My latest article for TheWeek.com looks at annoying noises that callow adolescents make. I give a detailed phonological analysis of each of them – and I reproduce all of them in a video.

A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds

Interesting word, escovitch. It starts with that esco, which looks vaguely Spanish and also reminds me of Escoffier, the name of a great French chef. But then there’s the vitch, which seems kind of Slavic, except that would usually be spelled vich without the t.

So I wondered where this fish was from. The thing was, the menu at my workplace cafeteria is a Caribbean theme this week. So I knew the dish was not Russian or anything of that sort. Perhaps it was made with a kind of fish with a distinctly non-Caribbean name?

The tall, bright young woman at the cash register was helpful, especially since she’s quite evidently from Jamaica herself. She told me and my colleague that escovitch fish is very popular in Jamaica, often bought from shacks right on the beach; people will go to the beach just to get the fish, and never go in the water. Escovitch, she explained, was a way of preparing fish, sort of like ceviche. You can do it to any fish – the actual fish I was about to eat was pollock.

So OK. This word, looking like a mix of Romance and Slavic with an English spelling, is a kind of popular thing in Jamaica. Well, Jamaica is full of people whose roots trace to somewhere else a long time ago – the young lady at the cash may well be descended from West Africans who were brought over a couple of centuries ago to work on plantations, though I didn’t ask. Jamaica has a version of English that is (in some dialects especially) influenced by West African languages. It has at the same time a colonial English history. And it has a lot of Spanish history and influence too, and some input fro all the other people who came through the Caribbean when it was still a developing colonial place with lots of trade and pirates and so forth. So this word came from… where?

Spanish, which got it from Arabic, which got it from Persian.

Nope, escovitch is not a Spanish word. Escabeche is. Escovitch is a Jamaican variation on escabeche. And the dish is, too. Escabeche is poached or fried fish, pickled in something acidic after cooking. Escovitch adds onions, chayote, carrots, and Scotch bonnet peppers. The Jamaicans gave the word its own local flavour just as they gave the dish. It just happens that escovitch is not a word that you would likely expect from Jamaica. But as an English respelling of a slightly phonetically altered escabeche, it’s not really implausible at all. It is also rendered as escoveitch and escoveech. The word has shown up in other altered forms elsewhere – for instance, scabetche in North Africa.

And Spanish got escabeche from Arabic sikbaj, which is a marinated sweet-and-sour meat dish. Arabic in turn got the word from Persian sik ‘vinegar’ and ba ‘broth’. So each language and culture in turn took the dish and its name and gave them its own rendition. Incidentally, ceviche may be another version of the same dish and word – although it has dropped the cooking step.

This is why I snort when I hear talk of purity in language… or authenticity in food. Please. I prefer to enjoy the flavour as I get it when I get it. It’s all the richer for all its changes, impurities, inauthenticities.

By the way, that fish was one of the best things I’ve had from that cafeteria in quite a while.

In the mouth: In the standard pronunciation, it starts with “sick”; it doesn’t quite make “sicko” because the o is reduced to a schwa. Many people now pronounce it like psycho, though, with the vowel of the last syllable getting a fuller pronunciation, too. The y actually comes from the Greek letter upsilon, which has stood, over the course of time, for [u] and then for [y] (like German ü) and now for [i]. Whatever the vowels are doing, though, the consonants make a tour of the mouth: tongue tip to back, then lips and teeth to tongue tip again. It starts with a nice snake-like hiss.

Echoes: An elephant that’s a sicko or a psycho? Perhaps a fantasy or phantasm? Maybe a sidekick fanboy? The hissing [s] and the juxtaposition of [k] and [f] and [ə] also give a vulgar air.

Etymology and semantics: I almost want to make the word sucophant, which would add a taste of succotash and maybe of suck, but we get the upsilon as y thanks to its coming via Latin. The full Greek source is σῡκοϕάντης sukophantés, which comes from σῦκον sukon ‘fig’ and ϕαίνειν phainein ‘show’. Um, yeah, someone who shows a fig. The speculative explanations that have been made for this one quickly come to strain credulity. Some of the more plausible ones connect it to making a hand gesture – one that even today is called a “fig” in Italian: dare il fico – a gesture that, depending on whom you ask, mimics male or female pudenda. One source says that sukon was also a word in Greek for the female pudenda.

But what has all that to do with a sycophant? It may or – probably – may not help if I tell you that the Greek word referred to someone who brought malicious and baseless legal suits against others, generally for some kind of personal gain. The word still has that sense in Greek and French, but in English it came first to mean a tattle-tale and then, presumably because tattle-tales do so to curry favour, it shifted over to its current sense of ‘fawning lickspittle toady’ – that is to say, a suck-up sidekick fanboy.

Overtones and how to use it: The hissing and subtly vulgar sound combine with the three syllables and classical origin to make a rather high-toned knife in the belly. This is not a nice word: it can be used in polite company, but it cannot be used politely to the person described. It is, in short, a literary insult, a lexical scalpel that cuts sharply and smoothly but surely and deeply.

The word was not defined anywhere in the play, and the context was a bit ambiguous, but we generally got the drift that it meant wild goings-on, or a cracking good time, or something hilarious going down, or or or. The director, Pat Benedict, spoke Irish Gaelic, so she was able to tell anyone who needed to know and didn’t seem to know.

I can now see this word in its Irish spelling whenever I pass by a particular pub here in Toronto, which has a sign proclaiming “Ceol, Caint agus Craic” – meaning ‘music, chat, and fun’. The phrase, it seems, was popularized by an Irish-language TV show of the ’70s and ’80s, SBB ina Shuí, which proclaimed “beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn” – ‘we will have music, chat, and fun’ (how to pronounce the Irish: kind of like “bay kyol, contch oggus crac a-ging”).

So this word really just means ‘fun’. Some people will tell you that it means specifically an Irish style of fun. Well, yes, when an Irish person is speaking Irish and speaking of fun, he or she will be speaking of the kind of fun Irish people have, and you may or may not find that they have fun differently in Ireland from how you are used to having it. Certainly if you’re using an Irish word in English you’re making a reference to Irish culture. But if you’re speaking in Irish about people in some other country having fun in their own way, you’ll still use the word craic. You just have no particular reason to refer to, say, Somali fun as craic if you’re speaking English.

Actually, lately, you’re probably well advised to be careful of the context in which you speak of having craic. If your audience knows you’re making an Irish reference, you can get away with saying “That was an evening filled with craic.” But you do have to recognize even then that crack, which the hearers may take it for, can refer to a range of quite other things. And any time you use this word, you’re going to get the full taste of all those kinds of crack. There’s the whipcrack and crackerjack kind of flavour, which gives a sharpness lacking in the word fun, but some of those different cracks may leave a bad taste in the mouth.

And if you’re a public figure, such as a politician, you certainly need to be wise about where and how you get your craic and how you speak of it. If you should happen to be getting crack for your craic, or even be thought to be getting it, it may leave quite the bad taste in your mouth and may cloud your reputation. You will become a new story – and, on Twitter and elsewhere, you will be the craic of the day, the target of many a wisecrack.

Thanks to Paul Jara for suggesting today’s word.

I bet you’ve never seen that word before. Wonder what it’s doing in the user guide for a skiing app? Well, here it is in context: “select the device and then select the Apps tab and schrol down until you see the File Sharing section…”

Got it now?

“Aw,” you may be saying. “It’s just a misspelling of scroll.” Yes, that’s true. But tell me: if you speak any languages other than English, in how many of them are you likely to get a misspelling that is less phonetic than the correct spelling?

English spelling isn’t so much a system as a bricolage. It’s like making a picture not by drawing or painting lines, not by taking basic pieces and putting them together, but by clipping bits from magazines and books and pasting them together. And because it’s so weird, we often come to assume that the less phonetic spelling is the correct one if we’re not sure. That’s how kneck has come to be seen as a spelling of neck.

Admit it: if they spelled scroll as skrol or scrol, you might wonder where they went to school, even though those are more phonetic. But if you see schrol you can tell they went to school – not the place, the word: just swap in an r for the first o.

It’s not that there are any English words with schr pronounced [skr]. The sch in all those cases goes the other way, the German way, the “sh” sound. But words like scherzo (Italian) and schizophrenia (from Greek roots) and the occasional Dutch name have given us a chance to make a [sk] with sch, and so there it is: extra letter, less obvious spelling, must be better. At the same time, to make it schrol, they went with a single l, which is actually more phonetic. Why would they do that?

Well, there’s school, yes. Anything else? If you Google schrol, you’ll get some pictures of shiny black tourmaline, even some ebay listings selling pieces of this semi-precious stone. There’s a variety of it called schrol, you see.

Well, called schrol by people who misspell it, I should say. It’s actually schorl. And it’s pronounced like “shorl.” The word comes from German schörl, and it’s not clear where German got it from, but it’s probably after a village (and then we have to wonder where the village got its name).

It’s a fitting stone to go with this lapidary misspelling. The chemical formula of schorl is NaFe²⁺₃Al₆Si₆O₁₈(BO₃)₃(OH)₃OH.

Isn’t it nice how that ends with “OH OH”? What you say when you see this. It’s about as complicated as… well, English spelling. You have accumulated bits and dirt and so on all hardened together, and embedded in the middle of it as you dig on down, the result of many obscure elements combining to produce something expected, is this dark gem. Exactly the same sort of thing happens with schorl tourmaline.

Fine, you don’t have to like it; you don’t have to be a nerd about schrol. But it scrolls my nurd. (Not that I’m going to use it. I’ll just put it in my gem box.)

Well, if you spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, your psoas might be out of order – by being shorter than it should be.

It? Yes, psoas is singular. It’s sort of like biceps, but also in a way opposite. Biceps is a singular word that looks like a plural and is often taken for one. Psoas is a singular word that was originally a plural word but got taken for a singular. It comes from Greek, psoa, which had an accusative plural of psoas and a nominative plural of psoai. So now the plural of psoas my be rendered as psoai, even though psoas was originally as plural as psoai: it’s getting pulled sideways instead of up or down. But since it passed through Latin on its way to English, you can also see psoae.

Naturally, we pronounce it without the p – so it sounds like “so us.” Or you could say it like “so ass,” I suppose. Try not to say “so as.”

But what is the psoas? It’s the thing my wife was stretching this morning when she put one foot in a skate and held it over her head, pulling it up from the back (not the side) – while standing on the other foot, of course. It’s also the thing that’s probably at the root of some back problems I’m having, even though it’s not in the back.

It’s a muscle that attaches to your spine and the top of your femur, coming around the front way. It’s much involved when you walk or run: you contract and release it with every one of your steps (pasos in Spanish, just incidentally). (Learn more about it and how to stretch it at stronglifts.com and runnersworld.com.) You stretch it when you twist, and since there are two of it, you can – if you want – see them represented with the s and s in this word.

And if you’re sitting too much of the time, it can get shortened and start making trouble for your back. Since it opposes the gluteus maximus, it can ultimately lead to overstrain on that part of your body (not to mention the back compression it can cause, which can make further trouble). Thus any pronunciation that sounds like “sore ass” is not so far off the mark. Ah, the heartbreak of sore asses, thanks to an overshort psoas.

Joined by fate by April

Last fall I was hit by a stop sign
by a truck that failed to stop;
the driver was caught by a red light
and sent off to jail by a cop.
I was taken away by an ambulance
and laid by a nurse in a bed
in a hospital built by a river
and by morning was back from the dead.
I was kept in a room by the river
by the nurse to heal and stay.
I was seen by my bed by the window
by the nurse twice every day.
I was healed by the power of beauty:
I was struck by the nurse’s face
and blown away by her lovely lips
by the time I left that place.
The nurse was known by April
by friends and by people about
and, by George, she was called by the next month
by me to ask her out.
By April she had been courted
by me for half a year
and by then it was time for a ring
to be given by me to my dear.
We were wed by a tree by a lake
by a hill by the moon by a priest
and the joining by God was feted
by the stars by our friends by a feast.
Now I’m joined in my life by April
and by fate we will never be parted,
and my wall is bedecked by the stop sign
by which this all was started.
By the wall a cradle’s been placed,
and by April all will know why:
by and large, my April’s grown pregnant,
and we’ll have a child by and by.

At first glance, English may seem to be going through a paradigm shift, with a  dizzying array of ways to put lipstick on the pig. This naturally provokes some push-back, even withering criticism, as we struggle to wrap our heads around it. But the upshot remains to be seen. Should we just run with it? Or should we step up to the plate and think outside the box? If you talk about the elephant in the room, will that mean you’re not a team player? Will you get thrown under a bus? And, on the other hand, at the end of the day, are we even truly at a crossroads?

More to the point, did that paragraph provoke you to hyperemesis?

We Anglophones have an apparently inexhaustible facility for creating clichés. A sharp turn of phrase or a particularly engaging image sparks interest and spreads like wildfire, and soon enough it’s tired and stale. This is not a new thing. Some hackneyed clichés of yesteryear have become so cemented that we continue to use them even though we no longer quite remember the literal reference. The result is sometimes what are called eggcorns: misconstrual of idiomatic words or phrases into things that make more sense to the modern eye and ear. This is how just deserts becomes just desserts, tide me over becomes tie me over, strait-laced and strait and narrow get straightened, sleight of hand gets slighted… Forget about trying to nip these in the bud in the nick of time; many of them are as old as the hills. You may look for the silver lining and try to make lemonade, but…

What? Oh, fine, I’ll stop. What I’ve really been doing is illustrating a central point of all of these: they’re all picturesque. They all involve metaphors. But in many cases the imagery is etiolated. The words are still there, and we could play with the images if we want, but for general use they are like posters or pin-ups that have been on the wall too long and are now faded to pale shades of cyan.

But that is how language works. Most language you use is made of metaphors and images that have lost their vividness and, in many cases, are no longer recognizable as imagery at all. Let us look at some “plain” words that could replace the clichés. Going through a paradigm shift – well, we could say changing, but that comes (much changed!) from a Latin word for bartering and exchanging, and may deriver further from an older word for bending or turning back. We could replace push-back with rejection, but reject is from Latin for “throw back.” If we prefer to understand rather than wrap our heads around, it ought not to take us too long to see the under and stand in understand. And if we go with comprehend? There’s the Latin again, meaning “grasp, seize” (remember that anything that can grab things is prehensile, from the same root). If you prefer betray to throw under a bus, you may want to know that the tray in betray conceals a Latin origin in trans plus dare, meaning “hand over.” And so it goes. Look back over this paragraph and try to find one verb I have used that isn’t a figurative use of a word with a physical reference: work, make, look, go… even prefer comes from Latin for “put in front, carry forward.”

In this way (as in a few others) English is like Chinese. I’m not talking about the Chinese use of imagery and metaphor, which is considerable; I mean the written form, the Chinese characters. People who aren’t familiar with Chinese characters may think of them as pictograms, resembling closely what they refer to. People who try to learn Chinese find very quickly that the characters generally give the reader nothing obvious to grab onto. This is because the characters are like our words and phrases that have had the imagery worn off them.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Look at the character for “look”: 看. Does that look like looking? How about after I tell you that it’s made of two parts, and the 手 was originally a hand (see the fingers? it has changed somewhat) and the 目 was originally an eye (it rotated 90˚ a long time ago; make the outside box curved and see the inside lines as making the edges of the iris)?

Now look at the character for “good”: 好. How does that look good, or like anything good? Well, the 女 part is the character for “woman,” and originally looked like a line drawing of a standing woman with her hands held in front of her. The 子 part is the character for “child,” and if you curve the top part and bend the crossbar down, you might begin to see an infant in swaddling clothes. It seems that, to the scribes who determined this character, the epitome of goodness was a mother and child.

Such is the way it goes, too, with our picturesque language. Time and tide, change and overuse, leave the imagery behind. But if you know how to look, it’s still good – and not altogether lacking in character.

What?

Oh, come on. Something that’s capricious is a caprice. The cause of anything malicious is malice. So my dinner was a delice. It…

How do I pronounce it? OK, OK, caprice and malice don’t rhyme. Which does delice go with? I’m going with the rhyme with caprice. Really, otherwise it sounds too much like jealous. Which you would be, by the way, if you knew how good my supper was. It was at this place called…

Yes, true, it could rhyme with vice, since vice is what – originally – is vicious. But I’m still going with the French-style pronunciation. After all, if you’re in Montreal, which is where I am today, you –

In Lachine. I was in Lachine for dinner, and then a dance performance. That counts. It’s now officially part of Montreal. But OK, yeah, it didn’t use to be, and it’s a ways out of the centre. Anyway, the restaurant is called Shangrila, and it serves Nepali, Indian, and Italian food.

No, I’m not making that up! Look it up for yourself. It’s an unprepossessing place, but I enjoyed the heck out of my dinner, which was “chatpate au poulet” (that’s how it was spelled on the menu) and two bottles of Cheetah beer. What’s with the suspicion here?

Mm-hmm, yes, I suppose we could say delicion instead of delice, given that suspicious has suspicion. But we could also say deliciosity. Which, however, is hardly shorter than deliciousness, which is not quite the same as delice, because something can be a delice but not really a deliciousness.

Why? Because I’m not making this up. Look, there really is an English word delice. It’s just not used anymore. Don’t ask me why. They still use the word delice in French.

Well, that’s where English got it from, of course. As I was about to say before. French made delice from Latin delicium, and English just plain old took it. The first meaning was ‘delight, pleasure, joy, enjoyment’, according to the OED. After that came the countable: a thing that causes the sensation of delice. But both senses are out of use now. I don’t know why.

I’ll tell you this: anyone who has what I had for dinner tonight ought surely to be motivated to bring delice back. Deliciousness just takes too long to say when you’re busy eating.

“To wit?” it asked.

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

“To who?” it asked.

“To you, of course,” I said.

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

“I want to know of love,” I said.

“To woo,” it said.

“Yes. Is that all there is?”

“To it?”

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

“To who?” it asked.

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

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

“But I lack the nerve,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do it,” it said.

“Thanks. Thanks for the encouragement.”

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