May 2008 Archives
Of Politics and Politicians: reptilian; prevaricate; Punch and Judy show; bombastic; Grand Guignol; logrolling;
earmarks (earmarking)
More Short Words: skep; knurl (knurling); cadge; plage; lido; ween (prate);
ret; scutch
Beer, Glorious Beer: brewster; spile (shive); gastropub; rathskeller;
estaminet; beer pong; malt
Glacial Geology: esker; cirque (cwm); kame; drumlin;
sérac (crevasse); fjord; tarn
Of Politics and Politicians
With
the
reptilian – cold-bloodedly treacherous (also, of course,
relating to or resembling reptiles)
Throughout his career, his [Ken
Livingstone's] real skill always been in political manipulation rather than
administration. … there was always something reptilian about this
town hall Machiavelli as he twisted his way to the top of
– Daily Mail, May 3, 2008
prevaricate – to avoid giving a direct answer to a question (note:
unlike to lie, it has a sense of evasion and of stalling, delaying)
[Great
etymology: from Latin for ‘to straddle’, which is in turn from varus
‘bent’ and either ‘bowlegged’ or ‘knock-kneed’. (Some cite Latin for ‘walk
crookedly’.)]
As far as the Electoral Reform Society is
concerned, the Labour party has stalled and prevaricated at every
turn.
– The Spectator, Apr. 16, 2005
Barbara George, the first high-ranking
Mountie found in contempt of Parliament for misleading MPs, now almost
certainly will become a historic example for all bureaucrats and other
witnesses who dare dodge, prevaricate, deceive or lie to
parliamentary committees.
–
For
today’s term, the dictionaries give only the literal definition, so I’ve had to
author the metaphorical one. Any corrections are cheerfully accepted.
Punch and Judy show – internal bickering that is low-spirited,
vicious, destructive and endless
[After
“that most tempestuous of puppet partnerships, Punch and
Judy,” spouses in a traditional English puppet for children, who constantly
bicker, battle and beat each other.]
… caricatured …
–
Is there anything to be done about the Punch
and Judy show that is our House of Commons? They shout, they heckle.
When an MP from an opposing party is speaking, the noise is worse.
– Diary Hugh Muir, March 21, 2008
bombastic – grandiose but with little meaning
[a
stuffing made of cotton fiber was called bombast, from Greek bombux
"silkworm"]
Hell hath no fury like a black pastor
scorned. … Obama should have thrown Wright under the semi a long time ago. …
Wright's apocalyptic rhetoric and bombastic verbiage have
poisoned Obama's mantra of hope and change.
–
Grand Guignol – a sensational or horrific dramatic entertainment
[from
the Grand Guignol theatre in
This
word seems appropriate for gory "slasher" movies. More about it in a
soon-upcoming theme.
The Grand Guignol between
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has to end eventually …
– Wall Street Journal, Apr. 30, 2008
logrolling – (N. Amer.) an exchange of favors between
politicians: “You vote for my project and I’ll vote for yours”
(sometimes,
a like exchange between writers, artists, etc.: “You write a blurb praising my
book and I’ll write one praising yours.”)
Urban lawmakers are normally happy to vote
for crop subsidies in exchange for food-stamp votes from rural lawmakers. It is
textbook political logrolling.
– San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 2008 (I
omit the details, so as not to be partisan!)
earmarks (earmarking) – “special spending projects that
members of Congress procure for their home districts, often with little or no
oversight” (Reuters, Apr. 30, 2008)
This
quote should give you the flavor:
Rep. Don Young [of
– Boston Herald, Apr. 30, 2008 (ellipses
omitted)
More Short Words
I'm
feeling lazy this week, so we'll do a theme that's easy for me: short words.
skep – an old-style beehive: dome-shaped, and made
of straw or wicker
And in Granny Weatherwax’s garden the bees
rose out of their hives. The emerged like steam, colliding with one another in
their rush to get airborne. The deep gunship hum of the drones underpinned the
frantic roars of the workers. … The swarms spiraled up over the clearing,
circled once, and the broke and headed away. Others joined them, out of
backyard skeps and hollow trees, blackening the sky.
– Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
knurl – a small protruding knob or ridge (also as verb)
knurl or knurling is also the name for something we see every
day without knowing the word.
knurling – a surface of such bumps, to improve grip
It seemed that those trees would suit
admirably … to serve as new masts and spars, once they were trimmed of limbs
and stripped down. The limbs were not so low on them that the of the trees
would have too many knots or knurls once they were cut to the
right lengths. "Ya chose well, sor,” the carpenter allowed to Chiswick.
– Dewey Lambdin, The French Admiral
All of the bits … have chrome bit holders
with a diamond knurl for fingertip control.
– Professional Tool & Equipment News,
Feb. 1, 2006
cadge – to beg or sponge off of <cadge a free cup of
coffee>
From
Christopher Isherwood:
The only fault I find with badgers
Is that they’re such appalling cadgers.
If you ask one out to dine
He'll want a dozen of your wine
To take home. If he likes your
prints
He'll bother you with clumsy hints:
"I say, who's that picture
by?...
It's my birthday next July..."
Once, one asked me for my car -
This was going rather far -
So I said, "Wouldn't you
rather
Take this ring? It belonged to my
father;
It's set with diamonds." Calm
and bland,
He thanked me and held out his
hand.
I had an apoplectic fit:
The Badger walked away with it.
plage – the beach of a seaside resort
[ultimately
from Greek plagios ‘oblique; slanting’; thence to Late Latin to Italian
to French (‘beach; shore’) to English]
Now she took her hand away. She examined his
face with a certain seriousness. She said: ‘All men are pigs, but some are lesser
pigs than others. All right. I will meet you. But not for dinner. What I may
tell you is not for public places. [N]ot at the fashionable plage.’
Bond said: ‘Three o’clock then. I shall be there.
Goodnight.’
– Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (ellipses
omitted)
['plage'
also has a meaning used mostly in astronomy, but that is a separate word, with
the same spelling but different origin. OED says, “In French the two words plage
region and plage beach … have been confused since the 16th cent.”]
Yesterday’s
word plage brought us the beach. Let’s enjoy another day in the water.
lido
– a public open-air swimming pool or bathing beach
[from
the Lido, a famous beach resort near
With 2008 racing from winter to summer … ,
mid-May finds us enjoying glorious weather and turning our thoughts to happy
days at the local lido. …
– The Londonist, May 9, 2008
ween – (archaic:) to think; suppose; believe
Bonus word: prate – to talk idly and at length (typically
about trivial matters); to chatter
The
poem providing our quote is both witty and deep. Do take a moment, at the link,
to enjoy it in full.
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind. …
[The six “observe” by touch. They come away
with six very different views, for each has "seen" only apart of the
whole.] …
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
– John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), The Blind Men and
the Elephant
You
may have heard of Ernest Rutherford (1871 –1937), who won a Nobel Prize and is
considered the father of nuclear physics. He grew up in the wild frontier of
colonial
… he helped at his father’s flax mill in
Brightwater where wild flax cut from aboriginal swamps was retted,
scutched and hackled for linen thread and tow. He lost two younger
brothers to drowning; the family searched the Pacific shore near the farm for
months.
– Richard Rhodes, The Making of the
Atomic Bomb
ret – to soak (flax, for example) so as to separate the fibers
[cognate with to rot]
scutch – to separate the valuable fibers from the woody parts (of
flax, for example), by beating
Beer, Glorious Beer
I’m
being visited by an out-of-town friend who regards beer with great partiality
and erudition. So let’s spend a week enjoying that glorious nectar.
Every
USn has heard of voyage of the ship Mayflower, carrying the Pilgrims to
what later became the
brewster – a female brewer
Sara [Barton] is one of
– The Telegraph, Apr. 23, 2005
We’ve
previously seen a story of a woman brewing behind her home.
“Now Luckie Jamieson had brewed a peck of malt, and set the liquor at her door
to cool. Luckie Simpson's cow came wandering by, seeking what she might devour,
was attracted by the foaming beverage, smelt, tasted, and yielded to the
tempter.” See the link for the upshot.
spile – a small wooden bung (peg) to plug a cask’s hole or to
regulate the flow [also, the same for the hole in a tree tapped for sap]
Often
a cask is stopped with a shive, which has a hole in it to accommodate
the spile.
[R]eal ale shows complexity and a higher
degree of drinkability than you will ever find in an over-chilled, highly
carbonated lager or keg ale. [T]rue believers have a certain glazed look in
their eyes. Because real ale undergoes a secondary fermentation in the cask, it
requires some careful attention from cellarmen who must replace the wooden bung
or shive with a porous spile when the beer has
reached optimum carbonation
– The Age,
A few days before he thought the sap would
begin running, he and Robert would traverse the
– Jennifer Chiaverini; The Sugar
gastropub – a bar where high quality food is served
"After all,” I said, “ a pregnant girl
shouldn’t be forced to go to a bar alone, should she?” “I suppose not,” he
said. “Would you settle for a slightly up-scale gastropub?"
- Emily Giffin, Something Blue
(ellipses omitted)
rathskeller – a beer hall or restaurant in a basement
[German
Rathaus town hall (Rat council)+ Keller cellar]
Every college campus has its beer hall, its rathskeller,
its underground den of inconsequential iniquity-someplace where the philosophy
majors can huddle in the corners hashing over eros and mortality while the
athletes sit at the bar discussing fucking and sudden-death overtime.
– James Morrow, The Philosopher's
Apprentice
Another
kind of drinking establishment:
estaminet – a small café
(Seems
to be used only for a café in
[prob.
from Walloon èstaminê, staminê cowshed, little café; prob. from stamen
post to which a cow is tied at the feeding trough. But there are other
theories.]
“Do you speak French, Blundell?”
The Superintendent grinned sheepishly.
“Well, sir, not to say speak it. I could ask for a spot of grub in an estaminet,
and maybe swear at the garsong a bit.”
– Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors
More
on college beer practices, as in our last quote yesterday.
beer pong – a popular collegiate drinking-game, which has gone
“mainstream” enough to have national tournaments. Play ping-pong with several
part-filled beer cups on each side of the table, and when the ball lands in
your cup, you must drink that beer.
I went down into the basement to rescue
James Leer and found him at the Ping-Pong table, facing Philly Warshaw with a
paddle in his hand. They were playing Beer Pong, a hazing
ritual to which, in his wild days, Philly had subjected all suitors and young
male visitors to the house, myself included.
– Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
malt – grain that has been sprouted (to convert the seed’s starch
into sugar) and then dried. The first step in brewing.
… beer is as sophisticated as wine. [W]ith
wine you have red and white varieties based on the grapes used to make them.
But with beer, for starters, you have dozens of kinds of malts.
You have the pale malts, toasted malts,
roasted malts. You have malts that
give flavor like toffee and caramel and honey. Then you have hops. They
contribute not only a degree of bitterness but can add flavors like citrus,
apricot, even a jasmine. Then we haven't even begun to talk about strength.
When you add more malt, you add more sugar, which brings a
higher degree of fermentation and more alcohol.
– Newsweek (web), May 19, 2008
Glacial Geology
A
state park I recently visited triggered the idea for a theme about the geology
related to glaciers.
esker – a long winding ridge of sediment (often
resembles a railroad embankment) deposited by meltwater streams under a
retreating glacier
[Irish
eiscir. Here’s another
picture.]
Sometime after noon the hunters climbed a
long, narrow hill of sand, gravel and boulders, deposited long before by the
leading edge of the glacier broaching farther south. When they reached the
rounded ridge of the esker, they stopped for a rest, and
looking back, Ayla saw the glacier unshrouded by mists … for the first time.
She could not stop looking at it.
– Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters
cirque – a bowl-shaped hollow (like an
amphitheater), at the upper end of a mountain valley, esp. one an the
head of a glacier or stream.
The glaciers are getting closer every day,
millions of tons of pale blue ice bulging down through their U-shaped cirques
…
– Edward Abbey, Down the River
This
word has some oddities. It’s pronounced ‘surk’. It’s from Latin for ‘circus’
(for the amphitheater-shape?) And its synonym is cwm, one of the few
English words with none of the classic vowels.
kame
– a conical hill of water-rounded sand or small stones, deposited by glacial
meltwater
Pronounced
like came, the past tense of to come. Our quote is a continuation
of yesterday’s quote.
We come to a dome-shaped pile of rocks about
twenty feet high. This, we learn, is a kame, a deposit
left here by the retreating glacier. Some of us climb it – overcoming a kame
– and let it go at that.
– Edward Abbey, Down the River
drumlin – an elongated hill, often tear-shaped,
formed by moving glacier ice – the blunt end faces into the glacier (contrast kame,
formed by meltwater). Common in
A
famous drumlin is Breed’s Hill in
Hill
Cumorah [in upstate
– Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of
Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (ellipses omitted)
Today’s
picture will make clear why today’s word comes from French for ‘cottage
cheese’! [Compare serum, which means ‘a watery fluid’ – like the whey of
cottage cheese.]
sérac;
serac – a pinnacle or sharp ridge of ice, among the crevasses of a
glacier
(crevasse
– a deep fissure or chasm)
Our
quotes give a literal usage, plus a nice figurative one from Lawrence of Arabia.
The icefall was crisscrossed with crevasses
and tottering seracs. From afar it brought to mind a bad
train wreck, as if scores of ghostly white boxcars had derailed … and tumbled
down the slope willy-nilly. … it is in the nature of seracs to move, the habit
of seracs to topple.
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
About [the sand flat], in scattered
confusion, sat small islands and pinnacles of red sandstone, grouped like seracs,
wind-eroded at the bases till they looked very fit to fall and block the road;
which wound in and out between them, through narrows seeming to give no
passage, but always opening into another bay of blind alleys. Through this maze
Auda led us unhesitatingly.
– T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
A Triumph
fjord – a long, narrow arm of the sea, running up
between high banks or cliffs. Glacially eroded.
Fjords
can be strikingly beautiful. Common in
An
orphaned mountain goat kid is tugging at the heartstrings of a boat crew. Only
three weeks old, the pure white kid with black button eyes isn't yet weaned so
it hadn't eaten since Friday, when its mother drowned in the sea. It is likely
to die from dehydration. The goat can't escape its predicament because the
terrain in the fjord is too steep, Weber said. "This little
guy is either going to die in place there or it's going to get rescued."
–
Today’s
paper reports that the kid made it and is recovering in the zoo,
“bright, alert and responsive”.
Recall
that a cirque is “a bowl-shaped hollow like an amphitheater, at the
upper end of a mountain valley”.
tarn – a lake that develops in the basin of a cirque
(more generally, a small mountain lake)
I
prefer to quote modern usages, but this older one from Poe is too delicious to
pass up.
I reined my horse to the precipitous brink
of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the
dwelling …
– Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House
of Usher