In Dear Kitty, you are addressing a person (the technical term for this is vocative) and are declaring her to be dear; it is an adjective, and you don’t put a comma between an andjective and what it modifies. Saying Dear Kitty is like saying Sweet kitty as in Sweet kitty, won’t you come lie on my lap?

In Hi, Kitty, the Kitty is again in the vocative, but Hi does not modify it; Hi is an expression of saluation, a performative. Salutations are self-contained in much the same way as imperatives, and the vocative is effectively an interjection; if you want Kitty to listen, you say “Listen, Kitty,” rather than “Listen Kitty,” and likewise it’s Hi, Kitty, how’s your cat rather than Hi Kitty, how’s your cat (unless her name is Hi Kitty). It’s true that many people leave the comma out there; that’s not considered standard, however, as there is a structural disjunction.

In a closing signature, the name is yours, so you are not addressing anyone with it; the signature function is a particular performative, sort of like Amen. It closes the text and expresses that it is from you. (We don’t do it in direct personal speech because it would be silly – it’s obvious that you’re saying what you’re saying.) The Love is short for “with love,” which means “I am sending this to you with love,” so it’s also a performative – but a different one. If you leave out the comma, you are making a direct connection between Love and Kitty, making it read like an imperative: Love Kitty! (With Sincerely it would be less snicker-worthy but still mistaken to leave off the comma: Sincerely Kitty would mean “I sincerely am Kitty” rather than, as you want, “I say this sincerely, and sign it Kitty.”)

So:

Dear Kitty,
Hi, Kitty,
Love, Kitty.

Ah, smite. The word struck me most recently in a chorus I (and the Mendlessohn Choir) have been singing from Handel’s Israel in Egypt: “He smote all the first-born of Egypt…” Yes, the word reeks of Biblical death. Of course we know that in general it means “strike, hit” and that “kill” is an extended sense in the same way as “copulate with” is an extended sense of lie with (or, for that matter, know in, as they say, the Biblical sense). But it is now a deliberately archaic word – that is, it is actually still used more often than many words that are seen as perfectly current (e.g., slug, cuff), but it calls forth an antiquated tone; it has the honeyed, dusty smell of foxed old books. Try these variations (related words served up by wordandphrase.info):

I will hit you.
I will beat you.
I will strike you.
I will punch you.
I will smack you.
I will thump you.
I will thrash you.
I will smite you.
I will slug you.
I will cuff you.

Some are more specific than others, some more colloquial than others. But only smite carries the weight of divine justice, of a great Gothic fist, of a rusty broadsword, of some great hero or medieval ogre; if you are smitten, you don’t just fall, you are laid low.

Ah, though, smitten. That’s a different case, isn’t it? Yes, it’s the past participle of smite, but that’s not its main use. Go to visualthesaurus.com and look the two up. With smite you get three branches: one, “inflict a heavy blow on,” leads to hit; one, “cause physical pain or suffering in,” leads to afflict; one, “affect suddenly with deep feeling,” leads to affect, strike, move, impress. With smitten you get two: one, “(used in combination) affected by something overwhelming,” leads to stricken and struck; the other, “marked by foolishness or unreasoning fondness,” leads to enamored, in love, infatuated, potty, soft on, taken with. All of a sudden it’s not the grave God with the long white beard ready to send a thunderbolt or press the smite button; it’s the cherubic little Cupid with his little arrows ready to pierce you through the heart with an unwonted fondness.

There are always a lot of reasons for shifts in sense: historical influences, chances of usage, little fads, great literary references. The King James Bible has done much to preserve and enhance smite; as it has passed out of common unmarked usage, some of the extended senses have fallen away – you would not now say, as you could 250 years ago, She smote him and mean “He was smitten with her” (by her, yes; with her, no), but it has kept and reinforced its majestic might. Smitten has through most of its history had a distribution largely the same as that of smite, and a fair bit of figurative use for affliction by any strong emotion (not just love), but perhaps its use by such lights as Pepys and Thackeray in the “infatuated” sense has added to its tilt in that direction as an adjective (as opposed to as a past participle proper – the latter takes “by” and the former more often “with”).

And just perhaps it has some cutesy air from echoes of kitten and mitten. It does also rhyme with bitten and written, true, but, then, you can be bitten by the love bug too, or so it is written. It is at any rate a lighter, cuter sound than that of smite; smitten has quick vowels and a bit of pitter-patter in middle stop, as though just bouncing off the surface. Smite has that diphthong swinging down, /aɪ/, and a sudden stop at the end, without bounce, and it echoes with might and spite. Yes, and more weakly with white, kite, write, slight, and so on.

And smote? Does the past tense lack the sharpness of the present? The vowel is mid back to high back rounded, not low central to high front unrounded, and that tends to give it a duller, hollower air. The echoes are more of smoke and mote (another very Biblical term now). I find it seems more natural to say it on a lower note than smite (try this: say “I will smite him” and then “I smote him” – is there a difference in pitch for you?). An old alternate form would have made it smate; either way, it’s a case of ablaut, vowel gradation, common enough in English “strong” verbs. It’s not that there’s something intrinsically past about the sound; indeed, when Dr. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, he made as the present tense verbal suffix (havas, “have”), is the past tense (havis, “had”), and os the future tense (havos, “will have”). But o is further back in the mouth, so if you match that to the ablaut pattern to take it as the past, it seems natural enough.

Now, naturally, a word as majestic as smite is readily amenable to being used jokingly, ironically, in a cutesy sense, as you might imagine. Indeed, deliberate archaisms used anew in the present always come with quotation marks, as it were, and so with a wink and a nudge. The word is just too solemn to use entirely ingenuously; it would bespeak an excessive pomposity. Thus smite, too, releases a little kitten while it conjures a massive medieval ogre wielding a mace. You expect it from geeks in role-playing games. Or in other playful contexts, as perhaps from some masochist: “She said ‘I’ll smite you,’ and she smote me; I was smitten by her, and I was smitten with her.” So mote it be.

It’s an adverb, actually; present participial phrases can be used adverbially, and all uses of going forward in the sense you (and I) find overused currently are matrix adverbs, modifying the main verb by specifying its temporal ambit, or sentence adverbs, expressing attitude towards the entire utterance by directing its action to occur within a specific time frame.

As a sentence adverb, it is part of the framing discourse, like in fact, from this point on, for all intents and purposes, etc. Whether at the beginning of the sentence or at the end of the sentence, it applies to the entire action of the sentence (in syntactic terms, it modifies the whole inflectional phrase). At the beginning, it is not an adjective applying to the noun, nor is it, as it could be, an adverb applying directly to the verb; we can see the difference if we compare, for instance,

Going forward, the driver must put the car in gear [ambiguous: "From now on, the driver must put the car in gear" (sentence adverb) or "When going forward, the driver must put the car in gear"]

The driver going forward must put the car in gear [adjectival: "The driver who is going forward must put the car in gear"]

Going forward, the car must be put in gear [ambiguous: "From now on" (sentence adverb) or "When the car is going forward" (subordinate non-finite clause)]

The car must be put in gear going forward [ambiguous: "In the going-forward gear" or "From now on"]

The car must be put in gear by the driver going forward ["by the going forward of the driver" or "from now on"]

You can see from these the difference between sentence adverbs and other uses of participles.

Although present participles can be used as adjectives, phrases such as “going forward” are not being used that way. A sentence such as

This car is a going concern

uses “going” as an adjective;

This car is a going-forward concern

is odd but understandable and makes a compound with a hyphen;

This car is a concern going forward

is ambiguous; it could be

This car is a concern [that is] going forward [subordinate non-finite clause modifier of noun]

This car is a concern [when] going forward [subordinate non-finite clause modifier of verb phrase]

This car is a concern[,] going forward [sentence adverb]

Since a sentence adverb is framing the speaker’s whole utterance – providing a temporal or attitudinal context – it is not a dangler when at the end. Compare:

Honestly, I can’t say what the problem is [I am speaking honestly to you and I say I can't say what the problem is]

I can’t honestly say what the problem is [I cannot make an honest statement of the problem]

I can’t say honestly what the problem is [I can only make dishonest statements about the problem]

I can’t say, honestly, what the problem is [I tell you that I cannot say – and I am speaking honestly to you – what the problem is]

I can’t say what the problem is honestly [If I try to say what the problem is, I will do so dishonestly]

I can’t say what the problem is, honestly [I say I can't say what the problem is, and I am speaking honestly to you]

Here are dangling or misplaced participles, by the way:

Walking across the street, the car hit the pedestrian

The pedestrian was hit by the car walking across the street

We can see that in a sentence such as

There will be problems going forward

if we are reading it not in the sense “problems with going forward” but rather “From now on, there will be problems,” the going forward modifies the main verb (more about which below), and in

Tell me your problems going foward

if we take it in the sense “From now on, tell me your problems” it is a sentence adverb. (It’s also a silly way to put it, obviously, due to the ambiguity. But we’re just talking about syntactic structures here.)

We will note that usage of commas helps to make it clear what is and isn’t a sentence adverb. But with phrasal adverbs, notably ones of time, we often leave the comma off at the end:

The car must be put in gear from now on

Notice that we can also say

The car must be put in gear from today onward

If you compare with

The car must be put in gear from the 19th century

you will notice that in that case from the 19th century modifies “gear” and changes the entire sense (because in gear must mean “into equipment” or such like); after reading that, we could read

The car must be put in gear from today

to mean “must be put in modern gear,” and even

The car must be put in gear from today onward

to mean “in gear that comes from this moment and the future” (odd, but you see the difference between modifying the noun and modifying the whole sentence).

A reasonable objection can be made that, in the temporal modifying sense, we could make it

The car must from today onward be put in gear

thereby suggesting that the adverb modifies the specific verb rather than expressing an attitude towards the sentence as a whole, so it’s really a matrix adverb. And indeed in such a case there is no particular difference in sense between the two, so they are interchangeable. Likewise, we see going forward as a matrix adverb in

He decided to do it that way going forward

Both possible readings of this use it as an adverb to modify the verb:

He decided to do it that way from that point on

He decided to do it that way in a forward motion

Compare the directive function of the attitude expressed by the sentence adverb:

Going forward, please ask what to do [I want you, from now on, to ask what to do]

Please ask what to do going forward [can also be a matrix adverb meaning "Ask (time not specified) what to do as you go forward"]

In all cases, it’s adverbial. And there is often a better, less annoying way to put it. But if it’s a question of wondering what its grammatical role is, that’s what it is: adverbial phrase, sometimes modifying the main verb, sometimes expressing attitude towards the utterance as a whole (specifically a requirement to its action).

But undoubtedly it’s also because of what it signifies. After all, rhabdomancy manages not to be quite so nasty, though it is a bit of a hairy word for what is more calmly called dowsing. You know, when you use rods to tell you where the water (or sometimes other liquids) are. Now, you may well know that mancy is the part that refers to divination (as in cartomancy, necromancy, etc.). It thus follows that rhabdo means “rod”. Which it does. It’s from ῥάβδος rhabdos “rod” (you see that the ‘ over the rho means it gets “rough voicing,” which is represented in our spelling as the h after the r – and is resolutely ignored by us in pronunciation).

We can thus set aside any relation to abdomen – well, any etymological relation, anyway. But what about the myolysis? Some of you may recognize myo from words such as myocardial and myoelectric. It’s from μῦς mus “mouse, mussel, muscle” (yes, all three) and, in English words, refers to muscles. And lysis? It shows up in words such as electrolysis and is also present, mutatis mutandis, in words such as catalytic; it comes from λύσις lusis “loosening, parting” and refers to breakdown, decomposition, disintegration, dissolution.

So: rod, muscle, breakdown. No, it does not mean breaking down muscles by beating them with rods; although it may look like a name fit for a torture technique, we may spare those rods. Oh, being beaten with rods may lead to rhabdomyolysis. But the rods in this word are the muscle fibres. The word is not rhabdo+myolysis but rhabdomyo+lysis: breakdown of striped muscle.

It’s actually even worse than it sounds. If muscle is damaged enough to start breaking down – and this can happen through quite a lot of different causes, not just injury or overexertion but metabolic imbalances, infections, poisons, and even drug side effects – the products of the breakdown go into your bloodstream and can cause electrolyte imbalance (leading to confusion, nausea, coma, etc.) and kidney damage (possibly leading to death, etc.).

News reports on the cholesterol drug Baycol, which was taken off the market after it was associated with risk of rhabdomyolysis, sometimes described it as “muscle liquefaction” or words to that effect. That’s not exactly it, but the broken-down muscle passes into the bodily fluids (a notable sign is very dark urine), so “dissolution,” anyway, is not altogether inaccurate.

And how, by the way, do you say it? It’s tempting to give it a nice three-beat trochaic rhythm, like confutatis maledictis without the dictis. But actually it follows the grand old tradition of accenting Greek-derived words on the antepenult (the third-last syllable), making it a pair of dactyls. Pterodactyls? Eeks – that’s even worse than raptors.

But, oh, that’s not even the half of it. This word and what it denotes have nothing to do with ducks, and only arguably something to do with earth. Not only that, it’s not pronounced like it’s spelled. OK, well, it often is pronounced like it’s spelled, but that’s not the original pronunciation and is still not the preferred pronunciation for those in the know. But let’s get to that anon. There’s lots of other weirdness to get through first.

Let’s establish that it’s a critter of some sort. Given that, what kind of critter would have about as little as you can think to do with ducks or with earth? Hmm, how about some kind of a marine critter. Let’s say it’s one that basically sits where it is and sucks in and spits out water its whole life, which can last well over 100 years. And let’s give it a shell. OK, yeah, let’s make it a clam. Unducklike and un-earthy enough for you?

But tell me about clams, now: what are they? Well, things that have their body inside a shell – they can close the shell and hide in it. And they’re usually pretty small. Well, now, let’s make this one up to 5 kilograms, and let’s make it so its shell can’t actually close over its body. In fact, let’s also give it a tail – OK, a siphon – that can get up to 70 centimetres long. This is a clam that is around the size of a turkey. And it looks rather phallic, too, thanks to that long siphon. (The Chinese name, 象拔蚌 xiàngbábàng, means “elephant-trunk clam”.)

Now, admittedly, it does have something to do with earth – the earth that is under water. It’s a burrowing clam. It digs in, then sits and sucks and blows water. Aaaaaaaand that’s about it. You think your life is boring. Well, meet zen master clam. I am sure that it is as happy as a clam. A very big clam. The biggest burrowing clam in the world, and one of the longest-lived critters on the planet, too.

They get to live to such a ripe old age in part because they have few natural predators. Not none, mind you. The most dangerous one is willing to pay more than $150 a pound for these things (imagine dropping $1600 on a turkey). So they’re a protected species. But they can be eaten, and in fact Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that geoduck meat is delicious. The siphon meat is best used in chowder (diced, I presume), and the body (the mantle) can be sliced into escalopes and prepared a variety of ways. You won’t be suckin’ ’em back like raw oysters, though.

And is the word geoduck delicious? Well, first you have to know how it tastes. It may look like the name of some environmentalist avian comic superhero (“Step away from those protected clams!” “Gaaahhh! It’s Geoduck!”), but it’s actually kind of gooey. “Gooey duck,” to be precise: that’s how you would do better to say it. That makes it less crisp, more round and dull and perhaps muddy. Um, yeah, so what’s with the spelling?

Well, as far as can be determined, the word comes from a west-coast first nations word, perhaps the Salish word gʷídəq, “dig deep”. It is also seen spelled as gweduc in English. But back in the 1800s the spelling goeduck gained some currency… but then got miscopied as geoduck: goe looks odd to English eyes, while geo is well known. The respelling has also led to people who don’t know better pronouncing it as the spelling would suggest; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary gives only that pronunciation for it. (But they don’t have geoducks in England, and the OED entry is rather brief.) And so we have a word that looks like it means one kind of thing and is said one way, when actually it means something quite different and is pronounced in a rather unexpected way. Weird enough for you? Welcome to the English language.

What would be a capper for all that? Well, a couple possibles come to mind. One would be a fake etymology. And indeed there is one noted by Davidson, which he found in a 1917 edition of the Tacoma Daily Ledger, involving some dude named John F. Gowey who was out hunting for ducks and shot at the jets of water emitted by the clams (yes, those long spouts do squirt) and bagged several, leading to their being called “Gowey’s ducks.” (Anyone who has studied much etymology would snort with instant disbelief at a story like that; they abound, and are almost never true.)

Another would be a collegiate athletic team named after them. Never mind Spartans and Trojans. Make way for the Evergreen State College Geoducks! Yes, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (yes, Olympia, the original of which is in Greece), have named their basketball, volleyball, soccer, track and field, and cross-country teams the Geoducks. Well, why not name an athletic team after something that just sits and sucks and spits water? If a Chevy truck ad can feature a song that has the line “like a rock, charging from the gate,” why not geoducks, which are at least theoretically motile? (At least they won’t run into the problem of the Corner Canyon school in Draper, Utah, whose school board ruled they couldn’t call their team the Cougars because it might be offensive to middle-aged women. No, I’m not making that up.)

I feel that this odd and paradoxical word and its sui generis referent are best capped off with the fight song for the Evergreen State College Geoducks, in case it all hasn’t been fun enough (I also encourage you to see their mascot on their website):

The Geoduck Fight Song
words and music by Malcolm Stilson, 1971
hear it on YouTube

Go, Geoducks go,
Through the mud and the sand, let’s go.
Siphon high, squirt it out,
swivel all about,
let it all hang out.

Go, Geoducks go,
Stretch your necks when the tide is low
Siphon high, squirt it out,
swivel all about,
let it all hang out.

Do you happen to know what an espadrille is? If not, please take a moment to hazard your own guess. If you do, think about what you would think it meant if you didn’t know what it meant. I’ll grab a sherry and be right back.

So? It is not a curly salad green (escarole) or a snail that might crawl on it (escargot). It is not a trellis, not a ball, not a dance, not a dress, not a high-heeled… Oh, wait, they do make high-heeled espadrilles too. But mostly they are flat-soled. Yes, they are shoes: those shoes with rope soles. They are fairly un-fancy, with their canvas uppers like tennis shoes (without laces); the intricate bit is just the jute braiding that makes up the sole. They’re worn all over the world, but they’re originally from the Pyrenees.

And originally, I should say, the soles were made with rope not of jute but of esparto (sometimes they still are). Esparto is a tall grass that grows in northwest Africa and southern Spain. The word esparto is the source of espadrille; you can see that the /t/ and /r/ underwent metathesis (reversal of order) and the /t/ became a /d/. The immediate source of espadrille is Provençal espardillo.

But what does esparto come from? From Latin spartum, from Greek σπάρτον sparton “a rope made with σπάρτος spartos”; spartos was the Greek name for the plant or for another similar one.

Does that make you wonder if Sparta has the same origin? Indeed, it seems that it does, though it is not known exactly what the association was between the plant or its rope and the famous Greek city (that was known for its disciplined and laconic warriors, who played a major part in the defeat of Troy – Helen was, after all, queen of Sparta before being taken by Paris to Troy). Where, by the way, is that city? In Laconia – whence the word laconic.

Which, as we can see, I am not. Nor spartan. But I also own no espadrilles. Unless you ask someone from Quebec, that is; in Québecois French, espadrilles is a normal word for runners or sneakers.

The Greeks came, with their horse; now Troy is destroyed and the women are soon to be de-Troyed, deployed on Greek ships as trophies. Their husbands? Dead, of course. “In their tattered black robes,” MacEwan tells us in the stage directions, “the women resemble crows.” Hecuba, Priam’s queen, is an old crone in rags (though, as Poseidon says at the play’s beginning, “negotiable (like old gold). . . . both worthless and highly valuable (if you know what I mean)”). Her son, Hector, is also dead, and Hector’s wife Andromache is about to face the loss of her young son, too: the death even of the future. Hecuba’s daughter, the nubile prophetess Cassandra, is to be Agamemnon’s trophy… to find out how that turns out, read Agamemnon by Aeschylus. (Hint: very badly indeed.) And Menelaus comes to reclaim Helen, the woman who started the whole thing: a vain pathological liar, to whom MacEwan has given the great line “I am not a slut, I am not a silly bitch! I am Helen, I am beautiful!”

At the end of the play, the city burns behind, and the women are led off to the Greek ships. Talthybius, the Greek messenger, looks back and sums it up, echoing lines already heard in the play:

As the moon bends the oceans
So this darkness bends the mind.
Even the planets are weary.
Everything awaits a series
of wretched and unreal tomorrows.

Goodbye, you splendid towers,
You once magnificent citadel,
You horrible heap of stones…

Sing for the great city that cries out
like a soul,
That falls like a shadow
On the threshold of Nowhere…
This place, this place was Troy.

MacEwan’s play holds a special place in my memories; I’ve seen three different productions of it now, and the first was when I was a drama student at the University of Calgary. I have never had the chance to perform in it, but have many times savoured the lines I could have said – and the many lines I could not have, as most of the parts are female, and none of the productions cast men in female roles.

But of course for most people Troy and its adjective Trojan carry no such flavours. It is true that (to quote Led Zeppelin) “the pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath,” but we don’t so often pause to think of the aftermath of the historical battles, in spite of the many poems and songs and plays of aftermath (I am quickly put in mind of Robert Burns’s “The Battle of Sherramuir” and the little-known Tolkien work “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” and, for that matter, songs such as “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye” and the very affecting “My Youngest Son Came Home Today”).

Rather, we think of warriors. We think of fights. We think of heroes. The popular movie Troy was certainly not an elegy for the widows. What sort of a boy is named Troy? Stereotypically the football hero, the square-jawed popular guy, maybe a fraternity brother… Try to picture it as the name of someone nerdy, quiet, thin, pale. Difficult, no? That tr is so truculent, so strong, perhaps trustworthy; it has traction, like a tractor-trailer truck. Oh, Troy is the golden boy – they may even weigh him in troy, that standard of weight that is used for gold (and is named after Troyes, France, which is not connected etymologically to the Troy of Greek legend). He is shiny, he is solid, he is a fighter. Ironically, he is lighter – a pound troy is lighter than a pound avoirdupois, which is what we use to weigh people and poultry and pillows and so on. (Incidentally, this means that a pound of gold is lighter than a pound of feathers.)

There was a real Troy, by the way, and it really did fall as a result of a battle – and, it seems, a few other times in history, too, once by natural disaster. We don’t know what the reality was of the personalities and motivations involved. But the ruins are on the Turkish coast (or near it – the coast has moved in the intervening 3200 or 3300 years), on a hill in Anatolia now called Hisarlık. It was named after its founder, Troas; one of his sons was Ilon, from whom Troy got its alternate name, Ilion (in Latin Ilium), whence the name of Homer’s epic, the Iliad.

Troy, in Latin, is Troia, and that i became written as y in modern English, but in Troian the i took on its alternate longer form, which in modern English has come to be a separate letter standing for a sound that Latin and Old English didn’t have: j. That jaw-jutting tongue-tip affricate adds even more solidity to the word. And the places you are most likely to see Trojan include the condom racks of drugstores and the gymnasia and stadia of high schools (how many high-school sports teams are called the Trojans? To follow legend, one would expect all the teams called Spartans to beat the teams called the Trojans, but I wonder how many of those students even know much of anything about Homer’s epics… I’m sure most of them know the word from drugstores, whether they’ve ever bought any prophylactics or not).

Well, well. Mindless violence and the prevention of future generations. And so we’re back at the play. And all those golden boys are weighed in the balance, and their pounds of flesh are still outweighed – and outlasted – by the black feathers of the “old crows,” the widows they would leave behind.

After a day of just this sort of thing, my colleague Heather Ebbs gave it a name (so much easier to pronounce a malediction on something when you can name it): scattermalia. She defines it thus: “odds and ends of queries or information scattered through several emails instead of being nicely cleaned up into one clear listing.” The sort of thing, I might amplify, that leaves you at last to say, “OK, so what has been decided? Where are we with this?”

It really is a 21^st-century problem; emails can allow you to have multiple conversation threads at the same time with the same person. It’s as though the two of you are singing one of those opera quartets all by yourselves, with each line sung antiphonally. The cyber-world may allow people to accomplish things more quickly, but among the things that can be accomplished are making a mess and getting confused. We are the authors of our own befuddlement; Pygmalion may have made a statue and then fallen in love with it, but what we have animated can come to be more of a cross between a siren and a hydra, and we are chasing it in an echo chamber covered in mirrors.

But it’s a lovely fun little word, isn’t it, scattermalia? Scatter skitters and rattles on the tongue, while malia is the soft nasal and liquid other half. The rhythm is smooth and charging. In spelling, the i before the l has been dropped as unnecessary and by analogy with, for instance, animalia. The word has tastes of various other words, several of which decorated my first paragraph, above. It also has a strong taste of Saturnalia, which sets a solid, familiar pattern for the sound – but, oh, how much less fun scattermalia is than Saturnalia, though they both involve misrule.

Those who know me will not be surprised when I say that it depends on the variety of English you’re using. In casual English, it’s fine, though the speaker may be aware that it’s non-standard (“not good English”). But it presents a few interesting issues. I’m going to start at the end.

I’ll leave off any real address of ending a sentence with ellipses (…), which some people dislike; I used it because I intended it to be “leading,” and that’s different from a flat-out statement.

But there are many people who will insist that a couple things is wrong and should be a couple of things. This is based on couple being a noun. The thing is, though, so is dozen, and we no longer (as we once did) say a dozen of things; so, too, is a million, and actually, in English, so too are numbers generally, though they are a special class of noun. (Numbers are not adjectives in English. Try using them in all the various places where you can use adjectives and you will see that.)

We no longer say a million of people, though we still say a milli0n of them. And couple is coming to be like other numbers, as dozen has and myriad is in the process of doing; you still can say a couple of things, but you can also say a couple things.

Can you say it when there are actually more than two things, as in fact there are with this sentence? Shouldn’t we say several things if there are three or four? Well, if you wish to be precise, yes, but several gives a sense of significant quantity, whereas couple downplays it. Like it or not, a couple is in use as an informal indefinite quantifier. True, it’s a bit weaselly. But English is a very weaselly language – or can be when we want it to be.

The interesting thing is that many of the people who will insist on a couple of will also insist, in this sentence, on There are rather than There’s. Now, if couple here really is a singular noun (like pair or brace), you might think it would take the singular. But of course with collectives we will use the plural when we are emphasizing not the totality but the mass of individuals. So There are a lot of paintings means there are many paintings, but There is a lot of paintings means that there is a lot, probably for auction: a single group.

Likewise with, for instance, the majority of voters – you may say The majority of voters decides the vote, because it is the fact of a majority that is decisive, but it is only (and not always) in newspapers and similar places where a writer is striving to be correct but doesn’t fully understand the grammar that you will see The majority of voters doesn’t want this rather than don’t want this.

So, since I have already said that a couple here is equivalent to “two”, “roughly two”, or “a few”, you would expect that it should be There are a couple rather than There’s a couple, right? And in fact in formal standard English that is so, because in formal standard English we match the number in there is/there are to the number of the predicate. But in casual English we often don’t do so, and it’s not because we’re ignorant or illiterate – it’s because it’s an arbitrary decision.

There is is really just an existential predicate, and there’s nothing other than convention that forces us to match it to the object. Spanish and other languages that use a version of “have” rather than “is” don’t do it (Hay dos cervezas sobre la mesa; Il y a deux bières sur la table); German doesn’t do it with its “give” verb (Es gibt zwei Biere auf dem Tisch); even some languages that use a version of “is” don’t do it (Tá dhá beoir ar an mbord – Irish).

Remember that what comes after there is is structurally the object. In normal usage (in English), objects have no effect on the number or person of the verb – it matches the subject. We don’t normally force the copular verb to match its object, even when adhering to the nominative object “rule”: not It am I but It is I, and not It are we but It is we… which, of course, normal people say as It is us, even when the It is empty. The famous quote from Pogo (appropriate with respect to grammatical confusion and disputes) is “We have met the enemy and he is us,” not “he are us.”

It’s just because the there in there is is just a placeholder, and not even a noun or pronoun, that we have the habit of matching the number of the verb to the object – the object is the only noun in the area, so we conclude that it must be the subject. There is also a mistaken belief that There is a person is an inversion of A person is there; this is not true – there is no spatial reference in there is. When we use there to point to a location, we have to have a location to point to, either present in context or established in text. If I say There is a mistaken belief, there is no “there” there.

In some languages, a subject isn’t even supplied for existential predicates; there’s just a verb. English doesn’t like bare verbs, so we always put something – there or it – in the subject position. Which works fine until someone stops and says “What is it? Where is there?” It gets to be like a person who starts analyzing the muscle movements in walking and finds he/she can’t remember how to simply walk anymore.

Thus, the use of there are rather than there is with plural predicates is learned behaviour, and is not truly natural – as witness the fact that even highly literate people often use the singular in casual use or unguarded moments. That doesn’t make it correct in formal English, but it does explain a couple things about it.

The non-word-geek might quite reasonably assume that Koocanusa is, like many a place name in B.C., taken (probably somewhat mutated) from one of the local indigenous languages. There probably would not be a question on the order of “If there’s a K to stand for /k/, what does the c stand for, given that these place names are as a rule meant to be at least roughly phonetic representations? Why would c stand for /k/ there when k stands for it elsewhere? But would it really be used to stand for anything else in this context?”

But, word geek though I am, I didn’t even get to that question; just about the first thing I saw, when looking at it, was the canusa: I’ve seen that sort of thing before. Canada and USA. Given that the lake straddles the border, that seemed immediately plausible. But the Koo? I didn’t get that part right away because Koo for me is a recognizable surname – actually, I have a friend of that name who was born in south central BC, but I didn’t think that the lake was named after her family. No, of course, the lake is on the Kootenay river. The name for it was the winner of a contest to name it; it was submitted by Alice Beers of Rexford, Montana. I don’t know what other names were submitted, but Koocanusa has, aside from a nice portmanteau kind of quality, a look and sound that seem to fit in with other place names in the region that are based on indigenous words. (One such is Okanagan, which, amusingly, has in at least one place been made into a spurious Irish name, O’Kanagan.)

And, after all, Kootenay is a word from an indigenous language – it’s the Blackfoot (Siksika) version of the name of the local Ktunaxa people. Come to think of it, Canada is generally thought to have come from an indigenous word, too (Iroquois, likely). Anyway, if Koocanusa had been entirely fake-indigenous, it still wouldn’t have been the first. Two great examples of words that were made up because they sounded “Indian” are Nakiska (the ski area that was built to host the 1988 Olympic alpine events, near Calgary) and Idaho.

Have you noticed, by the way, how often faux-Indian words have /k/ or /h/ in them? They seem to somehow be stereotypical “Indian” sounds (from the view of Anglophones), earthy or “authentic” or whatever – at the back of the throat, close to the source of breath, not on the dainty “civilized” tip of the tongue. True, they are both pretty common sounds; any given sentence of reasonable length in English is likely to contain one or both, perhaps several times. But I do feel – I don’t have survey data to back this up, but it’s an impression, so take it as you will – that they seem overrepresented in “Indian” words (names used with an intent of signifying some “Indianness” for non-Indian people). In actual indigenous languages, of course, /k/ and /h/ are present in a much more reasonable proportion (for a quick lesson in some of the Nakoda language, for instance, see “Meaning of a Nakoda Stoney prayer and âba wathtech”).

What Koocanusa is, anyway, is something not really new in place names. Not new at all, in fact. It’s a syllable acronym – well, except for the usa part, which is a letter acronym, so really Koocanusa is a mixed acronym, like canola. We all know what an acronym is; a syllable acronym is one that uses whole syllables rather than individual letters. Other examples include Kenora (Keewatin, Norman, Rat Portage – they left off the final t), Soho (South of Holborn in London, South of Houston in New York), Tribeca (Triangle below Canal), Soweto (South West Township)… Oh, there are a great many. An interesting variant is the spelled-out pronounced acronym; the first example that comes to my mind is Ceepeear, the name of a neighbourhood in Calgary that was built near the CPR railyards (I once heard a newsman mangle it as “si-pee-er” in an evident attempt not to say it like “C P R.”)

So how do you say Koocanusa? Heck, if Jim isn’t sure, neither am I. But I rather suspect the split is between those who say “coo canoe sa” and those who say “coo can you sa” (cool! can you canoe in the lake, sir?). Perhaps someone local to the area can say more.