A Transient Feeling of Wounded Vanity

Until I decide otherwise, the title of this post is the best dictionary definition I've ever read. 

If you google "in a fit of pique" you'll find an odd assortment of rash things people did, wrote, or said at a moment of, well, "wounded vanity".  If you search "piqué" at clothing merchant Land's End, you'll find some lovely polo shirts made of an oh-so-soft fabric.  So w here do we go with this?  Does pique mean upset or soft?

You guessed it (you know me so well), it means neither.  To completely clarify matters, let's add in another variant: picante as in picante sauce - America's favorite condiment.  Did that help?  No?  Then let's add in another Mexican restaurant staple: pico de gallo.  Yes, that should clarify everything.

Let's get to work here.  Picante sauce and pico de gallo are made of similar ingredients (tomato, onion, peppers, yada yada yada).  Pico is chunkier than picante and is served as a topping or side to some dishes whereas picante sauce (aka: salsa) is a chip dip or condiment.  As far as I can tell, the main difference between the two is the size of component ingredients.  Remember the peppers?  What category do they fall into - spices.  And that's our first real clue.  Spice and picante and pico share a common core - pic.  I'll deal with the s- part of the story in another post.  And you're probably running out ahead of me, yes, pick and spike are also related words.

Now, at this point of the story, I usually bring in some obscure old word that some people, somewhere, thousands of years ago used and I demand that all the words are related because of that one word.  (We're really getting to know each other aren't we?)  Well, that's just what I'm going to do.  The IE root is (s)peik.  (Remember we'll deal with the mysterious s- later.)  Let's break down pico de gallo to understand this.  Do you remember any Spanish?  What does "gallo" mean?  Right, rooster.  What do you think pico refers to?  Pico is the beak (s/peik) of the rooster.  A beak is sharp, like a spike, like spicy foods.  Salsa picante or "piquant sauce" has a sharp, spikey taste thanks to those spices.  Just like a bird pecks at the ground with its sharp beak to find food, the spice in piquant foods pecks at your taste buds - hopefully in a pleasing way.

What about those polo shirts?  It has nothing to do with the oh-so-soft material the shirt is made from, but rather the process by which it is made.  Ever watch your mother knit or crochet?  What did she use to weave that oh-so-soft yarn together - hard, sharp spikes, needles.  The fabric is thus called piqué (pee-kay) in reference to the process.

Now, where the heck was I, oh yes, "a fit of pique" (pronounced: peek).  Let's say you're on a first date, you're trying to get to know the other person, but you don't have a lot invested in the relationship.  The date hasn't been going well anyway and then the other person hauls off and says something utterly rude / stupid / suggestive.  That's it.  Grab the water glass, drench the fool, and storm out "in a fit of pique".  Pique is a transient feeling of wounded vanity.  Your pride (vanity) feels like it got pecked by a rooster, jabbed with a knitting needle, yada yada yada.

It's all true.  I wouldn't make it up.

Orthodox Rocks - Part III

Before your very eyes, I am building a post in three installments dealing with the roots and meaning of "orthodox".  This is Part III - the fin de siècle, whatever that means.

The Blog In Review, parts 1 and 2: Dox refers to things that are acceptable.  Ortho means straight or upright.

I can remember being a young lad and deliberately working through "orthodox" in my mind, breaking it down and testing meanings against other words.  We used to sing "The Doxology" in church.  It was a statement, of sorts, of things that we believed in (things that are "acceptable" from the IE root deks).  I thought of orthodontists and orthopedics - doctors who made things straight (from the IE root eredh).  I eventually arrived at the notion that orthodox must mean something like "straight beliefs".  In retrospect, I wasn't far off.

I am somewhat amused that orthodox is either a misnomer or a contradiction in terms.  There are as many "orthodox" beliefs as there are people who believe them.  In terms of churches, the Orthodox flag is flown by the Greeks, Russians, Serbians, and many more - and since they all differ somewhat in their beliefs, it can only be observed that each group thinks their beliefs are straighter than the others.  And so it goes. 

That is my story of noodling around with words based on word roots.  If you haven't read it, I hope you'll take the time to read the "Foreword" to this blog and get the big picture of what the blog is about.  I've also added a very few resources on the right.  Stop by these sites every once in a while and see if you don't find something that piques your interest - like how "pique" relates to "America's most popular condiment".

Orthodox Rocks - Part II

Before your very eyes, I am building a post in three installments dealing with the roots and meaning of "orthodox".  Here now is Part II.

Johnson County, Kansas is proud home to the first family of orthodonture - The Frys.  My youngest son (not pictured here) is only months away from flashing a dazzling smile thanks to Dr Jeremy (remember "doctor" from my last post?).  A few lazy teeth have been set on the straight and narrow.  Orthodontics, Orthepedics, Orthoepics* and the like all share this common IE root, eredh, which means high.  But clearly we were not going after "high teeth" when we went to the orthodontist.  That vampire look is really getting old.

Imagine a row of people; let's pretend they are new military recruits.  They're all the same height, all standing, but some are slouching over, some are leaning over on their buddy, some are standing upright.  The slouchers and leaners would clearly appear shorter than those standing upright.  In walks the drill sergeant and shouts "Ten Hut, Stand up straight you lousy maggots!"  (Drill sergeants are surly like that.)  Now, everyone is the same height - all "high", none shorter thanks to the drill sergeant's verbal orthodonture, so to speak.  That's what an orthodontist does, only without all the yelling insults and with more wire and rubber bands.  Ortho has morphed from meaning "high" to indicating that a thing is "straight or upright".

Another word related to ortho is arduous.  Imagine that mean drill sergeant ordering those maggots, I mean recruits, on a double-time "harch" up a high, steep mountainside.  I think there would be unanimous agreement, among the survivors, that such a exercise would be arduous.  And so it should be.

* Some years ago, the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee had to skip a word that none of the judges could confidently pronounce.  The word?  Orthoepy.  The meaning of the word?  Orthoepy is the correct (straight) pronunciation of words.  It's all true.

Orthodox Rocks - Part I

Before your very eyes, I'm going to build a post in three installments dealing with the roots and meaning of "orthodox".  This is Part I, of course.

At the same time we moved into our current home a new Greek Orthodox church was being built nearby.  While the rest of the family was looking forward to the baklava at the annual Greek food fest, I had my eye on more substantive fare.  Being a devout believer in the supremacy of Kansas City Barbeque, I devoted myself to building a mammoth backyard smoker.  I habitually scouted for construction areas where large flat slabs of Kansas limestone were exposed.  The good Greeks had unearthed a truckload for me a half mile from my house.  A hernia and a knee replacement later, I have myself a killer smoker in which I can smoke a drawn and quartered pig or 120 racks of ribs, more or less.

Now that I have established this scintillating prologue to my blog trilogy, I should prolly get to work.  Orthodox, ortho + dox.  Let's focus on the dox part today.  Our IE root is dek1 with the meaning of "to take or accept".  A direct descendant is decent - something that is acceptable.  How do we learn what is decent or acceptable?  Well, experience is a great teacher, but history is full of the value of teachers who instruct what is acceptable across the wide range of human endeavor.  The Latin word docere means to show or instruct (to teach) and it is the headwater of all our doc- words like doctor, orginally a religious term meaning scholarly teacher.  Over time, doctor became applied to anyone having earned the highest college degree.  A doctor then teaches doctrines or dogma and points out paradoxes to his disciples (those who are learning what is acceptable through discipline).  (The use of the term doctor to refer to a medical profession is really just the tip of the iceberg.)

As noble a word as doctor is, isn't it interesting that when you alter or change something with an attempt to deceive, it is said that you "doctor" it.  That's not acceptable at all!

Next post: we'll tackle the ortho side of the equation.

While not quite a googlewhack, "orthodox rocks" only gets 160 hits on a Google search.

The Dolphin Brothers

In the late '80s I was busy building a family, watching Thirty Something, and figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I totally missed the musical phenomenon known as The Dolphin Brothers who are described as having the sound of a "Fashion-era David Bowie" featuring the "classic simplicity of a nice piece of plodding liquorice and some good old plain sherbet."  [I wish I could write like that.]

But enough about me, this is a blog about word roots and relationships.  One of the first words that I learned was decodable was Philadelphia - the city of what?  That's right "brotherly love" (phila = love + brother = delphia).  Isn't it odd that a city famous for booing Santa Claus is called Brotherly Love.  I wonder if they like dolphins there?  They could rename the town to Philadolphia.

That actually wouldn't be much of a change.  The Greek word for brother, delphos, is interesting.  The IE Root, gwelbh, actually means womb.  Somewhere along its travels the g morphed to a d and picked up the delph sound.  Since brothers are from the same mother, they can be said to be womb-mates.  Get it?  Womb-mates, like roommates... oh never mind.

Okay, brothers are from the same womb.  But what about those cute dolphins?  Believe it or not, someone decided that a dolphin was shaped like a womb - an area of expertise that exceeds my knowledge base.

So here's to you, The Dolphin Brothers.  You named yourself after basically the same thing - a womb.   That's why I miss the '80s.

A State of Inactivity or Insensibility

Today we'll look at a family of words built around the IE root ster1. which comes to us with the meaning of stiff.  Before we're done, we'll see this word relates to barbeque and weapons of war.

How do you describe someone who is stiff and sour - stern comes to mind.  Of course, people like that tend to stare a lot - also from ster1.  Until recently I didn't know how to make great mashed potatoes.  I used to add cold milk which made the mash stiff and it more or less froze the starch in the potatoes.  (The key is to use warm milk!)

Start and startle both derive from ster1.  How "start" relates to "stiff" was pretty difficult to me until I remembered how I start the day - rather stiff, my joints wake up about 30 minutes after I get out of bed.  If some loud noise awakens me in the middle of the night, I bolt upright in bed, stiff as a board. 

Oddly, the word stereo relates stiff. I thought it simply meant "two" - you know, the opposite of mono as all you audiophiles know so well. Stereo is a Greek work meaning "solid". Who knew? Perhaps more oddly the stork bird gets its name from ster1 apparently because of its stiff posture and jerky movements. I'm no authority on the subject so I guess I'll have to go with tradition.

Kansas City's third worst BBQ joint features a dude struttin' with some barbeque in his up-to-date finest outfit.  I have no idea why they use this motif, but that dude a'struttin' sure looks stiff.  Of course, I guess if times are stark and you're about to starve any kind of vittles is better than nothing, even stiff potatoes.  These words describe conditions that clould lead to you being very stiff and very room temperature. A seldom used word, torpor - a state of mental or physical inactivity or insensibility, describes lifeforms in a stiff state.  I initially thought it was the definition of teenagers when Saturday chores have to be done.  Guess I was wrong.  (Notice how after all those st- words, the s suddenly disappeared.  This is the kind of thing I was trying to explain in my prior post, Sliding Sideways.)

Now, all this brings us to our last word as illustrated to the right.  I have recently become word buddies with a real creative New Yawker who has a fine gift of illustrating words.  This is his interpretation of a torpedo - stiff as can be, piercing through something that looks like my mashed potatoes made with cold barbeque sauce.  (Be sure to check out his blog every Monday when he posts a new image.)

Sliding Sideways

Sometimes, when I write my little posts about words, I imagine you, my reader, kicking the slats out of your bed and screaming, "What?  Those aren't even close to the same ________ (words, letters, sounds, whatever)."  So this post is for all of you with broken beds and sore throats.

Are too!

Let's see if I can school ya a little bit on this one.  Did you read my post on "Our Father..."?  Let's look at the words for father in several different languages.
              Ancient Indo-European root: p'ter
              Latin: pater (pronounced pot-air)
              Old Irish: athir (pronounced AH her)
              Old English: faeder (pronounced fy-der)
              German: fadar (pronounced faw-der)
Clearly these are all related in terms of sound qualities, but there are also quantitative differences that create distinct languages.  Notice the difference in pronunciation between Old Irish and Old English.  That's quite a difference.  In English, we grabbed the Old Irish th, but we actually pronounce it.

A friend of mine does a little doodling under the banner of Pez Martillo.  Ah, Pez.  I know Pez - that little candy thingy, right?  Not unless it is fish-flavored candy!
               Ancient Indo-European root: peisk
               Latin: pisces (like the zodiac sign)
               Old English: fisc
               Spanish: pez
Fish < > Pez.  On their face, there is little similarity between the English and Spanish variations.  But when you look at the whole group together, you see a lot of similarity.  That's how linguists go about figuring out the connections and conjecturing what the Indo-European root was.  By the way, Pez Martillo is the Spanish name of the... hey, you look it up, I had to.
 
And by the way, I didn't pick the image above just for the perky spokesmodel.  Look at what she is sitting on.  No, not her bum, the package.  Notice the flavor.  In German, that would be spelled pfefferminz.  How is that for changing the letters around?  Hey, wait a minute, pfefferminz. PfeffErminZ. 

I wonder...