A mole by any other name

Last week MrsK tried a new recipe for something called Turkey Mole. I had never met the word mole in a culinary context – though the fact that one of the ingredients was chocolate should have alerted me to the likelihood of a South American origin.

New words are like buses, you spend years not meeting a word and then two come along at once. In Saturday's Times Giles Coren  was reviewing a restaurant specializing in Mexican food, and he mentioned that one of the dishes came with a mole. I knew what it was,  just-in-time,  and tried to find other related words. Staying in South America, guacamole is a sort of mole – so there was another mole, hiding in plain sight.

Could this be related to our molars – the grinding teeth? Everyday English doesn't have any other word that preserves the "o" in a grinding word (as do Spanish and Italian [moler/molere] and no doubt many others. In French, it's become "ou" in moulin (and even the most monoglottally Anglophone will have met this in the trade-name  Moulinex). In English and German, different leaves of the PIE tree, we have mill and Mühle.

<digression>
Another way of smashing things up to release the flavour (apart from grinding, that is) is pounding or crushing, and words related to that are derived from the Latin pestare. The most obvious derivative from this is pesto, made with a pestle. This shows how a word that refers to a process can come to be used to refer to a sauce made with that process.
</digression>

Detail of the image in that video

But let's look more closely at that derivation of guacamole.   I knew before that avocado, the main constituent of  guacamole, is nothing to do with the similar-looking advocacy. Rather, it derives from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl (Nahuatl being the language spoken by the Aztecs).

<scatological_digression>
Watch the video here  to see that avocado means testicle – presumably because of the way they hang.
</scatological_digression>

But I had no idea until the last weekend in February that the "guaca-" of guacamole derived from ahuacatl.  Etymonline says:

So, it all looks pleasingly neat: Sp. moler, Pg moer, It. molere, Prov. molre, Cat. modre. Eng. mill, Ger. Mühle, Nahuatl molli ...{?} Hang on though, not so fast. Why should the language of the Aztecs (which pre-dates the Spanish which didn't begin to taint it until the late 15th century)  have anything to do with a PIE language? This is inviting further investigation, though I suspect the seeming relatedness between words to do with grinding (which on the analogy of pesto can  be used to refer to a sauce made with that process) and the Nahuatl molli is illusory and accidental. Shame....  Very probably molli has as much to do with grinding as ahuacatl has to do with advocacy.

b

PS – A couple of clues:

• Bi-polar longing to spill the beans. (6)
• Deserving opprobrium about sort of tail wrapped round first of belligerents. (13)
  

Update: 2018.06.04.12:05 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers: SNITCH and REPREHENSIBLE.

Being in two minds

My attention was caught (while I was making other plans, as usual :-)) by a blog about bilingualism and its correlation with personality. I have to admit, though, that the distraction from those other plans was not as great as I'd hoped. Like many academic blogs it's more of an amuse-bouche than a main course.

It starts out with the less than flabbergasting observation that

You might think of the shy person who becomes much more extroverted when talking to family or close friends. Alternatively, we could think about someone who acts in one manner with his co-workers but acts very differently when having a drink with former college dormmates.
Source

Well GOSH. Next he'll be telling me the Pope wears a big hat. This observation seems to me like that Einstein line about time seeming to speed up when you're with a pretty girl [Einstein's sexism, yer 'Onner] and slow down if your hand's on a hot stove; it's  true but its relevance to Relativity (in the physics sense) is tenuous at best. What I wanted to be told about was whether processing different languages favoured distinct character traits (a point I touched on here, referring to a personal experience):

...[T]his has resonance in my own experience selling magazines in Spain. I found it much easier to be deceitful (not lying but painting a rosy picture of the future – I was selling subscriptions). My initial belief was that this was a feature of the language; this belief fitted in with vocabulary that related to my own position, back in England.

<autobiographical_note blush_factor="10">
I was a boy-friend to someone who thought I was a fiancé; the one word novio blurred the distinction. Did I love her?  I doubt it; but I was happy to say Te quiero, because – past-master as I was in the field of casuistry [fruit of an RC education] – I did want her, and querer can mean 'want' (cf. Kant's 'murderer at the door' dilemma, and this  [specifically 'All men are false']).
</autobiographical_note>

But maybe it's to do with speaking in foreign languages generally; maybe it works for any L1/L2 combination.

But, returning to that blog [do keep up] that disappointing aperçu was followed by a more promising  later reflection:

As I thought about it more, I realized that language might serve as a form of context that triggers certain memories. One interesting analogy comes from work with deep-sea divers. Divers often seem to forget what happened to them underwater. Follow up work on this observation has found that when divers are taught a list of words underwater they are better at recalling more of those words later underwater than they are outside water. The opposite was also true. They exhibited better memory for words learned above water when they were asked to remember outside of water. Hence, a particular context serves to elicit memories relevant to that context. In this view, memory is driven by a set of cues that elicit certain responses from us. 

Source [My emphasis]

But this is just about speaking different languages, not about bilingualism (growing up in an environment that uses two languages). Is a Catalan child cheekier, say,  when using Catalan than they are when using Castilian? And, given the same context, if they are being cheeky, are they more likely to use one language than another?

Dunno –  Maybe I'll have to take the course mentioned in that blog.

b

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul....

Poster in a shop window
on Holy Island

....Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,.
It is the causeway.

On the way over to Holy Island last Saturday with a touring party from my choir (at about ⅓ strength – but still a good 30 or 40) I wondered about the derivation of the word causeway.


Well, the way part is fairly obvious; as Etymonline says:

But why cause? The most obvious candidate for radicalism (and I use the word in what regular readers should recognize by now as either creative or wrong, depending on  point of view) – I mean 'being the root' (latin radix = root) – was causa, which gives Catalan, Italian  and Spanish cosa, Portuguese coisa and cousa, French chose ... (plus many other languages and dialects of course).

What might a cause, though, (or a thing, as in all those Romance examples) have to do with a road raised above regularly flooded shallows?  The answer is – not inappropriately  – NOTHING (no thing, geddit?).

There were two distinct meanings of the Latin word calx. Its primary meaning was the English heel – in fact  the word is still used in an anatomical context. But after a fairly promising start in the 18th century its use has became quite infrequent as this usage chart shows:

Word frequency chart here

The other word calx (it's a separate headword in my (19th-century) Latin dictionary (there's a picture of a sadly mistreated end-paper here), although in that Collins entry there's only one headword and the order of priority is  reversed – with heel coming last) is a pebble, or a playing piece in a board game such as draughts/checkers, or limestone. In Vulgar Latin a via calciata was a paved road. This gave rise to the old North French cauciée and ultimately to the Modern French chaussée. On the way, it spawned the Middle English cauceweye, meaning a raised road.

But in Late Latin  there was a new verb, calciare, with the meaning "trample down with the heels", derived from the genitive of calx  –  calcis.  And it's not clear to me whether what was trampled down for a causeway had to be limestone.

Returning to Holy Island, though, the presence of many quarries and kilns in Northumbria indicates a long-standing industry based on limestone. So that causeway may have been both made of limestone and trampled down with the heels. I suspect (OK, it's more of a WAG, or Wild-Assed Guess) that the two meanings of words derived ultimately from Latin calx became inextricably linked  in a way  that is not dissimilar to The R That Came From Nowhere in the word for ink derived from the Greek word borrowed into Latin as encaustum that  just happened to be used in monasteries – in chiostro ("in cloisters"). I wrote at more length about  this supposed derivation here.

On 23 July we sang at St Mary's in Holy Island   – which is linked to the mainland by  a causeway – some wonderful music, and were thanked and congratulated by some American pilgrims, who were walking St Oswald's Way ("Good job!" was the way one of their number put it pumping my hand as though it were a hand-pump). And one of the pieces was Felix Mendelssohn's Verleih uns Frieden, the music for which reminded  me, sometimes, of the more-or-less contemporary hymn "O come and Mourn with Me Awhile" written by Frederick William Faber in 1849. But the tune I remember from a misspent youth isn't the one most readily thrown up by Google searches (St Cross), and things need doing in the garden, so I'll have to save any further investigation/discussion for an update.

b

PS And here's a clue:
Optimise with heart of new arrangement  to constitute a prime example.  (9)

Update 2016.07.30.12:50 – Added PPS.
PPS
While in Holy Island, I (and many other choir members) spent some  time here. Among other slips, whereby hangs a tail, I dropped my National Trust card. This morning I opened an envelope sent by the landlord returning my card. Do stop there if you're passing.

Update 2016.07.30.18:10 – Added clarification in blue.

Update 2016.08.11.20:30 – Added clarification in red (to account for an otherwise unaccountable gear-change).

Update 2017.06.02.14:15 –The answer to that crossword clue (at last ;-): EPITOMISE

Tying up

A while ago I saw this tweet:

This evoked a charming picture of competitive laundry between washerwomen on a riverbank. But it also led me to reflect on other words for arrive (Fr arriver, It arrivare... etc obviously derive from one root, Sp llegar Pg chegar... etc from another, while Provençal (predictably) has a foot in both camps with both arribá and plegar (I expect there's a story behind those differing inflexions, but there are things to do). 

<digression>
Catalan often straddles the French/Spanish camps, so I expected a pair like the Provençal ones. But Cat. plegar has a different metaphorical use: stop work, knock off  – reminiscent of primary school teachers' instructions: When you've finished, FOLD your arms on the desk in front of you.
</digression>

Elcock explains:

While VENĪRE remained everywhere the usual verb for 'to come', two new terms conveying a more visual image were  borrowed from maritime language. The older of these, which prevailed in Spain, was PLĬCARE, first used with reference to the folding of sails (cf Port. chegar, Sicilian chicari). In Rumanian a pleca means inversely 'to go, to depart'; this is because the metaphor there was military, and referred to the folding up of tents  (cf. Eng. 'to decamp').  AD-RIPARE, 'to  come to shore', was a somewhat later creation which found favour in Gaul (cf Prov. arribá [HD: Elcock does not mention plegar here, but he has already mentioned it in another context]. From Provence it spread to Catalonia, and during the Middle Ages was carried thence to Sardinia, as arribare.   

The Romance Language (I've given this source more than once, but make no apology for that: it's very good.)

Other nautical metaphors have found there their(!) way to the meaning arrive. My Subject line gives one; another, from a more  obviously nautical source, is to be heard in the sea shanty Fire Marengo:

When I get back to Liverpool town

I'll cast a line to little Sally Brown

I'll draw a veil over the other things he plans to do to Sally Brown, although it is already cloaked in more nautical metaphors: 'Sally is a pretty little craft/ Sharp to the fore and a rounded aft'.

<autobiographical_note>
In preparation for my family's visit to Rome in 1961 (BCE  – Before Considerable Education, as I was not yet 10) I collected a few useful words.

<digression>
Incidentally, this reminds me of another Roman reminiscence I recounted here, in which I referred to ‘a sophisticated and improbable mistake for a 9-year-old, but I was there'. On a re-reading, I realize that this was ambiguous and could be thought insufferably conceited. What I meant by those last four words was not to imply ‘... so you could expect some linguistic fireworks' but simply ‘...so I know what happened' (not that any memory is especially reliable).
</digression>

One of these was arrivederci, which I broke down into ‘arrive' (natch) and ‘backwards' (partly under the influence of another foreign der- word discussed here). It seemed to me at the time that ‘arrive backwards' was quite a plausible take on the idea of  leave-taking. The truth is much more simple: apart from the -ci (=‘you') it breaks down into much the same components as au revoir  (or, for that matter, Auf Wiedershehen).
</autobiographical_note>

Time for bed...  No, I'll do some checking, and add a bit about Catalan before I Publish.

b

PS Next morning: There.  And here's another clue:

Wide boy's feet embracing current exercise fad. (7)

2015.12.23.10:20 – Added esprit d'escalier in blue.

2016.01.01.16:30 – Added PS

PS And, while we‘re on the subject of river-based metaphors, I'm reminded of a word I come across often in France, which until recently I tried in vain to guess from the context (dictionaries being for me a last  resort – while being of course, an essential resource)  It's a word that I don't believe I've seen in any other context – road signs that specify restrictions on parking or access, for example Accès interdit...sauf riverains.

As that Larousse entry shows, the toes of a riverain/e can be either wet or dry:

2016.01.02.16:40 – Added PPS

PPS Next day...  And here's another clue:

Wanting to embrace father, but sure of failure. (10)

Update  2016.03.12.17:30 – Added PPPS and removed footer.

Crossword answers:  PILATES and DESPAIRING

2017.05.12.17:35 – Added P⁴S

^{P4S – A recent visit to a museum in Rye (covered here) has added to my stock of river words. The museum was adorned with an embroidery/tapestry depicting various local characters. One of these is a rippier. An 1825 glossary with the snappy title} 

A Glossary, Or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs &c. which Have Been Thought to Require Illustration, in the Works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and His Comtemporaries

 ^{explains the word thus:}

The word doesn't seem to be in current use (see the Collins Frequency Graph included below), but according to Onelook it is included in two more recently published dictionaries.

Extract Collins page

Lettuce, galaxies, and milk-wort

Milk, milk products, and plants associated with milk have been exercising my mind of late. Here‘s what Etymonline says for lettuce (n.)

late 13c., probably from Old French laitues, plural of laitue "lettuce," from Latin lactuca "lettuce," from lac (genitive lactis) "milk" (see lactation); so called for the milky juice of the plant

Probably?  I'd say it was a pretty safe bet. A common process in Romance Philology (and possibly others – I wouldn't know, though I can't think why it shouldn't be so) is palatalization:

...the production of consonants with the blade, or front, of the tongue drawn up farther toward the roof of the mouth (hard palate) than in their normal pronunciation.

Palatalization can take many forms, often in the same language. In  Portuguese, for example maré  cheia-(='high-tide' – literally full-sea) and praia (='beach') both owe their initial consonant to Latin PL- , although [ʃ] and [pr] could hardly be less alike.

Elcock's The Romance Languages refers to ‘the evolution of the group -CT- to -it- which took place all over the [BK: Iberian] Peninsula cf. Port. noite,  Cat. nit, Arag. nueyt' and then mentions lahtaira "yellow goose-grass" (< LACTARIA, Cast. cuajaleche).'

Cuajaleche (gallium verum is its $10 name) is more commonly known (in my dialect) as ‘lady's bedstraw' [or in some gardens as that bloody weed]. It is very acidic (as is suggested by its Latin name...

<autobiographical_note>
I never did ask, in Scripture lessons, what "flavoured with  gall" meant, but the context (the Crucifixion) suggested a certain degree of  bitterness.</autobiographical_note>

...)  and as the Castilian cuajar means ‘curdle'

<speculation type="For Further Study">
I wonder if "coagulate" is involved...?
</speculation>

I suspect that  the Castilian name has more to do with its properties when added to milk, than with its the milky appearance – of its sap   – as in the case of the French laitues or the English milk-wort for that matter.

And if you follow that Etymonline link to lactation you'll find that that word [BK  – and lots of other lact- words] is

...from PIE root *glakt- (cognates: Greek gala, genitive galaktos, "milk"), which, along with  *melg-  (see milk (n.)), accounts for words for "milk" in most Indo-European languages 

       <digression>

I wonder if they knew... 

Or was it just an extrapolation from Milky Way?

       </digression>

Anyway, you may have noticed that Etymonline took care to say ‘from lac  (genitive  
lactis) ' [my emphasis] to explain the appearance of 't' in the root. I've mentioned before (here and in several other posts)  the way Romance philologists explain this, without mentioning one grammatical form that is almost always irrelevant in matters of the formation of Romance vernaculars  (the nominative) and one that is always irrelevant thereto (the genitive): the root is LACTE(M) (and if that sort of thing floats your boat you could call it "the accusative with the 'm' ending in parentheses". And this strikes me as more convenient and more accurate  – it's certainly more efficient .

<digression type="bee in bonnet">
that is if you don't have to keep justifying yourself to  Classical scholars – who often seem to have a keen sense of ownership [custodianship?] of Latin.
</digression>

But the most interesting topic for further study is mentioned in that Etymonline piece on lactation: After citing the PIE *glakt- and *melg-: '(the absence of a common word for it is considered a mystery)' Hmm.

Time to be getting on. But here are a couple of clues to keep you going:

Knockout? Yes  and no. (10)
Feudal lord – about time for such a wedding. (7)

Update 2015.05.19.09:30  – Amplification in red.

Update 2015.07.13.10:50  – Added PS

PS Time for the answers:
OUTSTANDING and SHOTGUN.

Update 2019.06.27.10:20  – Deleted old footer.

'Latin phrases everyone should know'

I've just come across this site. Everyone? Should? (Certainly, people who use them should be able to spell them and know what they mean.).

Why they're good

• they often say more accurately what is meant; Cogito ergo sum, for example,  has the philosophical advantage (over the English translation) of not having a pre-existing subject ‐ it is the <verb>ing that creates the subject
• they are the key to more vocabulary. Carpe diem ‐'carpal tunnel', post mortem ‐ 'mortal'...
• they are un- ambiguous: 'Time flies' could evoke wacky visions of Bentine-esque scientists studying the speed of fruit-flies, stop-watch in hand

Another thing everyone (everyone who uses them, that is)  should know is how to translate and/ or spell them. Cogito ergo sum means the reverse of  'I think therefor [sic] I am' (which means 'I think, the reason for that [therefor] is that I am). And prima* facia‡is presumably a typo for prima fasciae, whatever that means ‐ undercoat specially for use on guttering?  Come to think of it, I have heard on some US TV drama a DA saying /pri:mǝ fæʃǝ/, which might suggest that this typo (facie, the ablative of facies [='at first sight']) ‐ and incidentally, I prefer 'sight' to 'view': when Elizabeth's walking by the lake at Pemberley, turns a corner and suddenly sees the house's façade, sort of thing ‐ may be at large in US law schools.

Another gripe about the translations: pro bono is an adverbial phrase; work done pro bono is done 'for the good' (either for the furtherance of goodness in general or because it in particular is 'a good cause'. Someone who translates it as 'done without charge' presumably says things like 'PIN number'. or 'ATM machine'. Again, I suspect the influence of US legal practice. For an American lawyer, 'pro bono' has been almost fully Anglicized as an adjective meaning 'unpaid'. Give it a generation or two and it will probably have coalesced into a single word.

But does everyone need to know these Latin tags? I have my doubts. Some of them are useful to know, but that's not the same. They're neat and  efficient; I use them sometimes. But they're easy to get wrong, and can interfere with communication. Moreover, they are a custom-made banana skin ‐ and if you slip on it you may get egg on your f... (Verbum sat)

b
Update 2013.04.08: A few tweaks and fix format.
Update 2013.06.13: Update footer.
Update 2013.09.30.11:15: Footer updated.
Update 2013.11.13.18:35: Footer updated
Update 2014.06.07.23:15: Footer updated:

Update 2015.08.01.16:30  – Added this footnote:

^* Incidentally, over the years there have been many ‘correct' ways of pronouncing Latin. In Goodbye Mr Chips one of the old teachers mocks Mr Chips for giving  veni, vidi, vici the new-fangled /w/ pronunciation. [I'm referring to the 1969 film. I don't know whether this happens in the book, or in any of the  other  film versions.]  This is the style preferred by Classics scholars today.]

In one of these styles,  prima has the /ɑɪ/ diphthong in the first syllable...

<autobiographical note>
In a choir I used to sing in, there was a great kerfuffle about how one should pronounce Benedicite. It couldn't have  mattered less, as it happens, since that word does not occur in the text.  But in  Benjamin Britten's world† (and particularly at the school he went to when he went there) the first "i" (but not the second) had this same /ɑɪ/ diphthong.
</autobiographical note>

...and in that world, while we're on  the subject the first syllable in habeas corpus had the /eɪ/ diphthong.

In that poem, in the school where Wilfrid Owen learnt his Latin, the last two lines rhymed (and they may have scanned as well – I dunno; even  if they didn't they probably did in schoolboy-speak, where the stress  is often inverted in memorized (and drilled) Latin. Think of aMO aMAS aMAT..., whose actual stress is attested by most [if not all] Romance languages.)

Update 2015.08.18.18:30  – Added this metafootnote:

† This is too restrictive. Looking  up something else in the Concise OED I just happened on this:

REWOP from COED

Update 2015.09.09.12:50  – Added this footnote:

‡ Not before time, I think this joke needs explaining. The correct phrase is prima facie, not prima facia. The reference would have been clearer if I had added an s; but it also depended on pronunciation of the first word with an /ɑɪ/ diphthong. The fascia is part of the eaves of a house (the surface facing out) as distinct from the soffit (the surface facing down).

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs ov vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 41,800 views  and over 5,800 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,150 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.