I'm Home, Lucid!

Last week we looked at some similar words that can be used interchangeably, and I shared my confusion with when to use “which” and when to use “that.” While compel and impel can be understood by differing definitions, and further and farther by different etymologies, which and that in the context of which (not that) I am referring is a matter of usage, not etymology or definition.

I even added parenthetical comments demonstrating some instances where it’s clear that “which” is the only word which (that?) can be used, and some instances where it’s clear that “that” is the only word which (that?) can be used. But I didn’t have space to clarify, so let’s get to that (an instance in which “which” won’t work) now.

What about which/that? You can see from my parenthetical comments above and last week that (can’t use “which” here) there are times when “which” and “that” can both make sense. But which (can’t use “that” here) word is the good word to use?

I found one site that suggests “use ‘that’ to introduce a ‘restrictive clause’ and ‘which’ to introduce a ‘nonrestrictive clause.’” The difference between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause is explained as depending on whether you are referring to only the person or thing that you just mentioned (as I did with the site) or whether it describes not only what you’ve referenced but other things as well. Further, the site explains that if you remove the restrictive clause the meaning changes and the sentence loses specificity, but with an unrestrictive clause it wouldn’t.

Another site, while agreeing on the restrictive/nonrestrictive clause explanation, adds that usage has changed over the past century (as usage tends to do) and informs us that restrictive clauses are (or at least used to when grammar teaches could wield rulers on knuckles with impunity) not separated from the rest of the sentence with commas, while non-restrictive clauses are.  The article even quotes Sir Ernest Gowers, writing in the 1965 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, saying he “comments rather sadly about this situation.” What is quoted is:

If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.

So, if you wish to be a stickler, use “that” when defining a word, and “which” when being less restrictive. 

Does that make it easy (or at least lucid)? If so, to misquote Ricky Ricardo, “I’m home, lucid!”

And that (not which), my friends, is a reference not readily understood by most people under age 50. 

Confused About Further and Farther and Compelled to Blog About It

This week I encountered the word impel where I would have expected the word compel. Why did the author use the former rather than the latter? Then later this week I was writing an email and wondered whether further or farther was the appropriate word. How do you know which is the good word to use, and speaking of which, that with which I struggle sometimes is whether to use which or that.

What’s the good word for each situation is not always determined by definition, but let’s start with those that are: impel and compel.

Compel is defined as “to force or drive, especially to a course of action” while impel is defined as “to drive or urge forward; press on; incite or constrain to action.” Not much difference. Other definitions of compel all have the word force in them, while neither definition of impel does (at least on dictionary.com). But other than that the definitions don’t provide a lot of separation of meaning. Let’s look at etymonline.com and see if the sources for both words sheds some light.

Compel came to English in the mid-1300s from the Old French word compeller, which came from the Latin word compellere, which means “to drive together, drive to one place” (when used of cattle) or “to force of compel” when used of persons. The Latin word was formed by attaching the prefix com- that means “together” together with pellere, which means “to drive” and from which we also get the word pulse. We also got impel from pellere, (in the early 1400s) with “im-“ as the prefix. In Latin, im- indicates entry, as in in, into, or upon.

Now we have some clarification. Impel should have a sense of acting upon something from outside. Compel is more of a force from within working together with outside influences. Its usage bears this out – compel is often used in the first person “I am compelled” while impel is rarely used in the first person.

So what about further and farther? The only difference dictionary.com provides in defining the two is that further has a tertiary definition of “additional; more” that farther does not. Both are used when describing a greater distance or more advanced point. Back to etymology.com to see if this helps clarify anything.

What we find is what I enjoy about words. Let’s begin with further, because it goes further back. While etymonline.com does not indicate the timing of its first use in English, it does show furthermore as appearing about 1200, which predates anything in the farther lineage. Further comes from the Old English word furđor if used as an adverb, or furđra as the adjective. Additionally, the etymonline.com clarifies for us that the word is “…etymologically representing either ‘forth-er’ or ‘fore-ther.’”

Moving farther ahead, to farther, we find that it first appeared in about 1300 as a variant of further, and etymonline tells us further that farther replaced ferrer as the comparative form of the Old English word fierr, that (which?) meant “far.” Then it goes on to explicate that fierr is “itself a comparative but no longer felt as one.” Etymonline.com also tells us that the vowel change (from u to a) was “influenced by the root vowel, and confusion with the Middle English ferþeren, which (that?) meant “to assist, promote, [or] advance.” It further (farther won’t do here) states “There is no historical basis for the notion that farther is of physical distance and further of degree or quality.” In fact, with the exception of the meaning of additional that the dictionary provides for the word further, the words can be legitimately used interchangeably. Further has a somewhat more pedantic usage while farther is probably more common, at least in my experience.

So I hope that clears up any confusion on those two pairs. Next week we'll get to the motherlode of my confusion: which vs. that. I bet you're excited and can't wait. In the mean time, enjoy some old episodes of "I Love Lucy." It will come in handy for my hilarious close next week.

I'm Adamantine About Obdurate, But Not Déclassé

Time to follow up on some words from previous posts.

On February 15, 2010 I closed my blog by writing “I won’t be obdurate or adamantine about it, no matter what the title says.” But I never got around to looking at those words.

Obdurate is an adjective that means unmoved or stubbornly resistant to moral influence. The first appearance of any form of the word was its noun form, obduration, in about 1400. I have not heard the noun form used, but have heard the adjective often. It appeared in the mid 1400s. The word in whatever form comes from the Latin word obduratus, which means “hardened” and is the past participle of obdurare, which means “be hard, hold out, persist, or endure.” In fact, endure comes from the root word of obdurare, durus, which means hard.

Obdurate is similar to contumacious or pervicacious, but obdurate has a moral quality the other two words do not, contumacious has a haughty quality the others don’t. Pervicacious you’ll have to let me know how it compares.

Adamantine is an interesting word to me. I thought it was the adjective form of the noun adamant, but adamant can also be used as an adjective, making adamantine duplicative. Adamantine also came to English directly from Latin in about 1200. The Latin word is adamantinus and means “hard as steel, inflexible.” It comes from the Greek word adamantinos, which is a form of adamus, from which in the mid-1400s English we got the noun form of adamant (through the Latin via the French word adamant). Its use as an adjective came into use late in the 1400s.

Adamus was also the Latin name of the hypothetical hardest material, and literally meant invincible. It meant hard as steel until the 1670s, when it was first used to mean unshakeable or stubborn or obdurate. Adamant the noun was used in antiquity (according to etymonline.com) of substances like white sapphire, steel, and diamonds. In Old English it was ađamas, which meant “a very hard stone.”

While obduracy is a force of will, being adamantine is a result of character or nature.

So many words for stubborn. I wonder if there are as many words for being nice and compliant.

Also, earlier this month I used the word déclassé. While I italicized it and used the accents the French requires, it turns out that it has made its way into English usage sufficiently that I could have just written declasse. While I have never seen it that way, etymonline.com lists it as such, and a search of dictionaries provides examples of its appearance without accent marks and non-italicized. It is possible that the change from French word being used in English to an English word is still in process, but since I have always heard it pronounced as a three-syllable word (dey-kla-sey) I think the non-accent spelling without italics is still premature. It’s been used in English since 1887, and has the same meaning in English that it does in French: to cause to lose class, status, or social standing. Of course, since I have never had class or social standing, I can’t personally become déclassé, and I am adamant about that. (But not obdurate.)

Blither-Blather, Maggie Lauder, and Garbanzo Beans

This week a friend of mine posted a link on her Facebook page to a list of “20 ‘Forgotten’ Words That Should Be Brought Back.”  On the list was a word that and spurred and starts today’s post – blithering.

The verb blither was first used in 1868, a variant of blether, which comes “from Middle English blather.”

Blather is a good word that is either a verb or a noun, and means either foolish talk or talking foolishly, although it is often used with voluble talking. It’s an old Scottish word from the 1520s that probably came from the Old Norse word blađra that meant to mutter or “wag the tongue.” In its gerund form (blathering) it looks very much like the word blithering, which I’ve heard a lot, too (never in reference to my expressing myself, you understand – always about others).

Blither means the same thing as blather and blathering. Maybe on Thanksgiving Day this week I can caution the kids to “stop all that blither-blather.” According to etymonline.com it wasn’t for another 12 years (in 1880) that the “present participle adjective (from the first typically [used] with idiot)” was formed, even though it had been in use as a “verbal noun” since 1872.

These words reminded me this morning of a word Bill O’Reilly used to use (he still may – I haven’t seen his show recently) in encouraging people to write in: blatherskite. Blatherskite doesn’t primarily have the implication of foolish talk, only of voluble talk, although its second definition does.  The word blatherskite is formed by combining the aforementioned blather with the “dialectical” (etymonline.com) –skite, the suffix applied to a “contemptible person.”

It also comes from Scottish, from bletherskate. It came to English about 1650, but came to America during the American Revolution as Scottish soldiers in the Continental Army would sing the song Maggie Lauder.

The list that I referred to as I began this post also had a word previously mentioned in this blog, gallimaufry. I didn’t have space in the post on gallimaufry to include a similar word so let’s get to it now.

Farrago is a word that came into English in the 1630s from Latin, and it is defined as “a confused mixture,” something that can be used to describe this blog today. The Latin word farrago described a medley, or mix of grains for animal feed, the far in farrago being the word for grain. (Which reminds me – another blogspot user posted a blog on 10 freezer to crockpot meals. I’ve got to replicate this preparation soon.)

Also from that casserole post is chickpeas vs. garbanzo beans. Chickpeas and garbanzo beans are disparate words for the seeds of the plant biologically known as Cicer arietinum.  Etymonline.com has the word as a hyphenated word, but my dictionary doesn’t; it also says the word is a “false singular back-formation” because the word used since the 1540s was chich-pease, having come from the French name for the seeds, pois chiche. In pois chiche the chiche comes from the Latin name of the plant.

Garbanzo is the other name for the seeds, and comes from Spanish. One source said it is an alteration of the Spanish word arvanҫo, but I couldn’t find the word in Spanish. Wikipedia says arvanҫo is possibly a Portuguese word. Wikipedia also says garbanzo came to English as calavance from Old Spanish, perhaps influenced by garroba or algarroba. Said by etymonline to ultimately to come from Greek or Basque, its usage is primarily American. According to the OED, the Basque construction it might have come from is garbantzu, a word formed by combining the Basque words for seed (garau) and dry (antzu). I like that explanation best, even if it doesn’t have sufficient provenance (not to be confused with Provence, an area of France which really isn’t that far from the Basque region).

How “beans” got attached to garbanzo, I don’t know, but garbanzos sound much more fun, and masculine, than chickpeas. 

Different and Disparate words for Dissimilar

Sometimes you encounter words that are different, but sometimes they’re just dissimilar. Then there are those that are disparate. When is something different, when is it dissimilar, and when is it disparate?

The definitions shed some light: different is defined as “not alike in character or quality” while dissimilar is defined as “…not having likeness or resemblance” and disparate is “distinct in kind”.  

Latin is the ultimate source of all three words. The Latin word differentem (from which we get different through the Old French word different. It essentially means “to set apart.” (As in the Sesame Street song “one of these things just doesn’t belong here.”) It came to English in the late 1300s.

The Latin word similis means “like, or resembling.” There’s actually an Old Latin word (I didn’t even know there was Old Latin) that means “together” from which it may have come – the Old Latin word is semol. The French took similis  and made it similaire. The French had a word dissimilaire, which may be the source, but by the 1620s English was using the word dissimilar.

The Latin word from which we get disparate is disparatus, and disparate didn’t come through French. It arrived in English around 1600. Disparatus is the past participle of disparare, which means “divide or separate.” It was formed from combining the prefix dis-, which means “apart” and parare, which means prepare or get ready. There is a Latin word for unequal or unlike, dispar, which may also have influenced the development of the word. It is the Latin root that helps clarify what I believe the current predominant usage to be: bringing together of unlike things that were prepared separately.

So, disparate words are words that are unlike and come from different places, while different are things that are not alike in character or quality and dissimilar are things that don’t resemble each other.

For instance, olio and oleo are disparate words, olio and medley are dissimilar words, and olio and hodgepodge are different words. And, since I mentioned but didn't explain oleo earlier this month, let's cover that.

Oleo is short for oleomargarine, and has been a word of its own since 1884. In 1854 the French coined the word oléomargarine to describe the butter substitute made from beef fat.They formed the word by combining their word oléine (from the Latin word for oil, oleum, and the suffix from glycerine, -ine) and margarine. Around our dinner table we call oleine glyceryl trioleate. Margarine was invented in 1869 by the French scientist Hippolyte Mège-Mouries, according to etymonline.com. 

Etymonline.com also quotes a "Punch" article from Feb. 21, 1874 as saying "The 'enterprising merchant' of Paris, who sells Margarine as a substitute for Butter, and does not sell his customers by selling it as Butter, and at Butter's value, has very likely found honesty to be the best policy. That policy might perhaps be adopted with advantage by an enterprising British Cheesemonger." We all know who they're talking about, don't we? 

Making a Hash of Words - and Fashion

I promised last week to cover heterogeneous and medley this week.

Heterogeneous means different in kind or unlike. It can also mean composed of different kinds of parts. It came to English in the 1620s from the Medieval Latin word heterogeneus, which came from the Greek word heterogenes, a combination of the Greek words for different (hetero) and gender/race/kind (genos, from which we also get genus.) Earlier in the 1600s they tried out the word as heterogeneal, but apparently heterogeneous won out. I don’t think the battle was as fierce as between vhs and beta (a reference that anyone under the age of 30 will likely miss) but a battle nonetheless

Notice it is het-er-uh-jee-nee-uhs, six syllables. While combining the last three syllables into jeen and yuhs is also given (as in genius), the stress is not on the syllable with the o, and there is a long e sound after the n. While heterogenous is a biology or pathology term for something outside the organism, it is a different word from heterogeneous. Now that I have that off my back, let’s look at some similar words.

The opposite of heterogeneous is homogeneous (again, homogenous is a biology term – get it straight!). It arrived in English 20 years or so after heterogeneous (they were looking at differences before they looked at similarities, apparently). I don’t think it will surprise you to find out that the Greek word for similar is homo. As with heterogeneal, there was an earlier version of the word, homogeneal, that lapsed into disfavor and was eventually shut up in the Tower of London.

The other word from last week is medley. In my mind a medley is a succession of items, but my dictionary defines it as “a mixture, especially of heterogeneous elements.” Medley arrived in English in about 1300, and has a very interesting etymology. It came from the Old French word for hand-to-hand combat, medlee. Within a couple of hundred years it developed a meaning of a combination or mixture, and was not used to describe the musical composition of diverse parts until the 1620s. So the next time some guy (anyone but me) shows up at work with striped pants and a plaid shirt with a paisley tie and a checkered jacket, refer to his outfit as a medley instead of a hodgepodge.

While we have space, let me follow up on last week’s coverage of the word hash. “Hash browns” and  “hash marks” have come into use in English. What have they to do with hash? While Hash browns is the earliest of the three, having arrived in English in 1917. It refers to potatoes that were hashed (i.e. chopped up) and then fried. The –ed was eventually also chopped. While my source (etymonline.com) doesn’t state that it is a product of the first World War, the other one (actually two) is/are.

Hash marks were first used in the armed forces to describe the service stripes on the sleeve of a military uniform. They’ve been used in that sense since 1909 (actually before the first World War, but give me a break) and were called that supposedly because they marked the number of years one had eaten the free food/hash from the Army. The similarity in appearance of the lines on an American Football field (I know this blog has readers in other parts of the world) to the stripes on a uniform sleeve resulted in them getting called hash marks, but not until the 1960s. On the football field they look more like dashes than hash, but who am I to quibble?

Are you ready for some football?

My Casserole Restaurant Menu

I like casseroles so much that I once thought it would be a good idea to open a casserole-only restaurant. (Name: “It’s how we ‘role”.) It would include stews and hodgepodge dishes, perhaps even olio, gallimaufry and ragout. Some ideas are best left as ideas.

But I do like casseroles. Yet I was a little surprised to find out that the word casserole refers primarily to the covered baking dish in which they are cooked. It was not until about 1930 that the word was used to describe what is cooked in the dish, perhaps as haute cuisine flourished and used phrases such as en casserole, or à la casserole.

Casseroles as a word came to English in 1706 from the French word from the 16^th century that described a sauce pan. The Middle French word for pan (used as early as the 14^th century) was casse, and came from the Provenҫal  word cassa, which meant “melting pan,” which they got from the Medieval Latin word for pan, cattia. It is possible that Latin got cattia from the Greek word kyathion, which is a diminutive of their word for the “cup for the wine bowl”, kyathos.

While in my mind a casserole is a hodgepodge of ingredients, it can be more simple than a hodgepodge.

A hodgepodge is defined as a heterogeneous (dissimilar – wait until next week’s post) mixture, or a thick soup made from meat and vegetables. I don’t know about the heterogeneous aspect, but  knowing that hodgepodge began by describing “a kind of stew…made with goose, herbs, spices, wine, and other ingredients” certainly makes it deserving of a place in my restaurant menu. Goose stew.

The word hodgepodge (also found as two words or hyphenated between the syllables) came into English in the early 1400s as hogpoch, which was an alteration of the word hotchpotch that appeared in the late 1300s. At that time it was an Anglo-French legal term meaning “collection of property in a common ‘pot’ before dividing it equally,” a word derived from the Old French word hochepot that meant stew or soup.

Another item on the menu would be gallimaufry. It is defined as “a hodgepodge,” meaning a jumble or confused medley (more on this, too, in next week’s post), a ragout or hash. Gallimaufry has been used in English since the 1550s, having come across the channel from France, where it was spelled galimafrée. In Old French it was spelled calimafree, and since the late 1300s had referred to a “sauce made of mustard, ginger, and vinegar; a stew of carp.” Where that came from is open to debate. Carp stew with mustard/ginger sauce – comin’ right up.

Ragout (still pronounced in the French manner as ra-goo) is defined as a highly seasoned stew of meat or fish, with or without vegetables. Another dictionary allows poultry to be an ingredient, so add chicken ragout to the menu. Ragout has been used in English since the 1650s, and came from the French word ragoût, a form of the Middle French word  ragoûter, that meant ”awaken the appetite.” 

Hash has developed a déclassé connotation of diner fare about it, but the word refers more to the preparation of the food than the other words do. There is an element of cutting into small pieces rather than just mixing disparate ingredients. Defined primarily as “a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef and veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan” or “meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy”,  we have another menu item – veal hash.

Hash came to English first as a verb (also in the 1650s) to describe the hacking or chopping of food into small pieces. The French word for chop up is hacher, from the Old French word for ax, hache (more on this in a future post, or I’ll never finish my menu).  The noun (the food, not the method of preparation) came into use about a decade later.  

One final item on the menu, a word much used in crosswords. Olio is a dish of many ingredients, and is not a misspelling of oleo. (See why we have so many “follow up” posts?) It, too, is defined as a mixture of heterogeneous elements, a hodgepodge, but it is also used informally to describe olla podrida, a spicy Spanish stew comprised often of sausage, chickpeas, tomatoes and other vegetables. Known on the Iberian peninsula since the 1640s, the word comes from the Spanish (olla) or Portuguese (olha) word for pot or jar. The Spanish and Portuguese got their word from the Latin word olla. Like casserole, its meaning transferred from the cooking vessel to the food itself. And we’ve come full circle.

Of course, the dessert menu would have to include zabaglione.