's Wordplay

I live in a fantasy realm, as do all of you; for the medium of communication does not exist except in our minds — without mind, there is no meaning to language. Hence each word we engrave or recite or thoughtfully deploy — that word is a fantastic creature, whose meaning arises only in imagination and the life of the neural net.

And so in my head, Raymond Chandler is a person whose name is associated with both wisdom and wickedness (Raymond = 'counsel-guardian', Chandler = 'candlemaker'). And also some of the most beautiful crime novels ever written in American.

When I see the name of Alistair Cooke, I think of letters from America, and also of intestinal fortitude (Alistair = 'defender of men', Cooke = well, 'cook').

And here I sit and look at the bookshelf in front of me, and I think of Jacob the deceiver (he who ensnares another's foot) and Robert Frost as a cold hard brilliant intensity (Robert = 'fame-bright', Frost = 'frozen-ness'). There is no end to it, nor do I desire such interminably. I am content. And so is my blog.

Chalcogens, Pnictogens

A pnictogen is an element from Group V of the Periodic Table; a chalcogen is one from Group VI. The etymology fascinates. 'Chalcogen' comes from Greek chalkos, which means 'copper'; 'pnictogen' comes from Greek ta pnikta, which means 'those which are choked'.

Why so odd? Well, to a metallurgist, many of the copper ores are compounds of copper and oxygen or sulfur; copper finds many ways to bond with the chalcogens. Pnictogens include nitrogen and phosphorus — elements which, in their molecular forms, either smother by substitution of oxygen or by combination with oxygen.

Word of the Day: Fugitive

The word 'fugitive' is an interesting one because of its origins; it is one of many words (yes, many!) that come from the Latin fugere — 'to run away, flee, move quickly away from and escape'.

The Latin phrase tempus fugit is thus translated 'time flies' by most people; that is, it eludes us, it escapes us by passing by too quickly for us to seize it. What I like about 'fugitive' is that it is not supposed to connote the sense of 'hiding from something' but that of 'escaping by being fast and elusive'.

That's why we learn about 'subterfuge', which means 'escaping by going underground' (fromsub- meaning 'below' and terr- meaning 'earth, ground') and 'centrifuge', which is about 'escaping (from) the centre'.

The meaning of such words, sadly, seems elusive. The fugitive sense of fugitive is what has drawn me to hunt down its etymology for my dear readers.

Educing the Young

The Latin word ducere is probably best translated as 'to lead'. In turn, it has spawned a large range of related words: most obviously 'duke' ('one who leads') and 'duct' ('a path that leads') — and then verbs like 'educe', 'seduce', 'traduce', 'induce' and 'deduce'. These are followed by associated adjectives and nouns, to a total somewhere around 200 different words.

But here we are today thinking about 'educing the young'. This is actually what 'education' is about — the Greeks called it 'pedagogy' in a more youth-focussed way. To educe is to lead out or draw out towards something, and from the mid-19th century or so, it meant 'to draw a conclusion from data'. In other words, education is a process which leads people to draw conclusions from whatever data they are given.

The young are particularly in need of such a process. The old have already drawn their conclusions, whether good, bad or ugly. But the young can still be saved enough for them to in turn become the old, at least.

The main problem of the age is that time is passing so fast, and change even faster, relative to what any of the old(er) know. What I mean is that the passage of time is a known change, but the things that come with it — technology, social upheaval — have never changed as quickly in the history of humanity.

This means that trying to lead people towards making conclusions (what you might call 'education towards eduction') is a thankless task. If you teach them through inductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the past is no longer an accurate guide to the future. If you teach them through deductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the rules are being remade everyday, and axioms are no longer the worthy authorities (Gk. axiomata) around which the universe rotates.

So how then should we educate the young? Two ideas appear to dominate.

First, some suggest that the accumulated weight of past learning will suffice. Some branches of learning have a very long shelf-life, so to speak — things like arithmetic and the core natural sciences come to mind. Some branches of learning constantly reinvent themselves, and are studied with that in mind — the arts and humanities come to mind. But that is almost everything, and so past methodologies will do, if not past knowledge.

Second, some suggest that the young should be taught to teach themselves. That is, the reinvention of self and of humanity should be the main methodology taught. This is rather Darwinian; those who can reinvent themselves well enough to survive and prosper in the next age of humanity will replicate their eductive memes and educative processes through appeal to the first idea.

You will note that I've not said WHAT the young ought to learn. To those who would like to think about it, I direct you towards a search of the venerable history of human education — specifically with the key phrase 'saber-tooth curriculum'. Enjoy.

Word of the Day: Xanthinophile

A xanthophile (from Greek xanthë, 'blonde') is someone who loves the colour yellow. (This should not be confused with 'xanthophyll', from a Greek word meaning 'leaf-yellow' and referring to the pigment in yellowish leaves). However, my WotD is 'xanthinophile', someone who loves xanthine-containing preparations.

A xanthine is one of a small group of alkaloid molecules which are naturally formed in the body. However, the methylxanthines are stimulants that block sleep signals and thus keep you alert; they include theobromine (in chocolate, cacao, cocoa), theophylline (in dark chocolate, tea), and caffeine (in coffee, tea). They alleviate asthma and, as a huge number of modern scientific studies show, are boosters for almost all aspects of human health and well-being (the old word was 'wealth', but that's been corrupted).

Xanthinophiles are therefore people who love coffee, tea and/or chocolate and other preparations that are chemically related to these.

Complaining about Systems of Education

As the population density rises, the habit of complaining about the system of education also rises. This is silly, but also unavoidable given the essential silliness of human nature. Let me explain.

In ancient Greece, the concept of paideia was used to indicate 'the art of bringing up children' (from paidion, 'a child', genderless noun). We get words like 'paediatrics' and 'paedagogy' from this. However, paideuo, 'to teach' or 'to train children' (literally, 'to child'), was mainly used in the sense of rigorous teaching accompanied by force or chastening if necessary; it is sometimes translated '(to) discipline' or '(to) rebuke'. Modern scholars like to imagine that the Greeks meant something holistic and beautiful by this, but in reality they just meant the art of bringing up children who were fit to join adult society, much as bonsai is the art of making beautiful little trees by application of force and discipline.

Such training requires much attention to detail if it is to be done properly. Each child and plant is a different entity, and while general principles can apply, the 'right' outcome varies from era to era and thus so does the 'right' method. Whatever it is, it has to be customised on an individual basis.

Enter the problem of mass education. This was not so bad when the population density was low. Then the number of people who wanted and needed a lot of formal education was a small number relative to the population. But once you combine high population density with mass education, you get greater competitivity and higher pressure on the individual to 'succeed' (in any way this can be defined). Clearly, it can only get worse because of this.

The only way to provide mass education is to systematize it. A large, thick layer of mediocre (by definition) basic education must be provided to everybody, like providing flour and water and asking them to make dough. This means everyone has 'bread'. Those who are more talented or gifted, better resourced, more ingenious and more determined (among other possible advantageous characteristics) will make better bread (tastier, fluffier, whatever).

But nobody should complain about having bread in the first place, stodgy and boring though most of it will be. You can always add fruit, nuts, whatever. Even this will end up 'the new boring' as people share recipes and compete with each other. The problem in mass education is that you can't make interesting bread for everyone without pricing it out of everyone's range — insufficient teaching staff, time, and so on.

The exceptions will be those who can spare enough resources for homeschooling or private tuition. These will have extraordinary bread which is either heavily customised or heavily spiked with booster additives. Whether such bread is also good depends on whether society will eat it, but those who make such bread always maintain it is better. It might be. Or not. As always, it depends on the quality of the baker.

Word of the Day: Flibbertigibbet

Middle English onomatopoeia. Means a flighty, chatty, and rather unfocussed character. Often female, faerie or both. Sometimes a child, possibly male. Or a mooncalf. And all this without the influence of alcohol.

Now that Victorian and steampunk are in vogue, it's a word I see more often. I'm not sure where I first saw it, but I suspect it was either in the writings of Pamela Lyndon Travers (although that would've been post-Victorian) or Edith Nesbit Bland.

Avengers

What is a venging, and what does it mean to be vengeful?

Oddly enough, all this vengeaunce, as Old French would put it, is just a mutation of the Latin vindicaré — to vindicate; that is, to obtain reparation, catharsis, freedom from the taint of accusation or guilt.

Cleansing.

Word of the Day: Reck

Words have long histories, some rather convoluted. Sometimes, a word's partner goes missing, and we wonder where it went.

That's the case with 'reckless'. What is 'reck', and why does having less of it (or the loss of it) make things difficult? 'Reck' comes from the Germanic, its old English form being something like reccan. It carries the idea of 'to take care of', 'to heed' or 'to have a thought for'. If you do none of these things, then you are said to be 'reckless'.

Obviously, if you are doing all these things, you are said to 'reckon' — giving due consideration to the topic at hand. Eventually, there will be a 'reckoning' — an accounting of all the pluses and minuses of the outcome of an incident, event, or other process.

'Reck' has traditionally gone with 'rede', the Germanic word for counsel or advice. A person who is 'ill-read' is actually one who is badly advised; a person who is 'unready' may be badly-advised, or lack wisdom, or reject good advice. The implicit or explicit relationship is one of recking one's rede; to be reckless of one's rede might lead to disaster.

Word of the Day: Avuncular

The Romans, like the Chinese and most other imperial cultures, were very hot on the veneration of ancestors and the assigning of appropriate titles or terms to each relative.

And so, avunculus was the term used for one's maternal uncle, one's mother's brother. It was the diminutive of avus, a 'grand old man' on that side, normally one's maternal grandfather (one's mother's father).

I suppose that distinguished it from a carbuncle, which by similar formation meant 'a small glowing coal' and thus 'an inflamed red spot'. It was also used to describe garnets and rubies. And pimples. Hur hur.

Water Dragon Year This Will Be

The Chinese calendar allows one of five elements and one of twelve animals to represent each year. The year that begins on 23 Jan is a water dragon year, which of course appears once in every 60 years.

It's therefore fairly appropriate to use the idiomatic blessing 龍馬精神 (longma jingshen) or 'spirit of the dragon-horse' at this time. It alludes to the virtues of the mythical dragon-horse, normally along the lines of having dynamic strength throughout a long life. But what's even more interesting is the fact that there's a perfectly good Germanic female name which means the same thing, more or less.

That name is 'Rosalind', which has nothing much to do with roses or linden trees. The elements hros and lind are Old English for 'horse' and 'serpent', and allude to the graceful power of the archetypal horse and the wise beauty of the archetypal serpent. It's also the name of a famous Shakespearean female lead: Rosalind from As You Like It, renowned for her wit and beauty, but also for her loyalty to friends.

On a One-Horse Open Sleight

To do things lightly with the hand is what legerdemain is all about; to do things swiftly with the fingers is what prestidigitation is all about. The first term means 'lightness of hand' and the second term means 'fast fingering'.

But what is 'sleight of hand'? 'Sleight' is not the past tense of 'sleigh'. Rather, it is the essence of slyness. The Old Norse has it as sloegð, which seems to me a lot like 'slither'. A sleigh is something that cunningly slithers along, I suppose, although it is Frisian (?) or Dutch (?) in origin.

Word of the Day: Hawker

Today I heard that an old schoolmate had insisted that we should develop a new generation of hawkers. At which point, I reflected that I knew at least three definitions of 'hawker' in the sense of 'one who hawks'.

First: a hawker (from a Germanic root-word meaning 'to carry on one's back') is an itinerant vendor. The oddity of course is that street food, the stuff most often being hawked, tends now to be sold from immobile stalls (haha, 'stall' of course has another appropriate meaning here).

Second: a hawker is one who hunts with a hawk. In this sense, the word 'hawk' comes from another old word meaning to grasp or seize — very much as the word 'raptor' comes from the Latin for something very similar in concept.

Third: a hawker is one who expectorates violently. I think this one's onomatopoeic. Heh.

Word of the Day: Iconditioning (or iConditioning)

Today, I am going to perform an act of the much-reviled derivative neologising. That is, I am coining a term that is so obviously piggybacking on current trends that I feel a little bad about it. The new word is 'iconditioning', or perhaps 'iConditioning'.

Some people have used the latter term before, I should imagine, with the intent of labelling those who have bought into the late Steve Jobs's amazing technological 'reality distortion field' — epitomised by the names iMac, iPhone, iCloud, iPad, iWhatever.

In my case, I'm thinking of a recent book by Martin Kemp, Christ To Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. In that book, the author discusses how various process make images iconic in our minds — processes that are mediated by political power, traumatic event, and so on. The role of the ever-expanding and entrenching media (using whatever the latest infodump technology might be — clay tablets, tablet computing) is fairly strong here, but there are some other psychological quirks.

Somewhere out there, a mysterious psychopomp conveys the imagined concept to some sort of iconic afterlife, where it is beatified and joins the pantheon. When an image becomes an icon, it is very much like the process by which a dying hero is taken by the valkyrior to Valhalla. There, it will eat and drink its immortal way, whether obscure or not, until Ragnarok comes.

The whole process of becoming an icon, I say (or should that be 'iSay'?), should be called 'iconditioning'. We are conditioned by our information-environments to think of image as icon until it becomes true by some sort of apotheosis. And there iRest my case.

Dictionary, Lexicon, Encyclopaedia

Sometimes, I am asked on what authority it is that I give definitions for terms. Why should my definition of 'science', or 'humanities', or 'education' (etc., etc.) be used instead of that found in the venerable Oxford or Merriam-Webster or whatever dictionary tome is the flavour of the decade?

The answer is a simple one.

A dictionary is a compilation of diction — that is, the uses to which words have been put. Most dictionaries are alphabetized lexicons — that is, they are lists of words in alphabetical order, with notes on their usual meaning and usage attached.

Some are encyclopaedic, which is to say they are meant to be both descriptive and prescriptive — they provide enkyklios paideia, as the Greeks would put it, an 'all-encompassing education' (literally, 'a (full) circle of child-rearing').

All definitions are provided by lexicographers who examine the typical diction (in the sense of usage) of a given word and from this describe the uses to which it is put. They do not tell you that you must use a word that way; they only tell you what it would probably mean if you used it in a given context. You are at liberty to essay a new meaning, and if that becomes a common usage, the next generation of lexicographers may include your meaning in a dictionary.

What I do is simple. I define words the way I use them, while keeping an eye on their pedigree and the uses to which other people put them. When I define a word, it is usually in historical and functional context, for the purpose of some practical use (for example, writing an essay on a given topic). Anybody can do this, but the test of validity is whether the reader will accept the word as you use it.

So I suggest this: anyone who reads this blog and disagrees with any definition I give should educate me more fully by counter-defining or re-defining the term. You should explain the amendment you wish to make, and I will certainly agree with you if it is a reasonable one that makes the definition more useful in its context of use.

I don't mean that sarcastically, ironically, or in any other perverse sense. I'm being honest here. The point about teaching is trying to nurture better outcomes, and you can't get better outcomes if you refuse to improve your word-hoard, stock-in-trade, or other parts of your armamentarium. So, teach me, and I will learn. Thanks!

Rune

From the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language:

Rún: a) something hidden or occult, a mystery or hidden meaning; b) a secret; c) secret thoughts or wishes, intention, purpose; d) full consciousness, knowledge; e) darling, love.

As I am fond of telling my students, the Celts were (in)famous for things starting with B — booze, bronze, bards and britches. These thoughts may or may not be related.

Figureheads

It's always bemused me when people think of figureheads as something or someone that is 'only for show'. A hundred years before the word first came to mean 'leader without real authority', it meant the ornament at the prow of the ship which symbolised the mission of its crew, their deity or source of moral guidance. It was the pre-literate version of a mission statement.

Even before this, sailors have always had superstitions about their figureheads. It was always unlucky to change one if the old one had not been lost to natural causes. It always had to be something the crew felt comfortable with, and a captain who chose an unlucky or ill-omened figurehead was not one that a seasoned crew would want to sail with.

If I had had to choose a figurehead in those pre-literate days, I'd choose one which gave my ship a sense of dignity, of beneficial omen, and of calm guidance. The reason that these ship ornaments were called figureheads is because, at the very least, such ornaments bore heads with clearly marked eyes to find the way through the dread and danger of the wine-dark sea.

Crowned

Tonight I had occasion in my studies to think about the Greek word stephanos. This word is often translated 'crown' in English, which has always seemed an iffy gloss to me. Historically and etymologically, the word means something more like 'wreath of glory', 'encompassing field effect' or some such.

Thus, when koinë texts use the word 'crown' in translation, it's good to bear in mind that it can idiomatically mean 'reward', 'aura', and many other concepts to do with something bestowed as a visible sign of acclaim and/or approval. And that should crown this short post.

New Words From Old

Tonight under the yellow light I read by, I am learning the old anew. I learn that the word 'ginger' comes from Greek zingiberis, a transliteration of Sanskrit srngavera (from a town on the Ganges); I learn that 'pepper' comes from Greek péperi, transliterated from Sanskrit pippali (a berry); even 'sugar' is not safe, it is from Greek sákkharon, transliterated from Sanskrit sarkara (grit).

I learn that it goes further back, and even further. Most of the languages I have studied come severely altered by, or have their origins in, the obsessive-compulsive disorder that was Sanskrit. Sanskrit grammar was based on super-encoded Vedic sutra-learning which only the brilliant could master; all else was dialect, with no dialectic synthesis.

And there were indeed four Chinese pilgrims who went in search of western learning. They journeyed to their west on a quest to find authentic Buddhist scriptures. They were also separated across a period roughly from 400 AD to 671 AD. The last of these returned to Sri Vijaya to transcribe what he had learnt until 695, translating from Sanskrit to Chinese.

On page 195 of this tome I am earnestly studying, Ostler tells us that Krishna's advice to Arjuna could as easily have been given to Achilles at Troy a thousand years before or Cú Chulainn at Connacht a thousand years later. What continuity of sentiment and philosophy!

Word of the Day: Legato

It flows, says the Italian, as if it is tied together, so smoothly that the joins cannot be detected. In that sense, legato has much more in common with the not-so-obvious 'ligature' than it has with the word 'legate'. Both, however, have common roots in some ancient Indo-European word which meant 'to bind' — a word, that however it might have sounded, has descendants in 'legal', 'ligament', 'ligature', 'delegate', 'legislate', 'league', 'allege' and 'allegiance'.

Strangely enough, if you hear the phrase a legato spoken aloud in public these days, it's more likely to be someone pretending to be Japanese — arigato means 'thanks' in that language, and is unlikely to have Italian or Latin antecedents.