July 2011
31 Jul, 2011
The new Mrs Malaprop?
Improving your vocabulary and word choice will help you properly reticulate [sic] your ideas.
I am not incinerating [sic] that any of you lack the consecration [sic] needed to focus on writing good English but I can safely say, without fear of contraception [sic], that poor word choice can reach into all aspects of communications and writing like the giant testicles [sic] of an octopus and ruin the whole effect.
Word choice is not rocket surgery. Mrs Marple [sic] was famous for getting her words wrong; and even I am not inflammable [sic], I do sometimes choose the wrong words.
A good writer will not confuse his propositions [sic] with his compunctions [sic]. If you are, like me, not gifted with a pornographic [sic] memory I recommend that you refer to entomology [sic] dictionaries. They are great suppositories [sic] of information.
If you are using lots of words of more than one syllabus [sic] look for a simpler cinnamon [sic]. Although using a dinasaurus [sic] can be time-consuming, patients [sic] is a virgin [sic] that will replay [sic] you endlessly. There are also pneumatics [sic] to help you remember the right words.
So let me reverberate [sic] by dipping into the literary cannon [sic] of The Rhyme of the Ancient Marinade [sic], and remind you that you shouldn’t let a poor vocabulary be an alcatraz [sic] around your neck. If you keep your feet solidly on terracotta [sic] and focus on improvement the carrot is there at the end of the tunnel [sic]. The pineapple [sic] of success is communicating clearly to your reader – that is the crutch [sic] of the matter.
20 Jul, 2011
18 Jul, 2011
I have a fondness for the adjective pelagic. It means of the open sea and comes from the Greek word pelagos for sea. It shares a little with the similar Greek word for the mysterious sea people who lived in Greece before the Dorians, the Pelasgians, who came from no one knows where and then disappeared back into history.
Pelagic is a soft-sounding, evocative word, creating a sense of otherworldliness, of things far from the dominion of man. It tends to be used in two senses: for seabirds, such as the albatross, that spend most of their time out in mid-ocean; or for fish, like the sunfish, that live and travel great distances on the uppermost levels of the sea.
Unfortunately, I have some cause for unhappiness as the scientists have got their rationalist hands on pelagic, and turned it into a technical adjective. For them, pelagic describes things of the ocean, from the low tide mark out to the open sea, and includes the whole volume of water from the surface to the bottom.
Scientists have taken the poetic and precise pelagic, which described the uppermost layer of the open ocean, and stripped the magic out of it. They have tacked on some Greek-derived prefixes and used it as a technical tag for all the depths of the seas.
Epipelagic zone
Epi- is a Greek prefix with a variety of meanings from: upon, beside, among, on the outside, above, over. The epipelagic zone from the surface down to 200 m is the zone where there is enough light for photosynthesis, so most of the ocean’s plants and animals live there.
Mesopelagic zone
Meso- is the Greek prefix for middle. The mesopelagic zone is from 200 to 1000 metres below the ocean surface. It is also known as the twilight zone because only some light penetrates this deep but not enough for photosynthesis.
Bathypelagic zone
Bathys is the Greek word for deep. No light penetrates this zone so it is also known as the midnight zone. The bathyal zone or bathypelagic zone extends from 1000 to 4000 metres depths.
Abyssopelagic zone
Abyss derives from the Greek word meaning bottomless. The abyssopelagic layer (from 4,000 to 6,000 metres) contains the very deep communities near the bottom of the ocean.
Hadopelagic zone
The zone gets its name from the Greek’s word for hell, Hades. The hadopelagic or hadal zone defines the deepest trenches in the ocean below 6,000 metres.
Benthic
I include benthic for completeness. It is derived from bathys as the Greek word for deep. Relating to the bottom of the ocean or lake or to the organisms that live there.
The scientifically derived zones have some interest for word buffs but are never going to find their way into poetry. Would Shakespeare have begun Richard III thus?
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the abyssopelagic zone buried*.
[*In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.]
11 Jul, 2011
Carbon is a non-metallic element that makes up less than one per cent of the earth’s crust and 100 per cent of the Australian political debate.
Much of the world’s carbon is contained in coal that was created during the Carboniferous Period from 360 to 300 million years ago. We are forced to burn more and more coal to keep up with the demand for electricity that is needed to run our air conditioners in the summer to escape the effects of global warming. The Australian Government is now asking us to pay a tax on carbon pollution because of global warming.
Although carbon has been known to man since prehistory, the word was coined in the 1780s by the French scientist, Antoine Lavoisier as charbone. It was based on the Latin carbo for glowing coal or charcoal, from the Proto-Indo-European base-word ker for heat, fire, or to burn, which is also seen in our word cremate.
Carbonifeorous is a scientific Latin construction meaning coal producing from carbo for coal and ferous for producing, containing, or bearing.
Coal, which is technically mineralised fossil carbon, comes from old English col and is similar in all the Germanic languages: Dutch kool; German, Kohle; and old Norse kol.
Coal can be classified in quality from the poorest quality brown coal, lignite, to high quality black coal, anthracite.
Lignite still contains the remnants of lignin, the plant material from which coal is formed, and is from the Latin lignum for wood. One form of lignite is jet, which is compact and has a deep black colour from which we get the expression jet black. Jet was carved and polished to make jewellery. Jet gets its name rather classically from Norman French jaiet, via Latin gagates, from the original Greek expression, gagates lithos, meaning stone of Gages, a town in Lycia where it was sometimes washed ashore.
Anthracite gets its name from the Greek word anthrax for charcoal or coal. The bacterial disease anthrax, gets its name from the coal-black-centred boils formed from skin infections. A boil with a red centre was known as a carbuncle, from Latin for little coal!
Carbon might well be disputed as the source of global warming but it is, indisputably, the hottest political word at the moment.
4 Jul, 2011
Choosing the right partner for your life journey can help you to achieve great things and to realise your full potential. Unfortunately choosing the wrong partner can drag you down and stop you achieving your promise. Unfortunately the pairing of dulcet and tones has not been a beneficial choice for the lovely dulcet. Every time you hear or read dulcet you expect her to be followed by her inevitable, plodding partner, tones. It has reduced dulcet to nothing more than a tired, old cliché.
Dulcet has been closely associated with tones for more than 200 years. The Oxford English Dictionary list several examples of “dulcet tones” from about the beginning of the 19th century, including from one of the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, a British Prime Minister.
Introducing speakers with reference to their dulcet tones is such an over-used irony that you cringe. When you hear it you prepare yourself for a barrage of clichés and expect a naïve and unsophisticated speaker.
But dulcet does not deserve this. It is a beautiful word that identifies things as harmonious, melodious and pleasing to the ear. She is descended directly from the Latin word dulcis via the Old French, doucet.
In musical contexts we use the Italian word, dolce, to mean sweet and gentle. The Italian word chose her mate much more wisely than did her English cousin. We drop la dolce vita, the sweet life, into our conversations as we sip our cappuccinos in Leichhardt (the centre of Sydney’s Italian community). When we do so we are using a bit of cosmopolitan language and referencing the classic 1960 Fellini film, La Dolce Vita. It makes us feel suave, urbane and even a little bit sexy. But using dulcet tones just makes us feel a bit daggy and won’t work to impress our friends.
So what can we do with dulcet? We need to wean her away from her partnership with tones. We need to introduce dulcet to new partners, hoping that when she gets out there she can build new relationships and grow into the word that dolce has become. Good luck, sweet dulcet!
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