Man Martin's Blog, page 216

Q, q November the Alphabet Project

Q, q: From the Semitic qoph, "monkey." The monkey's tail curves like a contented cat's in our uppercase Q, and in the lowercase, hangs as if a lead weight were tied to it.


quack: Onomatopoeia for a duck call, also any irritating noise. A healer who incessantly boasted or quacked about his salves was called a quack-salver, hence quack as a term for a bogus physician.


Coming November 30th, Return of the STOOPID CONTEST!

P, p: November, the Alphabet Project

P, p: From the Semitic pe "mouth," a letter than must have been frequently mistaken for the third letter, gimel. The Greeks avoided confusion by changing the shape to bridge-shaped pi. The Romans curved the right leg into a loop, making it an upside-down b.




palinode: A retraction at the end of a written work. From the Greek palin "again" and ode, "song," the Latin recantation is an exact calque. Stesichorus, stricken blind for defaming Helen in one of his poems, recovered his sight after wroting a retraction: "There is no truth in that story/ You didn't ride in the well-rowed galleys/ You didn't reach the walls of Troy." He claimed instead that her mere replica had gone to Troy, while the genuine Helen, faithful to Menelaus, was held incommunicado in Egypt. Later, Courtly Love poets, after pages of heated erotic verse, appended feeble palinodes to jibe with official Roman Catholic morality. C. S. Lewis notes, in the truest of these poems, no retraction is needed. "Life itself provides the palinode."

phatic communication: Social language stripped of propositional content, coined by Bronislaw Malinowski in The Meaning of Meaning. For example, in the exchange, "How's it going?" "Great, how're you?" no actual information is sought or given, both question and response ritualized to meaninglessness. Each culture has its conventional formulae, some very elaborate, made of questions asking nothing, replies meaning nothing, and statements announcing the dazzlingly obvious or stunningly untrue, as in, "Nice day." So prevalent is phatic communication, that many people, after engaging in a lifetime of nearly nonstop talk – pausing only to chew, swallow, use the bathroom, sleep, go into comas, and die – are buried without ever saying anything.

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

O, o November, the Alphabet Project

O, o: From the Canaanite aiyn "eye," although in the modern alphabet, it more resembles the open mouth of someone pronouncing the letter. Its simple shape has changed not at all in thousands of years. The Greeks called it mikron, "small."


onomatopoeia: A word, which, strangely enough, does not sound the least bit like what it means.

orgasm: The kinship to organ is more distant than we are first tempted to believe. Organ derives from the Greek root organo- and ultimately from erg "to work," and orgasm from orge, "impulse," and ultimately the Proto-Indo European root –uerg, "to swell." Partridge notes that the –asm ending, while associated with abstract nouns, seems to connote more vigorous activity than –ism: to wit, orgasm, enthusiasm, spasm. (Origins. Greenwich House, New York: 1983)

oxymoron: A self-contradictory phrase such as "pretty ugly," the word itself is an oxymoron, derived from the Greek oxus "sharp-witted" and moros, "stupid." From moros, of course, we also get moron as well as sophomore, another oxymoron, sophos meaning "wisdom," so that sophomore literally means something like "wise idiot."

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

N, n November, The Alphabet Project

N, n: From the Canaanite nun "fish." Between the waterfall, mem, and the fish, nun, leaping up like a lightning-bolt, comes the alphabet's midpoint, dividing the most common letters, placed within easy reach, from the least common, shoved against the back wall. A typical dictionary devotes a hundred pages on Aardvark to azygous, whereas we can get all the way from xanthate to Zyrian in less than ten.

nonce word: A word coined for a single occasion and never used again. One might reasonably ask if such a thing can even exist. For example, if someone made up the word gulk to mean "I cannot believe what I am hearing," could this properly be considered a word at all if it were never repeated? And once spoken, if it were printed in a dictionary somewhere as an example of a nonce word, wouldn't it cease to be one?

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

M, m November, The Alphabet Project

M, m: From the Canaanite mem "water." Modern M still has the same sharp, steep waves, but rather than cascading, stands planted on two feet, touching the ground with a beak-like middle, so it now more resembles twin mountains than a waterfall.

metathesis: The transposition of sounds in a word, as in the childish pronunciation of "pasketti" for "spaghetti" or the doltish proclivity for saying "noocular" for "nuclear." Metathesis is responsible for some genuine words in English: butterfly was once more logically known as a flutterby and sideburns take their name from the metathesis of Burnsides, the Civil War general who popularized the style.

move: To change location. From the Latin movere, from whence also motion, motor, demote, promote as well as emotion and motivation. Movement is expressed as the ratio of distance and time, distance being the interval between objects, and time the interval between events: miles per hour, feet per second. We use time to measure movement – see above – and movement to measure time – the gliding of a second hand around a clock face; the march of numbers from square to square across the Cartesian grid of a calendar; the gradual flight of color from wisteria and dogwood, to azalea, to gardenia, to mimosa, crepe myrtle, Rose of Sharon, and lantana, the leaves of hardwoods, and thence to the ground. Without movement, time could not exist.

L, l The Alphabet Project

L, l: From the Canaanite lamed "ox goad." A liquid consonant, formed sensuously by pressing the underside of the tongue to the alveolar ridge.



Love: With roots reaching to the Proto Indo-European lewb, love arguably means something different each time it is used. Aristotle believed words have essential meanings, so love is the same whether we say, "I love bacon," "I love my wife," or "God is love," a problematic idea because Aristotle himself had four different words for love: storge, "familial love," eros, "sexual love," philia "love of friends," and agape, "unselfish pure love." Wittgenstein, to the contrary, posits that a word's disparate meanings are no more than family resemblance. If so, love offers in-laws and multi-removed cousins to perplex the most patient genealogist. Overview of Neurology (Arthur Limongello, MD, MD. Kakos Publishing, New York: 2009) defines love as "the release of endorphins and oxytocin, creating sensations of well-being and promoting emotional bonding." But the definition seems insufficient. Surely we love even when we release hormones for anger or fear. Does it overstretch Wittgenstein's familial similarity to say animals with other hormones than ours feel a version of love? Do chickens, who display motherly concern for their chicks, feel storge? Do turtles, companionably sharing a floating log, have a sense of philia? Do they love the sunshine on their backs? Is a chicken closer than a turtle to understanding the essential meaning of love? Are we closer than a chicken? Can God, who, if He exists at all, has no limbic system or hormones whatsoever, love us?

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

K, k The Alphabet Project

K, k: From the Canaanite, kaph "hand," the original Egyptian hieroglyph having already lost several of its fingers. Since the Canaanite yodh, (I), from which we get I, also means hand, and since J is derived from I, K makes three hands in a row, lined up between the fence of het and the ox-goad of lamed.

kiss: Defined by Freud, with characteristic Viennese suavity, as "the sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth." Directly traceable to the Old Norse, koss, but unmistakably similar to the Proto-Indo-European kus. Ernest Crawley (The Mystic Rose, 1902) claims erotic kissing was unknown in ancient Egypt, a notion easily disproved by an Egyptian tomb inscription by an anonymous poet 2000 years before Christ: "I kissed her open mouth and it made me drunker than wine." A similar sentiment is expressed in the Song of Solomon, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine." The comparison to intoxication is apropos; studies show dopamine levels during kissing rival those caused by cocaine.

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

J, j: The Alphabet Project

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!
All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

J, j Originally a variant style of I, J did not appear as a letter in its own right until 6th Century Spain where it was pronounced as /h/ as in junto. In England, adoption was spotty and uneven; in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) Johnson omits both J and V, leaving a twenty-four letter alphabet. Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) includes all twenty-six letters, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the twenty-four letter alphabet still had prominent defenders until the middle of the 19th century.
Jehovah: One of the variant pronunciations, along with Yahweh, of the tetragrammaton, (יהוה‎) the ineffable name of God. Perhaps deliberately so, the word's etymology is as obscure as its pronunciation. Possibly derived from a Western Semitic root meaning "to bring into existence," but with equal likelihood coming from a Southern Semitic root, "to destroy or bring low." Some scholars argue it means simply "to be," an explanation supported by God's impatient retort when asked his name by Moses, "I AM THAT I AM… Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." (Exodus 3:14)

Jupiter: The greatest Roman god takes his name from the Greek god Zeus and the epithet, "father," as in "Father of the Gods," or "Father of Earth." Zeus + pater → zeupater → Jupiter


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Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

I, i: November The Alphabet Project

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!
All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

I, i From the Canaanite yodh, "hand." The Greeks pared it down to a single stroke, (I) iota, which, being their smallest letter, became a metaphor for anything tiny or insignificant, "not one iota." The King James Bible translated iota as "jot;" "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." (Matthew 5:18). To this day, jot remains a noun, "a small or insignificant thing" as well as a being a verb, "to write quickly or briefly." Parenthetically, a tittle refers to a small mark over a letter, such as the dot floating over the lower-case I, introduced during the Middle Ages to prevent confusion with similar-looking letters.

Ignus and lignus: Medieval scholars proposed an ingenious etymology for the Latin words, ignus, "ignite," and lignus, "wood." Wood, they supposed, burned easily because it already had fire inside it. Modern etymologists chuckle up their sleeves at this, as they do at the folk etymology that woman means "woe to man." These naïve guesses lack empirical support, but are meaningful to anyone who believes them. Who can doubt there is evil in the devil?

H, h November, The Alphabet Project

During November I will be blogging on etymology and the origin of the alphabet

H, h: From the Phonecian Khet "fence," H's status has always been marginal. The Greeks knocked off the top and bottom rails, calling it Eta (H) and changing the pronunciation from /k/ to /h/, finally changing it again to our equivalent of long /a/. The Latin alphabet restored the /h/ sound, but not without cavilers. In 500 AD the Latin grammarian Priscian claimed that H was not a true letter, a position was seconded in 1529 by Geoffory Tory, who nevertheless included it in the alphabet. In 1712, Michael Maittaire's English Grammar attempted once more to strike H from the alphabet; however, by that time H had received the imprimatur from Ben Jonson's more influential English Grammar (1640) so H was here to stay. The name "aitch" is from the French hache, "hatchet," the lowercase H resembling an upside-down ax.

handicap: A plausible but mistaken etymology has it that this word derives from disabled beggars waiting "cap-in-hand," but in reality handicap was a horseracing term hundreds of years before the euphemism for disability. Bettors held money in their caps as an ante while a neutral arbiter determined how much additional weight the superior horse had to carry, hence, a hand-in-cap race.

Hobson-Jobson, Law of: The tendency to corrupt exotic words to conform to familiar patterns. e.g., "oxycotton" for "oxytocin," "Old-Timer's" for "Alzheimers," and "very close veins," for "varicose veins." (See hocus-pocus) British Soldiers in India corrupted as "Hobson-Jobson," the Arabic cry, Ya Hasan! Ya Husayn! "Oh, Hassan! Oh, Husain!"

hocus-pocus: A jocular incantation, too foolish-sounding even for Vegas magicians. A corruption by disdainful Protestants, following the law of Hobson-Jobson, of the Latin formula, hoc est corpus meum, "This is my body," spoken by Catholic priests at the moment the sacramental bread and wine is believed to transform into the body and blood of Christ.

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Coming November 31, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!