to wit

The owl of word country is a wise bird. It speaks of the two most important things: knowledge and love. I came to it to know.

“To wit?” it asked.

“To wit,” I confirmed. This is how it speaks: using the old verb wit rather than the one more common now, know. To wit – that means ‘to know’ or, more loosely, ‘just so you know’.

“To who?” it asked.

“To you, of course,” I said.

“To it,” it said. Meaning go to it: ask the question.

“I want to know of love,” I said.

“To woo,” it said.

“Yes. Is that all there is?”

“To it?”

“Yes. What is the best way to make my love known?”

“To who?” it asked.

“To the object of my affection,” I said. “There must be a best way to make my desires known.”

“To wit: to woo,” it said. I suppose a more Latinate bird might have said “videlicet” rather than “to wit,” but this is an Anglo-Saxon owl.

“But I lack the nerve,” I said.

“Twit,” it said. Abusive creature, this bird.

“You’re telling me that having nerve is its own justification?”

“True,” it said. Or at least I think that’s what it said.

“But do you think she’ll care even one whit what I think?”

“Two whits,” it said. Great. Not sure how to take that. Two very small bits. Not a lot, God wot. (Oh, hey: God wot – there’s another form of the verb wit.)

“Well, OK, but surely she might turn her affections to someone else.”

“To who?” This owl doesn’t really go for formal inflections, I notice. Never to whom.

“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Who else indeed. A-wooing I will go.”

“Do it,” it said.

“Thanks. Thanks for the encouragement.”

“To-whoo,” it said. I think it was just being owlish. As if to confirm that, it added, “Tu-whit, tu-whoo.”

mist

In word country, where the realms of different languages meet, there is mist. The view is unclear; on peut perdre le sens. There is a mystique. The greenery hisses as you brush past it, all mixed: insalata mista. You hear it: “mist, mist.” But be careful of what you may have missed.

You know this word mist, of course, this good old word of Germanic origins, recognizably cognate even with Sanskrit (mih). You know where you hear it, coming through the morning mist, a fine mist, a light mist; you see the mist-covered mountains of home. You see mist on bottles of beverages, shampoos, cleaners. You cannot mistake it, the fountain m, the spray-top i, the sinuous s, the capped-off t. You say it: the mouth starts warm, /m/, and then the nozzle opens and tightens to a spray, /ɪs/, and then stops, /t/. Short. Simple. Clear.

But mists are not clear. They are things you get lost in, and not just the mists of time but the mysteries of language. Even with so few letters, you can get mixed up, ISTM. Wandering in English, you may smell must and find your shoes messed. This cannot be dismissed. Perhaps you have wandered over into German, where Mist means ‘dung’ or ‘rubbish’. Your ears and eyes and mouth may have taken you astray, and now you find you are in something you do not want to be in at all.

captious

As you wander through word country, as you pick and serve your delicacies of syntax and lexis, keep an eye open for the snares. There is a subset of the word country population who are there not to nurture and relish but to hunt, trap, capture. They are the catchers, the captors, the cacciatori. They are the captious.

Captious, because they set snares and seize on any small fault they can find. For them, the language is already too capacious and needs to be more rapacious. They have self-printed hunting licences declaring open season at all times. They forge on them the signatures of authorities, but in truth there is no central office, for the language is a common creation, cultivated by all. The jackbooted brigades that these trappers would like to call forth are not to be found; there is only this infestation of the captious, individuals with apparent common cause but in actual disagreement on many points, and their thirst to cavil outweighs their understanding of the subject. True understanding can be gained only by tending and nurturing, not by darting raids on the eggs and seedlings.

There is no fault too small for the captious. Nor need the fault be real: these cacciatore chickens play by invented rules, snaring and bagging on the pretext of imaginary laws that were confected only to give a smirking justification for hanging the language to drain its blood. Hanging from what? Flimsy scaffolds that they pretend are living syntax trees.

You can see them in the wild, scratching out captions and imposing Sharpies on apostrophes. Online you will find even more: the screen captious are the horseflies of cyberspace, buzzing and stinging between the tweets. Today has likely been an extra busy day, as it has been Grammar Day. Imagine: a groaning buffet table of the best and most beautiful of language, set out for all to take, but beset at the edges by the captious, who fling food to the floor, measure distances between dishes, set mousetraps beneath the fruits and cheeses, brandish bodkins at would-be diners. The gastronomy becomes an occasion of paranoia and competition. The gardeners and chefs of words must set out their defences and swat away the parasites.

But while we do not welcome the captious, beleaguerers of words and of word-lovers, we do welcome captious. It is a good word from a decent family with many close resemblances. From the progenitor capere ‘take, hold’ come capture, catch, caption, cacciatore (Italian for ‘hunter’), captor, and captious, among others, as well as cousins such as capable. This crisp word, captious, snaps like a trap or the clap and echo of a gunshot. It is well used to say ‘inclined to find fault on whatever pretext, to entrap’.

When you encounter the captious, as you inevitably will, counsel them: Do not be so captious. And when they start ringing ropes around you on the basis that there must be standards, and unitary enforced standards at that, ask them to start by setting and exemplifying standards for good manners, respectfulness, maturity, and thoughtfulness.

pingle

The work of word country, the careful crop-tending, extracting the fruits of the fertile soil of language, is not all large-scale operations for production in the millions or myriads or even thousands. Off in little patches here and there, small enclosures, window gardens and dooryards and suburban corners and rural nooks, dedicated individuals cultivate heirloom words, lexemes odd and quaint – to our eyes – but bearing flavours that make the tongue tingle afresh, ways of seeing and saying and hearing that many a logophile pines for.

Consider this one here: she has a little plot in which she keeps alive, for her enjoyment and in the hopes of repropagation, a few quaint and curious fruits of the English tongue, now found – when at all – in places peripheral and rural and mainly in books that already have the dusty-honey smell of aging paper. Today she has just added a new word, chelp, to the plot, next to her cherished crop of pingle.

Pingle! Such a fantastic fruit! It has conflicting tastes, of tingly-scented pines and kindling in inglenooks and of pinguid piglets and processed potato chips (Pringles, to be precise) and perhaps a soft pickle. Is pingle one word? Two? Three? Four? Five? When you taste it on your tongue, do you know what its place in your menu will be? It is a noun – it is three nouns: one is a struggle; one is a small enclosed piece of land; one is a small, long-handled pan or pot – and it is a verb, no, two verbs: one, used by Scots, is for exerting, struggling, contending; the other, used by Englishmen, is for picking at one’s food. So has it ever been, if you ask a Scot.

What do you do when you have a crop of words that look the same but have such different senses? They cleave together with the form; would you cleave them apart? The source is uncertain and may be multiple, but the sound and letters are all the same; drop it one place and it carries one savour, drop it another and it carries another. And it has such a hearty feel on the tongue – the old-home crisp pop of aspirated /p/, a quick high front vowel, then it sticks softly in the back, hardens next, and rolls off the tip of the tongue in a liquid syllable.

Our gardener loves this taste. She faces the challenge of keeping the word alive: it is a struggle, an exertion, a contention with nature in her little gated patch. If it bears fruit, it may be handed over to a careful cook who will give it a delicate turn in a little long-handled pan and serve it to give a special relish to a plate of language, only hoping that the diner will not pick at it and leave half behind. Oh, to pingle this pingle of pingle in her pingle, that it may pass through the pingle and not be pingled!

Thank you to Kathleen Lynch, word gardener, for mentioning pingle yesterday.

occult

Lurking in the occluded corners of word country, hiding in the flocculent tufts, dripping off succulents and mixing with the dust in the desiccated plains, is something occult.

Occult! Dark claws sink into your flesh at the word. A penetrating darkness occupies your occipital lobe like a succubus. Concealed, yes, concealed, this is what occult means, but even though they come from the same Latin celare these two words concealed and occult carry completely distinct cultures. What is occult is not merely hiding, and in some ways is the opposite: a crack in the eggshell of common reality. The inculcation of secrets may occur in closed chambers, but the dark corners you fear are right in front of you and you do not see them. You seek the simplest explanation, but you get your neck cut with Occam’s razor.

We may imagine a scene in a dark copse, an assembled cohort awaiting, the accursed brought bound. What is the occasion? A sacrifice? Not quite. J’accuse, says one. A toccata plays its staccato. Are you culpable? says another. Are you guilty of seeing what you should not have – or of not seeing what you should have? A chilling cachinnation echoes from among the elect, then silence as soon ensues, sliced only by the unsheathing of knives. The shackled figure sobs, bent; at last, in hiccups of lachrymose paroxysm, the word comes: Peccavi. And then the cuts begin to be made… the fabric is shorn into ribbons… the eyes are unbound and opened. You who would see and not hear, hear and not see, are now exposed, condemned to see. Accept your fate.

Do we see through a glass darkly? Through occult glass, that frosted pane that hides your nakedness in the shower as it lets in the diffuse light of external day? Or is it that we overlook small cooccurrences as our eyes make their saccades: through an ocular malocclusion, we see but do not see again and so mis-see? In medicine occult blood is not the stain on the wicked altar; it is bleeding that is not perceptible to ordinary inspection, blood that is mixed in with other bodily output in amounts too small to be detected without a sensitive test. So perhaps with the occult of the world. You see it but do not see it. You are acculturated; you overlook it in the clutter of accumulated rudera, of stuff and stucco. Perhaps it is simply too small, like the staphylococcus that occupies every square centimetre of your skin. Or perhaps it just escapes notice.

Is there a cult occult in our culture, not hidden behind a façade but actually a pattern in the façade that you can only see once you have seen? Look not for some wicked kind of Wicca or eccentric church of Cthulhu; stow your imaginations and your prejudices and occident-centrism. They merely misdirect. Sometimes you accept a sameness where there is a difference; on other occasions you see more, not less, than is there. You hide these facts from yourself; your doppelganger is just you again, carbon-copied. You see curled claws lurking in cracks but they are in actuality the crescent antishadows of an eclipse, one partly hidden sun reflected in many multiples.

So too with words: see what slips onto the page in the slippage between lip and copperplate. You hear a crack in the back, [k], and a break, [ks], but everywhere you see cc. You are not accursed; you are just inaccurate.

rife

Word country is rife. It is rife with the usual things, of course: speculation, rumours, problems, conflicts, and even corruption. Such strife! If something is rife with something else, that something else is simply expected to be negative. It is like a loaded rifle, this word, and with is the charge and the word that follows is the bullet.

But this rife gun may also bear flowers. And so it does in word country. Here it is also rife with life, each stream teeming, each river ripe with fish and flora. Words may reproduce like cells: each one, when riven, arrives as a pair, making multitude, a flow and a flood. Is this a corruption of the language? If so, we are rife with it, but is that a bad thing? Let sense effloresce. Somewhere in the rough, forgotten past, a split happened in a word and one branch went on through Latin to become river and arrive and kin, and another went by way of Germanic words to become a word that split to be the dividing word rive, best known now in its riven form, and rife, a word for multiplicity and prevalence.

Multiplicity and prevalence that has, over the centuries, leaned towards the sour flavour, the sound of strife and rifle more than of ripe and life and wife and rice; we seldom – though not never – now see such assemblages as rife with beauty or hope was rife that… The sense has split again, and one stream is the stronger.

As words and senses may divide, so too may sounds. In the word country of Canada, there is one more thing dividing rife and rive: the vowel sound is different. Oh, it is the same phoneme, it stands for the same thing, but Canadians start the /aɪ/ diphthong higher before voiceless consonants: “uh” rather than “ah”, [ɹəɪf] against [ɹaɪv]. Thus it is riven and we are ever more rife with sounds in the river of our language.

But what comes may go. Time will not reverse any more than a river may, but differences can disappear and words and sounds may merge, dissolving conflicts and creating problems. What is rife may yet see itself undone in fire. When will that happen, and how, and where? Speculation and rumours are rife. But you will not know until the time is ripe.

carol

Carol tends a special crop, a crop of words that come with music, words that come with music at one time of the year, always at one time of the year, only at the one time of the year. They are lovely as calla lilies but as seasonal as a Christmas cactus.

But climate change is affecting them. They used to show up on the same day every year and last for twelve glorious days, ringing in the air, macaronic mixtures of English and Latin, syntactic inversions, archaisms sweet with the dusty-honey scent of old books, gleeful alexicals (falala), references to holly and ivy and boar’s heads and wassail. Now they blossom earlier and earlier, fading in rather than bursting forth, and some of them barely open up at all; and in most places they drop dry to the floor and are swept away on the very day they used to blossom, or a day later at most.

Carol does not rejoice at this. Although she loves the longer blooming, by the time she most wants to hear these words they are coming faded, their scent not so much heady as decaying or simply desiccated. She finds she has to keep a window box, a little yard garden or corral, so that she can still enjoy the blossoms for herself when they should be in peak, in the days after most people have stuffed them into plastic bags and left them on the curb.

How churlish people can be. A little care’ll keep the cute curls of these lexemes as bright as a new poinsettia. What is needed is not a cure-all but simply the food of attention. If people would but keep these delicious harks and God rest ye’s and in dulci’s and many kinds of joy on their lips a dozen days longer, they would have such an epiphany!

It is lonely work, this tending of Carol’s. Her sounds of joy are often snatched up in passing on the way to saturnine Saturnalias and plutomania stretched from here to Uranus. She spends most of the year disconnected from all. She waters, weeds, waits, for the chance to see, oh so briefly and for just once in a year, her friend, her soul mate, who issues forth in a long breath and dances lightly as though on eggshells (at dancing she excels): Gloria.

———

Carol. Noun and verb. A word now used mainly for celebratory verse songs about Christmas, though it was first used in reference to a ring-dance, thence to a merry occasion at which ring-dances were performed, and then to the modern sense by the associated music for the dance. Some users may extend carol to refer to the fuller set of Christmas songs, including such ones as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “White Christmas,” but many would see those as outside the idiom and scope. There are some extant carols for non-Christmas occasions, such as “The Agincourt Carol” (listen to two different versions by Lumina Vocal Ensemble and Silly Sisters), but the common collocation Christmas carol is now pretty much redundant, though useful for helping distinguish carol from Carol.

The name Carol is the obvious strong overtone for carol, but the words are not related. The song carol is of debated origin, possible related to chorus, or perhaps to corolla “little crown”. The name Carol is at origin the same as Charles and all the related ones (Carl, Karl, Carolyn, Karel, Charlemagne, etc. – though not Carroll as in Carroll O’Connor; that’s from an Irish word). It comes from a Germanic root meaning “free man” that is also the source of churl. Other tastes you may get from carol include curl, chorale, care’ll, cure-all, Clairol, calorie, and of course carrel.

What we pay with in word country

In word country, words aren’t just what you buy. You can pay with them too. Not word by word, mind you; a word by itself usually doesn’t work as payment in a value exchange, except for words like “Thanks.” What people want are words in sentences. Words that signify obligations and expectations and negotiate status levels. The economy of social interaction.

This is pretty plain once you see it in action. Every child is taught it: a request with “please” in it is usually worth a little more than the same request without “please” because “please” acknowledges that you don’t have the right to make flat demands, so it doesn’t borrow as much status from the other person. And an indirect request, which allows the other person more latitude, costs you less – is worth more – than a direct request, which demands more of the other person.

Consider Mark, a word grower. He’s tending his words one afternoon in harvest season. He’s by the side of a dirt road, not too far out of town. People walk past every so often. Mark hasn’t set up a stand. He’s not out to sell his words to people who just walk past. But people come out this way not just to listen to the susurrus of the syntax trees and relax in the penumbra of a lexis vine, awaiting Morpheus. There is always the hope of some fresh words to bite into.

“Are you selling words?” A young guy in a hat and T-shirt is standing at road’s edge, looking down at Mark, who is busy pulling some weeds.

“Nope,” Mark says. He’s pretty laconic: he’s not in the business of giving words away for free either.

The guy strolls along a bit but doesn’t really go away. He stands inspecting a particular plant. “Some mighty nice-looking words you got here. Are these Greek roots here?”

“Latin,” Mark says, without glancing over.

“Could I buy one from you?”

Mark jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a guy with a stand up the road.”

Offer made and deflected without any direct request or rejection. You see: not “Sell me one” and “No, go buy from him.” Much less exposure and demand. This is all small-coin stuff.

“I’ve seen his stuff. Yours looks a lot nicer.” There’s something you can pay: a compliment. Coin in the bank.

Mark can see this guy isn’t going to go away so readily either. He stands up, looks up and down the road. He doesn’t want to commit to selling to anyone else. But there’s someone coming. More than one person, in fact. “If you can wait a few minutes, I might have something I can spare,” he says. Low commitment, low demand: not “Wait a few minutes and I’ll sell you something.”

“Okay, thanks.” The guy wanders just a little ways away and looks at the plants.

A young woman approaches. She is what one calls winsome and sporty. She has just a little bit of playfulness and naughtiness in the way she smiles as she walks up, stops abruptly, stands with her hands knit together behind her bum, leaning her chest forward. “Hi.”

Mark gives her an elevator look: top floor to bottom floor, back to top. He wipes his dusty hands on his jeans. “Good afternoon. Something I can do for you?” So far he’s gotten one word out of her and already he’s offering. This is because she has more that he wants: he likes looking at her and talking to her. Attraction is already partial payment.

“You wouldn’t have any words you could sell me today, would you?” She’s offering him lots of latitude. This is bigger payment than a simple request. She puts him in charge.

“Well, I don’t know…” It’s not that he doesn’t want to sell to her, and it’s not that he doesn’t know, either. He just doesn’t want to put himself in a weaker position with that other guy there, who can see this going on, and he also wants to draw out the interaction with this girl. He’ll get as much interaction as he can from her in exchange for some fruits of his labours. “I might have something.”

The girl wanders up to a vine. “These look nice. What are these?”

“Anglo-Saxon,” he says, and is about to step over and show her more closely, but a man wearing sunglasses and an expensive-looking suit has just walked up. Mark wants to ignore him but it’s too late; he’s already glanced at him.

The man pulls a fiver out of his pocket. “One word. I’ll have that one.” All demand, no payment – not in words, even if he’s offering money.

“No,” Mark says.

“I want that word. Give me that word.”

“I’m not a roadside word stand.” Mark isn’t interested in accepting this guy’s high-status positioning at all. If you let that sort of thing pass, it’s like giving a person a permanent line of credit that they don’t have to pay back.

“You’re selling to her.” He gestures at the young woman.

“I’m talking to her.” Pause. “She’s a lot nicer than you are.” Pause. “I already have buyers for all my words. There’s a guy down the road who has a stand.”

The guy thrusts his fiver at Mark. “That one,” he says, pointing.

“If you want Anglo-Saxon words, I can give you a couple you might already be familiar with.” Pause. “Go. Away.” The guy hasn’t once given anything of value to Mark. Mark doesn’t need the fiver, and there’s been no deference, no inconvenience on the guy’s part, nothing that advantages Mark or disadvantages the potential buyer. And he’s taking up Mark’s time.

“Some businessman,” the guy grumbles as he starts away, a last little shot to see if he can get Mark to open up a vulnerability, at least keep talking. But Mark just snorts a little as he turns back to the young woman. If he spent all his time taking fivers for a word at a time he wouldn’t have much of a business at all.

“So tell me about this one,” the young woman says, gently touching a nimshite.

“You don’t want to get any of that on you,” Mark says. He gently pulls her hand slightly away from it, which is exactly what she had designed the gesture for, and he knows it. Physical contact with an attractive person: that’s definitely coin of the realm. It may not be words, but it’s communication too. Value is given. “That’s not a word you can use in too many places. It’s rather rude. Crude.”

“What kinds of words are you growing here?” She steps back a bit and looks over the lot. She’s demanding time and information from him, but in this case it’s welcome because it puts him in the role of knowledge giver to someone he might want to have a positive balance with, and because she’s paying him something he wants from her: attention.

“Well, aside from the Anglo-Saxon, we have some Greek rootstock, lots of Latin rootstock, and I have a section over here that I’m really fond of, some borrowings from East Asia. Including some really interesting hybrids.” He starts walking towards that row and gestures forward. He doesn’t pat her on the back to encourage her to go forward: that might cost him a bit. “I like these ones. Here, look at this.” He points to sarariman. “And this.” Beisuboru. “Loans from English into Japanese. I’m looking at bringing them back into English.”

“Crafty!” she says. “Oh, what’s this one?” Bakkushan. “Could you spare this one?” She glances sideways at him, her head tilted slightly down: a submissive gesture. He knows he’s being played, but it’s fun, at least for now.

“Trust me,” he says. “You don’t want that one. It looks good at first, but I wouldn’t give it to my friends.” He doesn’t say “I wouldn’t give it to a friend” because that might seem too much like he’s calling her a friend. But he did say “give” – not “sell.” He’s loosening his position.

She makes a pouty little moue. She’s playing it maybe a bit too much: now it’s clear that she’s angling for something she wants, not just to spend time with him, so her currency is devalued slightly.

“These are interesting but not all that useful. You can sink your teeth into them, but you might find they don’t go with a whole lot of things.” He gestures towards the Latin section. Lots there that he can spare. That stuff grows like zucchini, courgettes, marrows. Cross-breeds spontaneously with the Greek stuff too.

They walk in that direction, a few accidental-on-purpose contacts between hands and hips as they walk. Just a little more flirting. He can’t be sure it’s of value to her other than for persuading him, but it’s of value to him and he’ll take it for a little longer before getting back to work. He’s not bored quite yet.

“Ooh! Look at this one!” She darts ahead. “I’ll take this one!” Before he can stop her, she’s run up to a word and grabbed it. “Callitrix! I love it! Like two little girls, Callie and Trix! So crisp and smooth and fast and stylish and… feminine! Oh, I just love it!”

Mark stands there, looking at her, lips pursed slightly. She’s overstepped a little, not paid enough respect in this interaction: her direct and demanding approach has taken money off her balance. But it’s done. He can’t unpick the word. He would have liked it to grow a little more – it’s riper with an h after the t, callithrix. But no point in saying that now.

She knows she’s presumed just a touch too much. But she doesn’t want to risk refusal now. She smiles at him, eyebrows lifted. Then she says “Thank you,” darts over and kisses him on the cheek, and scampers off.

Well. That was a brief bit of entertainment. And not all that expensive. And…

The young guy in the hat has been watching from nearby. He takes a few languid steps up, looking at the young woman as she scurries away. At first he’s not sure what sage or witty observation to make. Mark remains tacit. At last the young man says, “Hope you got a good price for that.”

Mark smiles a little. “If she’d given a little more she might have gotten a little more. Such as the definition of the word.” She gets less value, and he gets a little boost: even if she left with a bit of upper hand, he has the upper hand in the long run because he knows she might be in for a little surprise. Heh.

“What was the word?”

“Callitrix.”

The guy starts to laugh. “A little monkey.”

“Business,” Mark says.

“At least she didn’t take this one,” the guy says, pointing to meretrix.

Mark smiles. The young man has shown some interest and a certain degree of knowledge. A common bond is always worth a little something. He gestures towards the crop. “And what were you hoping might be ready for picking?”

ilex

You may think of the ideal ornamented evergreen as being some kind of pine, fir, or spruce. Branches like bottle brushes, well suited for being bedecked with garlands and tinsel and bulbs and balls and little sleighs and skaters and lights, lights, lights.

In word country, there is another yule plant that is preferred, a plant that you and I may use branches of for decking the halls but that we would not cut down whole and drag into the living room. Well, they don’t cut it down in word country either; it’s bad luck to cut it down – ask any druid – and decorating it could be painful due to the sharp points on the leaves, adding extra spots of red from your dripping fingers to match the winter berries. So they just appreciate it in its natural environment, like good linguists, and have their children draw diagrams of it. And they bring their gifts to its base.

The ilex. A magical tree, evergreen and bearing fruit in winter, beloved of druids and a symbol of fertility and eternal life; Romans associated it with agriculture and harvest and decked the halls with boughs of it during Saturnalia. Christianity naturally coopted it. Some carols sing of it – though usually by its more common Germanic name, rather than its Latin one. We don’t sing “The Ilex and the Ivy” or “Have an Ilex Jolly Christmas.”

Well enough. Although ilex is now fully borrowed into English, its Latin origin adds a bit of ambiguity: in Latin, the word names the holm oak, which happens to resemble the holly tree to some extent. The name was transferred, and by no lesser a light than Linnaeus.

So in word country the ilexicographers gather around the ilex, flower in the midst of a grove of syntax trees. They are very careful to watch the orthography of their ilex: a slip of the pen and it is the ulex, which is a different tree, or the ibex, a goat with huge arching horns that are alarming to behold. Add an extra letter – write this ilex sloppily – and you get silex, which is silica, and your evergreen life is evergrey and inorganic.

Where will you find the ilex in word country? Look to a series of islets, sewn like eyelets in the brook that bisects the plain. This is land where they grow lexis, often wild, rough lexis. They let it come uncultivated and then sell it in bunches with brambles and thorns still sticking out. Same words, same sound, but you can see that it’s rustic: it’s full ov ruff things sumwun sed, mite of sounded like normal speech but yew no there unejucated so it shoze up like this. The ilex and the ilex are different things that look the same; the eye dialects are the same thing but look different.

But it will ever be thus. And you will see, too, by the ilex, the Rolex-wearing Lexus driver. Growing near its base you will find lilacs. People picnic around it, some enjoying regrettable food as gallerized by James Lileks (lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html). They may drink mate (sometimes spelled maté), which is Ilex paraguariensis. Those wanting the harder stuff have lately taken a liking to Elyx, but there is many an elixir liked for luxuriating. They sing “lully, lullay” and relax (the younger ones listen to Skrillex and say goodbye to go watch flicks). Others circulate, quietly capturing pictures with the soft and surreptitious shutter of a Rolleiflex. And off in the corner is an exlex awaiting exile, allowed to prick his finger on a leaf’s circumflex-like apex and leave red specks of vital flux as a last look back at the land of lexis and syntax.

painstaking

He was splayed painfully on the hot, dry ground: a stake for each limb, stretching him like a Feynman diagram. She walked up, surveyed him from a distance of two feet, arms crossed. Kicked away an adder that was slithering towards his head. She was wearing an apron that had some fruit in it; she pulled one out. “Would you like an orange?”

“No, please, that’s what has gotten me into this in the first place.” But he did sound rather dry.

She started peeling the orange. “Who has put you here like this?”

He shook his head. “It was due to a grafting accident.”

“Grafting…”

“Compounding. Two words.”

“You are a word grower.”

“I used to be.” He said it oddly: not as most people do, with a voiceless [s], like “use to,” but actually as the two words used and to.

“You used to be…” she said, in the normal way.

“No, please, don’t say it that way.”

“I don’t have to.” She said this also in the normal way, as though it were “half to.”

The ropes tying him to the stakes seemed to tighten. “Please,” he said. “Have to.” He said it with the [v] voiced. “Just now, just for me here now.”

The orange was fully peeled. She broke a segment off it and knelt down by him. “Here. Have a wedge.”

“Thank you,” he said. She put it in his mouth, then another. Once he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “It’s phonology that has taken me to this pass. Devoicing by assimilation with the following consonant, like what happens to used and have before to. Shift of a consonant from one syllable to the adjoining one, like what made nadder, napron, norange into what they are now.” He looked at the orange. “Can I have an other?” Not another, like “a nother”; he said “an other.” Something had really spooked him.

Well, yes, when you’re staked splayed and supine on the dry, hot, hard ground, you may be a bit spooked.

“What would you give to be let loose?” she said quietly, close in, almost to his cheek.

“What would you like?” A little bead of sweat crawled down to the side of his left forehead.

She stood up again, looked him over. “Would you… stake your pain?”

The ropes seemed to tighten. He moaned a little, writhed as he could. “I think you’re a sadist.”

“I’m just… taking pains to see what the situation is.” The ropes eased a little.

“Please,” he said, “take my pains.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will not take pain, but I will take pains.” She took off the apron with the oranges, set it aside, and went over to his left hand and started undoing the rope there. “But have you been doing this long? Compounding?”

His hand came free. He swung his arm and held it in front of his mouth for a moment. “There’s a calm pounding in my wrist.”

She smiled, nodded to herself: Thought so. “A punster. You can get into trouble.” She moved to the right hand.

“If you take away my pain, I will take pains not to do it again.”

“I think,” she said, liberating his right hand, “you have done enough pains-taking for some time.”

He sat up, slid forward, managed to start undoing his feet. “But that’s the nature of the job,” he said. “It’s pains-taking work.” The ropes came loose and he rose.

“And sometimes,” she said, “pain-staking.”

And then, as if nothing had moved but everything had changed, it was she who was staked in pain on the ground… She had staked pain and lost the bet.

“Thank you,” he said, backing away. He turned towards her apron.

She grimaced. “Have an orange,” she said with some asperity. “Have another one. Have a whole nother one.”

He jumped back, then turned and started to walk, faster, speeding up to a run. She grimaced, was about to shout something. Paused. Shouted, “You don’t have to, you know!”