February 2008 Archives
Homonyms of Everyday Words: pawl;
toque (toque); wight; bight;
greave; skerry; throe
Valentine's Day L-words: lickerish; licentious; lubricious; libertine; leer; lewd; lust; lascivious; lambada; lechery
Pregnancy, from Z to A: zygote
(ectopic); chloasma; tocology; enceinte;
gravid; midwife toad; parturient
(parturition)
Logic, Reasoning and Thought: maieutic (Socratic, hebamic); chop logic; paralogism; sophism;
induction; dialectic; hypercorrection
Unfamiliar Homonyms of Everyday Words
This
week we’ll present words that sound just like more familiar words.
pawl [pronounced like pall] – a hinged bar
whose free end engages the teeth of a ratchet wheel, allowing it to turn in one
direction only
For
example, a spring-loaded mechanism, held in place by a pawl, will release when
the pawl is released. The pawl serves to ‘store’ the energy of the spring.
Here’s one application:
No man alive could haul a crossbow’s string
by arm-power alone and so a mechanism had to be employed. … The archer would
place a cranked handle on the screw’s end and wind the cord back, inch by
creaking inch, until the pawl above the trigger engaged the
string.
– Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale
One toke over the line, sweet Jesus, one toke over the line.
Readers
from the marijuana era may recall this 1970 song by Brewer and Shipley. Today’s
word, pronounced like toke, can mean either of two types of hats.
Complicating matters, a third hat has the same spelling but is (I believe)
pronounced tukue.
toque [rhymes with poke] – 1. the chef's hat, tall and white (more fully, toque blanche)
2. a certain small woman's hat, brimless and close-fitting
tuque or toque (Canadian; rhymes with duke) – a knitted
cap in the form of a closed bag: one end is tucked into the other to form
the cap
wight [pronounced like the
color white] – a living being; a creature (obsolete)
For
the first time, a woman has a serious chance to become President of the
|
There was once a Neolithic Man, An
enterprising wight, Who made his chopping implements Unusually
bright. Unusually clever he, Unusually
brave, And he drew delightful Mammoths On the
borders of his cave. To his Neolithic neighbors, Who were
startled and surprised, Said he, "My friends, in course of time, We shall be
civilized! We are going to live in cities! We are going
to fight in wars! We are going to eat three times a day Without the
natural cause! We are going to turn life upside down About a
thing called gold! We are going to want the earth, and take As much as
we can hold! We are going to wear great piles of stuff Outside our
proper skins! We are going to have diseases! And
Accomplishments!! And Sins!!!" |
Then they all rose up in fury Against
their boastful friend, For prehistoric patience Cometh
quickly to an end. Said one, "This is chimerical! Utopian!
Absurd!" Said another, "What a stupid life! Too dull,
upon my word!" Cried all, "Before such things can come, You idiotic
child, You must alter Human Nature!" And they all
sat back and smiled. Thought they, "An answer to that last It will be
hard to find!" It was a clinching argument To the
Neolithic Mind! |
Today’s
word, from Old English for "bend, etc.", was first related to a bend
in a rope, then to coastline. (It is related to bow.)
bight [pronounced like bite] – 1. a loop in a rope; also,
the middle, slack part of an extended rope 2. a bend or curve in a
shoreline (or other); also, a wide bay formed by such a bend or curve
coastline: "The coast is everywhere
scalloped with wide, sweeping bights separated from each other by
capes," an Allied terrain study noted.
– Rick Atkinson, The Day of
ropes: I could just drift, he thought, and
sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and The
Sea
Lopsang abruptly pulled her aside and
girth-hitched a bight of rope to the front of her climbing
harness.
– Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal
Account of the
greave [pronounced like grieve] – leg armor worn below the knee
[usually
plural, since you have two legs. from Old French for ‘shin’]
The book [XI of the Iliad] opens with
a marvelous description of him putting on his armor: greaves with
silver clasps, a magnificent breastplate covered in gold and tin and adorned
with twin serpents of blue enamel, a sword decorated with silver and gold, and
a shield of blue steel crowned with a terrifying Gorgon’s head – a warrior’s
haute-couture dream.
–
I looked down the lists to the king. His
squire was stripping him of his heavy armor. … They unstrapped the greaves
from his legs and the guards from his arms …
– Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
skerry [pronounced like scary]– a rugged isolated sea-rock; a
reef
Off in the ocean to the north-northeast, he
picked out a skerry where, in 1950, a boat heading in to Heimaey
had lost its power and crashed on the rocks.
– John McPhee, The Control of Nature
throe – a severe pang or spasm of pain, as in childbirth
Throe is pronounced like throw; indeed, it was originally
spelled similarly, throwe. Each word appears to come from Old English þrawan
'to twist, turn, writhe'. (The þ is an old letter, pronounced th.)
[The actors] simulated agonized death throes,
rolling around on the ground, twisting their bodies into grotesque shapes and
making hideous faces.
– Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Valentine's Day L-words
Ah
Valentine’s Day! The time for a lad and a lass, for love and lust.
Ever
notice how many such words, particularly the lusty ones, begin with the letter l?
(Lusty lads leer lewdly at loose lasses. Not to mention lesbian
and Lysistrata!) I wonder why. This week, in honor of the fleshy aspects
of Valentine’s Day, we’ll enjoy l-words of that sort.
We
start with one which also fits last week’s theme, in that it has the same
pronunciation as a more familiar word.
lickerish – 1. lecherous, lustful, wanton 2.
greedy; desirous
Licorice is from Greek for "sweet root" (glykys
'sweet' [as in 'glucose'] + rhiza ‘root’). Some pronounce the last
syllable as -iss; some say -ish. ‘Lickerish’ matches the latter, -ish
pronunciation of licorice.
Regarding actor John Todd, who played Tonto
in the Lone Ranger radio program:
I contrived to spend most of whatever free
time I had with him, transfixed by his lavish, sometimes lickerish,
often riotous account of a life in the theater …
– James Lipton, Inside Inside
Alternative
forms of lickerish are lickerous; licorous; liquorish; liquorous.
Today’s
word emphasizes lack of moral restraint. The amorality is usually in a sexual
context, but, as the first quote shows, it need not be.
licentious – 1. without the restraint of moral discipline (esp.
in sex) 2. having no regard for accepted standards
[Article title:] Licentious
and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to
– Journal of African History, Jan. 1, 2007
It was the third daughter, Aysha, whom Jack
liked most. … Although she was the youngest, she seemed the least innocent of
the three: something in the way she looked at Jack, as she leaned over him to
place a dish of spicy prawns on the table, unmistakably revealed a licentious
streak. She caught his eye … and Jack giggled.
– Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Today’s
word is related to lubricate. Our quote conveys its sense of sly evil,
of snaky sexuality.
lubricious – 1. lewd; wanton; salacious 2. slippery
smooth, with oil or grease; also, shifty or tricky
He began to tell us a strange story, from
which … we learned that, to please the cellarer, he procured girls for him in
the village … . But he swore he acted out of the sheer goodness of his heart …
. He said all this with slimy, lubricious smiles and winks …
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
libertine – a man who acts without moral restraint, especially
sexually (also used as an adjective)
This
word was not originally negative or sexual, but it has degraded over time. Akin
to liberty, it originally meant a freed slave, then a free-thinker in
religious matters, and then a free-thinker generally, “one who follows his own
inclinations” (OED). (Shakespeare uses it this way sense, and you’ll still see
it occasionally.) But at about the same time it came to mean "a dissolute
or licentious person,” with the emphasis on sexual dissolution. The earliest
quote in this sense gives the flavor: “The whole brood of venereous Libertines,
that knowe no reason but appetite, no Lawe but Luste.” (1593)
Our
quote, by a contrast, emphasizes the moral dimensions of the word.
"Remember," cried
– Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Yesterday
I pointed out that libertine was originally not a negative word, but has
degraded over the centuries. It’s not an uncommon change. Here are four more
words within our theme which have similarly degraded: they were not orignially
negative and sexual.
leer – to look (at) with a sly, immodest, or evil expression (noun:
the look itself)
lewd – crude and offensive in a sexual way
lust – intense or unrestrained sexual craving (also as verb)
lascivious – lewd, lustful
● Leer
is an old word meaning 'cheek', and to leer originally meant 'to look
obliquely or askance'; that is, 'to glance over one's cheek'.
● Lewd
originally meant 'of the laity, the non-clergy'. The word degenerated to mean
'unlearned,' then 'vulgar and common,' then 'base, bad and vile;' and finally
the current sense of 'sexually low and unchaste'.
● Lust
originally meant simply strong and vigorous desire, often positively. The word
can still be used in this positive sense: lust for learning; lust for life.
The word has two different adjective forms that make this distinction: lusty
has positive sense of vigor (a lusty cry), while lustful stresses
the negative sense of uncontrolled sexual desire.
● The Latin forerunner
of lascivious had the positive sense of 'playful', but early
church writers used it as a scolding word, and by the time it came into English
it had already become negative. In other languages the same root led to words
that not sexual, or are neutral or even positive: 'yearn, play, frolic'; or
'desire'; or 'love'; or 'flattery'; or 'greedy' -- but also to a Greek word for
'harlot'.
Here’s
a word you might not have expected in this theme! But it fits, doesn't it?
lambada – a fast, rhythmical, erotic dance, from
You’ll
understand better by seeing the dance. So here’s a
video clip.
– Financial Times, Sept. 15, 1988 (thanks to
OED for the quote)
[Most
say that the name lambada is from Portuguese for ‘beating, lashing’.
Some trace it to a Brazilian form of that word, which means ‘the wave-like
motion of a whip,’ and indeed, that sort of motion seems to be characteristic
of this dance.]
lechery – excessive and offensive indulgence in sexual activity
… Abel Ferrara's gritty [movie] "Ms
.45" (1981), about a New York woman who, after being sexually assaulted twice
in one day, goes on a shooting spree targeting lecherous men.
–
The
dictionaries vary a bit on this one, and I think they have the slightly the
wrong shading.
Some
(Merriam Webster; Compact Oxford) speak of excessive sexual desire, but
to me the word implies not just excessive wanting, but excessive doing.¹
(Action rather than mere contemplation, if you will –– and pooh to any
wiseacre who argues that "excessive sex" is a contradiction in
terms.) And I also think it requires that the excess be offensive and
pathetic, with a sense of preying upon others. (Even if you feel that a married
couple is spending ‘excessive’ bedroom time together, you wouldn’t say they
were being ‘lecherous’.)
What
do you think?
Pregnancy, from Z to A
A
natural follow-up to our ‘love and lust’ theme is a ‘pregnancy’ theme. [As
Ogden Nash says of June brides, “This year’s June is next year’s Junior.” Right
about this time of year, too.] Our theme, like pregnancy, goes from Z to A, or
more exactly, from zygote to accouchement. Our beginning word is from the
extreme end of the dictionary.
zygote – the cell resulting from the fusion of egg and sperm [from
Greek zugotos ‘yoked’]
My injury forces me to spend more time with my
morn than I have since I was a zygote.
– Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts
We’ll
try to keep this theme from becoming overly scientific, but please permit just
a bit here.
Pregnancy begins with a fertilized egg. This egg is
called a zygote. Normally, the zygote attaches itself to the lining of
the uterus. With an ectopic pregnancy, the zygote implants
somewhere else. More than 95 percent of ectopic pregnancies occur in a
fallopian tube. …
An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. About one in
every 40 to 100 pregnancies is ectopic.
– CNN International - Dec 21, 2005
Bonus word:
ectopic – in an abnormal place or position. [Greek ektopos ‘out
of place’]
Apart
from the familiar terms ‘trimester’ and ‘morning sickness’, there are few words
pertaining to the mid-months of pregnancy. Here’s one.
chloasma – a patchy brown skin discoloration
[particularly
occurs on a woman's face from hormonal changes of pregnancy. from Greek for
‘green’]
Her face was showing the faintest hint of chloasma,
plum blotches on her cheeks like she was blushing all the time. Mask of
pregnancy, her mother called it. Ellen was four months gone.
– Michael Knight, Ellen’s Book, in New
Stories from the South 2003 (Shannon Ravenel, editor)
tocology – the science of childbirth; midwifery or obstetrics
Recently,
a
"any person who holds current
ministerial or tocological certification by an organization”
–
thus allowing midwives to practice without collaboration with a physician.
Apparently he was able to sneak it in because no one understood what the clause
meant!
(
Today’s
word has two very different senses, each from the concept of ‘to gird; to
encircle closely’.
enceinte – 1. pregnant 2. a fortification
encircling a castle or town; also, the area protected
[a clothing designer specializing in
maternity wear:] Rogan's customers, their bellies as round and fecund as poppy
heads, are the flip side of easy-to-dress stick-thin supermodels. Rogan also
makes wedding dresses (from $600), leaping genres in a single bound for the
bride who's enceinte at the altar.
– Georgia Straight (
May 13, 1565 Castel Sant'Angelo-The Borgo-
– Tim Willocks, The Religion, as
serialized in New York Times, May 20, 2007
gravid – pregnant
A
nice simile today.
… the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in
off the
– Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Let’s
face it: pregnancy is uncomfortable, and a woman can rightly think, “Men! They
don’t have to lug this load around for months!” So our lady readers may
appreciate an animal where the male carries the developing eggs, wrapped
around his legs.
midwife toad – a certain genus of toad of
You’ll
find the midwife toad on the Guardian’s list of World's Weirdest
Amphibians. On that list I also liked the olm (a blind salamander with transparent skin that
lives underground and can survive without food for 10 years) and the Chinese giant salamander (which can be 1.8m long, more than
5 feet).
I’d
promised you pregnancy “from Z to A, from zygote to accouchement.” But since accoucheuse
(midwife) has already been our word of the day a few years ago, I’ll just direct you to
it, and offer a different 'pregnancy' word.
parturient – in labor; about to give birth (parturition –
the action of giving birth; childbirth)
First
used in reference to a saying of Horace: parturient montes,
nascetur ridiculus mus, “The mountain has labored and brought forth a
ridiculous mouse;” meaning “great labor but little result.”
And so it came about that at thirty-eight,
after many years of experience as a student of child development and of
childbirth in remote villages – watching … while old women threw stones at the
inquisitive children who came to stare at the parturient woman – I
was to share in the wartime experience of young wives all over the world. My
husband had gone away to take his wartime place, and there was no way of
knowing whether I would ever see him again.
– Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter,
in Modern American Memoirs (Cort Conley, co-editor, and Annie Dillard,
editor)
Logic, Reasoning and Thought
This
week’s theme is Logic, Reasoning and Thought.
Our
first word also fits last week’s theme of “pregnancy words”. Coming from Greek
for midwife and to act as midwife, it can be thought of as
“giving birth, or drawing out, to the student’s innate knowledge.” A good
example might be a writing teacher, helping the student to bring forth the
student’s own story.
maieutic – a technique in which a teacher (rather than giving
information) asks a series of questions to draw out, from the student, ideas
previously latent in the student’s mind
[A
more common word for this is Socratic. A few sources also give hebamic
as a rare word of the same meaning.]
Early in January Eliot returned to
– Valerie Eliot, in introduction to The
Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound
… maieutic thinking is
the kind of thinking characteristic of voice coaches, orchestra conductors,
painting teachers, writing teachers, and so on. Maieutic thinking
is intellectual midwifery. It is extractive, eductive, seeking to elicit the
best thinking possible from one’s charges.
– Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education
We
have a delicious word today, and I’m surprised how rarely it’s used
chop logic – convoluted, contentious and deceptive argument
The
dictionaries have it as choplogic or chop-logic, but it’s more
commonly written as two words, as above.
But how can one explain the hypocrisy, chop
logic and outright lying now being mustered daily in defence of hunting
with hounds?
– The Guardian, Dec. 28, 2000
Judge Jackson showed little patience for
Microsoft's dismissive attitude toward the case and its wordplay about
integrated products, and put the company's lawyers in their place after they
played chop logic – what one newspaper called "compliance
with a raised middle finger" – with his preliminary injunction …
– Wall Street Jourrnal, March 9, 1999
Honoring
William F. Buckley, Jr., he of the elephantine vocabulary, who passed away
yesterday, we quote his wisdom.
paralogism – an illogical argument, a fallacy, esp. one
which the reasoner is unconscious of or believes to be logical (contrast sophism)
A good debater is not necessarily an
effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through
which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and
thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue --
which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist
has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.
– William F. Buckley, Jr., The Unmaking
of a Mayor
Yesterday’s
word paralogism means an illogical argument, made without intending or
being aware that one is being illogical. In contrast:
sophism – a specious but fallacious argument, used either deliberately
to deceive or mislead, or to display ingenuity in reasoning
Often
used to describe the positions of a politician with whom one disagrees. I had a
bit of difficulty finding a quote that wouldn't be political 'fighting words'!
I will now tell you what I do not like.
First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid
of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press,
protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and
unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury …
– Thomas Jefferson to James Madison,
December 20, 1787, concerning the then-current draft of the US Constitution
The
word induction is much less familiar than its counterpart deduction,
but I'd suggest that induction is much more important in real life.
induction – inferring a general law or principle from the
particular instances observed
(contrast
deduction – drawing a conclusion from a general law or principle
already known or assumed; reasoning from generals to particulars)
… induction, the
process at the very heart of the scientific method … that sudden insight into the
solution of a problem that psychologists sometimes call the “Aha” reaction.
Great turning points in science often hinge on these mysterious intuitive
leaps.
– Martin Gardner, The Colossal Book of
Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems
In any event, the problem was not to be
solved by deduction from declared axioms, with the conclusion certain. Everyday
problems respond to a different logic, based on induction and
inference. [and much later:] The method of science is induction
from observation and experiment.
– John McLeish, The Story of Numbers: How
Mathematics Has Shaped Civilization
Today’s
word has several meanings. I’ll give the two I think are most important.
dialectic
–
the tension between two interacting/conflicting forces
–
the art or practice of reaching truth by the exchange of logical arguments
First sense: Soon, jazz had its
own canon of masters, its own dialectic of establishment and
avant-garde: Armstrong the originator, Ellington the classicist, Charlie Parker
the revolutionary, and so on.
– Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening
to the Twentieth Century
Second sense [speaking of the
Buddha]: … one of the greatest personalities of all time. … Perhaps the most striking
thing about him was his combination of a cool head and a warm heart … He was
undoubtedly one of the greatest rationalists of all times … Every problem that
came his way was automatically subjected to cool, dispassionate analysis. … He
was a master of dialogue and dialectic, and calmly
confident.
– Huston Smith, The World's Religions:
Our Great Wisdom Traditions
We
end our “words about logic” with one about the logic of language.
hypercorrection – a language misuse (spelling,
pronunciation, grammar) made by analogy to a form that is thought to be “better
speaking”
The
classic example is the speaker who, having been told that his statement “John
and me need to eat” should have been “John and I”, then carefully says,
"OK, then give John and I something to eat.” Another example is an
overdone attempt to avoid the mispronunciations of one’s ethnic group:
… without the hypercorrection
of Negroes who make “again” rhyme with “rain.”
– Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People:
A Memoir
Would
another example be the British use of -ise rather than -ize, an
in “civilise” rather than “civilize”?
As
one authority puts it, “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest
etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately.”¹ But this is the sort of nonsense up
with which I will not put!
¹