WordsWordsWords

Consider the word “defenestrate.” It has a strange and somewhat scientific sound, as well as a very specialized meaning. Who knew we’d need a word to express “to throw through or out of a window”? One would think that its apparent opposite, “fenestrate,” would be defined as “to push something (or somebody) back inside a window,” but not so. “Fenestrate” is an adjective and means windowed, or having small openings.

If you know German or French, you might easily guess at these meanings. Their words for window are fenster and fenêtre respectively. These two are even more similar than they look at first glance, for the circumflex accent you see in the French word means an “s” has been dropped after the vowel at some point in the past. (I’ll talk about that in another post.)

Even if it is much more obscure, the English word “window” also has a relationship to “fenestrate.” The Latin ventus, wind (as in “air movement,” not “to twist”), is related to Latin fenestra, window. Our English “window” comes from Old Norse vindauga (vindr=wind)—not so different from Spanish ventana, window.

“F” and “v” are practically the same letter. If you pronounce one and then the other, you’ll see that they are equivalent, except that with the “v” you vibrate and make a sound in your throat, while with “f” this vibration is missing. Linguists use the term “voicing” for this vibration. “F” and “v” are the voiced and unvoiced equivalents of the same sound. If you pronounce a “w,” you’ll see that it is also pronounced far forward in the mouth. Like “f” and “v,” the sounds “w” and “v” tend to be exchanged with each other over time as a language evolves. So window, wind, vent, winnow, ventilate, and fenestrate, as well as similar words in other languages, all come ultimately from a root lost somewhere back far in time that meant “blowing air” or “air passing through an opening.”

Complete etymology of “wind” from OED:
Old English wind = Old Frisian, Old Saxon, (Middle) Low German, (Middle) Dutch wind, Old High German, Middle High German wint, wind- (German wind), Old Norse vindr (Swedish, Danish vind), Gothic winds < Old Teutonic *windaz < pre-Teutonic *wentos, cognate with Latin ventus, Welsh gwynt, Breton guent; originally a present participial formation (*wēnto-) < root wē- of Old English wáwan (see wowe n.), Old High German wâjan (German wehen), Gothic waian to blow, waft, Lithuanian vė́jas wind, Old Church Slavonic vějati blows, větrŭ wind, Old Irish feth air, Greek ἄησι ( < *ἄvησι) blows, ἀήτης wind, Sanskrit v⁷ti blows, v⁷ta wind.

Amulet
A small object worn to ward off evil; a talisman
Appears in English around the turn of the 17^th century. From Latin amuletum, via Middle French amulete.

Emulate
To attempt to equal or surpass
Appears in English around the turn of the 17^th century. From Latin aemulatus, past participle of aemulari, to rival.

Immolate
To kill as a sacrificial victim, as by fire
Appears in English around the mid 16^th century. From Latin immolatus, past participle of immolare, to sprinkle with holy meal prior to sacrificing (mol=sacrificial barley cake, literally millstone!)

Omelette
A thick egg pancake made with cheese, veggie, and/or meat fillings
Appears in English around the turn of the 17^th century. From French omelette, earlier amelette, metathetic¹ form of alemette, variation of alemelle—literally a thin plate—which was a variation of Old French lemelle, from Latin lamella, plate. “Lamella” is in itself an English word that means a thin plate, scale, membrane, or layer in various biological contexts.

Umlaut
A two-dot diacritical mark on a vowel (i.e., ü, ë, etc.) to indicate a change in pronunciation from the unmarked vowel
Appears in English in the mid 19^th century. From German um-, about (i.e., changed) + Laut, sound.
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¹metathesis=the transposition of letters, syllables, or sounds in a word
Etymological info and some definitions taken from dictionary.com unabridged

For a long time, I’ve wondered about the name of the country Germany. I’ve studied a bunch of different languages to some extent or another, and I’ve seen that the country name was wildly different in several of them:

English—Germany
Spanish—Alemania
German—Deutschland
Slovak—Nemecko¹

I knew that the name in the other two romance languages I’ve studied was essentially the same as Spanish, just spelled differently according to the languages’ phonetics—French Allemagne and Portuguese Alemanha. But what was up with all this variety? The answer is fascinating!

While my librarian colleague (and longtime friend) Jackson chides me for turning to Wikipedia², in this case the best explanation I discovered for the question was found there. Germany’s geographic location in the middle of Europe and its history of tribal and regional divisions resulted in almost all world languages taking names for the country from six different sources. The names I was familiar with represent four of those six.

English is one of a large number of languages whose names for the country originate with the Latin Germania—the biggest group of the six. Oddly, the romance languages I knew of take theirs not from the Latin, but from a tribal name, Alamanni—the second largest group. (There are also romance languages in the Germania family.) The next largest group of names comes from the Old High German diutisc, which in turn comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning “of the people.” Germany’s Deutschland belongs here, of course, along with similar names not only in the expected Dutch and Afrikaans, but also in languages as varied as Vietnamese and Nahuatl. Nearly as many derive their names from the Proto-Slavic němьcь, “a foreigner.” Nemecko falls into this group.

In addition to these four, there are two small groups that take names from the Saxon tribe (e.g., Finnish Saksa) and the Germanic word for folk (e.g., Lithuanian Vokietija), as well as a handful of names that come from other sources. My favorite is the Navajo name for the country, Béésh Bich’ahii Bikéyah. It literally means “Metal Cap Wearer Land,” and was coined by the WWII code talkers.
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¹The “c” is pronounced “ts,” so Neh-MEHTS-koh.
²Everyone has an opinion about this, I guess.

Today, an excerpt from a work by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), who is considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. He is widely read in translation in the U.S., so you may already be familiar with him. If you’re not, here’s some info about him from poets.org.

From Ode to the Book (II)

Words
as slippery as smooth grapes,
words exploding in the light
like dormant seeds waiting
in the vaults of vocabulary,
alive again, and giving life:
once again the heart distills them.

De Oda al Libro (II)

Palabras
que se deslizan como suaves uvas
o que a la luz estallan
como gérmenes ciegos que esperaron
en las bodegas del vocabulario
y viven otra vez y dan la vida:
una vez más el corazón las quema.

On New Year’s Eve, The Professor and I decided we’d like to see a movie. We had a lot of company, judging by the fact that when we got to the mall, we had to park at the farthest end of God’s green acre. As we always do, we consulted movie reviews online to help us decide which show to see. Rotten Tomatoes is where The Professor usually goes first, while I tend to start with MRQE, also known as Movie Review Query Engine. (It was named back in the days when the Information Superhighway had few passengers on it other than geeks and librarians.)

We typically like to see a rating of at least 70% to bother with a movie, and it’s even nicer when a film is up in the 80s. We almost couldn’t believe it when we saw that one of the films currently showing had a mind-blowing 95%/96% (audience/critics) rating on RT. Those kind of numbers are very rare. The film that had so captured the interest of all these moviegoers was The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as Prince Albert. During the movie, the prince becomes King George VI after his father dies and his brother Edward abdicates the throne in order to marry his divorced American lover.

The movie’s story revolves around Prince Albert’s—”Bertie’s”—lifelong struggle with a severe stammer. (That word, rather than “stutter,” is used throughout the movie.) Bertie has seen a seemingly endless stream of different speech therapists throughout his life, none of whom has been able to help him improve his speech. This has been difficult in itself, but now that he is king, and now that “the wireless” has a firm grip on worldwide communication, he will be expected to do radio broadcasts. This is especially true—and especially crucial—as the Commonwealth heads into WWII. It falls to him to keep the people informed, and to strengthen the hearts of those for whom he serves as liege.

Out of desperation, the king begins working with Lionel Logue, a speech therapist whom his wife has found for him. Logue’s office is in a shabby basement room whose paint is peeling off the walls. The delightfully eccentric therapist character, played by Geoffrey Rush, uses many unconventional methods to help his clients. Among them is an instruction to the prince to begin swearing when he gets stuck in a stammering pause. We are all treated to the sight of a member of the royal family punctuating his therapeutic practice sentences with fuck-fuck-fuck and shit-shit-shit.

Why should swearing help the speaker push past the involuntary pause? Because swearing is actually seated in a different part of the brain than other speech. Swearing activates a part of the brain related to emotion, rather than the part of the brain that processes, comprehends, and generates language. This fact also has other interesting implications. Swearing has been found to reduce pain and to improve team spirit in the workplace.¹ Tourette’s Syndrome arises from this phenomenon, as well. It is similar to seizure disorders; a spontaneous misfire in the “swearing” part of the brain triggers the production of the involuntary curse word. (People with Tourette’s don’t suddenly say “sofa!” or “canteloupe!”)

I love words, and curse words are words. For a long time, I’ve been interested in the rich storehouse of taboo language. I’ve read some books about it, and I gave a presentation a couple years ago at the annual conference of the National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators, entitled, “Linguistic and Emotional Challenges of Interpreting Foul Language in the Courtroom.” In the future, I know that I will sometimes talk on this blog about fuck, shit, son of a bitch, motherfucker, cunt, asshole, dick, pendejo, chingao, carajo, joder, and hijo de la gran puta madre. All those words are a part of language, and to ignore them is to permit a great lacuna to be created by those who would omit a large part of human expression from linguistic research and discourse.

As you can guess, the king went on to make his big speech after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany, guided by the presence of his therapist. I don’t believe that’s a spoiler, any more than saying that the Allies won the war would be. Mr. Logue accompanied the king at every wartime speech, and they remained friends for the rest of their lives. If you haven’t seen it yet, The King’s Speech is definitely worth spending an evening on, and I hope you enjoy it with some fuckin’ popcorn.
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¹Thanks to my nephew Michael for this last bit.