Author Archives: wordmatters_admin

Literally Hysterical Signs from the Women’s March

Leave a reply

Here’s an important thing to know, if you are interested in language and gender: the word “hysterical” (along with “hysteria”) comes from a Greek root meaning “uterus,” as in the word “hysterectomy”.   I was in college when this was pointed out to me.  I learned then that for millennia, women were diagnosed as “hysterical” under the belief that one’s uterus could travel around the body and cause trouble with other organs, as evidenced by symptoms as varied as coughs, depression, nervousness, and general troublemaking.*  Recommended “treatments” varied from marriage and pregnancy to genital stimulation to complete bed rest.

A quick search produces many discussions of the Wandering Womb fallacy,** including this long and brilliant essay by author and teacher Terri Kapsalis, who pulls together Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,”*** ancient diagnoses and current politics, and so much history, and even a women’s march (last year’s) at the end.

I have slowly been removing “hysterical,” with its historical image of women out of control (or deemed out of control by others), from my repertoire of words that mean “funny,” a task that became much simpler once I realised “hilarious” filled exactly the same connotative slot for me.****

However, I found these signs from last Saturday to be, indeed, and appropriately, hysterical:

Sign "Don't Tread on Me" with uterus and fallopian tubes as snake  Sign "Public Cervix Announcement: I'm Not Ovary-acting"

Sign "Grow a Pair" with ovaries

——–

*It’s possible that my remembered image of a uterus supposedly traveling far enough to throttle one’s brain was satire, or exaggeration on my part, or possibly even just a misplaced Douglas Adams quote.  …But maybe not.

**Or, if you prefer, “phallacy”.

***With the vital takeaway that anyone who reads or assigns “The Yellow Wallpaper” is contextually obligated to read or assign the 1913 essay entitled “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”.

****Thanks to Adam Rex for this marketing comic, which kind of settled the word “hilarious” in my active repertoire, and for the eponymous book, The True Meaning of Smekday, an adventure both hilarious and thought-provoking, and one of my favorite middle-grade books.

Some Scissors Do Go Both Ways (But Not Any You’re Likely to Come Across)

Leave a reply

left-handed scissors, in Wescott package, with LEFTY in big letters on the packagingI recently requested, and acquired, a pair of left-handed scissors for my office. I was pleased to discover, with a quick search, that it was possible to order explicitly left-handed titanium-bonded scissors that exactly matched the scissors in the copy room cabinets. In fact, as I discovered when they arrived, they say “LEFTY” only on the package and not on the scissors, which say merely “Westcott titanium” and are therefore indistinguishable from the right-handed scissors except for the orientation of the blades. I held them up together to check. And then, alas, I had to check the other right-handed scissors in the cabinet to make sure I took my own set back to my office.

So here’s a thing about myself that I find frustrating: in spite (or possibly because) of the fact that I can read upside down and backwards,* I have a really hard time holding onto pattern changes in three dimensions. I turn something over, and, poof, everything I know about it vanishes. I’m not good with Rubik’s cube (I can get one side, but then I lose track), not good with folding washcloths so they face the same way when they’re done (actually, I can do this now, if I concentrate), and not good at remembering how the blades of scissors should be oriented to each other. I say things like, “okay, so the bottom blade is on the left,” and then I pick up a different pair of scissors and suddenly I’m not sure whether I’m holding them the same way, or which blade is now on the bottom, or whether I really was talking about the handle. I think it’s because I don’t have words for the transformation. Which means I can’t trust myself to look at scissors and know whether they’re for left- or right-handers. I have to trust other people, or the marketing.

right-handed scissors for kids, poorly marketed by Westcott as "left or right handed"And why shouldn’t I trust the marketing? I’m so glad you asked. I don’t trust the marketing because Things Have Changed in scissor handedness world. For example, I’ve asked whether there are left-handed scissors available for my kid in a craft situation, and I’ve been told that all the scissors should work for both hands. And when I dismiss this as ridiculous, and go off to find scissors (for kids or grownups) in an office supply store, I find packages that actually, explicitly say “left or right handed”.** I look at the scissors. They look like scissors. They are oriented only one way. There is no possibility that they can work the same way for right-handed and left-handed people. This is what we call creative marketing – or, possibly, lying.

And no one would have made these claims when I was a kid. Either they’d have the little scissors with the green covered handles and “LEFTY” carved into the blade, or they’d apologise and say I’d have to use the right-handed ones. None of this “don’t worry; they’re the same” nonsense.

Just to be clear, the reason it’s important to have left-handed scissors for left hands is that the angle of force is reversed when you switch hands. It’s possible – and often necessary – for a lefty to use right-handed scissors (or vice-versa; if you haven’t tried it, you might find it educational, particularly with older scissors), but instead of the natural movement of your thumb forcing the blades against each other, the natural movement forces the blades away from each other. So if there is any give in the joint at all, you have to work to counter that force – resulting in awkward cutting and generally a slight gouge in your thumb where you have to pull back against the metal. At the time, I believed this to be generally known … and yet, over time, this knowledge seems to have dissipated.

I have a hypothesis as to why this is, and it is twofold:
1) Right-handed scissors (and scissors in general) are now better made. Better joints, smoother motion, less awkward angling, fewer gouges. No problem. At least…no obvious problem. And this is certainly preferable to the earlier models. It’s just not accurate to claim, in one’s marketing, that these scissors are made for both hands.
2) The gouges were, of course, much clearer when scissors were made just with metal. And then there were plastic-coated handles, and then thicker plastic handles. At some point, there came a craze for scissors with big, swooping, molded plastic handles that were ergonomically designed and only faced one way. So then OF COURSE they could only be used for one hand. And I have several pairs of lovely left-handed scissors at home that I have loved and cherished and would never offer to my right-handed spouse except in times of dire need.

left-handed scissors with ergonomic handles

But then, according to my hypothesis, people shifted their understanding to fit the new reality and came to believe that the problem with right-handed scissors was that left-handed people couldn’t get their hands into them properly. Take away the ergonomically exclusive handles and, voila! They can be used with both hands.

(Facepalm here, with either hand, or, indeed, both.)

However, there is no way to make regular scissors symmetrical (without a special patent; see below), which means there is no way they can be used equally with both hands. If the companies want to go ahead and make them all left-handed and then claim that they are “for left or right hand,” then I might be on board with it. While I have not been able to tell by looking so far (for reasons mentioned above), I think it is a pretty fair guess that no, this is not what they’re doing. And for this reason, I wrote the following in my request for the scissors, along with the link I had found:

“IMPORTANT: Whatever brand it is, it actually has to have the blades reversed to be for lefties. Anything that says it works “for both hands” is basically saying “we’ve made these right-handed scissors that left-handed people can use if they don’t mind using right-handed scissors.” So, not that. (-:”

However, about the title of this post: In my most recent search for the “either hand” marked scissors, I discovered that there is in fact a patent from the 1970s for ambimanual scissors.*** These are scissors that can actually be used in a symmetrical way by either hand. Here is the abstract (emphasis mine):

sketch from US Patent US 3978584 A, depicting a type of scissors that has one blade with a large handle, drawn upright in the center, and one blade with a smaller thumb-hole, shown in two positions (one fainter than the other) to demonstrate that this blade can be rotated to either side and fixed in place.

sketch from US Patent US 3978584 A

“Scissors which may be used with equal ease and efficiency by either a left-handed or right-handed person. The scissors include two generally flat rigid, blade portions which are each sharpened on both edges to provide two sets of cutting edges. The blade portions are pivotally connected to one another and each includes a handle portion on one end. One of the handle portions is adapted to fit the thumb of the user while the other handle portion is larger to permit engagement of two or more fingers of the same hand in the normal fashion of scissors use. The thumb handle is pivotally mounted to its respective blade portion to permit pivotal movement from one selected position at one side of the finger handle as used during right-handed operation to a second selected position at the opposite side of the finger handle for use during left-handed operation. A detent or lock is provided to secure and hold the thumb handle in either of the selected positions.”

Clearly one has to be careful, what with the double edges. But I think it’s pretty cool.

By the way, I have also found that Wikipedia has a nice, brief description of the symmetry issue (including reference to the aforementioned patent).  I actually had forgotten the bit about the visibility of the cutting edge!
—–

* The reading upside-down and backwards thing has caused other problems, as in my early trips to England, where people drive on the other side of the road, and where (since, despite believing that we all have learned to “look both ways” before crossing a street, we actually tend to look only one way at a time) crossing the street can be treacherous. Many London streets kindly warn foreigners where the traffic will be by having very clear “look left” or “look right” signs, with arrows, painted into the road as you step off the curb (sorry, kerb). And this is lovely, and entirely useful. The problem for me comes when there’s a median in the road. For then they have a new sign, just after the median, telling you to look the other way. Which is also fine, except if you happen to read upside-down automatically and therefore don’t particularly distinguish between the sign after the median, which is for you, and the one right before it, which is for people coming the other way. Oops… Fortunately, I never actually got hurt (or picked up as a spy) due to this problem.

** I was pretty disappointed to look back in my notes from such a trip back in August and to learn that the offending scissors were *also* made by Westcott.

*** They are in fact called Ambidextrous scissors, but I prefer to use the alternative I was offered in adolescence by my friend Anna Licameli, summer program roommate, whom I credit with leading my second foray into identity politics. (The first, much earlier, was my beleaguered dad saying, “Why do you keep saying the tooth fairy is female?”) Within our first hour of meeting, she demanded to know why I was wearing my watch on my left arm if I was left-handed, and soon afterward pointed out to me that “ambidextrous” glossed as “right-handed on both sides” and should therefore be avoided.

Word of the Week*: Apricity

Leave a reply

A couple of months ago, a friend posted a list** of “Old English Words to Revive,” and I was charmed to see that the first word on the list was “apricity”.

I first came across the word apricity nearly ten years ago, in a book by dictionary collector Ammon Shea called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Shea sat down every day for a year (okay, he changed position occasionally) and read the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover (even the 451 pages of self-explanatory “un-” words), narrating as he went, with different chapters focusing on dictionaries, or libraries, or blinding headaches… At the end of each letter’s chapter he presented a list of words he found particularly noteworthy, and I began a practice of learning at least one from each chapter. Due partly to the primacy effect and partly to the fact that it instantly became and remained my favorite, my word from the first chapter is the one I have remembered longest. Here’s what he has to say about it:

Apricity (n.): the warmth of the sun in winter.
“A strange and lovely word. The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram’s 1623 English Dictionarie. Not to be confused with apricate (to bask in the sun), although both come from the Latin apricus, meaning exposed to the sun.”

I have been most pleased to have this word at my disposal of late, since I’ve found that no matter how cold it has gotten in the past few months, and especially in the past few weeks, nor how well bundled up I am (which has been pretty well, in fact, for which I’m extremely grateful), there is something remarkable about stepping into the sunlight and feeling just the tiniest respite. And so I’ve been remarking upon it.

shadow of train bridge on snowy river

A view from the train last week.

There are some other interesting and illuminating references to the word “apricity” scattered about the Internet. Here’s one from young adult author Julie Glover (in a post from 2014 that starts off with a link to a BuzzFeed list of similarly obsolete words, illustrated entirely with owls):

“Apricity. Here’s a word you’ll especially appreciate this time of year. Apricity is the warmth of the sun on a cold day. Have you enjoyed a moment of apricity lately? The word hails from the Latin apricus, which means exposed to the sun. It’s the same stem from which we (eventually) got the word apricot. The word is first referenced in a dictionary from the 1620s, but it no longer makes the cut in current dictionaries.
Which is a shame, because I could really use a word for that sense of sunny warmth as soon as I walk out from the coffee shop I’m currently in and emerge into the frigid (well, frigid for Texas) weather. I plan to revel in the apricity anyway.”

Yum, apricot.***  And here’s another, from Merriam-Webster’s Words at Play feature:

About the Word
This word provides us with evidence that even if you come up with a really great word, and tell all of your friends that they should start using it, there is a very small chance that it will catch on. Apricity appears to have entered our language in 1623, when Henry Cockeram recorded (or possibly invented) it for his dictionary The English Dictionary; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words. Despite the fact that it is a delightful word for a delightful thing it never quite caught on, and will not be found in any modern dictionary aside of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Example
“These humicubrations, the nocturnal irorations, and the dankishness of the atmosphere, generated by a want of apricity, were extremely febrifacient.” Lorenzo Altisonant (aka Samuel Klinefelter Hoshour), Letters to Squire Pedant, 1856****

Shea says, at one point in his book, referring to certain words that have gone out of favor:
“Even though I do not feel a need to remember these words, I do feel a need to know that someone has remembered them. It is comforting to me to know that they have not been wholly cast aside, and are still available to anyone who cares to visit the OED, whether it is some poet trying to find the right word to make verse properly obscure or a head-scratching child trying to make sense of some obscure poet she’s been assigned to read in school. The fact that the OED cares so much about words that almost everyone else happily ignores is one of its finest traits.”

So here’s one I feel the need to remember, and clearly, despite Merriam-Webster’s caution, it also wants to make a comeback. Let’s see whether we can bring this one to an higher level of consciousness and give it (at least) the moment in the sun that it truly deserves.

—–

* More alliterative than predictive, I think. Especially since my original idea for this post was back in November. The fall had been so unseasonably warm, and the transitions back and forth so abrupt, that even the chilly days near Thanksgiving seemed extra cold. Had no idea then that we’d soon be facing a nationwide cold snap quite like this one!

** Hat tip to Kathryn Perko.
Image apparently from Breathe Magazine via FB page of Watkins Books, an esoteric bookshop in London.
With a caveat that I’m posting it here because it’s pretty. “Old English” should be taken with a grain of salt,***** and I’m actually not on board with reviving all of these words.****** “Schoolman”? Not only is it fairly transparent (that is, someone could make it up independently), but also we’ve all been working rather hard to have *fewer* professional names that specify sex/gender. It does have an evocative feel to it, but I think it should stay happily archaic.

***My first taste of a fresh apricot, after many years of eating dried ones as childhood snacks, echoed my response to eating a real fig for the first time: “Oh! It’s…it’s like a Fig Newton, only more so!”

****Indeed.

*****Or possibly less salt; it has been pointed out to me (thanks, Dan D.) that the list creators may have been trying to say “Old [English words]” rather than “[Old English] words”.  Which I suppose I can see…

******There are some I like a lot, though, and could imagine using: “As it happens, the alternative to bedward braiding is to awaken in the morning with total elflock.”

On Specificity

Leave a reply
rooibos

rooibos flowers (mightyleaf.com/organic-rooibos.html)

A new colleague of mine introduced me to rooibos tea a couple of weeks ago*. Since several people in the office were wondering how to pronounce it correctly, I took to the internet to find out more. And there I was on the Rooibos Wikipedia page**, where I checked the pronunciation:

“Rooibos (Anglicised pronunciation: /ˈrɔɪbɒs/ ROY-bos; Afrikaans pronunciation: [rɔːibɔs], meaning “red bush”; scientific name Aspalathus linearis) is a broom-like member of the Fabaceae family of plants growing in South Africa’s fynbos.”

And then it continued: “The generic name comes from the plant Calicotome villosa, aspalathos in Greek…” And I thought, ha ha, generic name: what’s next, the brand name? And then I thought, wait, this is the scientific naming system we’re talking about, which means that “generic name” is referring to … the genus. And so it immediately follows (as it does right there on that Wiki page) that the next thing should be the “specific name,” or, in fact, the species: “The specific name linearis comes from the plant’s linear growing structure and needle-like leaves.”

I have known the word pairs genus/species and general/specific for a long, long time, but how often have I thought about them together? And now it turns out they’re relatives. Click, click, and now these words will be forever linked in my head. Thank you, rooibos tea!  (Or, thank you, Wikipedia.)

This also brings to mind the time I was trying to create a word puzzle*** by coming up with two separate words that matched the irregular plural pattern -en (singular) and -ina (plural) but were not themselves related. Alas, I no longer remember the original words that demonstrated this plural pattern****. But I do remember how excited I was when I thought of the words “stamen” (part of a flower) and “stamina” (endurance) … which lasted for about five minutes, until I looked them up and discovered that “stamina” actually is the plural of “stamen”.

Well, phooey.

Except that now, whenever I hear the word “stamina,” I think of flowers.

——

*I quite like it.  Hat tip to Nick Mancuso.

**Which, by the way, is worth reading. The history and economics of the plant are fascinating.

***Long-ago hat tip to Susan Garrett for suggesting this puzzle type.

****I suspect, since I was working as a medical editor at the time, that they were something technical.

Incorrigible Language Lessons*

Leave a reply
cover, The Unseen Guest

Book 3, The Incorrigible Children series

I first read The Mysterious Howling, book 1 of the series The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place by Maryrose Wood, as an advance reader copy, some months before its publication date (in 2010).  I was smitten and couldn’t wait to keep reading, but since the first book hadn’t even come out yet, the second was clearly far off in the misty future. And so my attention wavered, and by the time the second, and third, books appeared, I couldn’t recall the sense of urgency and let them go.

Until Now.

Last week I read book 2, The Hidden Gallery. I was then cautioned by a frustrated friend that book 6 had had its publication date delayed already multiple times throughout this year and was now scheduled for next year, so I thought, oh, I should take it slowly. And yet by the next day I was flying through book 3, The Unseen Guest. Which is where we are now. And because there were many many places where I felt compelled to stop and read excerpts out loud to those around me, I have decided to share some of them here as well. (I’m also taking this opportunity to go back and reread book 1.)

The general story is this: Young governess in Victorian England (she’s 15) is brought to a grand house to work with extremely untrained and fairly mysterious children. More mysteries ensue. My experience of the Incorrigible Children so far places the books as a hybrid cross between Joan Aiken’s Willoughby Chase novels (by temperament**) and Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events (by narrative style). The latter comparison, I hasten to clarify, is not so much due to unrelenting unfortunate events but instead to the narrator’s habit, rather like that of our heroic governess herself, of Teaching Us Things along the way.

Here are some examples, which should involve very few — and only minor — spoilers.

p. 64: ‘As Miss Lumley would later explain to the Incorrigibles, a rhetorical question is one that is asked, but that no one is expected to answer. “For what child does not like being treated kindly by an adult?” is a rhetorical question. So is “Why, it seems I’ve taken your saddle by mistake, Miss Pevington; how could I be such a dunce?” Not to mention the old standby, “Do bears live in the woods?”
‘There are countless such examples, but to catalog them all would take weeks, and who has time for that? (Note that “Who has time for that?” is also a rhetorical question. The curious among you may feel free to search for more instances within these pages, if you find that sort of treasure hunt enjoyable. And who doesn’t?)’

Then some plot happens.

p. 136: ‘But before we continue any further with the adventures of Miss Penelope Lumley and the three Incorrigible children as they venture into the forest in pursuit of a runaway ostrich, let us look away for a moment (for they will have to do quite a lot of hup, hup, hupping before they get far enough into the woods for things to become interesting) and consider some matters of linguistic significance, starting with three letters: namely, P, O, and E.
‘When the admiral first said POE, Miss Lumley thought he meant Poe, as in Edgar Allen Poe. This is because POE and Poe are homonyms, which means they are two different words that are pronounced the same way.
‘POE is also an acronym, which is a word made out of the first letters of other words. To the admiral it stood for Permanent Ostrich Enclosure, although POE could just as easily stand for something else: Pie Over Everything, for example, a tasty, if filling, notion. Or Ponder On Elks, which as you already know, is nearly impossible to avoid doing once you have been told (and told, and told yet again, in the strictest possible terms) not to ponder on elks.
‘Some acronyms prove so catchy that they become words in their own right. Marine explorers know that “scuba” is an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Those of you who enjoy shooting laser beams at your friends for sport can bamboozle your opponents by crying out, “Here comes my Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation!” just before you fire.
‘If you now think that you would rather confront a herd of Profoundly Outraged Elephants in a Perilously Oscillating Elevator than hear another word about homonyms, acronyms, or any other kind of nyms – well, think again. There is power in words used carelessly. Consider how disappointed you would feel if, after booking an expensive spa vacation, you found yourself on holiday with the Society of Professional Accountants instead.’***

Then most of the rest of the plot, but not all, intervenes before this next excerpt:

p. 278: ‘With no time to prepare a more complicated lesson, Penelope had left instructions for them to count how many pigeons landed in the branches of the elm tree outside the nursery window while she was out and to record the figures in what she unthinkingly called a PIE chart, by which she meant simply Pigeons In Elm. That the acronym for Pigeons In Elm was the same as that for Permanent Incorrigible Enclosure had not even occurred to the distracted governess, who had been in a tizzy deciding which dress to put on****, among other concerns. But the children knew nothing of the admiral’s plans and had simply understood their assignment to mean that the chart should be in the shape of a pie, complete with slices.
‘As it turned out, the pie-shaped chart worked wonderfully well. In fact, the “pie chart” remains in use to this very day, although the Incorrigible children themselves are rarely, if ever, given credit for its invention. (Why pie charts have stayed so popular while pudding charts, cupcake charts, and even tart charts have sunk into obscurity is a mathematical mystery, but perhaps it ought not to be, for who does not like pie?)’

Who, indeed?

—————————

*Not that I believe these lessons particularly need correction.

**Temperament of the humans and the story, not the temperament of the attendant wolves, which varies greatly between the series.

***Okay, I just keep feeling the need to add a note here saying that I see this panders to common stereotypes of accountants, which doesn’t seem strictly necessary.  If someone is expecting a spa vacation, then they may be disappointed by any alternative, regardless of company, whether those number accountants or acrobats or aardvarks.

****I would like to mention that this is not a standard distraction for our stalwart Miss Penelope Lumley.

A Response to a Question: Miners and the CPB.

Leave a reply

Because I can’t bring myself to deal directly* with the horror that is the director of the Environmental Protection Agency working to eliminate more environmental protections** in order to increase coal production***, I will take this opportunity to refer to another, earlier, federal statement on coal miners. Back in March, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney defended his department’s slashing of funding for diplomatic, social, and educational programs with the following:

“When you start looking at the places that will reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was ‘Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?’ And the answer was no,” Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a Thursday morning interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.”

I note that the answer was “no” because they asked only people who were determined to craft a budget from the president’s campaign promises.  Here’s what happens if they ask me:

So … leaving aside why we can in clear conscience ask such people to pay more of their taxes for defense than they already do … and leaving even more aside why we are acting as though individuals can choose where their taxes are going and should “pay for” only those things that might affect them personally****…

…Why would slashing funds for public broadcasting affect these people?

We shouldn’t even have to answer that one for “single moms,” but okay: because many, many parents, especially overworked ones, want to have educational programming they can trust, without commercials (okay, sorry, that’s no longer accurate, but they’re still much tamer and calmer than the other networks’), available for their kids, or themselves, to watch.

But coal miners? Why do coal miners need public television?

Two reasons:

1) The obvious reason: So coal miners and their families can watch public television. I mean, come on. People are people, and it can’t actually be true that no one with the job of coal mining, in a culture of coal mining families, could be interested in, or passionate about, the kinds of programming that publicly-funded television can provide.

And, less obviously, 2) So the rest of us can watch public television and learn about coal miners, past and present.

Here are some example shows and clips from a quick PBS programming search:

————–

*Except, apparently, in footnotes.

**I don’t know why this feels any more appalling than the simultaneous multi-pronged attacks on reproductive rights and women’s health and freedom – maybe it’s just on my mind because among this set I heard of this one last. I think all of them happening together takes me back to the barrage of executive orders from January that made it clear the main tactic of the new administration would be swamping the country with so many disparate changes we couldn’t hope to address them all in turn.

***Having never had to live it, I’m pretty disturbed by the idea of recreating these photos of the smog and pollution of American cities before the Clean Air Act.

****Not to mention the idea that we should pick specific people and decide that if something doesn’t affect them, then it isn’t important for anyone in the country. (Or, as I suspect in this case, to say well, my friends and I don’t want to pay for these things, so because it would sound wrong to say the budget should be based on what affects or doesn’t affect me, I’ll suggest some random other people who sound more worthy, and pretend for spurious stereotypical reasons that this is what affects or doesn’t affect them.)  Since I’m not mentioning these things here, perhaps they will need another post of their own at some point.

About About: An Introduction

Leave a reply

Welcome to Word Matters!

end-tufted brush, in packageIn my medicine cabinet, alongside my regular toothbrush, I keep a special “end-tufted brush,” good for focusing gently on my gumline and the backs of my front teeth. I recently found myself looking at the packaging and finding that the name in French is “brosse à bout touffu”. Which is to say, “brush, at the end, tofu” – or…well, something like that.

Anyway, while looking at the French name of my special toothbrush*, I noticed the phrase “à bout” and how similar it was to the word “about”. I found myself wondering whether it might be cognate or share history with the English word. In a sort of “what is this story really about, in the end?” way.

So I looked up the etymology of “about” and learned the following:

from Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (NI3):
Middle English abuten, aboute, going back to Old English abūtan, abūton, from a- + būtan “outside, without” –More at but

from Online Etymology Dictionary
Middle English aboute, from Old English abutan, earlier onbutan “on the outside of; around the  circumference of, enveloping; in the vicinity of, near; hither and thither, from place to place,” also “with a rotating or spinning motion,” in late Old English “near in time, number, degree, etc., approximately;” a compound or contraction of on + be “by” + utan “outside.”
By c. 1300 it had developed senses of “around, in a circular course, round and round; on every side, so as to surround; in every direction;” also “engaged in” (Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?), and gradually it forced out Old English ymbe, ymbutan (see ambi-) in the sense “round about, in the neighborhood of.”

In other words, “about” descends from words and roots that mean around, or outside of a center. Physically, I can picture this: a room, for example, with chairs scattered about.

Meanwhile, my searches online and in my little French-English dictionary tell me that “à bout” is “at the end” or “to the limit”. And “bout” itself translates to “end, tip, butt, stub”.

So, as it turns out, I’m wrong about about**. I was thinking that the focus of a story, what it’s about, might be something you’d end up with. Instead, the story centers around, or about, that focus.  But I learned some things. And I have a new picture in my head, of a story gathering, or maybe dancing, around its focus. And I love that moment of wonder, when I sense a connection between or among words, and new worlds of possibility and imagery open up in my view.  That moment, with the exploration that follows, is one of the foci of this blog.

About this blog

I am
(nouns): parent, writer, editor, singer, songwriter, lesbian, reader, feminist, linguist
(adjectives): female, Jewish, secular, white, left-handed, cisgender, Ashkenazi, American

I love
cats, music, chocolate, language, the woods, the city, puns, working toward peace and justice***

I write about
word origins and history. False cognates, true cognates. Language development and parenting. National politics and identity politics. Framing of arguments. Books and songs. Punctuation and pragmatics. The occasional grammar guide. Truth in advertising. The power of words to separate, or denigrate, or accord new respect. Dialect differences and language change.

*which I highly recommend, by the way, if you tend to get tartar in specific places. Hat tip to Terry, my dental hygienist!

** with the following two notes:
1) It’s kind of funny that “about” means encircled and close by, while “à bout” means to the farthest limit.
2) It’s also funny that “about” is related to “but,” while “à bout” is related to “butt”. False cognates indeed!

***Plus some other stuff. Here’s what I said I love when I was 13 and introducing myself to my diary: “reading, writing, singing, cats, unicorns, mythology, science-fiction, all animals that aren’t cats or unicorns, life, puns and other jokes, Doctor Who, other British humor, talking, chocolate, other food, being extremely weird, gymnastics, swimming, most of school, traveling, the idea of World Peace, nature, enjoying myself, and getting along with other people.” I’ve clearly changed some since then, in that … I don’t so much do gymnastics anymore.  (Also, I have taken the liberty of adding a comma between “cats” and “unicorns,” as I’m fairly certain I meant to have one there.)