“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”¹

The other night, The Professor and I watched Pressure Cooker, an Emmy-nominated documentary about high school students in inner-city Philadelphia who go through a demanding culinary arts program with an eye to winning scholarships for culinary school. The film was entertaining, suspenseful, and moving. I highly recommend it!²

The students are driven on by a ferocious and loving teacher, Wilma Stephenson, who puts every ounce of her being into moving these students toward success. Throughout the film, she urges them to better themselves, to pull their pants up (literally), to dream beyond their inner-city existence, and to start showing some class. Among other things, she makes them try foods that they’ve never been exposed to before, telling them that they need to move beyond a taste for the fast food they’ve grown up with and to expand their worlds. She wants them to develop a more sophisticated palate.

So what is sophistication? I’ve heard a few times that Seattle is not a sophisticated city. This is usually voiced by folks who are from or who have spent time on the U.S. East Coast. As far as I can tell by this, sophistication means having higher fashion standards than the fleece-wearing, Birkenstock-shod, off-leash dog park-loving Pacific Northwest is prone to exhibit. It also helps, apparently, if hollering is the normal volume level of communication, if allowing someone to merge in front of you on the freeway is seen as a sign of personal weakness, and if you are always crammed into the train or bus instead of actually having a seat on most rides. But what do I know? I grew up in a Midwestern town of 7000 people (since ballooned to 9000) where the local radio station call letters are WCOW. No, I am not kidding.

Let’s look at the origins here to see if we can dig up any further information about sophistication. Our journey starts with the Greek word sophistes, meaning a sage, derived from sophizesthai, “to become wise or learned.” Latin borrowed the word as sophista, then passed it on to English in the 16th century as “sophist.” But things started to go downhill. “Sophist” meant both “teacher” or “philosopher,” and later, “a person…who, while professing to teach skill in reasoning, concerned himself with ingenuity and specious effectiveness rather than soundness of argument.”³

The double meaning—showing both respect and contempt—follows the word and its relatives to this day. “Sophomore” means a student in the second year of her studies. “Sophomoric” can be an adjective that simply refers to sophomores, but most often is used to mean “intellectually pretentious, overconfident, conceited, etc., but immature.” “Sophistry” is wholly in the negative camp, meaning “a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning,” and a sophism is an instance of this method. “Sophisticated” has a number of meanings, ranging from “reflecting educated taste” to “deceptive; misleading.” “Sophistication” has the same dual character.

So is sophistication a desirable quality, worthy of admiration? Or is it a specious merit? Our word history tells us it can be either, depending on the way a person manifests it. Things have never been simple with the sophisticates. For Mrs. Stephenson, though, it means a way out of the ghetto. She and her students’ search for sophistication is an example of the use of this word in the manner deserving highest respect.
_____________
¹ Leonardo da Vinci
² available from Netflix both on disc and streaming, and as a rental from iTunes
³ This and other definitions quoted are from Dictionary.com Unabridged, Based on the Random House Dictionary

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Pulses, clouds and glasses

It’s become almost a tradition in our family to decide against a big turkey dinner on holidays. Instead, we are apt to set a big pot of soup or chili to cook while we play games, watch football, work on jigsaw puzzles, or nap. Today while my family in Wisconsin was cooking one batch of beef chili and one batch of split pea soup, the professor and I were simmering a pot of spicy lentil chili. I love lentils, and while I was cooking I thought about how the shape of this versatile ingredient has brought its name into our English language in several ways.

The English word for the food comes from the Latin diminutive, lenticula, via French lentille. English also had at one time the now obsolete “lent” or “lente,” a noncount noun word form. You can see from the following that other Romance languages also stuck with the diminutive: Sp. lenteja, Pt. lentilha, It. lenticchia.

As to other words, perhaps the most obvious is “lens” which derives from “lentil”—sort of—because of the similarity in shape. That is, “lens” means “lentil” in Latin. So the lowly lentil, in a way, is in our eyes, in our cameras, and in our microscopes.

From time to time here, we in the Seattle area hear another word in this family. There’s a weather phenomenon sometimes seen over Mt. Rainier, where lenticular (lentil-shaped) clouds precede rain by about 24 hours. These clouds can be awesome sights, sometimes looking like flying saucers. This picture, from Cliff Mass’s weather blog, is a great shot of them. There are also lots of other very cool photos of these cloud formations online.

Other word forms I found in my search for lentil influence:
lentoid, lentiform—like lenticular, these also mean lens- or lentil-shaped
lenticel—raised pore in a woody plant
lentigo—a skin condition causing small brown patches

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Pulses, clouds and glasses

Gifts from the East

I started my morning with a little dose of Arabic; I put sugar (Sp. el azúcar) in my tea and wiped my face with a cotton (Sp. el algodón) pad.

Usually when I notice that words have similar forms in Spanish and English, it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that they both come ultimately from a common Latin root, even if the English word may have waltzed in from French or another romance language. (Although somehow I suspect the French words sashayed* in, rather than waltzing.) In the case of sugar/azúcar and cotton/algodón, that’s not true. They have another common ancestor—Arabic.

Language is often spread when empires grow (generally through invasion, but let’s not stray into the political). In the case of Spanish, the Moorish (i.e., Arab) occupation of the Iberian Peninsula lasted nearly 800 years, from the early 8th to the late 15th century. For much of that time, I suspect the Moors just called it “living there,” but the Spaniards never saw it that way. Their culture survived, absorbing along the way many Arabic influences in language, cuisine, and architecture.

There are tons of Arabic-root words in Spanish, and when you see that the first syllable is “al,” that typically indicates Arabic origin. “Al” was then, as it is now, the definite article. You probably encounter this article almost every day, when you hear in the news about Al-Qaeda (Ar. the base) or Al Jazeera (Ar. the island). In Spain, that fluffy white substance, al godón, (whatever the Arabic form of the word was at the time) was adopted as el algodón. To this day, it carries around that double definite article. We don’t see the full article in “azúcar,” but the article particle (!) remains.

The English words “sugar” and “cotton” came to us from the Arabic via Italian, from which they were adopted by French, and finally into English. It was a circuitous route through history and geography, but well worth the wait for soft sheets and sweet treats. It makes me wonder, though. If we had somehow incorporated “sugar” into our language but not “cotton,” what we would call cotton candy?

_____________
*from Fr. chassé, a slide-jump move in ballet

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

That’s a funny shibboleth you got there

A friend of mind recently told me that there are only two non-liturgical words in English that are derived from Hebrew—camel and cinnamon. This friend readily admits to playing fast and loose with the factoids at times. So while I was happy to learn about the origins of camel and cinnamon (which I later verified), this assertion struck me as suspect. Surely in our gigantic corpus, with all of the contact that English has had with Judaism and the Old Testament, we must have absorbed more than two tidbits? So, of course, I investigated, and I’d like to share with you the results. But first, I want to mention that I learned something interesting as I looked at this issue. In Spanish, cinnamon is canela. And I learned that ultimately it comes from the same root as cane, canister and cannelloni—you can see how they’re all cylinders. (The cinnamon must be in pre-grated state!)

But on to the Hebrew. I culled these from a Wikipedia article. I’m sure the list isn’t exhaustive, but it yields some interesting stuff:

behemoth
cherub (via some other languages, but from the Old Testament–has come to be used more broadly than a literal angel)
golem
hallelujah (arguably liturgical, though it’s definitely come to be used in a broader sense as well)
jubilee (with several intervening languages)
kosher (which has extended far beyond religion in meaning)
leviathan
nimrod
satan (not liturgical, but related to religion)
shekel (has come to a general slang usage for money)
shibboleth

This is not counting those words that come straight from Judaism and are still used mostly in that context—like bris, bar/bat mitzvah, challah, matzo; or those that come from Hebrew via Yiddish, like schmooze, maven, and so forth.

Leave a comment to tell me what other Hebrew-derived words you know of in English.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on That’s a funny shibboleth you got there

Illegitimi non carborundum

Last night, I was wondering whether “molder,” as in “moldering in the grave” was related to the fungal substance mold. Turns out, the answer is mo. Er…no. There’s an archaic meaning of “mold,” from whence “molder”: decay, as a verb, or loose soft earth, as a noun, from a Germanic base meaning to pulverize or grind, via Old English. The other two molds come through different paths. The fungal one started out as the Danish mugle and came to us via Middle English, through various forms growing increasingly similar to our present-day word. The “form in which a substance is shaped” mold comes ultimately from the Latin module.

But a note in one of the definitions for the molder type of mold caught my eye. The Oxford Dictionary of English mentions that the soft loose earth “mold” is related to meal! I got the shivers. This grinding thing, with m-l in the words, is prolific!! I started looking around in the dictionary. Through those entries and my own knowledge, I produced the following list of related words in English and Spanish. Leave a comment if you can add any more!

English words
meal–ground grain
mill–the grinding mechanism
miller–the guy who grinds
Miller and Mueller–surnames therefrom
molars–your grinding teeth
moline–a certain cross design in heraldry, so named because the shape resembles the iron support of a millstone
mole–a mass in the uterus (medical use of the Latin word mola, millstone)
note: the burrowing animal mole, the spot on your skin mole, the chemistry quantity mole, and the Mexican sauce mole are not related

Spanish words
moler–to grind
moledor–adj., grinding
molinero–adj., milling or vb., miller
molinete–windmill
moledura–n., grinding/crushing/milling (e.g., of coffee, olive, wheat)
molino–mill
Molina–common surname
muela–molar tooth

Update, 1/9/11–see “immolate” on another post.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment