sardine

I wouldn't have come up with this one on my own at all. I just happened to be playing a word game that had a "fun fact" at the end, suggested that a sardine is not actually a type of fish at all--more of a category. I assume they must know what they're talking about, but all the same, I was surprised. I've heard sardines are quite healthy for you, but is this just true across the board for all small fish?

I'm confused.

***

No surprise--it's true. Sardine is the name for any number of small fish. The Free Online Dictionary tells us first that it is one of numerous small or half grown oily fish, herrings or others, from the family Clupeidae. The second definition, though, is: " Any of numerous small, silvery, edible freshwater or marine fishes unrelated to the sardine." (Emphasis mine.)

I guess the real question is, when is a  small fish not a sardine? When it's a pilchard?

This article in The Independent took the whole region of Cornwall to task for rebranding the lowly  pilchard as the "Cornish sardine". I hadn't noticed that the sardine was any less lowly than the pilchard, but apparently there was some kind of perception problem. Wikipedia  uses sardine and pilchard interchangeably. And even the aforementioned article ends with advise from the "food industry":

But when is a pilchard a sardine? "A pilchard is bigger than a sardine," explained a food industry source last week. "Anything under six inches is a sardine, and anything over six inches is a pilchard - but could also be called a sardine." Perfectly straightforward then.

Indeed.

The problem stems perhaps from the source of the name itself.  The thought is that it comes to us through Latin from the Greek sardine, sardinos and is thought to refer back to the island of Sardos, which we know as Sardinia, and around which the fish once swum in abundance. However the Online Etymology Dictionary also gives a dissenting opinion, that of etymologist Ernest Klein:

 "It is hardly probable that the Greeks would have obtained fish from so far as Sardinia at a time relatively so early as that of Aristotle, from whom Athenaios quotes a passage in which the fish sardinos is mentioned."

Whether Klein is in a position to know how far Aristotle would go for small, oily fish, I don't know. But one thing is sure--I am not. 

It seems fitting to end this post with the festival called "The Burial of the Sardine". This is the way Spain celebrates the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent. Each town has its own tradition, but the basic pattern is that the "Sardine" in some form is carried through the streets by a procession of "mourners" and ritually burned at the end.

We can start with Goya's famous painting, El Entierro de la Sardina , which captures the spirit of the festival, though not, unfortunately, the sardine. It is thought to have been painted sometime around 1810, and I guess we can presume this was not the first festival, so it must go back a long way.

If that's not to your liking, maybe this modern day procession is. There are any number of YouTubes up, but I particularly like the 'mourners' in this one. It took place in Sitges, which is on the coast near Barcelona.
 

 

conundrum

Hugo, a sometime commenter here, asked a while ago whether instead of just posing conundrums I might explore the word itself. I thought it was a good idea, and, more importantly to the state of my life over the last six weeks or so, easy to resolve. Some kind of typical Latin to Old French to Anglo French route, most likely.

But it proved more complicated than that. In fact, I haven't had time to do justice to the task--until now.

***

Scene of one of the most famous conundrums of all*.

First off, let's define the word a little. There turn out to be two meanings. One is the one that most of us are familiar with--"a paradoxical, difficult or insoluble problem," according to the FreeDictionary. But the second meaning is a little more specific--a riddle that is answered by a pun. Or, as one commenter over on Wikipedia has it, "a riddle whose answer also turns out to be a riddle." Wikipedia also has this definition of riddles (although I actually found it on an interesting and very punny thread on Metafilter):

"A riddle is a statement or question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and conundrums, which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer."

As for its origins. Well. The Online Etymology Dictionary sides with most other sources in saying that it is first seen in print in 1590 out of Oxford University and was slang for pedant but also whim. It gradually acquired the meaning of riddle or puzzle, but doesn't show up in print in this form till 1790. It took many forms before solidifying into the word we know now:conibrum, conuncrum, quonumdrum, connunder... and so on. The Online Etymology has an uncharacteristically pointed comment: "The sort of ponderous pseudo-Latin word that was once the height of humor in learned circles."

Yes--too bad those days are past...

But I promised a mention of my favorite etymologist soon, and here it is. Anatoly Liberman has a long article on Conundrum: a Cold Spoor Warmed Up, where he perhaps despairs a little of the type of quest involved here, in which all roads lead to the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells us only that "the origin is lost". 

"It may therefore be worthwhile to glance at the state of the art, the more so because our chase for the answer will not necessarily end in a confession of ignorance."

(Although, ironically and unbeknownst to him, it does--this one.)

I should have known from my own searching that that "-um" ending doesn't necessarily make it Latin.  In fact, I looked into the very word he mentions--tantrum--some time ago.

Liberman reminds us, too, that just  that this "rootless neologism" only appears at the end of the 16th century, that doesn't mean it doesn't go back a lot further.

"At that time, rather many words made it to the Standard from dialects (first to London slang and then to the language of the educated class)." He goes on to remind us that 'A word’s earliest recorded meaning and a word’s initial meaning are not synonyms; in our documentation, a great deal depends on chance. Conundrum “whim” and “pun; puzzle; quibble” may have coexisted from the start.' " 

Check out his article. You will find a survey of many ingenious etymologies--most of them necessarily wrong.

And there you have it. Oh, and if you like the idea of solving conundrums, both the punny kind and the puzzle kind, here is list of some increasing order of difficulty.


 *Why is a raven like a writing desk? 

fun

Photo by Gord McKenna

Yeah, no trick questions here--I just happened to pay more attention to the word recently and wondered what the whole idea behind it was. I have a feeling that having time to wonder  about whether things are fun or not is a relatively recent human development, although on the other hand I think fun itself has probably been with us for a long time. But what is it?

***

I'm always surprised when a simple English word that we all know, use (and can probably even spell in this case) proves elusive. "Fun" turns out to be a bit in that frustrating "origins unknown" category. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, its sense of "diversion" or "amusement" comes second. First off, it meant  a trick or hoax. The  noun came from the verb form, which meant to cheat or hoax, and preceded the milder meaning of the noun by a good bit. Before that, though, it all gets a bit hazy. Some think it comes from the Middle English fonnen, to befool. "Fond" is apparently related. But no one really knows.

There are a few fun things about "fun", though. For one thing, it doesn't really have a true correlate in other languages. Or so says Darius Kazemi, over on his blog, Tiny Subversions. I was thinking the same thing--how do you really translate the word?

Says Kazemi:

Did you know that the word “fun” is unique to the English language? In other languages, the word they use in similar circumstances translates to “diversion,” “amusement,” or something similar, but there is no word meaning exactly “fun.” (The etymology of the word goes back to Middle English, where we lose the trail.)
We don’t really precisely know what fun is: it seems to be a chimera consisting of many different emotions. So it’s disingenuous to say that a game is or isn’t some degree of fun. That said, fun still exists as a concept, whether we like it or not.    

Kazemi also recommends the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, which I might just have to check out sometime.

Personally, I don't really think fun has much to do with fond. It does have a relation to funny, of course, and funny has a connection to that older meaning of hoax, as in the phrase "something feels funny about this to me." Is it possible that funny, as in odd, actually has a connection to the word phony?

Whatever else, though, etymologists do seem to have a lot of fun. Regular readers here will be familiar with the dry humor of Anatoly Liberman, and if not, I should be writing about him soon. If you look at etymological sources at all regularly, you will soon run across the attribution "Skeat", but it was not till now that I actually came across the actual irascible voice of the  man. This entry in Notes and Queries comes from the volume dated July to December, 1880.

It's fun.


The “etymology ” of fun from A.-S. feán (not fean) is too ridiculous to be worth “powder and shot”; one wonders who could ever have proposed it. It is new to me, but welcome as an addition to my list of curiosities. Fun can hardly be from Old French, or there would be some trace of it in Old English. I should like to see an example of fun as a substantive earlier than 1700. Spenser's fon is not an adj., but a sb., and means a fool, just as Chaucer's fonne does. We do indeed find fonly as an adverb, Shep. KaL, “ May,” 58 ; but it is either a printer's error for fondly, as we may charitably hope, or one of Spenser's own (very numerous) errors in attempting to deal with archaic English, with which his acquaintance was, from a scholarly point of view, very meagre indeed. The relation of fond to fon is well known, and given in my Etym. Dictionary; both words are Scandinavian, not French at all. The relation of fun to fon is not clear. There is a verb to fun, to cheat, clearly from the Scandinavian; but the common sb. fun in the sense of joviality is, as I have said already, best explained by the Irish and Gaelic fonn, pleasure. I suspect it was imported from Ireland in the days of Swift, but further illustration of the history of the word is much desired.
                                                                                                         Walter W. Skeat
Cambridge.

 

inputs

Sure, I know what "input" is. But why is it that I'm suddenly hearing the plural everywhere? It's partly, I suppose, that I was taking a course on Global Poverty, and as brilliant as the course was, there was still a fair amount of jargon associated with it. Referring to things as inputs was one of the ways this happened.

My sister then mentioned inputs when referring to her cell phone, and my latest sighting of the word was over at the One Acre Fund, which refers to a farmer carrying "farm inputs" home on her head. One Acre Fund looks like a great project, but as the woman is carrying a brown burlap sack on her head which could contain anything but probably contains seeds, fertilizer and the like, this is not exactly a model of precision in language. Wendell Berry would probably very much disapprove of seeds being termed inputs, though of course I shouldn't speak for him.

My first guess was that inputs comes from computer speak as  much as anything, but then I remembered that input and output have been around a bit longer than that, so I'm going to guess that this kind of jargon was adopted more from factory speak. I don't really know why we like to refer to ourselves as machines and farms as factories, but of course we adapt language endlessly, and perhaps that's reason enough.

Although I have to say that when someone says, "I value your input," it very often means they don't.

***

Okay, so here's a snippet from the Free Online Dictionary regarding usage.

"The noun input has been used as a technical term for about a century in fields such as physics and electrical engineering, but its recent popularity grows out of its use in computer science, where it refers to data or signals entered into a system for processing or transmission. In general discourse input is now widely used to refer to the transmission of information and opinion, as in The report questioned whether a President thus shielded had access to a sufficiently varied input to have a realistic picture of the nation or The nominee herself had no input on housing policy. In this last sentence the meaning of the term is uncertain: it may mean either that the nominee provided no opinions to the policymakers or that she received no information about housing policy. This vagueness in the nontechnical use of input may be one reason that some critics have objected to it.... Though the usage is well established, care should be taken not to use the word merely as a way to imply an unwarranted scientific precision."

And I did just check out Wendell Berry's thoughts on what seems to be common usage in the ag industry. It comes from Chapter 9 of The Gift of Good Land, which I highly recommend. The relevant passage is this:

In agriculture, so-called “inputs” are, from a different point

of view, outputs – expenses. In all things, I think, but especially in agriculture struggling

to survive in an industrial economy, any solution that calls for an expenditure to a

manufacturer should be held in suspicion – not rejected necessarily, but as a rule mistrusted.

Check out Wendell Berry if you haven't yet. I'm sure my thoughts were formed by him, though sadly  not as well  as he's elucidated his own. Mainly, I think I can't live up to his vision, but we are kindred spirits all the same...

 

Meanderings of Memory

On The Rachel Maddow Show of May 17th, there was a clip about the Oxford English Dictionary's appeal to the public to help them find a copy of a rare book called Meanderings of Memory, written by one "Skylark". More than a few words in the OED apparently have only this work as a source, and no copy of the book has ever been found. Since the airing of this show, Wikipedia tells us that one other mention of the book has now been found in an 1854 Sotheby's catalogue, making it less likely that the book's existence is a hoax. 51 words in the OED, many of which we use commonly, have Meanderings of Memory as a first or early source. So if you happen to have a copy lying around somewhere, do be so kind as to let the OED folks know. And if your great, great granddad (or grandma) has "Skylark" on his tombstone, I suppose that would be helpful too.
 

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spinifex

I needed a fairly short and straightforward post here as I'm not home or in my regular routine for a week or so. But after reading and reviewing Adrian Hyland's Moonlight Downs over the last few days, I realized that there was one word that kept cropping up in his book that I had glossed over one too many times. It's not one of the aboriginal words, or one of the Australian slang words, both of which he provides a helpful glossary for. No, spinifex is just a word for some plant that apparently grows in abundance in the Australian Outback. And I think elsewhere, as I've certainly come across it before--somewhere.

At the very least, it's time to get a visual.

***

 

 

Well, this is presumably what much of the terrain in Moonlight Downs looks like, as Wikimedia Commons tells us that this is a picture taken in central Australia. 

 

 

But spinifex--straightforward? No. Because when you look up spinifex in say, Wikipedia, it will tell you that this is a coastal grass of Australia and New Zealand. Now not to give anything away, but as far as I can remember, no one in Moonlight Downs goes anywhere near the ocean. Coastal spinifex grass looks like this:

The seed head

The grass

 

 

 

What people in central Australia call spinifex is actually a grass called triodia, which grows in hummocks and grows in arid land and is not part of the coastal genus spinifex at all.

 

Sometimes I think the word gods are just messing with me. 

 

Of course, this is all an English and Latin layover of a native plant first named by the aboriginal peoples completely differently. Baru was the name it was given by at least some of the different peoples there. As with some plants and animals that native people of America knew well, multiple uses were found for spinifex, including making food from its seeds, adhesives from its resin and shelter using its long grasses.

 

 

 Various dictionaries tell me that spinifex comes from the Latin for "thorn maker". But spina in Latin also means spine, and I think it's more their porcupine like spines that gave these plants their name.

Mountain lion trapped in Santa Cruz aqueduct and...

When I came up to work the cash register today, my coworker told me that there was a mountain lion trapped in  downtown Santa Cruz. By the time that shift ended, my 'career' as a bookseller, for lack of a better term, was over.

The mountain lion was not actually in downtown Santa Cruz, it was in an aqueduct some distance away. I used to walk over that aqueduct every day in a former life, and remember it chiefly for the wild ducks that frequented it.

In the time immediately after this announcement, I got into a lot of nice interactions with people and one exceedingly bad one, where a woman wanted to forego the now mandatory by city ordinance paper bag fee (one dime) because she was a regular customer who spent four hundred dollars a year there. Frankly, flaunting your money is the thing least likely to move me as a lowly salesclerk, but there you go. Of course this is the kind of person who would rather call and complain than pay a dime for a bag, so that's exactly what she did. My employer demanded to have an account of the conversation. I refused. That is pretty much where my longstanding relationship with this bookstore and independent bookstores  in general ended. Live long and prosper if you can, but not with my support.

I was going to say that I'm sorry to authors everywhere that I will no longer be able to support their books there, but really, I have no compunction at all now about supporting them on Amazon and by any other means I can, which will be, if not better, at least equally helpful.