tantamount

"This is tantamount to treason!" Yes, we all know what it means. But, uh, what does it mean, exactly?

I think most readers will agree that it means something like "this is an equivalent of treason". But does anyone have a clue as to the etymology of this word? I certainly don't.

But as it's my job here to guess, I will put forth a feeble Greek origin to the tanta- prefix. But -mount doesn't sound very Greek to me. This is one of those words where the deeper I get into guessing, the deeper I get in the muck. So let's find out the truth while we still can...

Yeah, it's a hybrid. But no, not Greek. "Tant" means 'so much, so great' and comes from the Latin tantum and "amount" apparently comes from the Old French amunter, a variant of amonter. You say amonter and I say amunter, let's call the whole thing... uh, sorry--I got distracted.

(P.S.--I tried to find a suitable image, but nothing quite worked. However, I'm open to suggestions...)

yeoman

Egads. The toils of ignorance are never done. Apparently it was not enough to discover that those Tower of London guardians/tour guides were called the Yeoman Warders. It has now been pointed out to me that I failed to sufficiently explain what yeomen are. There's a perfectly good explanation for this, however--I don't know the answer.

Not quite good enough, though, is it? Well, up to the moment that I was actually questioned on this, I thought I did know. They're strong, stalwart types, a little like Robin Hood's Merry Men, salt of the earth, good archers, wearing tunic and tights...Yeah, I'm starting to make less and less sense to me too. Let's cut to the chase.


Well, the chase is not so easily cut to as all that, it seems. Did you want the short answer or the complete one? The fast and serviceable one is that a yeoman is a.) a freeholder who cultivates his own land, b.) an assistant or subordinate to an official, or c.)an attendant or lesser official in a royal or noble household. Oh, and there's d.) a naval petty officer.

But where does the word come from? Well, no one really knows. Some think it's related to Old English iunge man or 'young man', others to Old English geaman or 'villager'.

But this guy has a different theory. Personally, I like it. It seems to account for the unusual prefix in a less "ingenious" way.

What's the headshot about, you ask? Why, that's Owain Yeoman from "The Mentalist", of course. And no, he didn't pay me anything for the publicity.

At least not yet.

Beefeaters

Okay, I think we all have a visual, at least from the gin bottle, if nothing else. But who are these guys?

Strictly speaking, this is not an original idea kind of post, as a friend was the one who brought it up because there is a new novel coming out which features these guys somehow. She can remain anonymous or not, as she wishes. I'm still not entirely clear on the function of the Beefeaters, but now I know that they live in the Tower of London. For real! And there's this one guy who's the raven keeper, and they are apparently called something like the Order of Yemen and...

But maybe it's time to do a little fact-checking....

Oh,great. Yeoman warders, not Yemen warders. Please tell me that there is a raven keeper and not just a ravin' keeper.

Just kidding. I already knew there was a raven keeper. And you who didn't know can check it out here. If you get that far, be sure to scroll down a bit because the Ravenmaster, as he's really called, has some nice stories about the individual ravens.

Why ravens? Because legend has it that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, the White Tower will crumble and a terrible disaster will befall Britain. It doesn't seem quite, well, cricket that the reason the ravens don't leave is that their wings are slightly clipped. But I suppose when the future of a nation is at stake...anyway, they're well cared for.

But I digress. Why are the Yeoman Warders called Beefeaters? Turns out no one really knows. In fact, not even the Yeoman Warders know. There are lots of theories, of course--most having to do with these men and their families being given extra rations of beef in an era when few had much or any of it. According to this very charmingly rendered account ( scroll down to the part about the legend of the ravens towards the end), it may have been a term of derision, which would make sense on several levels.



There is some controversy about whether the fellow on the Beefeater's gin bottle actually is a Beefeater and not a Yeoman of the Guard, one of the monarch's personal bodyguard. The Beefeaters' everyday uniform is,after all, blue and red. But their state uniform is red and gold and similar to the Yeoman of the Guard's uniform. As, for some reason, these haven't been modified since the days of the Tudors, they are rumored to be very uncomfortable.

The toast of the Yeoman Warders is "May You Never Die a Yeoman Warder", which may sound odd, but it began at a time when the vacant post reverted to the Constable of the Tower on your death, leaving your family with nothing. Not too well thought out, I'd say.

Unfortunately, I must finish this post with the news that a couple of Beefeaters were sacked at the end of 2009. The reason? Harassment of the Tower's first female Beefeater, Moira Cameron. Some things never change, I guess.


I'm thinking that getting booted for harassment wasn't exactly the way those two foresaw that toast being fulfilled somehow...

purview

On Peter Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders blog, it happened to come up what exactly was in the purview of this blog. I promptly said that there was nothing that was beyond the purview of this blog, and only belatedly realized that I didn't entirely know what "purview" meant.

Well, I know what I want it mean, at least. I want it to mean something like "the defined scope" or the "rightful subject" or something like that. The "-view" part I think we all get--it has to do with sight or seeing. The "pur" however, I'm not so sure. The only "pur" I can think of is related to "pure" and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with that. At least I hope not. Pure vision is not anything this blog can ever hope to promise...


...This is one of those instances where I seem to have the definition largely right and the etymology miserably wrong. "Purview" can be taken to mean the extent of something's scope, its reach (and let's emphasize that last word's familiar distinctness from its grasp as entirely fitting.) However it has nothing to do with purity or vision at all. It is actually very closely related to words like proviso and provide and purvey. It's real root is the Anglo-Norman purveu est--"it is provided". Interestingly enough, it seems to have been altered due to some kind of strong influence from the verb "view", which means... okay, we know that part already. And yes this blog especially must acknowledge that, well, mistakes can happen.

(The first, uh, view is, rather predictably, the Milky Way. The second is not a galaxy. It is an image of the 15 million atoms in the protective coating of a virus, courtesy of Rice University. This sums up the scope of my ignorance quite nicely. Now let's hope that the nice folks that posted these pictures let me keep them up...)

chiaroscuro

I'll start out by saying that this is one I should know, and may in fact actually know. I'm just not sure. The word came up in my last Finnegans Wake meeting, and here is the Joycean sentence that provoked this post:

"In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarities eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it's as semper as oxhousehumper!) generations and still more generations."

Leaving aside the question of whether I understand any of this, I will say that it does tend to confirm my sense of the word in question. What I think chiaroscuro refers to is a style of painting, pretty obviously originally an Italian one, which uses the play of light and dark to highlight what the painter wants our eye to focus on. I know that "oscuro" must refer to darkness, and though I don't know quite how, I think the "ciar" must refer to clarity or light. Shall we see?


Well, given my outrageously wrong guesses on some recent posts, it's heartening to see that I seem to have played this one right. Chiaroscuro is precisely a word about the mixture of light and dark and my etymological understanding is correct. Hooray!

Ignorance, of course, has its several levels. What I don't know about chiaroscuro is far more than what I do know, including the other meanings the word has accrued. For one thing, in a technical sense, it refers not just to such bold contrasts, but even subtler effects of light and shading. And though we usually think of chiaroscuro in terms of masterly paintings of the past, you have only to think of the effects sought in film noir cinematography and in many, many comics and graphic novels to know that chiaroscuro is alive and well and living in Sin City.
Or at least slumming there from time to time...

chimera

Thanks to my new Finnegans Wake blog, or more precisely, to Mr. Joyce himself, whole new realms of ignorance have been revealed lately. One word that came up in our last session was "chimera".

After my last post, I am not confident enough to be sure that what I think I know is actually right. But my sense of "chimera" is that it is a mythological figure, possibly Greek, which is something like a willow-the-wisp. In other words, whimsical, elusive and possibly puzzling.

But what is it really?

Well, not what I think, anyway. At least I got the Greek part right. In Greek mythology, it's a creature that has the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tale of a serpent.(And we think we have identity crises.) The chimera is consistently thought of as female, despite having a mane on the lion's head aspect. It is a sibling of Cerberus the three-headed dog. It also breathes fire. And Harry Potter fans are apparently going to be way ahead of me on this one.

What's perhaps more interesting is the modern day application of the word, in which the term has come to mean many organic things that have two or more different genetic sources. If you stop and think about it, this is an age ripe with the chimerical. Grafting, organ transplants and genetic engineering all result in sorts of chimeras, don't they? In fact you may meet a chimera tomorrow, or eat a piece of fruit from one and never even know it. (Try not to eat one from any of the fire-breathing varieties, though. Unless it's a pepper.)

By extension, "chimera" has come to mean a monstrous figment of the imagination, or even a kind of pipe dream, something of the imagination only.

Monstrous, sure, but come on, it's not that bad. Didn't you see that cute little geep or shoat or whatever it is up above?

coruscating

Recently, on another blog I write, I mentioned a new publishing venture called MatchbookStory.com, in which the publisher will publish a 300 character story on the inside of a matchbook. Peter Rozovsky and I were batting around some very short reviews that these stories might evoke, and one of his was "coruscating".

I am pretty sure I can understand the general drift of coruscating--it means something like "scalding, abrasive, harsh", right? A review that was coruscating would be dripping with venom.

But here is one of the problems of Latin having dropped from our curriculum. I can guess at the general meaning from context, but the sounder etymological roots I haven't a clue of.

The one clue I do have is that it must have something to do with either tinder or fire. Or at least matches...Here we go.


Oh, dear. So far off. Coruscating means "to give off flashes of light. To sparkle."

Diamonds coruscate. So do, apparently, flutists. But it doesn't mean to rake over the coals, as I somehow thought.

The one thing I was right about was the fact that a grounding in Latin would have stood me in good stead here. "Coruscating" comes from the Latin coruscare, "to flash".

Who knew?

Well, okay--maybe the Romans.

Looks like I'm going to be reading reviews in a whole new, uh, light.