretty well use up my annual supply of italics. And just in time for the end of the year!

Now, the Latin version of "O Come O Come Emmanuel" (which Enya performs after thoughtfully singing the English version for comparison) contains the word "Gaude", which is Latin for "Rejoice". When you look at the word, it is impossible not to think of the word "gaudy", isn't it? And yet "gaudy" means "showily vulgar and flashy", so far removed from the idea of rejoicing. And yet it is not that hard to see how the word could have evolved a string of meanings that supplemented and finally supplanted the original sense: maybe rejoice -> celebration -> decorations for celebrations -> shiny things -> vulgar shiny things.

Unfortunately, "gaudy" is a bit of an etymological mess. The "rejoice" sense seems clear enough, and Old English "gaudi" once meant a large ornamental rosary-bead (as opposed to the little beads that make up the main part of the rosary, and that once were made of the rose petals, rolled up tightly and dried, that gave the thing its name). But there is another line of evolution which is as follows: rejoice -> be merry -> a jest or trick -> a deception, which would naturally lead us to the sense of "false but made to look genuine", which gaudy things certainly might be--a large glass gemstone, a brass ring plated brightly in gold.

Hilarity Ensues

2010-12-22T20:18:00.003-04:00

Oh, Jack Chick, you old nut, you.
When you start poking into the source of a word, you never know where it will take you.

I am not exactly sure how the word "haw" came to mind, but it did. I knew it was the nictitating membrane in a cat's eye (so named for an ocular discharge--yuck--and of unknown origin), and of course it can be used to express laughter in print (see above), but that doesn't shine any light on the word which subsequently comes to mind, "hawthorn". Now, to look at it you'd think that it was decomposable into the word "haw" and "thorn", on the assumption that a hawthorn bush is or might be thorny, but such assumptions are not always correct.

In this case, though, they are. "Haw" is an Old English word for "hedge" or "enclosure", and the plant itself is thorny, all right. "Haw" in this sense comes from an ancient Germanic word, "khag", which shows up in a couple of interesting places: because it means "enclosure", it is ultimately the source of The Hague, a city in Holland (which they call Den Haag), and it also wormed its way into English as "hedge", which is delightful.

There are lots of Germans up where my mother lives: in fact, she married one. One of her close friends, who also married someone of Germanic stock, has the surname Hagedorn, which is the German word for hawthorn! And if you look at "khag" and then "Hagedorn" and "hawthorn", you can see the interconnections! Well, maybe you're not as excited as I was to learn that, but I still think it's neat.

And speaking of surnames: Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story called "Rappaccini's Daughter", the introduction to which refers to a French author named M. de l'Aubepine, author of such works as "Contes deux fois racontées" and "Le Voyage Celeste a Chemin de Fer." Aubepine, as you might perhaps have guessed, is the French name for hawthorn (from Latin "alba spina", "white thorn"), and the works cited are French translations of Hawthorne's own works ("Twice-Told Tales" and "The Celestial Railroad").

Found and Lost

2010-12-18T02:10:00.004-04:00

I don't know about you, but I use Wikipedia all the time, like ten times a day at least, so I figure they've earned some money from me in their current fundraising drive, and so of course I made a donation. I'm not about to try to tell you how to spend your money, but maybe they should get a few of your charitable-donation bucks this holiday season, too. It may be flawed--you can't just take every single thing you read on it with faith, because it is created and edited by fallible human beings--but it still ranks as one of the greatest collaborative efforts in the history of humanity, and I hope it sticks around.

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Another website I use kind of a lot is the Online Etymology Dictionary, because I couldn't always be bothered to go look something up in the OED or one of my etymological dictionaries or whatever. Just now I was reading a Slate article on password security and came across the following sentence:

In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees' e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles.

No, there's nothing wrong with it--a Christmas miracle!--but I briefly misread the word "trove" as "trouve", and then I had that blinding flash of insight: the French verb "trouver", "to find", is the source of English "trove"!

It obviously must be, so I went to the Online Etymology Dictionary to confirm this, and was horrified to read the following sentence:

As this usually meant ancient hordes, the term came to mean "treasure horde" in popular use.

No! No no no no no! "Horde" and "hoard" are not the same thing!

No Way!

2010-12-17T22:03:00.003-04:00

It's an iPhone app that instantly translates signage. Just hold the camera up to the sign, and bang--English where there was Spanish before, or vice versa.

I mean, jeez. What's next, hoverbikes?

It's not perfect, but then, no machine translation is; it isn't going to be any good for you if you literally know nothing of the language being translated, because you have to run it through your own internal filter. But it could be really useful for a traveller who knows a little of the language and needs a boost.

It's going to need a lot of polishing before it's as useful as it plainly could be. Once they've accomplished that, and added French and German, that's it--I'm upgrading my two-year-old iPod touch for one with a camera. Because holycow that is amazing.

Hue and Cry

2010-12-16T20:05:00.005-04:00

Here is a sentence from a piece on, yes, Slate.com about iPhone apps for kids:

It's actually a sweet story: The boy hues closely to his sense of justice and has a lot of fun putting out fires with the fire truck.

All I could think was, "You have got to be fucking kidding me. Is it even possible that an adult, and a presumably professional writer, doesn't know the difference between 'hue' and 'hew'?"

Well, apparently it is, because there's the proof, right there, along with proof, yet again, that no piece of writing is ever checked by another human before publication on Slate.

Both versions of "hue" in English are extremely old. "Hue", as in "colour", is from an Old English word, "hiw", which meant such things as "colour" and "beauty" and likely originated as a Sanskrit word, "chawi", with similar meanings. The "hue" of "hue and cry" is an old French word that meant "war cry" or "hunting cry", which makes "hue and cry" seem a little redundant, but there you go, that's language for you.

The word that Slate writer Michael Agger intended to use, "hew", is something else altogether. It may be familiar from the phrase "hewers of wood and drawers of water," a Biblical reference that was also once widely applied to Canadians, and it is also an Old English word, "heawan", "to hack or gash", which seems pretty clear. But the idiomatic verb form "to hew to" is, as so many modal verbs are, obscure, until you learn that when you hew to a line, you are cutting by following a straight line marked on a piece of wood, and any metaphorical sense--such as hewing to a sense of justice--is clear and obvious.

Maybe the writer didn't know the difference, or maybe he did and just slipped up, or maybe the computer's spellchecker was unnaturally stupid. But the mistake should not have made it into print, because someone should have caught it beforehand. It may or may not be the writer's fault, but I don't know who to blame, and I gotta blame someone.

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On the other hand, here is a hypnotically fascinating piece on cannibalism (and not an error in it, as far as I can see). Read it!

A Less Than Glowing Recommendation

2010-12-08T10:51:00.004-04:00

From a Slate review of magazine gift-giving guides:

Dim Ideas: Pom-pom makers ($31 for 4—"the pom-sibilities are endless"), "quirky" Edison bulbs. ($8 each—seriously, why all the hardware-store recommendations? Next year, the florescent bulbs from Martha's assistant's cubicle.)

You may recall that a few months ago, Slate used "florescent", which is a word, when they meant to say "fluorescent", which is not the same thing at all. And here it is again!

Here is what I want for Christmas: I want someone in the Slate office to open up their spellchecker and manually delete "florescent", since it's almost never used.

Thank you in advance.

Will o' the Wisp

2010-12-07T19:40:00.003-04:00

I don't know why the word "ephemeral" showed up in my brain this morning, but it did, and I spent a good ten minutes trying to pick it apart and figure out where it might have come from (I was in the shower, which doesn't require a whole lot of brainpower). "E-" is usually a shorted form of "ex-", "out of", in Latin words, but the "-ph-" suggested it was Greek, and I couldn't think of a single related word that seemed to have anything to do with the fleeting nature of ephemerality, so after taking a few wild stabs and basically just making stuff up I eventually gave up and did the research. It isn't as gratifying as figuring it out yourself, but it's more likely to be correct.

The only thing I got right was that it is in fact Greek, which was a pretty obvious assumption. As for the actual construction of it, I never could have guessed it, because it's formed from "epi-", "on" (as in "epicentre"), and "hemerai", "day", and it originally entered English as the phrase "ephemera febris", a fever that lasts a single day, and only later was enlarged to mean anything that is short-lived. The reason I couldn't identify any other common English words with this root is that there aren't any.

Madhouse

2010-12-06T20:43:00.002-04:00

So on Sunday Jim and I were out running a few errands, and as expected the streets were full of cars and the malls were full of people, and as Jim and I don't celebrate Christmas, we could watch it all from a bemused and perhaps just slightly superior distance. I made some comment about the Christmas frenzy, and then it occurred to me, as it so often does, that I didn't know the source of the word that had just left my mouth.

"Frenzy" sounds sort of French, doesn't it? You can imagine some predecessor looking like "frenzie" or "frenessye" or something. And that turns out to be true: the word is French. But it's a lot more than that.

"Frenzy", or "phrenzy", is a very old word, dating from the mid-1300s: we did in fact adapt it from the French word "frenesie". Now, what about that "ph-" spelling, you may ask, and well you might: I know I did. And the reason it is there is that its original source is a Greek word, "phrenitikos", which, if you look closely, is obviously the source of "frenetic", a word meaning, and of course related to, "frenzied". Now, "phren-" occurs in a few other English words, including "schizophrenia", obviously, and also "phrenology", the pseudoscientific and antiquated analysis of one's personality through the bumps and contours of the skull. "Phren-", in fact, means "mind" or "reason", and so Greek "phrenitis" meant an inflammation of the brain, which of course would lead to strange and possibly frenzied behaviour. Another related English word was the splendid "phrenesis", "delirium", which made its bow in 1547 and is due for a revival, I think.

"Frenum" and "frenulum", though related to one another, are unrelated to "frenzy", surprisingly, considering that the main reason anybody untrained in medical language might know the word "frenulum" is that it is there is one just under the head of the penis (in an uncircumcised man). But no: the "phren-" that's all in your head has nothing to do with the "fren-" of "frenum", because "frenum" is the Latin word for "bridle", which a frenum presumably reminded some Roman doctor of. Human beings can have several other frena and frenula: there's one under the tongue and another in the brain, and women have one below the clitoris, exactly analogous to the one that men have. A frenulum, since you asked, is a little frenum. A frenum, since you asked, is a flap of skin that checks the movement of another part of the body.

She Said

2010-12-05T00:22:00.006-04:00

Ah, trusty Slate. You never let me down.

In this review of Black Swan, the new Darren Aronofsky movie, we find the following sentence:

One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks.

Now seriously, how did that sentence even get written, let alone past the eye of an editor and onto the page? How is even possible that the writer, Dana Stevens, did not notice that the second occurrence of the word "female" is as superfluous as any word could possibly be?

First of all, we have logic: if Nina is intent on surpassing another dancer, her target must of course be a female dancer, because male and female ballet dancers play very different roles. Second, we have nomenclature: the name Beth tells us that the veteran dancer is female. Third, we have gendered language: "ballerina" means "female dancer" and nothing else, with the male version being called a "danseur" or occasionally a "ballerino", which, if you know even the merest smattering of Italian, is self-evidently male, just as "ballerina" is self-evidently female.

Is Stevens paid by the word? Because I just don't get it otherwise.

Lower Education

2010-12-04T23:22:00.002-04:00

Ah, trusty Failblog. You never let me down.

Christmas Kiss

2010-12-03T23:36:00.002-04:00

I've just started reading Darwin's "On The Origin of Species"--high time, you might think--and was startled to see a spelling I had never encountered before: "misseltoe".

The word is more usually spelled "mistletoe", of course, but "misseltoe" seemed reasonable enough--not a typo, not a nonce spelling, but a previous or coexisting version of the word.

Since I couldn't think of any parallels to it ("missal" came to mind, of course, but without even bothering to look it up you can tell it must obviously come from Latin "missa", "[religious] mass"), I guessed that "misseltoe" was an earlier spelling, and the modern "mistletoe" had come about by way of analogy to "thistle". And my guess was quite wrong.

In fact, "mistel" was the Old English word for "mistletoe", sometimes lengthened to "misteltan", "tan" meaning "twig". Just as the "-t-" can be silent in such words as "thistle" and "gristle", it became silent in "mistel", which began to be spelled "missel" in addition to "mistel", and eventually "mistle-" as the ending degenerated from "-tan" to "-ta" and then eventually swelling back up to "-toe". In fact, the OED lists thirty-three different spellings for the word--"misselden", "myscelto", "misleden", and "messelto" are a few--and even though we expect dictionaries to lock down a single approved spelling, it's a miracle we could just settle on one. I'm surprised we don't have three or four parallel and acceptable versions of the word.

Just as "missal" is clearly unrelated, so too is "missile", from Latin "mittere", "to send", the source of such words as "transmit" (to send across) and "mission".

Not Again

2010-12-02T12:23:00.001-04:00

There are things about English that drive me crazy, not omissions but built-in features that shouldn't be there, and here are two of them.

1) I don't remember where this came up, but I saw it again in print: "woman" as an adjective. I can't help but think I've ranted about this before, but I also can't be bothered to check, and at any rate it's been a while, so here goes again. If we feel the need to specify the gender when describing a job a man holds (because otherwise one would assume it's a woman), we naturally prefix with the adjective "male": male nurse, male stripper, whatever. But when we do the same thing for women, we don't say "female", we say "woman": woman doctor, woman priest, whatever. Why? WHY? It's horrible.

On reflection, I see that we do the same thing with "child": "child prodigy", "child actor". But it doesn't feel the same somehow, probably because there isn't a matching adjectival form for "child": neither "childish" nor "childlike" are appropriate. "Male" and "female" are exactly parallel, as are "man" and "woman", and it seems to me that the rule ought to be that we use an adjective where an adjective might logically be used. "Female doctor", if you must, but not "woman doctor", which somehow sounds condescending, which is probably the point, or worse, like a doctor who specializes in women, as a brain surgeon operates only on brains.

2) Here is a bit from an ad on page 4 of the newest issue of Ready Made magazine:

See that first line? "Average-cup-of-joe drinker." I love that. I love the way English ropes words together with hyphens to make it indisputably obvious that a phrase is being turned into an adjective (as it is here), a noun, or whatever. But look at the last two lines!

"Coffee house" is a two-word noun that we could hyphenate together if we needed to make them into an adjective: "coffee-house ambiance", for instance. But the rule in English is that if we have an unhyphenated multi-word phrase that we need to hyphenate together with another word, we only put a hyphen between the last two words in a sort of trailer-hitch composition, leading to such horrors as that seen in the ad, "coffee house-quality drinks". And it grinds my gears. It's the rule, it's how it's done in English, but it looks so obviously wrong. How easy it would be to fuse everything together, as we normally do, with hyphens into a single phrase!

I am tempted when I write to just do it the way I want to, the way that it ought to be in English, the way that looks correct. But I don't, because that way lies anarchy. Instead I avoid such constructions altogether: I write around them. Sad that it has to be this way, but such is language.

Innumerable

2010-12-01T23:18:00.004-04:00

A foolish, avoidable error in a recent Farhad Manjoo column in usual suspect Slate:

I've got a 1-terrabyte USB drive that I keep connected to my main household machine, a fast Windows 7 desktop.

No, he doesn't. He's got a 1-terabyte drive.

The "tera-" in "terabyte" is Greek, as are all the prefixes for large numbers of bytes, which we will get to in a minute. Adding that extra "-r-" turns it into "terra", which is Latin for "earth" and completely unrelated to the Greek: instead, it's from the Indo-European "ters-", "dry", because the land is (self-evidently) dry as opposed to the sea. (The word "thirst" is also descended from this root.)

You know, for someone who is so devoted to computers, Manjoo doesn't seem to have much use for a spellchecker.

"Tera-" may look familiar to those with a taste for esoteric medicine, because it is also the root of the word "teratoma", literally a "monster tumor" which contains tissue such as hair or teeth. "Tera-" means "monster", and a terabyte, one thousand gigabytes, is a scarily large amount of data. Or used to be, before one-terabyte hard drives became standard equipment. (I've got one in my computer and another external backup drive connected to it.)

So here are all the big-number prefixes:

"kilo-", "one thousand", from "khiloi", with the same meaning. Also seen in "kilometre" and "kilogram".

"mega-", "one million", from "megas", "great". Also seen in "megaton" and "omega" ("big 'o'", as opposed to "omicron", "little 'o'").

"giga-", "one billion", from "gigas", "giant". Also seen in "gigantic".

"tera-", "one trillion", from "teras", "monster", as we have seen.

"peta-", "one quadrillion", derived from "penta-", "five", for the fifth big number.

"exa-", "one quintillion", derived from "hexa-", "six", for the sixth big number.

"zetta-", "one sextillion", derived from "zeta", the Greek name for (perversely) the last letter of the Roman alphabet, on the assumption that this was the last big number that would ever be needed. (Compare with the Commonwealth pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet, "zed".)

"yotta-", "one septillion", derived from "iota", the Greek name for the second-last letter of the Latin alphabet, since "zeta" was already taken by someone who didn't think big enough.

I suppose this is also the place to point out that not every system uses the same names for big numbers such as billion and trillion. The North American system boosts the counter every three zeroes, as I have done above: billion ("bi-" for "two"), trillion ("tri-" for "three"), and so on. The British system interpolates French-derived numbers and boosts the counter every six zeroes: after million comes milliard, then billion, followed by billiard, and so on. It would probably be easier to reduce the whole thing to groups of agreed-upon terms--our billion is "one thousand million", our quadrillion "one thousand million million"--or to just use scientific notation.

Cut-Up

2010-11-25T12:15:00.003-04:00

The suffix "-er" has multiple uses in English. Probably the commonest in everyday use is to form the comparative from most one- and two-syllable adjectives: ugly/uglier, sane/saner. Another common example is as what's called an agentive suffix, one which turns a verb (usually) into the thing that performs that action: kill/killer, bake/baker. (It also appears in such nouns as "commoner", from the adjective "common".) There's also the frequentative "-er", which is, as linguists say, "no longer productive", which means we don't make words any more in this form, though many frequentatives still exist: "flicker" from "flick" and "patter" from "pat", for instance. And of course sometimes the letters "-er" just appear at the end of a word thanks to its etymology and not as a suffix: "canter", for instance, which looks like it ought to be a frequentative but is actually a contraction of "Canterbury gallop", and "slaughter", from Old Norse "slahtr".

Sometimes we have a collision between these various endings with their various meanings, and that can lead to a little bit of confusion, or at least a momentary pause. Here's a sentence from the A.V. Club review of Burlesque:

It’s a glittering neon valentine to divadom so exquisitely, unapologetically gay that Alan Cumming’s homage to Joel Grey in Cabaret actually constitutes one of its butcher elements.

Nothing wrong with that at all, and "butcher" is the most obvious comparative form of "butch" (although "more butch" is perfectly acceptable). But didn't it give you pause to read it? Didn't it maybe just a little bit make you think of Alan Cumming in a bloody apron wielding a carving knife?

Here's the funny thing: "butch", in the sense of "tough and masculine", is apparently a contraction of "butcher". How about that!

"Butcher", by the way, is, if you know any French, obviously derived from or otherwise related to "boucher", which--and this is the less-obvious part--is related to English "buck", which now means "male deer" but once meant "male goat".

Currant Events

2010-11-23T02:56:00.003-04:00

Dare French Cremes. All you Canadians will know what they are. They used to be better, or at least better-textured if not actually better for you, because now that icing on top is made with palm oil, which leaves that greasy scum on your tongue a minute after you eat one.

Someone left a box of them on the breakroom table yesterday: we do that all the time, buy a big bag of chips or a box of candy and leave it out for everyone to share. A co-worker and I were wondering just what was in the cookies that made them so deliciously dangerous, and so we were reading the lists of ingredients, she in English from her side of the box, I in French from mine. Yeah, we lead fascinating lives, but in our defence, we were on a break, when heavy intellectual lifting is not expected.

When I came to the sixth ingredient on the list, "raisins de corinth", my first thought was that "Corinthian raisins" was kind of funny, because naturally it is going to make you think of Ricardo Montalban talking about rich Corinthian leather, and then it hit me: Corinth! That must be where the word "currant" comes from!

It sure is. "Raisin" is actually the French word for "grape": what we call "raisins", they call "raisins secs", "dried grapes". (Our "grape", wonderfully, is related to "grapple", because the word originally referred to the hook used to harvest grapes and then synecdochally became the fruit itself: prior to that, the Old English word for "grape" was "winberige", "wineberry".) Corinth, where the raisins once in fact came from, was rendered in the French-English hybrid spoken in Britain as "Corauntz" and later in Early Modern English as "Curans", and finally, well, you know.

Old Whine in New Bottles

2010-11-21T21:04:00.003-04:00

Here is a really interesting site vending beautifully designed things that you probably do not need but might nevertheless like to have.

Here is one of those things, a wine aerator that supposedly makes inferior wines taste better, which really sounds like bullshit to me, but then I think wine pretty much all tastes alike, so I'm probably not the best judge.

Here is a sentence from that item's lengthy and glowing description:

vino arielle™ - wine aerator designed to instantly alleviate the flavour of wine, accentuate its aroma, and smoothen its texture.

I'm going to allow "smoothen", which is more usually rendered "smooth" these days, though "smoothen" is actually a word and therefore valid. What gets under my skin is "alleviate".

Did someone sort of get the idea that since "alleviate" means "to make better", then it can be used synonymously with "improve"? Because it can't. "Alleviate" has exactly one application in English: it is invariably used in conjunction with some pain, illness, or infirmity. You can alleviate symptoms, you can alleviate pain, you can alleviate boredom, even. But you can't alleviate wine.

Seriously. If you don't know what a word means, you really have no business using it.

Obsessive Compulsive

2010-11-20T10:12:00.004-04:00

One of the glories, and problems, of modern technology is that it allows us to completely throw ourselves into whatever happens to strike our fancy at the moment. For example, this song:

Now, I love a minor-key dance tune, particularly one that is about past or present misery and suffering, and this one fits my brief so perfectly that I have listened to hardly anything else for the last three days. See? (You may have to click on this to be able to read it.)

Date added: Thursday, November 18th. Number of plays 31. And that doesn't count the number of times I watched the video.

I was at the gym this morning and had "Indestructible" on repeat-play, and after four or five repetitions, I thought, "Well, I should probably listen to something else," and then I thought--and I am absolutely not making this up, and yes, I know how crazy this sounds--"But then I wouldn't be listening to 'Indestructible'." So I kept listening to it nearly the whole I time I was there, and on the way home, too. (The "nearly" was when I turned it off to watch on one of the gym's many TVs the last twenty-five minutes of an episode of "Canada's Worst Driver 6", which was hilarious, while on a cardio machine: then it was right back to the song.)

I'll get sick of it sooner or later, or at least it will cease to have the same magnetic attraction, and will simply fall into my usual rotation of classical music, stuff from the eighties and nineties that I remember fondly, and beat-heavy trance (like another minor-key dance tune I adore, Erasure's Breath of Life). And then it will be on to the next new thing.

So in case you were wondering, "obsession" is from the Latin, "ob-", "against", plus "sedere", "to sit", because the word in that language originally meant "to besiege": less than half a century after its introduction into English, it had taken on a subsidiary but closely related meaning, "to haunt" (as in "I am being obsessed by evil spirits"), and from then it was a very, very short step to the modern sense in which one might be obsessed by a person, an idea, or a really excellent pop song.

Give

2010-11-15T06:22:00.001-04:00

In this Atlantic article about Michael Pollan and the ethics of food, I spotted the word "indulge" with an accidental hard hyphen inside it, "in-dulge", which had the effect of spotlighting the word for me, after which I (of course) began to wonder where it could possibly have come from.

Obviously Latin; it starts with "in-" and has a rather Latinish feel about it. But other than speculating that it must be a back-formation from "indulgence" (it certainly has that overtone, as does "burgle" from "burglar"), I could not for the life of me guess what its root was.

And with good reason! Nobody else knows, either.

"Indulge" is a back-formation, I was gratified to learn, so that instinct is still working. As for "indulgence", it emerged from Latin "indulgentia", which is a form of the verb "indulgere", "to be kind, to yield". Before that, well, nothing. It just is. Not a very satisfying resolution, but there are sometimes dead ends in the world of etymology.

No, The Other One

2010-11-14T05:26:00.002-04:00

For some reason the word "altruism" kept popping up in things I was reading, most recently yesterday morning at the gym, when the news channel on one of the TVs had a piece about a couple of women in Ontario who had been arrested for faking cancer as a way of making money from the unsuspecting well-meaning public; some talking head was gassing on about it (not his fault, the news channel has to fill the hours somehow), and of course the word in question came up.

It looks as if it ought to be Latinate, from "alter", "other", but what's that "-u-" doing in there? It ought to be "alterism". It just doesn't make sense.

And then you learn that the word was coined by some French guy (a philosopher named Auguste Comte, if you must know) as "altruisme" (since it's French, but the last letter naturally enough got trimmed when it was imported into English) from the French word "autrui", and you think, "Well, fine, then what's the ell doing in there? It ought to be 'autruism'."

And it turns out that, predictably, "autrui" used to be "altrui" in Old French, and when Comte created the word, he was harking back either to Old French or even older Latin.

So that's that sorted.

Skin Deep

2010-11-10T10:14:00.002-04:00

The other day I was wearing a scent called Cuir Cordoba, or "Cordoba Leather", "cuir" (pronounced, approximately, "queer", unfortunately) being the French word for "leather", and of course I began to ruminate on the etymology of the word.

Couldn't think of a thing. (I was at work, so I couldn't look anything up.) There's no reason that "cuir" should have left any trace in English, since we took the Germanic word for "leather" instead: the German word is "Leder", as in "Lederhosen", and the relationship is instantly obvious. But it turns out that there sort of is a distant and barely connected relative of "cuir" in English, really more of a great-aunt's third cousin twice removed, and you will never, ever guess what it is.

"Cuir" is not unexpectedly from Latin originally: it's a derivative of "corium", which means "skin" or "hide", leather being a preserved skin. ("Corium", by the way, exists in English, but in a very restricted sense: it is the deep, sub-epidermal layer of the skin.) You may not have heard of "corium" before--I hadn't--but you have heard of a related word, "cortex", originally in Latin a tree's bark and now the outer layer of a number of things, including the human brain and also the adrenal glands, which is where the word "cortisone" comes from.

"Corium" and "cortex" in turn come from the Indo-European "(s)ker-", "to cut", for obvious reasons, which gave English quite a few words, including "scar" and "shear", along with some more unexpected ones.

Now, the unrelated Latin word "cor", meaning "heart" (as in "cordial", originally "hearty", now just "friendly"), was expanded into "corata", "entrails", which gave rise to the Old French word "corée", with the same meaning. This eventually evolved into "cuirée", which is unrelated to "cuir" but was given its spelling based on "cuir". The entrails of the hunted animals synechdochally came to represent the whole animal, which was eventually referred to as "quarry".

The other kind of quarry, since you are certain to be wondering about it, is related to "quadrilateral": a quarry was a place where stones were excavated, cut out, and squared off.

Reading Material

2010-10-31T21:10:00.002-03:00

First of all, and apropos of nothing, is this video, the Irish-dance team of Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding, who (as the English say) take the piss out of their art form by performing in strait-jackets with their mouths duct-taped shut. Since parodying the rather stone-faced, arms-to-your-sides rat-a-tat format of Irish dance clearly wasn't enough, they created an equally percussive variant using nothing but their hands and arms.

If that doesn't bring a little joy to your day, then honestly, I don't know what will.

+

Jim and I just got back from another week in London: long story short, we got bumped from our flights last June and ended up with travel vouchers that we used to pay for another trip. It was awesome, because London is awesome.

I've read on the opera site Parterre Box of people being so disenchanted with a performance that they walked out during the first or second intermission, and I never could understand that. You've probably paid upwards of $150 for a ticket: could the opera really be so bad that you would actually just walk away? I always figured I'd stay just to try and get my money's worth, if nothing else, and maybe the whole thing would improve; you'd never know unless you hung around until the end. But now I understand, because we went to see a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, and we left at the intermission. It wasn't terrible, although Jim thought it was: it just wasn't very good. Part of the trouble was our fault: we had made the huge mistake of booking tickets for the day we arrived, when we were tired and jet-lagged (it was the only performance at which we could get good seats), and Jim nodded off a few times while I actually couldn't focus my eyes for about twenty minutes. The real problem, though, was the production, which had been uninterestingly and confusingly modernized, with bad cuts--there were sequences that could easily have been cut but weren't, and lines that were cut that might profitably have been left in. Also, some of the actors couldn't project, at least not over the sound effects, with the result that if I hadn't known how the play opened, I would have had no idea what the guards were talking about.

Not repeating the mistake we made last time, in which we managed to pack an entire week's worth of clothing into a single carry-on bag and then discovered that if you buy one single thing then nothing will fit any more, which forced us to buy another suitcase less than a week into the trip, we brought much bigger suitcases, which were only half full when we left for London and full to bursting when we returned. (Staff weighed them at the train station on the way home from Halifax: mine was 50.65 pounds.) We bought a lot of books*, over a dozen**, and Jim bought a year's worth of shirts at Marks and Spencer, which used to have a very grandmum kind of feel but now has really excellent, well-made and attractive clothing; I bought a heavy jacket and a couple of light sweatery cotton things that actually fit. Also, black dress socks, the best I have ever owned, fourteen pairs.

Now, about those books. At the airport we each bought a book for the plane trip over: mine was "I Drink for a Reason" by David Cross, a comedian whose stand-up work I generally like. Here are a couple of sentences from the preface:

I like very much the idea that I'm writing a book and by extension am now a "writer," because let's be honest, no one considers sketch or stand-up "writing," even though of course it is. But writing a book, well, that puts me in the same rarified air as Voltaire or Sue Grafton or Tim LaHaye.

And I thought, oh, nice, a typo on the very first page of the book. Seriously: the first page. But "rarified", although it is not actually correct, is kind of sort of more or less accepted by some dictionaries as a variant on the indisputably correct "rarefied", so whatever. I let it pass.

And then, on page 18, this sentence:

That's one of those little things on the plus side of being an athiest, no conflicting rules within your prescribed religion in which you have to pick, and then justify, a side.

An actual bona fide typo. "Athiest". Athy, athier, athiest. Wouldn't you think that an atheist would be able to spell "atheist"? Wouldn't you think that someone along the way from Cross' fingers to the finished book might have at least run the text through a spellchecker? Wouldn't you think that even if the hardback somehow made it onto bookstore shelves without ever having passed beneath the eyes of an editor of some sort, the paperback edition of the book might at least have been scrutinized?

But that is just the start. The book is littered with mistakes--contaminated with them. Typos, grammatical errors, flat-out mistakes, you name it. If you aren't David Cross or don't work for the company that published "I Drink for a Reason", you can probably skip right to the last few sentences, because what follows is a list of the mistakes I flagged, and it may not be very interesting if you haven't read the book, but I am just that sort of completist.

Page 21: There are few greater proponents of absolute, improvable hucksterism than psychics. Should be "unprovable".

Page 22: Half of the planet doesn't and hasn't celebrated "Magick Day" for the last two thousand years. Should be "doesn't celebrate and hasn't celebrated".

Page 25: "psylium" should be "psyllium.

Page 30: "for all their worth" should be "for all they're worth".

Page 49: "less then". Seriously.

Page 55: Whoopi Goldberg's name misspelled twice as "Whoopie Goldberg". At least he's consistent.

Page 65: "Antartica". Which, I am disgusted to note, my spellchecker doesn't even flag as incorrect. It is, though.

Page 82: In the guise of their public persona, they have never made a genuine apology, or, having the valuable benefit of hindsight, changed their position about a polemic event unless it was cajoled by some vague, begrudging idea of propriety. I don't quite know what Cross means by "polemic" in this context, unless it's "controversial", and in any event there are clearer ways to express the idea than this badly written sentence, which should have received a few slashes of an editor's red pen, unless Cross has, as Bret Easton Ellis was said to have had, a no-editing clause in his contract, which is about the only way I can explain the barrage of mistakes. But there are more!

Page 87: a heroically long and convoluted sentence that begins with It should be ascribed with such physical characteristics as... (what? "should be ascribed with"?) and ends with ...a much different, albeit as equally beautiful, heaven resembling the biblical Golan Heights ("albeit as equally beautiful"?). Another candidate for the red pen.

Page 93: "genetalia". Oh, honestly.

I'm kind of running out of steam here, so let's quicken the pace. On page 105, a misplaced apostrophe, as far as I know ("toy's", which could be deliberate, but probably is a mistake, and if the reader can't tell, it should be fixed). Page 111, a cock-up in parallelism ("wants, hopes, and actually prays for": one "for", two, or three?). Page 145, "belay" used where "betray" was meant, and how does a mistake like that even happen? Page 186, Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, misspelled "Aeolis", which is flagged by auto-correct and would have been caught by any spellchecker or any editor who has ever read any Greek mythology. And some other things which I flagged as, if not completely wrong, then at least clumsy and in need of some discussion and probably correction.

Maybe Cross is just a bad speller--that's no crime--but I reiterate that it is quick and easy and free to run your copy through a spellchecker before you hand it over to the publisher, and how can it possibly be that this book obviously got no editorial oversight whatever through a hardcover edition and then a subsequent paperback? In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Cross jokingly refers to "the editorial staff at The National Review" and thanks "[e]veryone who priff-read this," which actually kind of pisses me off, because this is a book that wasn't priff-read, or even proof-read, which means I gave money to someone who apparently doesn't give a damn about his readers.

Anyway, there you go, Grand Central Publishing. Not guaranteed to be complete (I read most of it on two airplanes), but at least guaranteed to be correct. Get on it for the next edition, will you?

*I had been vaguely thinking of buying a Kindle: we saw so many people reading them in the airports, on the planes, and on the subway. They sure seemed like a practical idea after we lugged all those books home. But then I checked and discovered that most of the books we'd bought weren't available in the Kindle format, so it's probably just as well that I didn't invest in one.

**You want to hear something weird? I had read good reviews of Derren Brown's latest book, Confessions of a Conjurer, which was published just a couple of weeks ago. Early on in our trip, I had leafed through a paperback copy in some bookstore, probably Waterstones but maybe W.H. Smith, but decided not to get it right then. When a couple of days later I found his first book, Tricks of the Mind, I bought that and then tried to get his newer book, too, but could only find the hardcover, anywhere. I looked everywhere and was beginning to think I had just imagined the paperback version, somehow; nobody had it. Finally, on our last day, literally, Jim found it in the W.H. Smith in Gatwick Airport, and of course I bought it immediately. When I got home, I went online and discovered that the hardcover had been published on October 14th, and that the paperback isn't due out until April 14th, 2011. How can this be? How can bookstores have a book that isn't supposed to exist for another seven months?

Books, by the way, are much cheaper in the UK than they are in Canada. Huge difference. I paid £16.99, or under $29, for a massive book called "London: The Biography", and the Canadian price stamped on the back--it has both the UK and Canadian prices, for some reason--is $42.

Conditioner

2010-10-17T20:29:00.002-03:00

This is the sort of thing that drives grammar fans crazy.

From, as ever, Slate, specifically the advice column Dear Prudence:

I would have loved to hear your sister's side of this, but I can say with near certainty that she would disagree with your characterization that she's severed your relationship over "one mistake."

"I would have loved to hear" is, I would have thought, self-evidently incorrect, because "I would have loved" suggests to corollary "but I do not, in fact, love." What was intended was obviously (I would again have thought) "I would love to have heard", because the corollary to that, "but I didn't hear", is what is intended--the columnist didn't hear the letter-writer's sister's side of the story. The conditional mood--"I would have" plus a past-tense verb--has somehow gotten attached to the wrong verb in this admittedly complex structure.

You don't often hear this construction correctly, do you? It wouldn't take much to convince me that the incorrect version is more common than the correct: I can't prove it from Google, because "I would love to have" usually continues with a noun ("I would love to have kids/a Maserati/twenty-inch biceps"), but "I would have loved to" gets about four million hits, and that's seriously four million too many.

Here's a variant of it that you also hear all the time: "If I would have known he was sick, I would have visited him." In this case, the subjunctive "If I had known" somehow gets squished into the conditional perfect "would have", and the speaker or writer creates a sentence that's not only a grammatical mess but also unattractive and overly wordy.

The headline to an article from the business-oriented Self-Improvement Association:

"10 Things I Wish I Would Have Known Before I Went Into the Real World"

The missing thing number 11: I wish I had learned correct grammar before writing business articles.

Big Ideas

2010-10-15T11:46:00.005-03:00

My friend Ralph recommended to me a book called Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield, and a good read it is, too. (I ordered it sight unseen from Amazon.ca, because I trust Ralph's taste.) Using the Oxford Corpus, a two-billion-word description of the English language, Butterfield entertainingly dismantles and analyzes the tongue. For instance, did you know that twenty-five per cent of all the words we write consist of the following list of ten words?

the
is (and its conjugations)
to
and
of
a
in
that
have
I

And a mere 100 words--which I will not bother listing for you, but it's more of the same, really--comprise half of everything we write?*

In the first chapter, Butterfield is wondering how we define a person's vocabulary size and consequently discussing what exactly a word is, and says the following:

...You and I know the 'word' drive, and probably think of it as a single vocabulary item. But drive can be a verb, a noun, and an adjective....So is drive one word or nine? If we count it as nine, we'll marginally inflate the size of our vocabulary....But that is not the way vocabulary size is calculated, or how the Corpus is usually analysed. In those contexts it makes more sense to take drive as a single unit--technically, it's known as a lemma, and is what you'd look up in a dictionary. Its individual variations are known as word-forms. (p.15)

But is it true that "drive" has to be either one thing or nine? I think Butterfield has chosen an awkward example, because "drive" has a great many uses in English--just about thirty, according to the Free Dictionary--but they all have the same basic sense, that of impulsive force. "Drive", in all its forms, really is just one word, whether it's a charity drive, the four-wheel drive in your SUV, or a line drive.

I would rather look at a word that has related but drastically different meanings which are usually but not necessarily obvious from context. "Round", for example. It has one primary meaning, that of an adjective--"curved", which applies to a person, a ball, the hole that a square peg won't fit into. Then there are secondary meanings that derive from the sense of curvature but diverge further and further: "complete", or self-contained and tidied up, alluded to in "a round number" and "rounding off"; "a complete, self-enclosed unit of something", as a doctor's rounds, in which he visits every patient once; "a single instance of something", as a round of applause. There are at least forty definitions, and while they might be related, they aren't as obviously so as the meanings of "drive", and some of them are very far afield indeed, such as "thoroughly and angrily": "she berated him roundly for his insult."

If you know that "round" means "curved", and "a drink for each person at at the table" (You buy this round) and "a unit of game-play" (a round of golf), and I know these things but I know that it also means "a cut of beef" and "a musical composition in which voices singing the same melody enter at different times", then isn't my vocabulary bigger than yours? Even if we know exactly the same number of words, isn't it the case that someone who knows a larger set of the meanings of those words has a larger vocabulary?

I don't think vocabulary is a single thing; I think it's two different but related things. First, and most obviously, it's breadth of your knowledge of the language, the actual number of words that you know--In Butterfield's formulation, both "active vocabulary", or the words that you use on a daily basis (that list of a hundred words mentioned above, and a few thousand nouns, verbs, and adjectives), and "passive vocabulary", the words that you know and can presumably define, but that don't generally make it into your everyday speech and writing, such as "supernumerary" and "Manichaean". Second, vocabulary is the depth of your knowledge of these words: if you know that "fix" means not only "to repair; to mend", but also "to prepare" (to fix dinner) and "to make permanent" (to fix a photograph) and "to castrate" (get your dog fixed) and "a dose of narcotic" and "a thorough understanding" (a fix on the situation), then your vocabulary is deeper than that of someone who knows only one or two of these meanings.

A good Scrabble player is likely to have a very broad vocabulary, because you can't play the game well unless you know a lot of words, but little depth, because depth isn't necessary to play the game: the meanings are irrelevant as long as you know for certain that the words exist and are allowable under the rules. You don't need to know what "beziques" means in order to get 392 points (the highest possible single-turn score) by playing it. (It's the plural of "bezique", a trick-taking card game, in case you wanted to know.)

You also need to combine the two qualities to master the language: the ability to use a large vocabulary deftly and accurately, to be able to navigate all the fine and minute variations between the endless synonyms in English. If you're trying to describe a large person, it's not much use have twenty terms at your disposal if you don't know that "voluptuous" is a complement and "elephantine" isn't, that "Rubenesque" refers to women and "burly" to men, which is why a thesaurus is such a peril--worse than useless--to the undiscerning writer.

*The list isn't definitive, of course. Other sources suggest other rankings: this one says that "of" is the second most common word, relegating "to be" to seventh place. The list also refers to written English: I recall having read that the most common word in spoken English is "I", which would not surprise me, but I can't find a citation, so consider it anecdotal at best.

Comprehension

2010-10-12T09:53:00.005-03:00

A Slate article--and what did I say yesterday about Slate articles?--on masculinity and men's magazines contains the following sentence:

The idea, apparently, is to rebuild the American Man, vertebrae by vertebrae.

"Vertebrae" is plural. "Vertebra" is the desired-in-context singular.

People who don't know anything about Latin plurals probably shouldn't be using them.

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You know who else shouldn't be using Latin? Doctors.

I mean, they can use it among themselves. It has a long tradition, and they understand it. But I think it's time to retire it when dealing with the public at large, because they're unlikely to understand that "q.i.d." on a medicine label means "quater in die", or "four times per day".

Oh, you might say, but medicine-bottle labels don't use those terms any more. No?

Hilarious! "1 suppository per rectum"! As if there were people who had more than one!

But of course "per" is Latin for (in this context) "through", and therefore means "via". It ended up on FailBlog because it seems like a violation of natural English usage, when it fact it's perfectly correct Latin, and medical, usage. But it's still a fail, because it seems wrong, and a medicine-bottle label is surely the very last place you would want there to appear to be an error.

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A couple of weeks ago I was complaining about the misuse of Middle English, and a commenter took me to task (mildly) for insisting that the rules of a disused language be followed when approximating that language in modern times. But it can be done, and done correctly, to hilarious effect, as the invaluable Kate Beaton shows us:

"Someone doth" is correct, and we know this because the unfailing mnemonic is that the pronoun for "someone" could be "he", and as I noted previously, "he" begins with "h-" and "doth" ends with it (just as "thou" and "dost" are paired).

See? That's how it's done. Grammatically correct and still funny.

And Taxes

2010-10-11T00:12:00.002-03:00

A Slate article--and whenever I begin a sentence with "a Slate article", you can be sure that you are about to read of some patently unnecessary mistake--on the stereotype of the dumb blonde contains these sentences:

Just like modern gentlemen, Romans valued blondness—they would dye their hair using goat's fat mixed with beechwood ashes or vinegar concoctions or saffron. But as Pitman has noted, earnest types associated hair-dying with vanity and lack of gravitas.

"Dying" is the wrong word here, and I know it is a little thing, just one missing letter, and what's more I know that everybody who reads that second sentence understands what is meant, but nevertheless it is the oafishly wrong and un-proofread word, exactly as if the author had used "there" or "their" instead of "they're", and wouldn't that have exposed her, or the magazine and its obvious lack of editorial oversight, to ridicule?