coolth

He switched on the air, and a pleasing coolth pervaded the room.

What?

I can write that he switched on the heat and a pleasing warmth pervaded the room, right?

So what’s wrong with coolth? Why would we treat it as uncouth?

Don’t bother saying it’s a non-word made up on analogy with warmth. They both come from the same formation, the one that also gave us truth from true, depth from deep, strength from strong (with a vowel alteration), length from long (ditto), sloth from slow, and a few others. And coolth has been in the language since the 1500s at least. It just happens that it has fallen out of favour in recent times and is now used mainly for humour or cuteness. You can still find it in the dictionary.

What are the alternatives? There is coolness. That, like coolth, adds a suffix. It looks perhaps more normal to us now; new words are still being made with ness. But it’s a longer word, and it lacks the minty fresh final sound of coolth. And would we brook warmness? Our alternative is just cool: “In the cool of the evening,” for instance. That uses an adjective as a substantive – in other words, it’s a conversion of an adjective to a noun. We do it with cold: “Come in from the cold.” But we don’t usually do it with warm or hot: “In the warm of the room”? “I have come to appreciate her hot” (rather than hotness)?

And what would the harm be of keeping forms parallel, and having a distinct and concise and soft cold word for the condition of being cool? Why must it now be just a funny form, a word-that-doesn’t-exist-but-should? I really can’t tell you why it has fallen out of fashion and become uncool.

But what we certainly see is that English does not hew much to logic and elegance and all that. No, it goes by what is cool and couth, what we are habituated to and what we have learned. Here is a rule; here are exceptions. Here is a word you see all the time; here is a word you would expect to see quite often but it just doesn’t show up. You infer that the words that should be there but aren’t are somehow, for some reason, uncool. Lacking in coolth, and therefore received without warmth – except the warmth of mirth. Words that match patterns but aren’t used are taken as signs of poor language understanding (we learn early that small children and illiterates use words like goed). And so, though they are cut from the same cloth, they are considered uncouth.

U-ie

There are some colloquial words that you might say casually every so often for your entire life and never have a good idea of how to spell, even if you’re highly literate. Today’s word may be about the chiefest among them.

You may not even recognize it on sight. What is it? It’s a colloquial term for a U-turn, as seen in phrases such as He pulled a U-ie, He did a U-ie, He made a U-ie, et cetera. It simply takes the U of the usual term and adds the ie suffix, a diminutive or derivative suffix (as in wheelie, meaning to rear up a vehicle on its hind wheel(s)). The suffix is normally spelled ie, so that’s why I spell it that way here; you can also see the word as U-y. And also Uy and Uie, and the same with a lower-case u. And every single one of them looks like a Dutch family name.

Or the stage name of a Korean pop star. Well, that would be Uee or Uie. Or Yui. She acts, she sings, she looks very, very pretty. I suggest looking her up. Especially if you like pictures of pretty Korean pop stars.

The awkwardness of the spelling of this word is just what we get for having such a slippage between the spelling of words and how they are pronounced. If we wrote everything in the International Phonetic Alphabet to reflect how it’s said, this word would be /ju i/. But, then, if we did that, we wouldn’t call it that, because the turn is shaped like U, not like ju.

I hope that you don’t mind that I put serifs on that U. Older Editions of the Chicago Manual of style specified that, for instances such as T-shirt and U-turn, where the letter described the shape of something, serifs should not be used on the letter as it may carry an implication that somehow the course of action has little flares on the ends. I always found that fatuous. People are not that stupid, and for that matter no one expects a T-shirt to be shaped exactly like a T even sans serif. So more recently the advice has made a 180˚ turn and now it allows the shape-descriptive letter to stay in the same font as the other letters.

The turn is also shaped like how this word moves in your mouth, though. Say these letters a few times in a row: U E U E U E. See how at one point the tongue is constricted towards the front, then it pulls back as the lips round, then the lips pull wide and the tongue is forward again, and on it goes, back and front and back and front, every time a boomerang – a U-turn.

mammothrept

Visual: This word seems a strange syncretism: the smooth mass of mammo exploding into the ripped mess of thrept. It’s like a string of firecrackers half exploded. Smooth bumps to the left; torn thorns to the right. Overall, long.

In the mouth: There’s little depth to this word: the consonants are almost all on the lips, except for a trip of the tip of the tongue across the teeth and ridge. The vowels are towards the front, going no farther back than the neutral reduced vowel in the middle. The word starts off soft and humming but then, as if a snare has been tripped, turns to the voiceless. And while the first two syllables are simple consonant-vowel, the last is a thick cluster of four consonants nesting just one vowel.

Echoes: You can’t avoid the mammoth. But also think of mammal and mammogram. And then, at the other end of the size scale from a mammoth, you have thrip, along with trip and rep and ripped and stripped perhaps threat. And maybe even strep throat. I suppose if you think about it you could find stripling, but that’s faint at best (mama’s stripling? hmmm). The ending also makes me think of bankrupt.

Etymology: This comes from Greek μαμμόθρεπτος mammóthreptos ‘brought up by grandmother’ (‘grandmother’ being μάμμη), by way of Latin mammothreptus ‘kept at the breast too long’. It has no relation to mammoth, which comes, somewhat modified, from Russian.

Semantics: A mammothrept, in English, is a spoiled child, or someone of immature judgement. This word is a silver salver version of twerp or douchebag.

Overtones: This word is obviously a very erudite insult. The odds are quite good that your hearer will not know its meaning until you explain it, but as long as you say it with the right intonation and in the right context, the general sense is likely to be clear. It has a sound of a muttering and a spitting, and it has about that taste, too, but coming from not an urchin but a dowager duchess.

Where to find it: You’ll find it in a play by Ben Jonson and a novel by Patrick O’Brian, and not much in between. But once you show this word to your friends, you’re sure to see it here and there in their writings.

How to use it: This word isn’t like an ace in the card game of conversation. It’s like slapping down an odd stone as your bet – a stone that could be priceless or worthless, but no one at the table probably knows which. It’s a big woolly mammoth ripping through the grass of verbiage. Use it in writing when you know your readers will look it up. Use it in speech when you can say it with about the same sound and tone as “Mmm, I’m’a throw up.” Make sure you say it so that it clearly starts with a “mamma” and not a “mammoth.”

fixin’s

You prob’ly know this word arredy, but if’n y’don’t, I guess I should tell ya that you almos’ allus see it in th’ same phrase: all the fixin’s. Sometimes they spell it with the apostrophe, sometimes not.

I jes’ thought I should tell ya that cuz maybe you mighta thought it was some kinda possessive or somethin’. But now, knowin’ that it’s a plural, d’ya think it’s wrong ta have that apostrophe? I mean, it’s not right to put “I deep fried two turkey’s,” cuz we don’t use apostrophes in plurals. But we do use apostrophes to indicate that somethin’s missin’. An’ here in this word it’s the g. One fixin’, or as many fixin’s as you can fit on yer plate. So there.

Cuz that’s what fixin’s are, right? All the side things you eat with the main thing. If I go to Bob Evans and get me some good country style steak (you may know it as chicken-fried steak), it comes with fixin’s like mash potatoes an’ white gravy an’ some carrots ’n’ peas ’n’ stuff. If’n you deep fry yourself a turkey, your fixin’s’re gonna be stuffin’ an’ mash an’ gravy an’ maybe some slaw an’ who knows, why not some grits too. Look, it’s alright, it’s recommended by the USDA, you kin read it right here. A dish jes’ ain’t right without some fixin’s next to it.

Now, fixin’s aren’t jus’ food things, you understand. Not originally. Why, they was all sorts of any kind of thing that was attached or made ready or accessorized to. You know, fixed up, fixed on, fixin’ to be. That’s how it was in the early 1800s. But now a lot of you won’t see this word at all except in some place where they want to be all homestyle an’ folksy ’n’ everything. You won’t see about the fixin’s of clothing cuz that’s not how they sell it. What’s homestyle? Why, comfort food, that’s what. That good ol’ home food made by honest folk who appreciate the good things in life like fat ’n’ starch. None o’ this fancy city folks stuff that ain’t even cooked an’ leaves you hungry.

And when you serve up some marketin’ text to tell people all about your country style food, you don’t just want the names of the things an’ some description. You want all the fixin’s. You want text that has jes’ as much backwoods southern homestyle as you kin manage ta git away with. So you kin go with the eye dialect – words spelled the way they’re said even though they’re said the same way everyone sez ’em, jes’ ta make it clear that these isn’t fancy edjicated folks. You know, ta an’ sez an’ kin an’ edjicated an’ so on. You might add some infixes, like abso-goldarn-lutely.  And you surely go with the apostrophes.

Funny thing, them apostrophes. They’re supposed ta indicate missin’ things. Well, in somethin’ like an’ or o’ they surely do. But when you write fixin’ and doin’ an’ so on, well, sure, the spellin’ is missin’ a g, but there ain’t no g when you say those words ever in th’ firs’ place. Nosiree, they jus’ have a velar nasal. An’ then, when you move it up to th’ front like even literate people an’ well-respected authors did into th’ early 1800s before the spelling pronunciation took back over, it doesn’t lose a g, right, it jes’ becomes a alveolar nasal. But we still put that apostrophe there. It’s sorta like that little [sic] that people put in quotes to show they know better.

You know what it is? I’ll show ya what it is. Ya see this? ; ) That’s a winky smile, right? OK, mister, so what’s this: ’ ? Why, it’s just a little wink. Every time you see that apostrophe there in fixin’s or anythin’ else like that, it’s a little wink that says, “Yessir, I’m homstyle, ah yep, I am.” An’ authentic as all get out. By which I mean you kin all get out if you think it’s authentic.

So but why not jes’ write it fixings? Well, goodness gracious me. You must be kidding. If we write it that way, we hear that velar nasal clear as day. Sounds like something some British chappy might say. Like this: “She was undeniably an eyeful, being slim, svelte and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.” You know who wrote that? P.G. Wodehouse, that’s who. A man surely a complete stranger to grits.

any more, anymore

Dear word sommelier: When should I use “any more,” and when should I use “anymore”?

If you’re not Canadian or American, you can pretty much avoid this issue and use any more everywhere. But in Canada and the US, we have a merged form, anymore, that has taken on one specific sense and left the others to the old two-word version.

First let’s start with the parts. They’re good old Germanic parts, not borrowed from anywhere else. They’re so old and basic that they have multiple uses. Any can be an adjective (Do you have any idea?) or a pronoun (I don’t have any), but it can also be an adverb, modifying an adjective, and that’s what it is in any more and anymore. More can be a noun (I want more) or an adjective (I want more food) or an adverb (Could you be more specific?). In any more, it can be any of them; in anymore, it’s an adverb.

There are three general areas of meaning that you can use any more in, and anymore is used for just the last one:

Quantity. I don’t want any more. I want fifty dollars, and not any more than that.

Degree. I don’t like this any more than you do. I couldn’t possibly love you any more [than I already do].

Time. I don’t want you anymore. I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore. Do you do it anymore?

You may notice that the examples all have one important thing in common: they’re all negative phrases or negative-option questions. Actually, you can use any more in a positive phrase: Any more than this and we’re in trouble. But in standard English, anymore is always in a negative phrase or a question with a negative option. Not anymore can be paraphrased as not any longer or as no more or no longer.

Note that I said standard English. There are areas where it’s not so uncommon to hear positive anymore in ordinary speech: Anymore, we hold the parties indoors. We can see that for these speakers it has moved out of its place in a whole limiting phrase and has become a synonym for these days or now: We don’t do that anymore > We don’t do that these days; These days we do this > Anymore, we do this. I am not endorsing this usage for standard written English, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see it more mainstream some decades hence. But you should know that it exists. At least for some speakers, anymore is not a one-valence word anymore.

When you are considering serving this word in a sentence, you should pay attention to the rhythm – it trips quickly, not quite as long as any longer but less staid than no more or no longer. It’s a more common and casual usage, too, and is less likely to be seen in formal documents, where you may see wording using phrases such as in previous years and until recent times and prior to the current situation and so forth. There are really many ways to describe the aspect of time, and some of them take quite a bit of time themselves. Probably the most formal – and obviously poetically referential – alternative to not anymore would be nevermore. To get a sense of the difference, imagine Poe writing, “Quoth the raven, ‘Not anymore.’”

Thanks to my colleagues in the Editors’ Association who brought up this issue and helped me clarify my thinking on it.

nullifidian

In the April 23, 2013, Toronto Star (the local daily broadsheet), columnist Royson James, in an article about the possibility of a casino being built in central Toronto, wrote this:

Riding a backlash against centuries of Puritanism and uptight strictures, we’ve turned nullifidian, consumers of everything to the exclusion of nothing.

Ya gotta love newspaper columnists. They are the one place in daily journalism where you get not only considered opinion unburdened by the albatross of faux-impartiality but also decently used twenty-dollar words.

Nullifidian. The context may not give a perfect clue to the meaning. But if you happen to know your Latin roots, you know just what it means. Null, ‘nothing, none’; fid, ‘faith’ (as in fidelity and infidel), from fides (as in bona fides): together, ‘faithless, of no faith, disbelieving, believing in nothing, etc.’ Add connective tissue and an adjectival suffix and you get an eleven-letter, ten-phoneme, five-syllable word with a rhythm right out of Dave Brubeck (accent on the middle syllable), a veritable forest of ascenders and dots in the middle seven letters (bookended by nu and an, phonemically mirrors: /nə/ /ən/) with the twin steeples ll disintegrating into i and i and i with the bent f and bumped d.

So there it is. The church towers ll fall apart into the image of the self i i i and are bent and distorted and we fall out of the righteous quaternity of 4/4 time into the supersaturated metric quincunx. All is relative. We are tossing out rules and instituting an “anything goes” approach. It’s appalling and Sardanapalian. Take away the pillars and everything collapses.

Just the sort of thing I am occasionally accused of. When I point out that a certain “rule” of grammar has no real basis and no utility in communication other than that of excluding and condemning (you’d think we we would grow out of that after our adolescence), I am told I am saying there are no rules and that anything goes and am promulgating the destruction of the language. Which assumes the point at issue: that the “rule” is actually a rule, and a beneficial one. If I say that people need to consider the effect and utility of the rules they follow, I am branded nullifidian, relativist, wallowing fecklessly in the utter degradation of the language.

Funny thing, relativity. Motion is relative and yet we can still speak coherently about it and measure it usefully. Direction is relative and yet we can still find our way around. But somehow if one proclaims relativity of any prescriptive rule one is seen as being a nihilist. I find this view lacking in important understandings.

The equation that Royson James’s paragraph makes is a common one: that faith equals restriction, and openness equals lack of faith. If you are a free thinker, you are an unbeliever, which means you are faithless. Faith is unquestioning acceptance of a set of strictures and structures: have faith in the source that has given them to you. This maps to acceptance of rules, often arbitrary, for language as for other behaviours. In practice, this “faith” becomes enforcement of a set of rules that render a sphere controllable and predictable.

How much faith do you need when things are controlled and predictable? Tell me this: which is a greater act of faith, cultivating a bonsai tree with daily attention or planting an acorn and coming back after twenty years? Driving to work on the same route every day or sailing a ship into uncharted waters? Forcing a language into unchanging conformity or participating in its somewhat guided, somewhat channeled, but never entirely regulated or stifled development over time?

Yes, holding to a dogma is an act of faith; certainly, you are taking it on trust that these principles are valuable and their source reliable. But one does best to choose one’s sources of principles wisely and thoughtfully. And dogma can be a means of minimizing the faith necessary: what faith and trust is there in Procrusteanizing everything into preset categories? Not adhering to a dogma, on the other hand, does not mean lacking in faith; one may still have desiderata, principles, aims, experience, and a faith that this approach will produce good results and that one’s data and reasoning are sufficient. One may even believe in some “greater power” (or what have you) without believing that that greater power has imposed a set of restrictions that we are to enforce so as to limit the possibilities of the world.

So the historical use of the word nullifidian is a bit of question-begging, in that it assumes that if you don’t have faith in a specific religious position you thus have no faith in anything at all. And its association of nullifidianism (or nullifidy, I suppose) with a sybaritic, thelemite position is even more question-begging, because it assumes that if one believes in something it must be rules that prohibit such hedonism – and the converse implication is that if one does not hold truck with wanton oral-retentiveness, one is a person of their particular kind of faith.

All of these observations may seem to have nullified the validity of nullifidian as a word to use anywhere. But no. They have simply unshackled it, or at the very least pulled the drapes open on it. And you may always feel free to say nullifidian, allowing its delicious flow over the tip of your tongue and your teeth and lips: whether or not you believe it when you say it, you can still give it lip service.

goon

Visual: Two dull, staring eyes, perhaps: oo. What’s the g? A nose? Off to the side? Naw. Maybe if it were ogon. But then the n? An ear? Who knows. The oo is the dominant feature; it shows up also in kook and loon and goof and tool but also in moon and book and look.

In the mouth: This is a hollow, echoing back-of-the-mouth word that closes off at the tip of the tongue. It has no crispness to it – no /k/ as in cool and coon; just the dull voiced stop /g/, and the resonant /n/ at the end making it sound much like a beat on a big drum.

Echoes: The above-mentioned oo words, such as goof and loon and kook and noodle perhaps, oh, and goose. Maybe go on. There’s no significant taste of good that I can find, but perhaps of gun. And lagoon, though that’s a very different image.

Etymology: It may be a shortened form of goney ‘booby, simpleton; albatross’, which has become gooney bird. Goney may be related to gawney ‘simpleton’; that seems connected with gane, noun, ‘ugly face’; that is likely related to gane, verb, ‘gape, yawn’, which is related to yawn. That’s a bit of a goose chase! But what we know for sure is that our modern use of it traces to Alice the Goon, a character in the comic strip Thimble Theatre, drawn by E.C. Segar and later named after its chiefest character: Popeye. Alice the Goon was a giant, not-exactly-human, thug-like being. You can see a couple of cartoons with her at A View from a Goon.

Collocations: It shows up in the comedy show The Goon Show (featuring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe; the name was inspired by Alice the Goon). The most common collocation in normal usage is goon squad. As Edward Banatt (@ArmaVirumque) has reminded me, there’s a line in “Fashion” by David Bowie that goes “We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town. Beep beep!” There’s also a novel by Jennifer Egan titled A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.

Overtones: The word is unavoidably insulting (unless the person described knows it’s a reference to The Goon Show, and maybe even then) and carries something of an implication of low intelligence and perhaps subhuman nature. Goons are often seen as subservient lackeys, as in “Call off your goons.” And generally they’re huge and muscular.

Semantics: A goon is a stupid individual, probably violent, probably subservient. Thug is sometimes synonymous. For the rest, see above.

Where to find it: I suspect you’ll find it most often in crime fiction, but that’s just a guess on the basis of the types of people who are in such works – not just the goons but the people who are calling them goons as opposed to anything else. You wouldn’t find goon in a news article except in a quote, but it is the sort of word likely to be quoted. In other words, it’s provocative.

lockdown, lockup

All Friday, as Boston and surrounding towns and cities were under a “shelter in place” order, everyone on the news kept referring to it as a lockdown, or as being on lockdown.

Lockdown? As though Boston were some kind of lockup?

I used to live in Boston (or actually in Medford and then Somerville, but part of the same melted-together urbanity), and I can tell you it’s not a prison, even if it does have many institutions (among which a striking number of good universities and colleges). So it’s interesting to see a term applied there that came into being to refer to prisoners being confined to cells, as though citizens were at liberty only at discretion of their warders, the police.

But, then, what other term works? Curfew communicates an overnight confinement (and comes from French couvre-feu, ‘cover fire’). Stay-inside orders or similar terms – or the official shelter in place – may be descriptive, but lockdown simply has an impact the others lack. Lock: a word that conveys a constrained freezing of movement, and in sound moves from a flowing liquid to the hardest stop we have, /k/. It’s like a river locked up with ice. Down: in place, fixed. You can easily see a bolt sliding down to fix a door firmly in place, and the occupant of a cell (or house) being held confined like a butterfly with a cup clapped down over it.

And there lies the difference between lockdown and lockup (and their associated verbs lock down and lock up). What’s up? A hand help up to stop you. A wall thrown up in front of your face. The stoppage of motion: we run up to an obstacle and end up at a place when our time is up. We fill up a tank, of course, and we look up a word in the dictionary. Up in these senses conveys motion that culminates or is blocked (like a sink stopped up or your nose stuffed up) or simply unable to continue (because full, like a container – your nose stuffed up again). It can be a containment, as with something walled up. It can even be a constrainment that might yet be broken free of, as if you’re tied up today but your schedule is free tomorrow. So when you are locked up, you are in a containment or cessation of motion, a point of at least temporary culmination. Like how the sound in your mouth is abruptly contained with the /p/ in up. (Which is not to say that the sound is responsible for the meaning.)

And what’s down? Not something stopped in motion, but something fixed at a point, anchored. Held down, nailed down, tied down. Down actually has a few different isotopes: it can communicate a motion in direction without specific endpoint (settle down), or a motion that moves downward and comes to a fixed point (set down, tie down), or – in adjectives made with past participles – fixity in a place without specific reference to prior motion. If you are cooped up you may still be able to move within confines, but if you are pinned down you can’t move at all. Interestingly, the word down starts with a stop /d/ and then fades off with a nasal /n/ – not quite so iconic – but it does have that closing-in diphtong in the middle.

In short, the difference between up and down in these words is that up is like putting your hands forward and up, palms outward, as against a wall, and down is like driving your index finger downward to a stopping point. Locked up: nope, stop, not getting out, kept in. Locked down: staying put, going nowhere. Up is to stop as down is to done, perhaps.

Well, anyway, Bostonians were kept in but they have now been let out; they were confined but now they are free again. The suspect was hiding in a boat, but no one knew that; because he could have been anywhere, everyone in Boston was in the same boat. Once the police got a lock on his location, everyone else could unlock: his number was up, and they could let their guards down.

surreal, unreal, hyperreal

Today, as Boston and suburbs were under “lockdown” (more technically “shelter in place”), after one gun battle last night and another to come this evening, Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster (@KoryStamper) observed on Twitter that surreal was one of the top lookups, and that it “always spikes during times of inexplicable tragedy.” Robert Lane Greene (@lanegreene) noted that “This is awful, but not exactly droopy clocks hanging over trees,” and reckoned, “‘surreal’ is coming to mean ‘intense’, and we’ll have to explain the original meaning to art students one day.”

Or more likely art students are the only ones who will still know the original meaning. Kory Stamper speculated that “people who use it are connecting with the connotation of intense or dreamlike irrationality.” There may be some of that, but I suspect that it’s also because unreal somehow doesn’t seem quite right anymore. Unreal is a widely used word, but it’s also a little semantically bleached – it’s used for too many things that are not all that out of the normal – and it’s sometimes used with a strong positive tone: “The way that kid plays the guitar is unreal!” It feels wrong to carry that tone into seeing SWAT teams crawling over your neighbourhood.

The reason, I think, that all these things seem not simply awful, horrible, shocking, etc., but something beyond, is that they seem so much like things you normally see only on TV or movies. Jordan Fifer, @JordanFifer, tweeted, “No, the #Boston #manhunt is not ‘like something straight out of a movie.’ Movies are like something straight out of life.” Which is true in that movies are based on life, but they generally heighten things somewhat, and, more to the point, most people have no experience of such things from real life, only from movies and TV. For distrurbances of a slightly lesser order, people sometimes say it’s like something from the evening news. The evening news is from life, of course, but not from your life.

So when people are saying something is surreal in these circumstances, what they mean, I would say, is that it’s something they associate only with the subjunctive worlds of fiction and the dissociated worlds of the news. It is to reality as whiskey is to beer or brandy is to wine: an intense distillate of mainly the same basic materials. It is a rupture in their normal schema of life and they have not assimilated it fully yet. It doesn’t have an exactly dreamlike quality; it looks like real reality but going by a different script, one not associated with the reality one actually experiences. So it’s not exactly unreal, though it just doesn’t feel like real reality. But it’s not really actually surreal.

We don’t know precisely when and where unreal came into being, but an early sighting is in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Hence horrible shadow, Unreal mock’ry hence.” Milton used it, too; here’s from Paradise Lost: “Th’ unreal, vast, unbounded deep Of horrible confusion.” I like T.S. Eliot’s “Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,” from The Waste Land. All of these describe things that seem not quite part of reality – perhaps eerie, eldritch, or unrealized, or from art.

Surreal did in fact come from art. But a surreal thing is a thing that has the qualities of dreams. We know just when surreal and surrealism came into the language. The art movement Surrealism began in France around 1920, guided chiefly by André Breton; the term surréaliste appeared first in the preface to Guillaume Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, written in 1903 but first performed in 1917. The word, had it been invented by an anglophone, would have been superreal; the sur means ‘on top of’ or ‘above’ and is the sanded-down French descendant of Latin super, which English borrows undigested. The surrealists wanted to go above the merely quotidian real; they sought to access the unconscious; they believed in the value of automatic writing and sought to unlock the associations of dreams and the unconscious without being suppressed by reason and use them to revolutionize the way of seeing and acting in the world.

So if you were to see a fish dance past your window with a blowpipe in its paws, that would be surreal. But most events now described by people on news shows as surreal are not, in the original (and, in the 1920s, strictly enforced) sense surreal. But is unreal the best word?

There is another word that comes to mind. It has also been given to us by a Frenchman (they do do this sort of thing well and by habit). It is hyperreal. This word is actually macaronic: it mixes bits from two languages. The real is the same real as in the others, from Latin realis, but the hyper is from Greek. And, as it happens, hyper comes from the same Indo-European root as Latin super, and means about the same thing: ‘above, beyond’. It has also come to be used to mean ‘extremely’. But where surreal aims beyond the real by going into the mind and the unconscious, hyperreal goes into the subjunctive world of the media, the representations of reality, the distillations, the representations of a reality as envisioned conditioned by representations that are envisioned conditioned by representations that are envisioned conditioned by… The hyperreal, as Jean Baudrillard explained in Simulations, is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” It is a map that precedes the territory and survives the territory. In the world of semiotic reference, it is a hall of mirrors, it is turtles all the way down. Life looks like television, but television has not based itself on life. Our reality, as conditioned by these simulations, becomes them: “It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.” (Read that as many times as you need or want. Baudrillard’s philosophy is a form of drug, I think.)

It is tempting to say that this is what people were experiencing today: a sense that what they were seeing was not a reality, not a dream, but a version of life based on the simulations of life seen in TV and movies.

But no. It may have seemed hyperreal, but when real bullets fly, and people and property are really hurt, and real human minds feel real torsions and vortices and myriad motivations, this is not simulation. And it is not a dream. It’s real. Exceptional, yes, and difficult to assimilate as a result. Hard to believe. Comparable to a simulation. But inescapable in its actuality. In the end, no un, sur, super, hyper. Just real.

hirple

Visual: This word has much verticality for one so brief. Of six letters, only two don’t reach up or down. There’s a dot, two sticks sticking up, one leg dropping down. Two sticks and one leg? Well, it doesn’t look like crutches. Actually, it looks kind of like a one-legged man hiding behind a curtain.

In the mouth: This is just not a dignified-sounding word when said with a standard North American English pronunciation. You may be familiar with the currently popular herp derp, an ideophone that conveys a sense of dopiness. Well, hirple starts with the same sound as herp. The heavy-breathing /h/ comes out of the throat only to curl around the retroflex /r/, like a deranged laugh, “hurr hurr hurr.” Then it stops at the lips /p/ and pulls back into /l/. In normal pronunciation, thr r n vwls n ths wrd. It’s just two syllabic liquids between the consonants. In accents that “drop the r,” such as standard British English, it sounds a little better.

Actually, in those accents it sounds like an odd way to say herbal. Of course it’s quite close to herbal in North American English, too, but the /p/ is more distinctive in that position because it pops forward from two liquids curled up in the middle of the mouth.

Echoes: Aside from herp derp, there’s herpes, herbal, hobble, and the various words that end in ple – people, pimple, scrapple, and especially purple. Remember: if you’re ever at a loss for a rhyme for purple, there’s always hirple – no need to interpol-ate a break.

Etymology: Alas, the etymology of this word is unknown. It’s been in the English language for at least half a millennium, though. The Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Its coincidence in sound and sense with Greek ἕρπειν is noticeable.” Yup, sure is, mm-hmm.

Semantics: Hirple means ‘walk lamely, limp, hobble, move with a gait between walking and crawling’. In other words, pretty much the opposite of hurtle, and definitely not compatible with hurdle.

Where to find it: Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Seamus Heaney… Heaney used it in his recent modern English rendition of Beowulf: “He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain, limping and looped with it.” You may or may not find that easier to read than the original: “synnum geswenced, ac hyne sar hafað mid nydgripe nearwe befongen, balwon bendum.”

How to use it: Carefully. The odds that your reader will know it off the top of the head are not high. By these lights, it should be a twenty-dollar word, but it’s so undignified and dialectal-sounding that it is not so much vintage or antique as just strange old stuff. This means that a certain literary crowd, the kind who crawl off to their lexicons at every new trouvaille, will love it. It will be a bug on the windshields of all other readers or, at very best, a rather limp little stunt.