From Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. I’ve found the book indispensable for years now—its discursiveness is a lunatic joy to get lost in. Anyway, the above passages extend/unwind from the root ap/apo; I found it while looking up the eytmology of poseur.
DEALING WITH THE ETYMOLOGY OF COFFEE — from William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee (1922)
Origin and translation of the word from the Arabian into various languages—Views of many writers
THE history of the word coffee involves several phonetic difficulties. The European languages got the name of the beverage about 1600 from the original Arabic qahwah, not directly, but through its Turkish form, kahveh. This was the name, not of the plant, but the beverage made from its infusion, being originally one of the names employed for wine in Arabic.
Sir James Murray, in the New English Dictionary, says that some have conjectured that the word is a foreign, perhaps African, word disguised, and have thought it connected with the name Kaffa, a town in Shoa, southwest Abyssinia, reputed native place of the coffee plant, but that of this there is no evidence, and the name qahwah is not given to the berry or plant, which is called bunn, the native name in Shoa being būn.
Contributing to a symposium on the etymology of the word coffee in Notes and Queries, 1909, James Platt, Jr., said:
The Turkish form might have been written kahvé, as its final h was never sounded at any time. Sir James Murray draws attention to the existence of two European types, one like the Frenchcafé, Italian caffè, the other like the English coffee, Dutch koffie. He explains the vowel o in the second series as apparently representing au, from Turkish ahv. This seems unsupported by evidence, and the v is already represented by the ff, so on Sir James’s assumption coffee must stand for kahv-ve, which is unlikely. The change from a to o, in my opinion, is better accounted for as an imperfect appreciation. The exact sound of ă in Arabic and other Oriental languages is that of the English short u, as in “cuff.” This sound, so easy to us, is a great stumbling-block to other nations. I judge that Dutch koffie and kindred forms are imperfect attempts at the notation of a vowel which the writers could not grasp. It is clear that the French type is more correct. The Germans have corrected their koffee, which they may have got from the Dutch, into kaffee. The Scandinavian languages have adopted the French form. Many must wonder how the hv of the original so persistently becomes ff in the European equivalents. Sir James Murray makes no attempt to solve this problem.
Virendranath Chattopádhyáya, who also contributed to the Notes and Queries symposium, argued that the hw of the Arabic qahwah becomes sometimes ff and sometimes only f or v in European translations because some languages, such as English, have strong syllabic accents (stresses), while others, as French, have none. Again, he points out that the surd aspirate h is heard in some languages, but is hardly audible in others. Most Europeans tend to leave it out altogether.
Col. W.F. Prideaux, another contributor, argued that the European languages got one form of the word coffee directly from the Arabic qahwah, and quoted from Hobson-Jobson in support of this:
Chaoua in 1598, Cahoa in 1610, Cahue in 1615; while Sir Thomas Herbert (1638) expressly states that “they drink (in Persia) … above all the rest, Coho or Copha: by Turk and Arab calledCaphe and Cahua.” Here the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic pronunciations are clearly differentiated. Continue reading “Coffee Etymology”
The strongest and strangest literature usually has to teach its reader how to read it, and, consequently, to read in a new way. Jason Schwartz’s new novella John the Posthumous is strong, strange literature, a terrifying prose-poem that seizes history and folklore, science and myth—entomology, etymology, gardening, the architecture of houses, the history of beds, embalming practices, marital law, biblical citations, murder, drowning, fires, knives, etc.—and distills it to a sustained, engrossing nightmare.
What is the book about? Was my list too choppy? Our unnamed, unnameable narrator tells us, late in the book: “Were this a medical, rather than a marital history—you might then excuse so conspicuous a series.” (His series, of course, is different from mine—or perhaps the same. John the Posthumous, as I’ll suggest later, is a series of displacements).
So, John the Posthumous is a marital history. There. That’s a summary, yes? Ah! But there’s conflict! Yes, this is a book about adultery, about cuckoldry! (“Cuckoldry, my proper topic . . .”). Adultery is threaded into the titles of the three sections Schwartz divides his novella into: “Hornbook” — “Housepost, Male Figure” — “Adulterium.” There’s something of a poem, or at least a poetic summary just there.
Do you sense my anxiety about writing about the book? Some need to deliver a summation? Perhaps I’m going about this wrong. How about a sustained passage of Schwartz’s beguiling prose. From the first book, the “Hornbook”:
The lake is named for the town, or for an animal, and is shaped like a blade.
Adulterium, as defined by the Julian Statute, circa 13 B.C., offers fewer charms, given the particulars of winter, not to mention various old-fashioned sentiments concerning execution. Mutilation, for its part, is more common—the adulterous wife, or adultera, to use the legal term, surrenders her ears or nose, and, on occasion, her fingers—with divorce following in short order. Some transcriptions neglect the stranger, or adulterer, in place of graves—a simple matter of manners, this, not withstanding the disquisition upon the marriage bed. Others relate ordinary household details—dismantling the chairs, and visiting the windows, and departing the courtyard.
A gentleman, remember, always averts his eyes.
Cuckold’s Point, near Brockwell, in London, is most notable for its gallows—the red sticks recall horns—and for the drowning of dogs.
Schwartz’s narrator’s sentences do not seem to flow logically into or out of each other. They seem to operate on their own dream/nightmare logic, as if the words of John the Posthumous were the concordance to some other book. The single line paragraph about the lake (source of its name not entirely determined; its shape best expressed in simile) shifts into a horrific legal history of adultery and then into Cuckold’s Point, a bend in the Thames that owes its name to a simile.
Simile is perhaps the dominant mode of John the Posthumous. Schwartz’s narrator condenses and expands and displaces his objects, his characters, his themes. Sentences sometimes seem to belong to other paragraphs, as if multiple discursive discussions wind through the book at once. Our narrator tells us that
The common wasp measures roughly two hundred hertz. This is well below the frequency of, say, a human scream. Anderson compares the sound of a dying beetle with the sound of a dying fly. (The names of the families escape me at the moment.) The common bee, absent its wings, is somewhat higher in pitch. (Carpenter bees would swarm the porch in August.) The true katydid says “Katy did” — or, according to Scudder, “she did.” The false katydid produces a different phrase altogether, something far more fretful. Wheeler concludes with the house ant and the rasp of a pantry door. Douglas prefers a hacksaw drawn across a tin can. (We found termites in the bedclothes one year.) A sixteenth note, poorly formed, may be said to resemble a pipe organ or a hornet. The children set their specimens on black pins.
Here, entomologists (note how Schwartz always pulls his language from his reading, his research) try to describe the language of insects. Interspersed we get images of mutilation and impalement (“The common bee, absent its wings”; “The children set their specimens on black pins”) along with interjections of insects infesting intimate domestic spaces (“We found termites in the bedclothes”). The passage also picks up the novella’s motif of sharp objects (“a hacksaw drawn across a tin can”). There’s something simultaneously banal and horrifying about the tone of this passage, its language a juxtaposition of scientific observation and cloudy personal recollections—all contrasted with “the frequency of, say, a human scream.”
Infestation, violence, and betrayal shudder throughout John the Posthumous, erupting in strange moments of deferral and transference: “When the horse becomes a house, furthermore, termites appear on the floor,” reads one bizarre line. “A woman says ‘dear’ or perhaps ‘door,’ and then two names—or perhaps only one,” we’re told. “Even the earliest primers compare the heart’s shape to a fist or to a hand waving goodbye,” the narrator points out.
At one point, the narrator laments: “how I regret these grisly, inexpert approximations.” In context, he’s working through a series of etymologies (linking shroud to groom and wishing that dagger had some connection to dowager), but the phrase—“grisly, inexpert approximations”—approaches describing the narrator’s program of deferral and displacement.
Etymology repeatedly allows the narrator (an approximation of; an attempt at) a basis of description:
The doorframe disappoints the wall, as the wall disappoints the door. The mullions divide the yard into nine portions. But portions—or, if you like, portion—is an unlovely word. Guest and host, for their part, issue from the same root—ghostis. Which means stranger, villain, enemy—though naturally I had believed it to mean ghost. And the figure in the corner, lower right, is neither my daughter nor her hat, but just a paper bag in the grass.
The passage is remarkable. We begin with the mundane but symbolically over-determined image of a doorframe, along with an equally mundane wall and door—all connected, bizarrely, with the verb disappoints, producing an uncanny effect. The mundane mullions that divide the yard reveal the perspective of our narrator. He is looking out. He seems to be trapped in a house, but the house is always displaced, shifting—it’s many houses. Portion leads him etymologically to ghostis (a root I’ve long been obsessed with), a word that condenses a series of oppositions—and, as the narrator points out, provides its own imaginary ghost. The final sentence shifts us again; it seems to belong to another paragraph. But perhaps not. Perhaps we continue to survey the wall, the door, the mullions—do we look out the window and see the figure that is not (and thus, in the realm of the narrator’s program of imaginative displacement, is, or rather, approximates) his daughter or her hat? Is it a photo on the wall? Both?
I’m tempted to keep on in this manner, pulling out passages from John the Posthumous and riffing on them, but maybe that’s a disservice to its potential readers, who I think should like to be assimilated by its strange strength on their own terms. Schwartz’s narrative doesn’t cohere so much as it enmeshes the reader, who must learn a new way of reading, of grasping (or releasing) his series of objects and histories and rumors and rituals.
The novelist and editor Gordon Lish (who has championed Schwartz) famously advised: “Don’t have stories; have sentences.” Great writing happens at the syntactic level, which cannot be separated from plot—the language is the plot. John the Posthumous embodies this aesthetic, creating its own idiom, composed from the real and the imaginary and the symbolic, an idiom that refuses to yield a straightforward calculus or grammar. The effect is wonderfully frustrating; the novel nags at the reader, confounds the reader, haunts the reader.
Haunt has its own strange etymology, likely deriving from the Old Norse heimta, “to return home,” through to Old French hanter, “to be familiar with,” popping up in Middle English haunten, “to use, to reside.” We can take it all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root kei — “lie down, sleep, settle, hence home, friendly, dear.” Etymologically, all houses are therefore haunted—the series of houses (all different, all the same) in John the Posthumous especially so. This is a horror story, a haunted house story, a story larded with killers and connivers and adulterers. Another passage (I promise just to share this time and withhold remarks):
In the cellar: a pull saw and a hasp, a jack plane, a wrecking bar, and a claw hammer. A tin contains a cap screw and a razor blade. A jar contains the remains of a carpet beetle.
I dismantle the chairs and place all the parts in a crate. I station the broom beside the garden spade.
The killer in the cellar, in folklore, is discovered by a mute child. The prisoner in the cellar survives a fire or a storm—but is later mauled by wolves.
There were fleas last year, and squirrels the year before that.
I feel like I’ve offered enough of Schwartz’s uncanny prose here to appropriately intrigue or repel readers. The vision here is dark and the prose imposes an alterity that the reader must work through. This book is Not For Everyone, but it might be for you—I loved it. Haunting, frustrating, and disturbing, John the Posthumous is one of the best new books I’ve read this year.
John the Posthumous is new in trade paperback and e-book from OR Books on August 6th, 2013.
Read a 1999 interview with Raymond Pettibon in BOMB. Excerpt:
I read as I write, write as I read. If it used to take me five minutes to read the whole newspaper, now, my mind wanders, and then five minutes later I wonder, Gee, did I read that? I used to take notes, and I have notebooks full of drawings and notes that were partly quotations, and I’ve done a lot of marginalia, writing in books. I’m usually reading a number of books at a time, and whether I get through an individual one is probably unlikely. I’ve lost interest in narrative. (sigh) At least in the sense of seeing how a story comes out at the end. There’s a type of reading where you get lost in the narrative and you become part of the story and you’re compelled to finish. I don’t really have any interest in that. For me, reading has become more microscopic, more about dissecting the work. It may start on the level of the novel, then go down to theme or style, then to a paragraph, and finally a sentence. Or the sentence itself becomes about structure, or the words in it. Probably the most obvious example of that kind of reading is James Joyce. It becomes a kind of disease. Every text becomes related to another one, even in a different language, down to each individual word, which then becomes a clue into the etymology of the word, and then that etymological tree. A different context, a different language…you’re just making these associations from one thing to another. I used to start out with a simple drawing that would begin as an idea, and then my writing would make some associations with something else. And then, you know, a day later, or a year later, or whenever, the whole page would be covered with small, finely written text. And it would become a lot of things that were meant to be just in one drawing, expanded into this while still part of my notes. Voluminous notes. You do actually get lost in that morass of associations.
(From The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots by Joseph T. Shipley)
I had never heard of James Lipton’s dictionary of terms of venery, An Exaltation of Larks, or The Venereal Game before I found it wedged between some old etymological dictionaries I was browsing in my favorite book store, but when I picked it up I knew I was going to buy it almost immediately. Part dictionary, part etymology, and part linguistic game, An Exaltation explores those strange collective noncount nouns of English that anglophiles (like me) find so charming and weird. The first part of the book deals with some of the more common terms of venery, like “pride of lions,” or “skulk of foxes”:
But Lipton soon gives over to more esoteric terms, and then eventually plays with outright invention. The book’s illustrations recall Max Ernst’s surrealist graphic novel Une Semaine de Bonté; they also remind me of the recapitations of recent Biblioklept interviewee Click Mort. Anyway, a very cool book, likely a cult favorite, and lots and lots of fun.
In his new book Euphemania, a cultural history of euphemisms, Ralph Keyes takes a frank and often bawdy look at why we use euphemisms in social and political discourse, even when such evasions can degrade communication. “We all rely on euphemisms to tiptoe around what makes us uneasy, and have done so for most of recorded history,” writes Keyes, adding that “Euphemisms are a function of their times.” As such, Euphemania surveys different euphemisms throughout different cultures and times, from ancient Greece to the Roman republic, to Shakespeare’s England and the Victorian era (a treasure trove of euphemisms), to our modern age–which Keyes argues is not nearly as frank and open as we might like to think; indeed, one of his most intriguing arguments points out that modern discourse has simply opened up more topics to euphemism, including medicine, politics, and advertising.
Keyes doesn’t intend his book to be a straightforward history or dictionary of euphemisms; rather, he writes “it’s a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place. Euphemizing most often results from an excess of politeness and prudery, but it can also demonstrate creativity and high good humor.” Although Keyes always has a keen eye on the prudish mores of which ever age he’s discussing, he balances this analysis with plenty of humorous examples. His tone is fun and earthy, drawing examples from literature, film, TV, advertising, and political rhetoric. Between discussions of the Bowdlerization of Shakespeare, W.C. Fields’s difficulties with censors, or dialog from The Wire, Keyes also holds forth on the strange etymologies of our words. The root of the word bear (the mammal, not the verb) simply means “brown” or “the brown one” — the word bear is an unexpected euphemism, a refusal to name a lethal wild animal. Such examples can often magnify one’s awareness of how indebted our language is to euphemisms. Even when we reach for one of those Latinate technical words, we’ve really just picked up another culture’s euphemism. Our medical standby penis, for example, comes from the Latin word for “tail.” Vagina was a Roman synonym too–it means “sheath” or “scabbard.”
Euphemania is best when Keyes is riffing on naughty bits like these–or sex, or excretions, or violence, or all those things we’d like to otherwise gloss over. Most readers will likely gravitate to chapters like “Anatomy Class” or “Speaking of Sex.” Although Keyes is never dull (if anything, he’s at times too effervescent), his book is less convincing when discussing why we use euphemisms, simply because, at least to this reader, the answers are so obvious–euphemisms are part of the intrinsic codes of our culture. They make it easier to discuss unpleasant things; they build a sense of shared knowledge; they alleviate anxieties of race, place, and gender. At the same time, the cost of euphemisms–particularly in contemporary political discourse–can be astounding, leading to the evasion or outright denial of dramatic problems. Keyes doesn’t offer a pat solution to this problem, which is really better, if one thinks about it, because after all, wouldn’t an overly simplified, self-satisfied answer be just another dodge, another evasion, another euphemism? Good stuff.
Euphemania is new in hardback from Hatchette/Little, Brown and Company.
Upfront: We like words. We think etymology is fun. We consider Bill Bryson something of a hero, and Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origins of English Words is a staple at Biblioklept World Headquarters. We can spend hours at a site like Luciferous Logolepsy, and it’s not just obscure words we love–we’re also likely to pore over nerdy linguistic battles at Word Court for far too long. Unlike most people, we think puns are a sophisticated way to crack a joke. If any of these proclivities seem to align with your own tastes, you’ll likely enjoy Henry Hitchings’s history of the English language The Secret Life of Words as much as we did.
Hitchings organizes his book into sixteen parts, each named for a word that will inform the narrative thrust of that particular thrust. After opening, appropriately with “Ensemble” as an introductory overture, Hitchings uses “Invade” as his key term for chapter two. Throughout the book invade comes not only to signify an obvious entry point for a history of English (the Norman conquest of England in 1066), but also a general trend of just how ubiquitous (and perhaps invasive) English has become. Hitchings’s take veers toward post-colonialist theory, with a heavy dash of historical-materialist tendencies to boot. In a chapter titled “Angst,” he comments that “it is impossible not to see the long shadows cast by Marx, Freud and Einstein, the architects of socialism, psychoanalysis, and the atomic age.” Darwin and the American Transcendentalists (whom Hitchings saliently credits with greatly expanding the English language) also figure heavily in his readings. Hitchings is not all Frederic Jameson and post-colonialism, of course (not that we mind that sort of thing around these parts), but his liberal readings on contemporary linguistic issues like the place of Black Vernacular English in modern America are welcome and refreshing. Still, Hitchings’s Secret Life is a balanced affair, drawing not just on readings of master artists in the English language, like Shakespeare, Joyce, and the Romantic poets, but also on a seemingly-endless bibliography of dictionaries, almanacs, histories, and etymologies (Hitchings’s chapter notes, bibliography, and index run to nearly a 100 pages).
At the heart of it all, of course, are words. Each page brims with little etymological factoids. Hitchings clues us in to the fact that venison once simply referred to all hunted game, not just deer. He avers that “It is quite widely known that poppycock comes from the Dutch for ‘doll’s shit.'” (Is it really that widely known? We had no idea). He tells us that while molasses derives from the Portuguese word melaços, we don’t really know where we get the term rum from (some will be content to remain drinking in ignorance, of course). We had no idea that the game chess gets its name via the Persian word for king, shah. And while Hitchings lards his book with plenty of fun little details, they all serve (and serve well) his greater narrative; namely, a history of the English language. While this book isn’t for everyone, we certainly enjoyed it and have already given it a little spot on a shelf of books we return to often, books in English about English. Fun stuff.
The Secret Life of Words is now available in paperback from Picador.
Conservative Republicans seem to be having an awfully tough time with their vocabulary lately. They keep misusing words, poor old dears. In particular, these confused politicos keep using words that have traditionally had a positive connotation in a pejorative sense. Therefore, we present a little gloss that might help them with their sorry diction.
1. Liberal
“c.1375, from O.Fr. liberal “befitting free men, noble, generous,” from L. liberalis “noble, generous,” lit. “pertaining to a free man,” from liber “free,” from PIE base *leudheros (cf. Gk. eleutheros “free”), probably originally ‘belonging to the people'” (Online Etymological Dictionary)
From the Indo-European root “leudh,” meaning “grow, rise,” as in progressive (Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words)
2. Elite
“1823, from Fr. élite “selection, choice,” from O.Fr. fem. pp. of elire, elisre “pick out, choose,” from L. eligere “choose” (see election). Borrowed in M.E. as “chosen person,” esp. a bishop-elect, died out c.1450, re-introduced by Byron’s “Don Juan.” (Online Etymological Dictionary)
“1a singular or plural in construction : the choice part. 1b singular or plural in construction : the best of a class” (Merriam-Webster)
3. Maverick
“1867, “calf or yearling found without an owner’s brand,” in allusion to Samuel A. Maverick (1803-70), Texas cattle owner who was negligent in branding his calves. Sense of “individualist, unconventional person” is first recorded 1886, via notion of ‘masterless.'” (Online Etymological Dictionary)
Samuel A. Maverick refused to brand his cattle, ostensibly claiming that the practice was cruel. However, by not branding his cattle, he was able to claim any stray cows as his own property. What a devious genius! How’s that for laissez-fair?
Clearly, a maverick would never let himself be branded with someone else’s label. He’d cut his own path, forge his own trail, create his own hackneyed metaphor, and not, f’r’instance, vote with the President 95% of the time.
4. Conservative
“Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” ( Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary)
5. Change
“From the Indo-European root “(s)kamb: bend, change; exchange, barter . . . Fr, change, exchange. Gc, change, changeable, unchanging, etc. . . . This root is related to camp, campus, campaign, etc.” (Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words)
Synonyms for “change” include: modification, variation, transformation, revolution, conversion, adjustment, amendment, difference, and alteration.
When used in politics, the word connotes a dramatic shift in ideology from the previous regime to its successors (e.g. “The idea that a new set of Republicans would be a change from the old set was both a paradox and a misuse of language”)
Biblioklept 