Lingua Somnia

One sometimes wakes up from what feels like a dream, but the only residue is a single word. That happened to me last night; and the harvest of my dream was the word Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the largest country in that slender isthmus that connects North to South America or vice versa. Honduras is to Nicaragua’s north, Costa Rica to its south, about 6 million people. But none of that was in my mind.  What my dream presented was a linguistic challenge. I lay there in the dim dark, nose barely reaching the cold air, wondering if the first part of that word, Nicar, had any linkage to “black” in Spanish—because agua, of course, meant “water.” This kept me awake just long enough to make a firm decision to look into the matter when light finally came.

It turns out that the etymology of a word like Nicaragua is a swamp not even Donald Trump will ever drain. The accepted  version is that conquistador Gil González Dávila, its western discoverer, named the country for a local chieftain named Nacaro. But later scholars, having studied the original language of the region, called Nahuatl, have made correctives: that R in Nicaragua is suspect—but the “agua” is very defensible. But let us start with the name of the language itself. Nahuatl is formed of two words: NAHUAC and ATL. The first means “near,” the last means “water.” Note here, however, that atl is clearly not related to agua; agua, however, is a natural translation of atl. The name Nicaragua, scholars say, originates from three native words: NIC meaning “here,” ATL meaning “water,” and NAHUAC meaning “near.” In simple terms, Nicaragua means Here-Near-the-Water—just as the name of its language means Near-Water. These folk were proud either of their nearness to two oceans or, more likely, having their population centered around two big lakes on the south-western extent of the country: Lago Xolotlán and Lago Nicaragua (today). That chieftain named Nacaro perhaps played no role at all. But the Spanish clearly got the idea that agua had better be part of every major name around here. The capital is thus called Managua; it is the largest city in Central America. The Man part of that name comes from the name of a tribe, the Mánkeme, who lived in the area of Managua; the rest of it I need not repeat again.

Even a brief investigation into language reveals a universe beneath. To those who, like me, are absolutely fascinated by the hidden, near-forgotten, and overlaid parts of history, I recommend a closer look at the Nahuatl language, presented here by Wikipedia. It turns out to be part of the Proto-Uto Aztecan language group, the fifth level down a sizeable pyramid—all of which was leveled down, you might say, by the Spanish invasion of Latin America (Aztekistan?). The image of the Nahua woman I show above, the curl showing that she is speaking, comes from the same source. The image dates from the sixteenth century Florentine Codex produced by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Clearly the Nahuans were also originating later North American techniques of comic book speech. What a vast world we live in…

The Materialization of Thought

The stray thought struck me the other day that language may be a kind of materialization of thought—a happy circumstance allowing us to communicate in this world of boxes. Words are sounds or their symbolic representations. Depending on the language in question, the words lo, Pferd, equus, and cheval all mean the same thing in English, horse. The entity so designated is the same no matter where observed; we may quarrel over what we’re seeing, a phenomenon or noumenon (the kind of questions, evidently, Russians can get into fights about (link)), but what is certain is that what we call it is quite arbitrary—if many people all agree. At the same time, quite obviously, when we finally call it by some name, it seems to take on a special quality missing, somehow, until that name’s affixed—hence, presumably, Helen Keller’s earth-shaking discovery that a particular hand-gesture and the experience of water were one and the same thing. With a little help from the Creator, who presented the world’s animals to Adam, this process of naming began, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19).

But why do I call this the “materialization of thought”? I do so because we can’t communicate without a material medium—sound, gesture, or writing. The inner perception, say of a horse, is present in the mind—say in a dream. But we cannot convey that image, as we perceive it, to anybody else without the use of language. As children we are taught each name—and acquiring each word is an act of socialization. Since words merely represent, as a sound, something they are not, we manage to compress one kind of reality, however complex, into another, which is a realm of sounds. To speak of abstraction here is actually false—since abstraction comes from the Latin for “drawn away.” Rather the opposite happens: words are “stamped upon” something real out there. We engage in an abbreviating substitution of sounds for often massively complicated relationships. Thus five words will do it if I want to ask for “equal justice under the law,” but unpacking those sounds into a living reality might be almost impossible without days of demonstrations on the scale of the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

The great convenience of words—for creatures who, in another and more perfect realm, may well communicate just thought-to-thought but here are boxed into bodies—also has its problems—for the very reason that words are arbitrary and the meanings we attach to them always vary and change over time. Therefore misunderstandings are inevitable—and people talk right past each other all the time. The material nature of meaning-sounds, however, also gives us the delights of poetry—where we can play with sounds in efforts to produce exalted or funny meanings just by the art rubbing of this word against that one.

A last note. I refer, earlier to the “world of boxes.” The phrase comes from Carl G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. There Jung recalls a near-death experience of his; it came in the aftermath of a heart attack. After some quite stupendously elevated experiences, he found himself back again. “Now I must return to ‘the box system’ again,” he thought. “For it seemed to me as if, behind the horizon of the cosmos, a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box.” Thank the Lord we’ve found a way to penetrate that cardboard and thus can talk to one another.

A Gloss on Glossolalia

Many posts on this blog have their origins in conversations between Brigitte and me—certainly all those that deal with language. The context of this one may illustrate how that works. We were actually talking about what are known as the Left Behind novels—and films—by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The novels, which deal with the End Times, have achieved amazing sales. But the cultural meaning of their popularity is not really remarked upon—because the secular culture regards these books/movies as attacks on itself by a residue of resistant elements of the population, which alas, resistant to conversion to the modernity. That, of course, is deplorable, from that perspective, indeed embarrassing when the residue seems much greater than the new faith. Sixty-five million copies? Multiple, long-time disfigurements of the New York Times best seller list?

That reminded me of Tolkien’s view that in cultural decay the three responses to it are futurism (read pro-freedom, rights, and technology), archaism (nostalgia for past times, return to former customs, disgust with modernity), and the transcendental view which sees the solution in the religious dimension, which has room for the supernatural. The Left Behind phenomenon is, therefore, a recognizable indicator that at least part of the population belongs to this category. The novels, surely, are a popular presentation of that view—but is not taken seriously because the dominant culture considers such people of a kind of lower class.

This then suddenly made me think of a very close friend of ours, particularly Brigitte’s, once a neighbor, still a close friend, who, after her husband absconded leaving her to fend with children still in the home, coped magnificently and made a brand-new career for herself at an age where most people start getting ready for the slow fade out. A life-time Catholic, this lady joined a charismatic Catholic church in which (Woe! we thought at the time) some people engaged in glossolalia. So finally we get to the word.

Now here is the curious fact. Because of our friend—and the really wondrous qualities she suddenly began to show forth when pressed by circumstances—my view of an ecstatic or semi-ecstatic religious behavior began to change. Until then I’d viewed it with a great deal of caution. It’s not class, region, education, or even culture that really matters. It is the inner quality of individuals. And our friend has qualities.

Now for the word itself. It comes from the Greek glossa or glotta in usage meaning an obscure or foreign word (but literally meaning tongue) combined with lalia, meaning to speak or to prattle, babble. Hence, also, a “gloss,” in English, is an explanation of a word because it is obsolete or foreign. And a “glossary” is simply a collection of those glosses. The explanation of what people mean when they are speaking in tongues, alas, is not translatable into language—except by something like faith. Which, if the popularity of those novels is an indication, may be on the rise.

Il Linguaggio Musicale

We have been attending performances of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra held at various churches and centers in the suburbs of Detroit, yesterday once again. We like to sit in the front row of the balcony quite close to the orchestra at Grosse Pointe Memorial Church. The balcony has a neat railing where the opened program finds a spot so that we can follow the movements as they are played. Mozart’s Serenade No. 6 in D major for Two Small Orchestras, “Serenata notturna.” It has three movements: Marcia maestoso, Menuetto, and Rondo. The Rondo is described as Allegretto, Adagio, Allegro. Originally, when first performed, the first movement, the “majestic march,” was played both at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning the two orchestras marched in playing it, positioned themselves at two different spots in a great hall. And when they finished the Rondo, they rose again and, playing their majestic march, again departed. So our vastly gifted conductor, Christopher Warren-Green, informed us. (Not all knowledge comes from the Internet.)

Looking at those, and the succeeding, movements, I got curious about the designation of tempos these words indicate. So what exactly is the difference between an Adagio and an Allegro? Well, adagio means slow, allegro merry and cheerful. One movement was Allegro con brio, meaning that the composer of it, Franz Joseph Hayden, wished it to be played cheerfully and “with panache, with flair.” Are these tempos or do these words transcend mere beat? Did I just discover a secret but quite literal “language of music” quite familiar to composers, who know this stuff much better than I do? It’s common to hear that music just cannot be expressed in language—but here are the composers doing so. Very parsimoniously, to be sure, but they have something in mind.

Among tempo indicators, for instance is Solenne, meaning “solemn.” But just as solemn music is quite difficult to put into words, so is that word itself. How do you render solemn into other words? What is a solemn occasion? Perhaps a funeral? What all does that word contain? It contains the whole behavior of a collective of humans gathered for it, their dress for the occasion, their postures, their facial expression, the words they utter, the look in their eyes. It means the kind of music that will be played, the formality of movements observed by everyone, the content of the words exchanged, the subject of the sermon, the words chosen for the service itself.

And what exactly does “with flair” signify? Not any one thing? Something graceful may be entirely still—or may be in motion. Not just music, it strikes me; vast ranges of human experience, rendered by words as well as music, extend beneath words the meaning of which is as elusive as music itself—and yet we all know what they mean.

To Eschew is Not to Chew

The Wall Street Journal this morning has as its subhead to its lead story the following: Catholics’ Selection Of Pope Francis Eschews Tradition. Quite a mouthful. My oldest big Webster’s defines eschew as follows: To avoid, as something wrong or distasteful; to abstain from; to keep one’s self clear of; to shun. So why did the WSJ not use one of the headline words like shun, avoid, or side step? Did the impenetrable mystery of a closed enclave suggest a mysterious word? I do honestly wonder how many people readily understand that word—or, for that matter, two others of the same ilk: eschatology and escheat.

English for me was the fourth language I encountered (not counting Latin), hence I once looked it up and discovered that it links, by way of Old High German, sciuhen (“avoid, escape”) to the common German word scheuen (to fear, avoid) or scheu, which means the same feeling as “shy.” In Old English that same word was sceoh. As you can see, we have a plain old and well-known Germanic word native to English already. Catholics’ Selection of Pope Francis Shies from Tradition. But there was that Norman Invasion, don’t you know. And therefore we got our eschew from Old French eschiver; that’s where that leading e comes from. It modifies the Old Frankish, skiuhan, which sounds a lot like sciuhen. And that e? Well, that’s the Latin part, echoing ex-, “out of,” and in this case “away from.”

Eschatology is one of those words I used to look up every other year when younger; as I’m plowing deeper into my seventies, the word has come to yield its meaning instantly. It is the science of final things, the last things, a ways back four things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. The e there meant “beyond.” And escheat? It’s the feudal word from which we get “cheat,” meaning to do someone out of something valuable—or, extended to marital relations, to violate one’s vows. The root is Latin, excadere, the ex meaning “away,” cadere “to fall.” Something that “falls away,” more precisely something that “reverts.” In feudal times land granted by some lord to a family could revert back, escheat, to the lord if the male line died out or the family could not maintain its fees. Survivors were, and felt, cheated.

Now to deal with my headline. Chewing comes, not surprisingly, from a Proto-Indo-European root, *gyeu-. We’ve been chewing for a long time. By the time Old English came to be spoken, that root had yielded ceowan. If you pronounce that c as a k, it is easy to see why Germans to this day engage in kauen. Which means that when we are eschewing something, we’re definitely not engaged in chewing—unless by sheer coincidence.

The Year of Our Lord 7DD

It was Goethe who said, “He who is ignorant of foreign languages knows not his own.” In a way that applies also to numbers, but perhaps with less of a bite. He who only knows decimal notation will miss out on some fun. Those for whom the accessibility to computers became possible thanks to the original Apple—and who were drawn into that puzzle—will have learned at least binary and then hex notation as well. Those who went deeper also ultimately mastered octal—which was in use (maybe still is) in some Hewlett-Packard midsized computers.

The Year of Our Lord above is rendered here in hex, a 16-digit system. The annotation runs from 0 to 9 in numbers; 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 are rendered by A, B, C, D, E, and F. F is the highest digit in hexadecimal notation—much as 9 is in the decimal. Sixteen is rendered in hex as $10. That dollar signs is used to indicate hexadecimal notation.

Here is that year in three different notations:

	Value of Column
In Hex	1000	100	10	1
Value in decimal	4096	256	16	1
The year in hex		7	D	D
The digits in decimal		7	13	13
Translated into decimal (e.g., 7 x 256, etc.)		1792	208	13
The columns added				2013
In Octal	1000	100	10	1
Value in decimal	512	64	8	1
The year in octal	3	7	3	5
Translated into decimal (3 x 512 etc.)	1536	448	24	5
The columns added				2013
In Decimal	1000	100	10	1
The year in decimal	2	0	1	3
Actual values	2000	0	10	3
The columns added				2013

Note that the progression from column to column is the same in each language: 1, 10, 100, 1000. But they have different values as we switch mathematical tongues. Fun for the nerdy. Not that I recommend anyone dating a check today March 9, 7DD—or March 11, 3735 (that 11 is really a 9 in octal). But if you’re a natural trouble-maker, you might wish to do so—and then have a very spirited argument about the legitimacy of using other than decimal systems—with spicy comments about the decay of our educational system—as the sales clerk, if she notices it at all, rolls her eyes.

Shape-Shifting Words

Let the Context do the talking, never mind the Words. For about a week now, Brigitte and I have been exploring the deeper meaning of that title above. Words are inherently layered anyway, even in culturally more disciplined times, but nowadays…  

A nice example came this morning in the New York Times, a book review. The book is titled Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. So what is this book about? It is about impulse purchases by women (who obviously can afford them) of low-cost items at places like Kmart, like $7 shoes. It is about finding your closet full of cheap things most of which you’ve never worn. It is about a “malaise” that makes us do this short of shopping. It is about the guilty Social Media that made us do it, about YouTube’s sins for letting people post tempting “haul” videos in which they glory in their heady purchases for nearly nothing. About “craving” connections to our “stuff.” because, somehow, we’ve become “disconnected” with “ourselves.” More importantly yet, we may be doing this to create an “eternal brand of the self.” The review goes on and on, documenting all the ills that weigh down the passive shopper. But suddenly comes the unexpected. The author, Elizabeth Cline, has clearly fought her way back to the chilling surface because, in conclusion, she suggests simply wearing what you already own—and taking up sewing to create the new. Such acts restore, she says, a person’s “agency and self-sufficiency.” Now such words in this context are indeed like being drenched by a bucket of snowy-cold water. Shockingly refreshing. Not all is lost. Agency? Self-sufficiency? These words come from another Order of Reality. Well, about time.

B and I got into shape-shifting words in discussing such concepts as time, space, reality, intention, will, feeling and the like—the hard-to-describe inner things dismissively named qualia by branches of philosophy. But all words are shape-shifters—because we are so incredibly intelligent, quite naturally, even if we’re only, or primarily, Kmart bargain-hunters. When shaken a little, we’ll understand agency and self-sufficiency too. A random sample for that shifting might be cover—but what do I really mean by that word? Is it that fluffy thing above the bed-sheet? Has it got some linkage to agenda, as in “Have we covered that yet?” Does it mean travel—as in “we’ve covered a lot of ground today”? Does it mean camouflage, as in “under cover.” Content—as in “it covers events in Indochina under French colonial rule.” Lots of things. It is a veil, a lid, a cap. It conceals—and it reveals, as in the cover of a book. It’s an image, it’s a function—it even reaches metaphysics: in PD James’ novel, Cover her Face, it also means death.

Context is king. Most ordinary human speech, recorded and then transcribed, sounds like a kind of bubble, broil, and flow—more wildly random than steady (like a down-pour). Some drops are shooting up, some whizzing off to the side, colliding, melting, interrupted, reasserting. Jabber. But we know what it’s about. We know how to understand the words—because we know the context.

Now to conclude. Using that word above, Indochina, brought  back a memory—suitable for “coverage” under the topic of shape-shifting words. Michelle, as a child, studying a map of the world hung on the refrigerator in our kitchen, something she did daily, looked up one afternoon and wondered if there was also an Outdoor China. She couldn’t find it.

Sapristi!

Son of a biscuit! It took me more than 75 years to discover the formal name for a practice that initially puzzled me when first I arrived in the United States at fifteen. Arrived in Kansas City. There I heard people say “Gal Dang it” and “Jeepers Creepers”—not having the slightest, you might say. I was then still concerned with elementary etymology, thus working on gunna, as in that splendid “She’s gunna git got.” An old lady, whom I actually asked to explain it to me, was baffled by my question and responded by repetition. “You know,” she said, “like in we gunna do that, we gunna finish.” I suppose she meant mowing the lawn, which is what I was then doing for her for a quarter. Yes. Those were the day. You could get a gallon of gas for that then.

Well, today I learned, in the course of tracing another wonderful word, that Gal-Dang-it belongs to a category called “minced oaths.” Minced? Well, oaths made ever so small, cut into little harmless sounds, thus euphemized, if that’s a verb. The root of this mincing is the third of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.” Exodus 20:7. Mincing is the art of retaining the emotional energy of an oath but changing the sound enough so that the speaker is not literally violating the commandment. With advancing secularization, the practice came to be applied to ordinary obscene words as well, and really fine mincing is provided in print, as in the phrase, which might be applied to my posts: “What in the            are you talking about?”

My last report on minced oaths was on a German phrase (link). I still did not know the name of the category then. I will add one today from the French—although it also has a German equivalent. The word is sapristi, usually rendered as Sapristi! It means, to translate it into another minced oath, Oh my gosh! The German version of that, derived from the French, is sapperlotti—in its shorter version sapperlot.

The Internet, thickly populated as it is by sites that enable the ignorant to instruct the challenged, at first would not yield anything, but eventually I found the family lineage of sapristi. It comes from an early pre-mincing, used in the same way, sacristi. That one is a contraction of Sacrum Corpus Christi from the Latin. Now German sites are not all in agreement. Some want to derive sapperlot from Sacré Nom de Dieu. Okay, the nom provides an O, absent is sapristi, but the sapperlotti suggests, to me, that the German form is just more mincing of the French.

Another way of mincing oaths is by the simple elimination of the holy name or names. In French Sacre nom, by itself, produces less scandal (as Catholics might say) than adding de Dieu. And the French also use, with exactly the same shocked surprise, the word Sacrebleu! Some call that a Marian oath in that The Lady wore a blue mantle; others go deeper and discover that bleu is a nicely minced substitute for dieu, and they hark back to such curses as morbleu (death of), corbleu (body of) and others.

Gee-whiz! What an ocean language is —and the fish in it are without number.

Deontology

No, no! It’s not another variant of ontology, the last being a discourse or theory about being, in Greek onto. Therefore with ontology we have onto-logia. The word under my microscope today, however, parses apart a different way: deon-logia. Here the Greek word is deon meaning “that which is a binding duty.” Therefore deontology is the science of moral duty.

I came across this word by what may seem a highly indirect route. Michelle is studying therapeutic hypnosis in a course sponsored by the hospital where she is a midwife. And she sent us a paper, in which that word occurs in the abstract†. The sentence:

This common definition of therapeutic hypnosis needs updating in order to enable the therapists who offer it to their  patients to adjust their relational aptitudes to the scientific, deontological, and ethical needs of the contemporary therapeutic relationship.

The word is most closely related to Kantian ethics, characterized as focused on the actions and will of the agent rather that the consequences of an action. Deontology is therefore associated with the rules of absolute morality—on inputs by the agent rather than the outputs of the action (ht to Charles D. Kay). Therefore deontology is contrasted to pragmatism.

Now it amused me that in a recent post, before Michelle’s link arrived, I was committing deontology (in “Virtue and Time” link) without knowing that I was doing it. And it amuses me further than in a highly scientific context, the author would point to fundamental morality by using a very scientific-sounding word. But when it comes to reality—like really healing people—it turns out that morality is indispensable.

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†Eric Bonvin, Therapeutic hypnosis: a relational art using attention with the intention to treat (link).

Ochlocracy and Other Gems

I got here because, the other day, Brigitte used Pöbel, a German word that refers to the uncultured masses (to put it mildly). We often use German words in our conversation when they have a sharper, more appropriate meaning than the English equivalent. Then, as is her wont, she wondered where that word might be rooted. We both assumed that its roots are the same as that of people, thus by way of French, peuple, where its first meaning is “people, nation” but les gens du peuple has that German flavor, meaning “the lower classes” or “the crowd.” We were right. But the French comes from the Latin populus, which, it turns out, comes from the Etruscan.

In seeking the German etymology of Pöbel, I encountered a, for me, brand new gem, ochlocracy. You might say that it is the rule of the Pöbel. Sure enough okhlos in Greek means “mob, populace,” and the Greek itself carries the sense of a mass in motion. This sense is captured in the derogatory Latin phrase mobile vulgus, literally “moving mass” or “moving people,” usually rendered as “the fickle crowd.”  Now, amusingly, for me—who’d always assumed that “mob” was a stalwart Old English word—it turns out that mobile vulgus is the root of “mob,” only the first three letters of the Latin phrase having been retained—and the whole meaning. And when we capitalize it as in The Mob, or talk about mob-rule, we are talking about ochlocracy.

Is it in our future? Well, it’s making inroads; it is moving. One indicator of our current situation is that we use the phrase pop culture with positive connotations (unless we are a ways past fifty). The family lineage of pop is very similar to peuple in French and okhlos in Greek. But the whole phrase is still in transition. It is something we cultivate even if, it seems, it is aiming at -kratia instead, the Greek modifier to signify “rule.” And sometimes, turning on the TV, even news shows, popocracy already seems to be comfortably in the saddle.

Don’t Gift Me That

Reification marches on. More on that word may be found on this blog (link), but in that note I failed to mention one meaning of the word. It also means to drain the life out of something, thus to make it seem like a corpse. Today the Wall Street Journal features an article on its Personal page titled “The Science Behind Gifting.” It uses two words that both do this—and then it concentrates on that mo-mo-modern linguistic delight, regifting. The science consists of asking people questions in surveys, which, like “gifting,” comes about as close to rendering Nothingness tangible, audible, and tactile as I am able to imagine. Below that article WSJ gifts me with news of mad-cow disease, to the right with news about heart attacks (actually how to avoid them by dieting). I’d rather catch the one or be felled by the other than learn to manage my gifting. Bah! Humbug!

Heaven, Arse, and Thread

Let’s round out November with a German saying, Himmel, Arsch, und Zwirn. All depending on how it’s said, it can be a curse (as in “Hell and damnation!”), a reaction to bad news (as in “God Almighty!”), or merely an exclamation of surprise (as in “Oh my God!”). It’s certainly colorful. It also strikes me as a little too long to issue spontaneously. It requires just a nanosecond’s worth of pause before it tumbles out. Not surprisingly, therefore, it has variants that make it even longer by substituting a longer word for Zwirn or thread. The most popular, at least among the scholars who attempt to explain this saying, is Wolkenbruch, cloudburst. And those who make this claim also think the phrase comes from farming dialects. Another is Heaven, Arse, and Chimneysweep! (Himmel, Arsch, und Schornsteinfeger), which hints at an originator with poetic gifts.

I found a great many attempts trying to explain the phrase in various sophisticated ways on German websites. The typical approach is to take each word in turn and then to list every conceivable meaning and connotation that it carries and then weaving something from selected meanings (e.g., heaven is the highest, arse the lowest, thread the finest). Some have discovered that in criminal contexts Zwirn means money (hereabouts we use “bread”); others have it that in old German usage Zwirn carried the meaning of “semen”— and the activity that makes it flow. And so on. Yet others opt, perhaps intuitively, for a single meaning hidden in all three: strength. The strength here is meant to refer to the strength of the emotion that rises and causes that exclamation to be made. That explanation fits both heaven and thread—Zwirn being a particularly strong, twisted filament. The Germans use the word Draht, which has the same rooting as thread, to mean wire, as in metallic. The explanation is difficult to apply to arse—except to say that it must be strong to have us sitting on it all the time. But the intention of this explanation is persuasive to an extent. Big emotion—and a wild grab for big, contrasty words.

Regarding arse, I stumbled on the reason why we use ass instead across the Atlantic. The R got eroded—as it has in cuss for curse, bust for burst, and hoss for horse. Online Etymology Dictionary (endless source of delights) also informs me that the German for our perch, the fish, is Barsch. In Old English we used to call it bærs. Now we call it bass. Oh, the complexity!

*    *    *

After reading this much to Brigitte, she seemed to remember another version. She screwed up her face and said: “Himmel, Kreuz, und…” She could remember no more. But I had another clue—and went to work. It struck me that the combination of “heaven” and “cross” might prove  productive.

Right. It was. I discovered that an older form of this saying—but, to be sure, also associated with disasters—was Himmel, Kreuz, und Wolkenbruch (Heaven, Cross, and Cloudburst) or Himmel, Kreuz, und Donnerbaum (Heaven, Cross, and Thunder Tree). Digging even deeper, I discovered an even older version: Himmel, Kreuz, und Sakrament!†

At this point I knew I had arrived. It happens that in Bavaria Sakrament! was the most common curse word; indeed it seemed to be the only word ever used by our choleric landlord. All the cursing in Bavaria was exclusively blasphemous. The longer version in this case was Herrgott, Kruzifix, und Sakrament (Lord God, Crucifix, and Sacrament). Now I knew the pattern from which the “secular” versions have descended. One Austrian site suggests that in very early Christianity, when something dreadful happened, people thought that the End Times had arrived, that the heavens would now open, the clouds would burst, and Judgement would descend—for which no one was quite ready yet.

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†Robert Laude, Hinterpommersches Wörterbhuch: des Persantengebiets, p. 164 (link).

Raise to the Lintel

Call it sublimation—whatever that word actually means.

     [Plucked from a diary entry of mine.]

Post-and-lintel a ways back...

One of the best proofs that we are very strange creatures indeed is that we use words like sublimation and know exactly what we mean. That in turns means to have a real grasp of the process described, but the description of it in any kind of effective detail is difficult, slippery. It involves an inner movement of the soul, indeed a quite complex series of such movements, sustained over some period of time; both the “experience” sublimated and what happens to it after that process must, of course, be retained in memory. But to signal that nexus of perceptions and actions, we must have recourse to physical shorthand. My title betrays what sublimate actually means: it means to raise something to the lintel. So what does that mean?

Well, let’s go to work by using a contrast. Submerge means to dip something under the surface of a body of water. In submerge we encounter, as in sublimate, the prefix sub-. That Latin form has multiple meanings. It means “under,” the function used in submerge; but it also means “close to, up to, towards, and up from below” of which “up to” plays the functional role in sublimate—but with “move X” simply understood. Surface? Here we encounter the French slurring of the Latin super-, one of the meanings of which is “on top of”; therefore on top of the face. The water has a “face”? Only to very strange creatures like we are. In the paragraph above I use the word sustain. Here, by contrast, the French slurs sub- into sus-, using the meaning of “up from below.” The verb tener means “to hold.”

Curious how the human mind sovereignly uses concepts employing the same basic symbol, this way, that way. Sub- now means up, now under. So which is it? No problem. Just leave it to that in finitely malleable human intelligence.

Lintel is another of those wonderfully fluid concepts useable in different ways. It comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, but the word is related to limes, meaning boundary or border. It is, at the same time, the upper limit of the opening, thus its border; at the same time it is the member that lies under the structure above it, thus is a weight-bearing member.

The threshold or boundary toward which we move something when engaged in sublimation is, of course, the edge or border of the material sphere. The movement is toward the transcendental. Getting to that limit is hard enough; passing it, of course, would be sublime.

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Image source is Wikipedia (link).

A Farrago of Terms

People readily believe that others in their circle also know what they do. This arises, seems to me, because they’ve forgotten the price they paid for knowledge. Hence that damnable word palimpsest keeps surfacing in antiquarian discussions. It’s a mongrel of a word; I regard all words that contain a ps- beginning as such, a Greek favorite, as in psyche and the derived psychiatrist. The p is #@!& silent, so why print it. Coming to America and learning English, the Ogre was th. The absolutely simplest word in English was a bear to those who hadn’t just grown up with it. That damnable ps- belongs there with the the. Palimpsest comes apart, you see. Palim is “again” and psest is “rubbed,” deriving from psen, “to rub smooth.”  So what is it, finally? Well, a palimpsest is a piece of parchment bearing writing—but one from which the writing has been scraped off so that it can be used again—or it is the same parchment that has already been used again following a vigorous scraping. Why not just say “scraped parchment”? Well, you have to fit in. You have to stay on the reservation. You learned it as palimpsest—it was an achievement. A tiny little pride took root with that effort. The first independent use of that word gave you a little tremulous satisfaction. Therefore, never mind the ordinary ignorant reader out there. Learn it, dammit. I had to…

Parchment is another great word—and has nothing to do with the state of being thirsty. But back when we wrote on the skin of unfortunate beasts, that skin had to be dried. Or so you would think, wouldn’t you? Wrong. The word comes from (1) the name of a city then called Pergamon,  these days called Bergama (in Asia Minor) which evidently introduced leather in competition with papyrus; or (2) the Parthian region of ancient Persian from which the Romans obtained parthica pellis (Parthian leather), and in the repeated use of that phrase they dropped the leather part—much as the drinkable port began as vinho do Porto, a product of Portugal. Sometimes we lose the beginning, sometimes the end.

So what is a farrago? It is a medley, a mixture. I came across it yesterday in a book written in the late 1920. Google’s Ngram facility, which tracks the frequency of word usage way back, shows that for some reason, probably untraceable, the word had a sudden lurch of popularity from 1890 through 1920 roughly; before and after that period, the word lived and lives in the same obscure communities which serve up the palimpsest. The word comes from a mixture of grains, the Latin far, and was coined by the Romans. Barley is a cognate of far. Cognate? It comes from “together” and “born.” Born together, placed in the same cradle, as it were, often meaning that the same word was pronounced differently by different populations. All was well until the dictionary-makers rose to power and started writing down the careless mumbling of the people just out there guiding the plows….

Esperanto Studied Here

One of my esteemed colleagues quite a number of years ago gave me a little book entitled Esperanto. It is by J. Cresswell and J. Hartley and issued by Teach Yourself Books. It’s not the kind of book you read, but one that produces delight at intervals. For that reason it occupies a “busy” shelf I tend to look at two, three times a week.

Perhaps the most wonderful creations in life are those that requires enormous, complex, and transcending efforts that—viewed from an ordinary, main-street, realistic view—are entirely unlikely to reach their goal. Esperanto was the creation of a Polish eye-doctor, Dr. L.L. Zamenhof (1859-1917). He felt that before humanity was ready to tackle the grave problems that confront it, the “language problem” had to be overcome—and so he set to work. Ah, the psychic airs of the nineteenth century West. Zamenhof was “one who hopes”—the name of his language in English. Now, of course, this creative tour de force didn’t entirely vanish. Books have been written in it. It is the native language of 1,000 people; 10,000 speak it fluently; and I am one of 10 million who have studied it “to some extent at some time.” These are the sorts of minorities to which I tend to belong—never more than, at best, 10 million. Zamenhof died as World War I was raging. The first grammar of the language had been published in 1887—not time enough, evidently, to conquer the globe. Ho ve! Meaning “Alas!” in Esperanto. The roots of that? Probably the Yiddish Oy vey. Word-roots in Esperanto derive from Western languages. Asia did not as yet throw the sort of shadow over the world that it does today.

A man much better known as a creator of so-called constructed languages is J.R.R. Tolkien. He created more than  twenty Elvish languages; the full list is still being counted as his unpublished papers are studied. With Tolkien we’re yet another step upward, as it were, in the transcending direction, because his linguistic creations served art. And such efforts also have their parallels in other fields. In the realm of architecture, the monuments I admire most are the Watts Towers constructed by Sabato Rodia. The image I show is from Wikipedia (link).

Sometimes when I pass that shelf and see my copy of Esperanto, I’ve just been reading the news or, as happened yesterday, anticipated a medical day that came today—one of the less pleasant kind. Then my mind tends to produce the word Desperanto—the language I ought to learn instead. Original with me, that word—but I discovered today that others have used it too. There is even a song by that title, written by Marianne Faithful. It’s opening lines:

Desperanto spoken here, today I hear it everywhere
It is the language of despair, it's in your nails and it's in your hair
It's in your mouth instead of air, it's in your house, it's in your heart
It's in your mind, it's everywhere, it's in your heart, it's in your heart.

And then there are days that begin in Desperanto but, after the bad thing is over, my mind has switched to Esperanto again—and I am filled with energy enough to start my own Watts Towers.

Getting Real

One of my etymological reflexes—and it arises particularly when a term is philosophical—is to ask myself: “What is the German word for it?” That’s usually enlightening because in German the commonly used word is usually still rooted in Old Germanic; the Latin word we use is present too, but is not the dominant word. Sometimes the roots of the two are different. Take the word real. I’m on this subject because a sentence in the paper once more repeated that tired old “in the real world…” An interesting phrase. The intention is to point to conflict. In the dream world or in the imagination, anything is possible, not so in the real world. In the real world you will be up against it—people, matter, etc. Now that word, used in so many different ways, derives ultimately from the Latin res for thing or matter. The real world is the world of things. So what is the German word for it?

The German for reality is Wirklichkeit. It is rooted in the verb wirken, derived from the same roots as our “work,” but wirken has a slightly more expansive meaning, including to invent and to discover. Wirklichkeit has a more dynamic flavor because the verb is to the fore: That-which-has-been-wrought. It corresponds much better to our actuality, although at least my sense is that we don’t think of acts when we speak of actuality. The reason for that, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, is because we took it from the French actualité, which the French use to indicate the “now existing, up to date.” The older root is the Latin actualis, viewed as a Latin loan-translation of the Greek energeia. The Romans meant by it “active, pertaining to action.” That’s dynamic, but that meaning in the word has faded. It is still present in German.

Things and action. Matter and energy. Our “reality” is a little hollow. What lies behind Reality is something alive and energetic. And the “real world,” therefore, is a great deal more than the endless battle for survival and success in the realm of matter.

The Inch and the Oate

We played MyWord yesterday afternoon and Brigitte gave me inchoate as my test word. I got there, actually, but it was a struggle, in part because I didn’t really know the word, you know, up close and personally. I didn’t know how to spell it, either. I’ve heard it spoken hence when I read it I read it as in-ko-ate—and every time I do it, I always wonder what that H is doing there. The H is silent, not like in cha-cha-cha. And I’ve always understood the word, from the context, as meaning incoherent, which is close but no seegar.

Very confusing word. It should be banned. Its actual meaning is “rudimentary,” thus something  still in early stages, undeveloped. Sure enough, its origin is Latin, a variant, mind you, of incohare, a verb meaning “to begin, to hitch up.” Therefore that H got moved. The confusion comes because the word derives from in and cohum. Notice where that H is. Cohum means “the strap affixed to an oxen’s yoke.” In is used in its second sense, thus “in, into, on, upon,” not it its first Latin sense meaning “opposed to, not, against, etc.” Inchoate entered the language first. Then some people, misunderstanding what it meant—or at least what the in meant, began using choate as an adjective to mean “finished.” They thought that inchoate meant “unfinished,” therefore removing that in would produce “finished.” The Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that Oliver Wendell Holmes lamented the use of that choate in a letter in 1878, calling it barbarism in legal language. What are things coming to…

Pronunciation also varies, and Webster’s gives two versions. In what follows the emphasized syllable is italicized. in-ko-ate. in-ko-it. I’ve been pronouncing it in-ko-ate, so getting that wrong too. Satis. Basta. Done with it.

My test word for Brigitte? Solecism. Meaningful coincidence, in a way. That word means “mistake in speaking or writing.” Applies, generally, to inchoate, I’d say. I’ll stick to rudimentary.