myriad

Herewith, to mark the ten thousandth view of Sesquiotica, I present an epistolary correspondence between Ion Orzabal and Muriel Wan.

IO:
Muriel, I wan to woo you.

MW:
There are wan ways to do that. Wan, my name, one of the old hundred Chinese surnames, means “ten thousand.” So it is one hundred times the hundred. Square me away with some poetry.

IO:
You, Wan, are Han (Chinese); I am Basque. May I bask in your glory? Muriel, for you I will make merry with a myriad of means – myriad being “ten thousand” but rooting in the Greek murios, “countless.” Any Tennyson? Let’s try this:

Sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
and murmuring of innumerable bees.

MW:
You have connected! You speak of innumerable bees and moaning birds, surely the source of the countless many things – in Chinese, wan wu: the “ten thousand things.” Everything. As often mentioned in the Tao Te Ching – let me quote the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English:

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

and

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.

I do like the water images. After all, Muriel comes from Scots Gaelic Muireall, “bright sea.”

IO:
If water is music to your ears, I can Handel it. But then let me Aeschylate matters. Who stole the fire from the gods and put them in your eyes? Why, Prometheus, of course, and he is bound to be relevant. He is quoted speaking of the “Myriad laughter of the ocean waves.” A cheat, though, I declare: the original Greek is pontion te kumaton anérithmon gelasma, no murios in sight until lines later (where it is murieté)… Here is David Grene’s translation of the lines:

Bright lights, swift-winged winds, springs of the rivers, numberless
laughter of the sea’s waves, earth, mother of all, and the all-seeing
circle of the sun: I call upon you to see what I, a God, suffer
at the hands of Gods –
see with what kind of torture
worn down I shall wrestle ten thousand
years of time –

And indeed, Muriel, I wrestle a myriad of yearning tortures for you. Let me, IO, quote Io from Prometheus Bound, stung by the gadfly, goaded by Argos, the ten-thousand-eyed (muriópon) herdsman. In Greek, “Io, io, popoi! Poi de m’agousi téleplagtoi planai.” In English, “O, O, O, Where are you bringing me, my far-wandering wanderings?” Do my wanderings take me back? Do I strive pointlessly?

MW:
Ah, earth, the mother of all, again. You have named it! But there it is: you begin from the myth and you take it to the myriad in the moment, an instance of hierophany – Mircea Eliade’s “eternal return.” We create the sacred space when we connect with the myth, and the time now becomes the time of the myth for the moment. In every countless moment we may return. But again I am jonesing for the tao:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.

IO:
Ah, all is wan and wan is one. I know another eternal return: the idea that, given an infinite amount of time, all arrangements of matter in the universe will recur. But I eternally return to you, Ion after eons. Will you yield?

MW:
And the universe, too, returns, from big bang to big crunch, every breath a myriad of eons. But is this yield you desire the yield of a cookie recipe? I hope it is not a mere yield of a myriad. Myriad matches miscellaneously: ways, problems, forms, details, issues. Do you make merry or do you make as to marry? I do not marry ad hoc; Muriel does not marry all who ask. Wan will have but one.

IO:
Well, when all is Wan, Wan is all. I will be a rock and will not roll. If you wish a stairway to heaven, let us physically manifest the sacred. But let me speak of what I believe; I will shout and let it all out, my tears and fears. You speak of Mircea Eliade, and I hope my words are not Greek to you; I seek no Iliad, and I wish theodicy, not the Odyssey. Have mercy. Let my hierophany be Coleridge’s “Hymn to the Earth”:

Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess,
Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled,
Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he woo’d thee and won thee!
Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning!
Deep was the shudder, O Earth! the throe of thy self-retention:
Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre!
Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience; and forthwith
Myriad myriads of lives teem’d forth from the mighty embracement.
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impell’d by thousand-fold instincts,
Fill’d, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels;
Laugh’d on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swell’d upward;
Young life low’d through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains,
Wander’d bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.

The myriad myriads – noun and adjective, the universe in verse – will teem forth from our embracement. Let me be the genial Heaven that woo’d and won Wan! The rivers will sing in their channels, and the hoarse seas will laugh – countlessly; the yearning ocean will swell upward.

Oh, let me Marvell at your beauty! To be exact, Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
…
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
…
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

MW:
Ah, thirty thousand – san man. Mister San Man, you bring me a dream. The wingèd chariot may be your father’s, for you are Ion, son of Apollo, who drives the sun. I hope you will not run. You are myriad-minded, to borrow a word Coleridge applied to Shakespeare: Greek murionous. I am in mind of Bronson Alcott, from “Ion: A Monody”:

Early through field and wood each Spring we sped,
Young Ion leading o’er the reedy pass;
…
For endless Being’s myriad-minded race
Had in his thought their registry and place

But for your harbinger, let me end with a line from Edmund Charles Blunden’s Harbingers:

And wed me with the myriad-minded man.

IO:
Then let us be happily myriad!

collyrium

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable relates this tale under the heading “Sight (Far)”:

Zarga, the Arabian heroine of the tribe Jadis, could see at the distance of three days’ journey. Being asked by Hassân the secret of her long sight, she said it was due to the ore of antimony, which she reduced to powder, and applied to her eyes as a collyrium every night.

A collyrium! Well, I suppose it did clear ‘em. I wonder if she could see all the way to Illyricum. Who? No, not the Who, though they did record “I Can See for Miles.” Illyricum was the Roman province roughly where Bosnia and Croatia now are. But though that’s a day’s journey now from Arabia, it would then have been somewhat more; she could only have seen it on television (“far-see,” which in German is Fernseh, meaning literally “farsee” and actually TV… but Zarga was Arabian, not Farsi). If she’d had one.

Perhaps she was wanting to see Mary, Queen of Heaven; if she was a Collyridian, she might have. They were a sect of the 4th and 5th centuries known for offering the Virgin little cakes (kollurida).

But where did she get her antimony? Perhaps from her television? It’s used in electrical alloys, after all. But, no, probably from stibnite, which was popularly applied to the eyes in powder form at the time (but was that really all that farsighted of them to do?). That form of antimony was called koh’l, which, with the article al, is the source of our word alcohol – through an obviously winding path of senses passing through alchemy.

But would she apply alcohol to her eyes? Ha! My eye! In this respect the guidance of etymology would force an antinomy with that of sensibility. No, such suggestions are collyrium – mere eyewash. She might as well get her dust from a colliery.

But, now, is collyrium another word for antimony, then? If the antimony is applied to the eyes, it can be. But collyrium can be any of a variety of powders – or liquids. The main is just that they are applied to the eyes, you see. Or, on the other hand, the word can also be used to refer to a cylinder of solid medicine to be stuck in some bodily opening (we don’t mean the mouth). And, from the “eyewash” sense, it can mean “nonsense.”

The word comes, anyway, from the Greek: kollura, referring to a small roll of coarse bread (and the root of kollurida – see above). I don’t quite see how that gets into the eyes, but there it is. The word has a nice lyric flavour to it anyway, with the liquid l’s and the the look of the llyr. What kind of lyrics? Well, Zarga being Arabian, and being Jadis – and jadis, French for “in the past” – she might well have chosen ruba’i, a quatrain form, collected perhaps in a volume, named by the plural ruba’iyat. And then she could use her fine sight alternately between the book, a jug of wine (or other alcohol), a little cake or roll of bread, and the wilderness – whether Arabia, Illyria, or North Dakota (where you can watch your dog run away for three days). And, of course, her lover, who could recite to her Fitzgerald’s famous translation of Omar Khayyam’s eleventh ruba’i:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

And that’s not just collyrium!

 

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I thank my mother, Mary Anna Harbeck, for suggesting this word, which she in turn heard from a friend, Pat Verge, who read it in a Baha’i book.

caparison

Don’t dress up much? Why not put on something really smart, just for the sake of caparison? Oh, come now, try… even if you look so good your significant other won’t let you out without a chaperone.

Caparison is not, I should say, lest there be any doubt, related to comparison. On the other hand, it is related to chaperone. The latter word is also – and with greater historical basis – spelled chaperon; it comes from a French word of the same spelling meaning “hood.” Its sense is one of protection, and it came to its modern usage through application to an older woman who would travel with a younger one to protect her (just think of Maggie Smith’s character Charlotte Bartlett in A Room with a View). But the same hood came to be called caparazon in Spanish and caparação in Portuguese, and so by way of older French caparasson we came to this English term caparison for a cape for a horse. And from that we come to other decorative clothing for other beasts (us included) for special events.

And why shouldn’t it be a word for haute couture? We can see that it has paris at heart. It’s a word for the fancy-dress ball set (and I don’t just mean those ball-ended tassels hanging on the horse’s cape)! If the time to cut a caper is on, or if at the end of the night you wish to cap a risen sun with one last waltz (or tango), what better mode of attire than one expressed by a word perhaps best known today in the works of Shakespeare? It’s an uncommon word for uncommon events, and it so nicely drapes a vowel between each pair of consonants, like a lovely garland. Just do remember not to overdo it – try two-r‘d and you may end up with craparison.

scrimp

This word happens to immediately put the song “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles in my mind: “Every summer we can rent a cottage, in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear. We shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee, Vera Chuck and Dave.”

And indeed scrimp and save is one of the most common collocations in which to find this word. It is also commonly used with on plus a noun phrase – here’s a real live example: “For the most satisfying results, don’t scrimp on the olive oil or the salt.” This example also shows the other thing that shows up often with scrimp: n’t – scrimp is frequently preceded by a negative auxiliary, inevitably in contraction: don’t scrimp, shouldn’t scrimp, doesn’t scrimp, can’t scrimp.

The word is a bit of a shrimp, really, which is appropriate given that shrimp is a closely related word (and one that was used to describe small creatures and people generally for some time before being applied specifically to the cocktail-party crustacean, which has given us that entertaining oxymoron of entertaining, jumbo shrimp). Scrimp, for its part, has origins with Germanic words relating to shrivelling, wrinkling, etc. It hit English as a verb, adjective, and adverb in the 18th century; a noun version came into use in the 19th century. These days we scrimp on all but the verb. It’s as though we’ve crimped the outflow of the others.

Scrimp also avails itself of a notable phonaestheme, the scr onset. Scr often goes with words that involve roughness and/or constriction (scrabble, scrape, scree, scraggly, scrap, scratch, scruffy, scrofula, scrub, scrunch) but also shows up with many words of writing (scrawl, screed, script, scribble, scribe, scripture, scrivener, scroll – several of these trace to the same Latin root). There are some others that have different meanings but may still bear the aesthetic influence of association with the preceding lists: scream, screech, screen, scrim, scrutinize, scry, scram, screw, scrimshaw, scrod, scrotum, scrounge, scruple… and quite a few more.

The imp rime has less of a clear effect: limp, blimp, pimp, shrimp, gimp, wimp. I leave it to the reader to taste the associations, but they are not overall positive.

Serve this word in a variety of levels of text, all but the most formal and most informal, but mostly focused on practicalities.

budgerigar

This is a long word, but still can have a stubby sound because of all the voiced stops and affricates. It is as though it refers to a pudgy budget bird owned by Dagmar from Castlegar, who plays guitar and didgeridoo (Dagmar, not the budgerigar; you could probably lodge a budgerigar in a didgeridoo with the aid of a cudgel, but you might have to fudge it, depending on the age of the budgerigar and the bore of the didgeridoo). In fact, its object is a rather resplendent avian, bred in a variety of designer colours for the discerning owner, preferably one whose neighbours are deaf as posts. (Have you heard the screech of a parakeet? It’s not discreet.)

To me, this word has a particularly British air, probably because I’m only used to hearing Brits use the full forms; North Americans in general seem to stick with the short form, budgie, and my guess is that many or even most budgie-sayers are unaware of the long form. But although its pronunciation can involve a primus paeon (an accented beat followed by three unaccented beats), a particularly British pattern (North Americans tend to stick in an extra stress somewhere so they don’t have to tumble out three unstressed syllables as though falling down stairs; in this word, the extra goes at the end, making it a choriamb, like the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), the word itself is undeniably Australian. As is the bird – for the last five million years, living in some rather inhospitable places. (As it still does, if you count cages in cramped living rooms.)

The Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary, two of the best sources for etymology, have a bit of a disagreement about the exact origin of this word, however. Oxford says flatly that it comes from the “Port Jackson dialect” of “Native Australian” (which is as broad a term as “European”), from budgeri “good” (itself an Aussie English slang word too) and gar “cockatoo” (though it’s not a cockatoo, it’s a parakeet). AHD declares that it’s an altered form of the Kamilaroi word gijirrigaa. If budgeri was already common slang for “good” at the time, it is easy enough to imagine how it could have been swapped in. (Note the competing transliterations – old-style dg and new-style j.)

So why not just say budgie? Well, many do. But it’s not as fun, is it? And if this all seems perhaps wantonly prolix, consider that it is still shorter than the vocabulary of some budgerigars, which (the males especially) can be taught to imitate human speech: the largest vocabulary of any bird, according to Guinness, belonged to a budgerigar named Puck, which could say 1728 different words, whereas this note has but 482. This loquacious, stentorian, sesquipedalian bird ought to be a mascot of word tasting… except I really hate loud shrieks.

polyphloisboian

Dang, this word looks like a letter-form depiction of something rolling down a hill loudly and messily. You get the rolling sense from the o o o spaced through it (and from that roly-poly opening), and the flailing ascenders, descenders, and dots bring to mind the various bits sailing in the air from some one-person yard sale careering down a slope – or from some two-person cartoon-style dust-up (I remember once in school seeing two kids in a ball of a fight ejected abruptly from a classroom – turned out onto the hallway floor, nothing but jeans, feet, and fists all ascuffle). It even has the sound of flapping and bouncing.

I’m put in mind, too, of the great fall at the beginning of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, expressed as “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!” (I’ve kept Joyce’s hyphenation points to facilitate line breaking, though really the word is not hyphenated per se). Which in turn reminds me of the noise that alerted me to the fact that the clothes rail in the bedroom closet in our new apartment had not been anchored well in the wall (due to the drywall being right up against the concrete outside wall), and would no longer be enduring the weight of the various jackets, pants, shirts, and dresses we had lately laden it with, nor, for that matter, of anything else ever again. And the resultant heap of fabric and metal looked, come to think of it, a little like this word.

But the pftjschute of a rack of clothes hardly begins to illustrate this word. Think of how it sounds: like an Australian saying “Polly flies by an’…” Well, and what? If Polly is a parakeet or budgerigar, then probably Polly flies by an’ makes a lot of noise. With all the other Pollys out there.

But this word, the historical persistence of which we have Homer to thank for, was in the first place used to refer to the sound of the sea. Wot, that soothing rush of waves? Hmm. Turn up your stereo a bit. On a windy day, that rush becomes a roar, or many roars or much roaring. Phloisbos was Greek for “roar,” anyway, and Homer liked to refer to poluphloisboios thalasses, the “loud-roaring sea.”

In more recent times, however, when used at all, this word has typically been applied – with a humorous stiltedness – to people and their utterances. One may speak of polyphloisboian football hooligans (though I think I’ll be the first on the web to do so), or of polyphloisboian critics, or of some prolix polyphloisboian stentor, which, I must say, aside from being stilted is a touch redundant. Or one could use the word in a court proceeding; many lawyers and judges, it seems, enjoy tossing in obscure words and references, and I find this in the 2003 decision record of a US Department of Labor complaint: “The CO who conducted the inspection opined that the crane’s alarm might not be able to be heard in the polyphloisboian conditions within the warehouse.”

One may also, if Greek isn’t good enough without having been passed through Latin, spell this word poylphlœsbœan, and that forces a pronunciation on it that rhymes with “lesbian” and can make euphonious pairs with thespian and similar words. And if you want the word to seem to screech (perhaps to screech the brakes or to career uncontrollably), you can use the nonce-formation (attested only once in the OED but still in it) polyphloisboiic. If the object roars not just loudly but the loudest, you may call it, using another humorous nonce-word (this one from Thackeray), polyphloisboiotatotic. But my favourite in this line (and one that is still in use) is the massive portmanteau word polyphloisboisterous, which surely describes many a bar on a busy night – including the ones down the block from the island of calm in the sky where I write this.

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I thank Elaine Phillips for bringing this word to my attention; she in turn passed it on from her friend Craig Withers.

 

anodyne

The first I ever noticed this word was in the title of a mystery novel: The Anodyne Necklace, by Martha Grimes. Although the book came out in 1983 and I first spotted it around 1990, I have yet to read it. But I immediately sought the meaning of anodyne. Had it to do with anodes? Negative. With dynes, perhaps? Not even if forced. No, relax… or it will relax you.

In spite of its echoes of iodine, you see, this word has no sting. Rather, its object takes away the sting – or other pain.  It comes to us from classical Greek an (a negating prefix) and oduné “pain.” So its object alleviates pain, soothes, calms… It is in service as both noun and adjective, and the adjective in particular has gained a more metaphorical, or at least intellectual, use that has been soothed down from “calming” to “inoffensive” and even to “vapid.” That’s quite a contrast to the off hint of dynamism and related words it can have.

And is the feeling of saying this word anodyne? It can be, if done slowly. Focus on the three taps of the tongue and the gaps between them: between [n] and [d] the tongue becomes concave, stretching up at the back while the lips round; then, between [d] and [n], the tongue rolls forward from the concave to a convexity, like an ocean swell rolling to shore. Perhaps like those recordings of soothing sea sounds so popular around the early 1980s.

And what is an anodyne necklace? It’s not simply some fashion accent soaked with opiate. In fact, it’s something sounding, appropriately, less likeable: a quack cure. Thanks to Ask the Quack I find that it was sold to worried parents in the early 18th century as a preventative of infant mortality, specifically to aid children in passing through teething, which was thought to be a cause of mortality (which makes the Tooth Fairy sound a bit like the Grim Reaper). A fake thread of web messages created from a real sequence of advertisements about it from the time may be read on Ask the Quack . Perhaps ironically, perhaps appositely, I find that reading advertising texts from that era has a calming effect on me, regardless of content. (It may be that I associate them with Wendy’s restaurants, which, in the 1980s, had reproductions of old ads on their tables.)

And why is Martha Grimes’s book named after it? Apparently it’s the name of a pub central to the book’s action. And certainly in pubs one may find anodynes, and in mystery novels one may find the neckless…

calque & loanword

“Long time no see!” Marilyn exclaimed untruthfully as I approached. “Here,” she said to Edgar, handing him her plate so she could hug me, “take the cake.”

“No,” he leered, taking it, “you take the cake.”

“You both – unh – take the cake,” I said, as Marilyn crushed me against her leather-clad bosom.

At this point Maury happened by. “I’d say you take the calque,” he said.

“Oh,” Marilyn exclaimed, releasing me, “is this cake a calque?”

“No,” he said, “it’s a chiffon cake. Made in a Bundt pan.” He made it, so he would know.

“Which makes it two loanwords,” I pointed out.

“Indeed. But takes the cake is, arguably, a calque – from the Greek. The phrase translates directly from the Greek in Aristophanes.”

“Surely,” Edgar interjected, swallowing, “the Greeks were not the only people to use cakes as prizes. The term could have come up independently.”

“Indeed it could have,” Maury said, “like your Adam’s apple. But not like Adam’s apple.”

“A calque from the French,” I said, with a smiling nod: “pomme d’Adam.” (Marilyn leaned over to Edgar and murmured something which I suspect was “I’ll French your Adam’s apple!”) “And,” I continued, “long time no see is a calque from Chinese, exactly word for word. In Mandarin, it’s hao jiu bu jian. Though hao in most contexts would be translated as ‘good.’”

“‘Good time no see’?” Marilyn cocked her head. “That would sound rather impolite. And unfortunate: not seeing a good time.” She gave a calcareous, calculated grin and traced a seam on Edgar’s jacket with her red-polished fingernail.

“Tracing is the origin of calque,” I said, trying to keep their pursuits in the intellectual realm. “French calque, noun, ‘copy,’ comes from calquer, verb, ‘trace,’ which itself traces back to Latin calcare, verb, ‘tread.’”

“Well, it may look like an elegant word,” Marilyn said, “with the que and that nice c to start, but it sounds like a cat coughing up a furball. Especially if you underpronounce the /l/. I’m glad this cake isn’t a calque.”

“You’re not alone,” I said; Maury finished my pun: “But it is.” (A loan, of course.) “Chiffon, as James pointed out. A French word originally meaning ‘rag’ but coming to mean a light, diaphanous fabric. And by transference from that, light and fluffy pies and cakes.”

“In this case, as made by Maury, Bundt,” I added, and got a low-lidded look over the lenses from Maury, who did not wish more moribund jokes. But I simply said “From German for ‘turban.’”

“Loanword,” Edgar said, rolling it on his tongue. “There’s a nice English formation, ironically. Loan plus word, both great old Anglo-Saxon four-letter monosyllables. Low and liquid, almost moaning, so unlike calque.” Marilyn responded predictably to this: she became lower and more liquid and almost moaned as she creaked her leather garments against his while taking their pieces of dessert and setting them on a side table behind him. Maury’s eyes rolled… rolled away and he followed them.

“Even more ironic,” I said, trying valiantly to maintain a conversation. “Loanword is actually taken from German Lehnwort.”

Marilyn looked up abruptly. “So it’s a calque!”

“Yes,” I said, “and calque is a loanword.”

“A semantic exchange,” Edgar said, cocking his eyebrow. “An exchange of tongues, as it were.” (Marilyn murmured, audibly, “As it will be…”) He smiled. “That takes the cake.”

Marilyn reached for the side table and came up empty. “Speaking of the cake,” she said, “where is it?”

“Maury took it,” I said, not without schadenfreude, and headed off to get my own piece.

 

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Thanks to Wilson Fowlie for suggesting this pairing and the amusing twin ironies it presents.

cachexy

Amid the aftermath of verbal bacchanals, a bit of bad bearing can sometimes bring out interesting phonetic effects. One morning after a late night of wine, words, and song, as I was struggling with almond butter on toast, Elisa Lively – who really is, and sometimes a bit too much – came bouncing up with a book.

“Look!” she said, thrusting an open page spread between me and my bread. “Cachexy! It’s so sexy!”

She pronounced it like “ka-check-see.” I felt obliged to correct her. However, with my head thumping and my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth, I grimaced out something that was intended to be “ka-keck-see” but involved two phonemes not heard in English, one of them three times: the /k/ realized with not the tip nor the back but the full-on middle of the tongue against the hard palate, and the /s/ made by hissing out the sides of the mouth with the tongue still stuck to the top.

“Oh, yes, ‘ka-keck-see,’ I see!” she chirped.

“From Greek kakos, ‘bad,’” I said, having recovered my tongue, “and hexia, ‘condition.’ Means just that: general ill health, malnutrition, that sort of fun. That must be a medical book.”

“No, it’s philosophy,” she beamed. “The author is writing of a fin-de-siècle Weltschmerz.”

I have a fin-de-semaine Kopfschmerz, I thought, but left it unsaid.

“But,” she continued, “say it again! You said it really interestingly!”

“What, cachexy? Oh…” I made a weak smile and grimaced out the almond-butter version again. My head hurt a little with every exclamatory k.

“Aren’t those sounds from Hindi?”

“Well, no, I think the stops in Hindi that are like this are done more with the tip curled back rather than with the body. The hissing s, aside from being said in English by some with oral dysfunctions, is like a sound in Welsh, the voiceless lateral, ll, only I’m doing it with my teeth clenched, which makes the pitch higher.”

“Well, what’s really interesting about it –” she made some tries at it, sounding like she was suppressing emesis, which did not serve my guts well: “k! k! ks! – is that when you have your tongue full-on pressed like that it tends to make an affricate when you release it.”

“Mm-hmm. Yes. So our x, which is not an affricate, meets its two parts in the middle and becomes one.” I reached for my cup of tea and succeeded in causing it to fall and shatter on the floor. I stood wincing for a moment before searching for something to clean it up with. Elisa observed me and then reached down to help.

“Say,” she said, ever the observant one, “you’re looking a bit dodgy this morning. I hope it’s nothing bad?”

“A bit of a bad condition,” I said, trying to wipe up with my eyes half-open. “But transitory. Could be worse. Could be cachexy.” I couldn’t smile because I was wincing.

She couldn’t resist a little play with the sound, which, it turns out, is less charming from the receiving end at the wrong time. “Well, I hope it’s not catching. Should I call you a taxi?”

“No,” I said, warming to it in spite of myself. “Similia similibus curantur: like cures like. Just pour me a Metaxa.”

tribology

You know those family gatherings… Your whole tribe drive in and get together, say at Christmas, and rub shoulders for a while, maybe play some hockey (or table hockey), maybe get along or maybe there’s some friction. Seems like a suitable subject for tribology? Perhaps in parts, but likely not the parts you think. Which parts? Ah, there’s the rub.

This word is pronounced with the first syllable like tribe, not with a “short i“; it doesn’t sound like it’s the study of tribbles, however much you might want to cuddle up with them… though it could be the study of that cuddling. Tribology is not science fiction, you see; rather, it’s the science of friction.

Well, actually the science of surfaces rubbing together. Minimizing friction is often a matter of special concern. Lubrication engineering keeps the world running smoothly (remember: WD-40 for whatever doesn’t move that should – and duck tape for whatever moves that shouldn’t). In 1965, the chairman of a working group of lubrication engineers sought a nice, proper, scientific ology for his field. What did he do? He called the English Dictionary Department of the Oxford University Press. The person he spoke to relayed a Greek-derived suggestion given by one C.G. Hardie: tribo, from tribos “rubbing,” plus ology, which ultimately comes from logos, “word.” Tribology.

So, in other words, the Oxford English Dictionary not only knows exactly when and how this word came about, it (i.e., the people who make it) actually invented it. Those slippery beggars!

But of course it does run up against the effects of resemblance. The googly ology is fine and sets the tone and field well, but that trib – well, pace Chicago’s daily (Tribune is related to tribe – which is thought to come from the root that gives us three, but that’s a whole other story – and not to tribology), you’re likely to get some unexpected news. I can only hope it won’t cause tribulation (now, there’s a sibling to this word), but if it does, I will try apology. It just happens that the tribologist at your family gathering may ignore your family group dynamics (except inasmuch as they involve, for instance, lip gloss) in favour of studying your hockey puck’s slide… or getting bearings on the engines of the various cars parked out front.