May 31, 2008
Entonces, people . . .
For a while now I’ve been meaning to pose a “Dear clusterflock” question that I continually forget, but a message from Alek Lindus called it to mind.
Bear with me now. This may take a little explaining.
I’d observed of a photo of Alek’s that its violet cast lent it a crepuscular feel, and she replied that the word crepuscular “sounds vaguely dirty and disgusting”. (A “great word” she deemed it, by the way.) And I thought to myself, Well, yes. Maybe it’s the pus in the middle, but in any case, crepuscular does sound like a word suited to something vile, viler than anything “pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim; indistinct”. Dirty deeds may be done at twilight, to be sure, but the hour also known as the gloaming is generally considered to possess a haunting, albeit possibly unsettling, beauty. Hard to think of it as crepuscular.
And so: I bethought myself of the word entonces. A Spanish word. Literally, then, but like pues, one of those filler words Spanish speakers use as English speakers might use, for instance, so. “So, has it stopped raining yet, Cooper?” You get the idea.
So a couple of years back Allen and Jon and I were touring around Nevada and Arizona in a big old rental car. We were . . . somewhere; Jon was dozing in the back seat, and I was sitting up front with Allen, chatting with him as he drove. And Allen asked me whether I’d ever encountered words whose sounds conjured up images or meanings not associated with any of the words’ commonly accepted meanings. As an example Allen offered entonces.
He’d heard an awful lot of entonces during a stretch when he lived and worked in Nicaragua, back in the early days of Sandinista rule. (One of his projects was a wonderful illustrated comic-book style construction manual intended for campesino beneficiaries of land reform.) A Nicaraguan co-worker prefaced so many of her remarks to him with “En-ton-ces, Allen . . . ” that the word was embedded in his brain.
And the funny thing was, whenever he heard entonces, he imagined a pair of tongs. En-ton-ces.
And once he’d shared the secret of entonces, I began seeing tongs, too! In fact, when he married, I presented a pair of forged iron entonces to the wedding couple. And Allen’s wife has been known to relay to me the message, “Entonces, Sheila . . . ” when he and I are conversing by phone.
Entonces, ‘flockers and friends, after this shaggy-dog build-up, any words come to mind whose sounds conjure up images or meanings not associated with any of the words’ commonly accepted meanings? [Update: Either within one language or across languages.]
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32 Responses to “Entonces, people . . .”
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Do you mean specifically in Spanish–or in any language?
English: “shunt ” (need I say more?)
Spanish: “queso” –a dozen beers.
Oh, any language! I reckon I didn’t make that clear. I suppose ‘intra-language’ examples might be the most common . . . say, breakfast puts you in mind of a structure resembling the Santa Monica Pier. But instances that cross linguistic barriers are good, too. That’s what set me to thinking about this.
yes! limpid. it sounds the opposite of what it is supposed to mean. and sometimes intrepid feels that way too.
Deron, I agree! Limpid is a word for something muddy and murky, a stagnant body of water clogged with rotting leaves.
And intrepid is another good one. “If that boy of yours weren’t so damn intrepid, he wouldn’t have to slink home from school the long way round.”
I wonder whether people who can drift with some degree of ease from one language to another are more prone to these apprehensions. It is interesting that Alek, with her English, Greek, French, and Serbo-Croatian, would perceive a ‘counter-meaning’ in crepuscular.
Maybe, Deron, your childhood use of Persian/Farsi[?], though you presume it forgotten, manifests itself in the way you hear English words.
Or maybe I’m full of a load of hooey.
Hooey.
Persian is very passive. The verb comes at the end of the sentence and no one ever does anything, something happens. I don’t know if this affected me or not. It is also very beautiful, very lyrical. Not at all like Arabic in terms of how it sounds, although it shares the alphabet and some of the swallowed / guttural consonants. It is a beautiful poetic language.
My wife spent a year in Tucuman, Argentina, and got into trouble with the word embarazadas early on.
and for what it’s worth, I, as an english speaker, share Alek’s discomfort with crepuscular. it feels veiny and furrowed like a dried up apple.
Kris, re: embarazada. Yep, that’s one of those faux amis, for certain (to borrow from yet another tongue).
Reversing the flow (from English back to Spanish), Cooper Renner told me a tale dating from a time when his knowledge of vernacular Spanish was weaker than it is today. He was reading a story to a group of young bilingual kids, a story featuring a crab, I believe — some claw-bearing sea creature. Sensing that perhaps some of the kids didn’t recognize the word crab, he mimed the action of a crab’s pincers while saying, “Pinchy, pinchy.”
See: pinche.
Giggling ensued.
I think of the late Klaus Kinski as crepuscular. (When he wasn’t rabid.)
Sheila, we watched My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski a couple nights ago.
You know, I’ve yet to see the film; I’m happy you reminded me of it. Crepuscular — or rabid — though he may have been, Kinski was a remarkable actor, especially when working with Herzog. That scene in Aguirre in which he cradles his daughter after the arrow pierces her breast . . . not as celebrated as other fabled Kinski scenes, but . . .
“Schist” (take your pick of German or English)
I also remember a story I heard when in high school: The woodworking teacher was going over the names of the files and came to one in particular . . .
“I didn’t hear you, sir–what’s it called again?”
“The bastard file.”
“I still didn’t hear you.”
(louder) “The bastard file.”
“Could you say it louder? I still–”
(shouting) “THE BASTARD FILE!!!”
Then the teacher realized what was going on and started laughing.
Kris: you can also get in trouble ordering huevos for breakfast in Mexico.
Also, Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu was definitely crepuscular.
Fitzcarraldo = rabid?
“So I sell myself, for the highest price. Exactly like a prostitute. There is no difference.”
but this is a digression…
Crepuscular verges on onomatopoeia, though visually, scaly skin comes to mind.
Greek lends itself to more specific meaning as it has bled into other languages and its naming has a mathematical universality
Interesting that Deron retains such a sense of Persian
‘no one ever does anything, something happens’ - could be modus for solitary bees
Tangentially related, perhaps, but I experience this phenomenon all the time in Chinese. The tonality required to speak Chinese are crosswired with the emphasis and emotional tones of English.
What it leads to (at this stage of learning anyway) is a great deal of satisfaction pronouncing certain words.
Cheng2 (成) comes to mind as an example of where they line up. The longer, rising tone really reinforces the idea of change and completion.
Pang4 (胖) works the opposite way. It’s quick and falling tone clashes emotionally with the idea of calling someone fat, even if you still consider it a compliment.
Crepuscular grows prettier after a while, despite there being both crap and pus there. But then coruscating sounds as though it should be to do with rust and it ain’t so. It’s that nice cr sound as much as anything.
Then there is this little quatrain from the 17th century English poet, Charles Cotton:
The Drunkard now supinely snores,
His load of Ale sweats through his Pores,
Yet when he wakes the Swine shall find
A Crapula remains behind.
There’s your word, crapula. It doesn’t mean quite what you’d think, but I think we could run with it…
I think I was thinking about one of these words the other day, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. And trying to remember is dangerous, as these kinds of brain-knots are subject to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—you can’t think about whether you have them without starting to shift the meanings of all kinds of words in your head. Everybody rotate! Three neurons to the left!
I had a problem once in junior high school with the Italian word for parents: genitori. If I’d had a bigger vocabulary at that age, I might have associated it with a more appropriate English relation, such as progenitor. I did not, however, so in my head it became linked with the far more common (especially in the minds of adolescents) genitals. Which is how it came out in my homework one day: i genitali instead of i genitori. I console myself with the knowledge that my teacher, Mr. Kim, who deserved to be amused more often, must have gotten a good laugh out of it. He very kindly wrote in the margin only the discreet query, “The genitals?”
Much more common for me, I think, is the association of certain words with the circumstances and manner of certain people’s saying of them. For example, rotate, which I used above, is indelibly associated in my mind with—again, junior high school—gym class, where we had to attempt to play various sports that as far as I know are simply not played in New York City other than in gym classes. Volleyball, in particular. During that unit, the teacher was always yelling, “Rotate!” A horrible sound, as eventually it would put you into the serving position. I’m not so good with projectiles.
John’s suggestion of schist reminds me that many words associated with geology convey non-geological images to me. Take drumlin — and till, while we’re at it.
“Today’s special is Gratin de Chou-fleur. That is caulflower covered with a rich Béchamel sauce, topped with a liberal dusting of drumlins and till, broiled, then served with a granitic crust.”
[...] Sheila’s excellent post on words that sound different than they mean has generated a host of excellent responses. For those reading via RSS, this is a good example of our comment threads. [...]
“Crepuscular grows prettier after a while.” (See the comment above from George Szirtes.) It does creep up on one, rather like twilight.
On the other hand, it might suggest an insidious form of muscular Christianity.
I do also like the verse quoted within this same comment. Reminds me of a couple of encounters I had this weekend . . . but that is for another post.
This story has nothing to do with the subject at hand, but refers to India’s post above about the Italian genitori and genitals. When I was taking my education courses as an undergrad, one of the classes was supposed to be Educational Psychology but was actually just a survey of various approaches to psychology: the teacher justified it with “This applies to adolescents too”. Anyway, said teacher habitually said genitinalia rather than genitalia and to this day I do not know if it was a genuine mispronunciation or if she did it deliberately to see if any of us (little public school kids in the early ’70s) would correct her on such a loaded word. We never did. I had another professor who said ambigyurity.
crenalate is a word that always comes up for me when I’m thinking of words beginning with CR–. For some reason it always reminds me of pouring coarse sugar, instead of the design it refers to. Maybe it’s because I once built a castle out of sugar cubes.
flocculant always reminds me of many children swimming (too literal, I know–sorry).
Fecund makes me think of singular poop. Theses makes me think of plural poops.
That is all.
Does the fact that I’m shocked—seriously: shocked—that you’re twenty-four comments in here and no one has mentioned the kumquat say something about me and my, uhh, world view?
Really, though. I read this post in Google Reader and said to myself, “The first three comments. Someone in the first three comments has said ‘kumquat.’ ” Sheesh. Such grown ups at the ‘flock…
Jonathan, I’m actually embarrassed for myself.
When I was doing my Honours, we would have fortnightly meetings to discuss our progress. One guy had an odd, but not uncommon manner of speech whereby his “th” sound was a “fff”. Thus, “think” was “fink”; “thought” was “fought”; “Thursday” was “fursday” and so on.
The thing is, the main thing talked about at these meetings was the progress of each person’s thesis. Seriously, this guy would (seemingly unaware) be talking about “My faeces this.. My faeces that… Your faeces is really interested… I’ve been struggling with my faeces all week”.
So much time was wasted trying to get this guy to say something rude. And now I can never use that word without conjuring up this guy, and I wish that it would stop.
There’s a Chinese restaurant somewhere (in Queens, I think?) called Poon’s Fan Fan, which my ex-boyfriend—something of a connoisseur of dirty—used to say was perhaps the dirtiest name he’d ever heard.
Kumquat makes me think of persimmon.
Damn. What’s happened to me?
Huh– Kumquats make me think of W.C. Fields
I love you, Daryl. I almost posted the same thing, but I figured only you would know what the hell I was talking about.
[...] New York Times included a story featuring one of those words. This week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work [...]