Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/shark-week.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, take the recommended dose of language. Stick around till the end of the episode, please, because I have much to tell you about upcoming live Allusionists. And also, I have to allay the concerns many of you expressed after my last dispatch a month ago when I was clearly rather ill. You can hear now that I am still alive. Hurray, happy to be here. On with the show.
HZ: Today we are delving into the Allusionist mailbag to deal with some of the word queries you listeners have sent in. And one of my most verbally-agile friends has come along to help.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: My name's Hrishikesh Hirway. I'm the host of Song Exploder, and I co-host another podcast called The West Wing Weekly.
HZ: And today you are also The Allusionist co-host.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Woohoo!
HZ: Now you're very good at puns, Hrishi, and I have to warn you I am operating at less than usual capacity. So I might just completely miss some clever wordplay that you do.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh, I thought you were saying "less than usual capacity for puns." Like, in your weakened state, you have even less tolerance.
HZ: Exactly. My immune system is compromised, have mercy on me. So I've been rummaging through some of the listener requests. Devon wants to know where we get the expression ‘beyond the pale’ from. Care to make any guesses?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Does it have to do with ghosts?
HZ: Ooh — so beyond a spiritual dimension?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yes.
HZ: I thought maybe it was something that, you know there's a very thin band of paleness along the horizon that's lighter than the sky and the land? I thought maybe that, to suggest distance, but I was wrong.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh! What's the answer?
HZ: It's a very obscure thing, and it is like the ‘pale' in ‘impale’, but it's the noun from that, like a big spike, that was used as a fence post. So then ‘pale’ meant the fence, and then by extension the area within the fence came to be known as the pale. So a pale basically was a ghetto or an enclave. So there was, in the Middle Ages, the Irish Pale and the Calais Pale, which were little bits of Ireland and Calais that the English government managed to retain control of. And then there was the Russian Pale in western Russia, where Jews had to live between 1791 and 1917 to restrict trade between Jews and Russians. So ‘beyond the pale’ was the area you weren't allowed to go into, or you were too terrified to go into.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: The pale's like the spikes of the fence.
HZ: It's the spikes of the fence and then it's the fence and then it's the area within the fence.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Right.
HZ: So I guess ‘beyond the pale’ is an expression you would only use if you weren't someone confined to the pale?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, ‘beyond the pale’ has different meanings depending on which side of the... I mean, I would think that ‘beyond the pale’ would be for the people who are fenced in.
HZ: Yeah. I think it makes more sense in than out. God, language is depressing sometimes.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Which is why your happiness level has just slowly been drained from you as you've done these investigations from the beginning of this podcast.
HZ: I felt you're a very imaginative person with language, so I thought perhaps you could tackle this question from Kate, who says: "I hope you might be able to tell me why there is not a word for 'neutral'. Let me explain. When I say, “I don't like The Beatles,” people assume I dislike the Beatles; however, that is not the case. I neither particularly like nor dislike The Beatles. I 'neutral' the Beatles. Why is there no word for this situation? Or is there one, and I just haven't realized it? If that isn't a word I feel like there needs to be one." So this is your chance, Hrishi, to institute one.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: So she wants just a single word for the act of not feeling anything.
HZ: Yes, she wants something more efficient than 'to be indifferent to'.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I think the problem is that she's looking for a verb, because ‘neutral’ is a word that exists, ‘indifferent’ is a word that exists, but these are adjectives to describe the state of something. But she's looking for a verb, and it's hard to encapsulate in a word nothing. Something that is not happening.
HZ: Yes, the absence of feeling.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, the absence of verbing, right? Because she neither likes nor dislikes the Beatles, so what is it that she's doing? She's not doing anything. So I think maybe that's the reason why there is no word, no verb, for the situation.
HZ: And yet it is a state of being. The absence of the feeling is a statement, because you're expected to have some kind of positive or negative reaction to The Beatles. It's like sometimes I say that I'm ‘whelmed’, rather than underwhelmed or overwhelmed, because the act of not being under- or overwhelmed is in itself worth defining. So what would be the verb of whelmage?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: As Kate tells us, she says "I neutral The Beatles." I would understand that. If someone said, "I neutral the Beatles," I would get what they mean.
HZ: Yeah. People are always making verbs out of other parts of speech and vice versa.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I nothing The Beatles.
HZ: My emotional graph is unflickered by The Beatles.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I flatline The Beatles.
HZ: Flatline is really good. I'm going to go with that.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: OK.
HZ: A lot of people, including myself in the past, use ‘ambivalent’ interchangeably with ‘indifferent’, which is a pet peeve of 99% Invisible's Avery Trufelman, because she's saying ambivalence is the state of holding more than one opinion at the same time, and indifference is sort of the removal of those opinions.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I think with an ambivalence you have both peaks and valleys on your, you know, you have a sine wave maybe. Ups and downs.
HZ: I think you have two lines on the graph.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh yeah, right, exactly, yes. And if you were to average them out, maybe they would come out to a flat line. But really they are both existing simultaneously, which is different.
HZ: So ‘flatline’ it is. And now we get into the smutty portion of my inbox. Here's an email from Matt in Hawaii who said he was recently at a party: "Here in Hawaii, when the whiskey-drunk British mother-in-law of the hostess stood up to demonstrate the etymological origin of 'testify' by grabbing her hypothetical ball sack just as she claimed some ancients used to grab their package and raise their arm when taking an oath. My etymological dictionary, the concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 2003, says that both ‘testify’ and ‘testicle’ share the Latin root 'testis', meaning 'witness'. In the latter case, it is because the testicles 'bear witness to virility.' Is any of this true? Is there an actual tradition of grabbing a crotchful in court?" You just did jury service, Hrishi. Did you see any crotch-grabbing?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: No, my fellow potential jurors were very discreet.
HZ: I feel like this is a testament — also related — to how etymology has been written by men.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, I buy that. But what would you do if you wanted to grab your ovaries? What would be the gesture there? You'd have to reach inside yourself.
HZ: It would be a brutal procedure. Might require invasive equipment. I'd rather not ascribe some kind of legal value to my gametes. But then maybe this is from when the legal system was pretty much all men, all the time, and women were just in the house tying ribbons and cleaning and dying in childbirth.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: And preparing ointments for their tender nuggets when they come home.
HZ: Now, I've read a lot of etymologists wrestling as to whether testifying' is related to testicles, because they are from the same Latin root.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: And the Latin root is for ‘witness’.
HZ: Yes.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: It's not an anatomical origin. The anatomical meaning also derives from ‘witness’.
HZ: OK, there was one etymology I read that was different, that said it might be from the Latin ‘testa’, which meant a shell or a pot, which would just probably mean visually it was a bit similar to a ballbag. But if we're going with the witness explanation, some say it depends on whether you think ‘witness’ is the correct translation of that word. So it's not so much a legal thing as more ‘bystanders’. It's from the word for ‘three’, so the witness was meant to be the impartial third in an altercation between two people.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I am definitely referring to my to my testicles from now on as ‘bystanders’.
HZ: So that witness was meant to be a neutral party, so you can take the whole legal kind of witness out of it, and it's just things that are beside another thing.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh my gosh. Just, the whole thing. The witness and the bystanders. A person on the stand, and then the people... OK. It's going to be hard to forget this.
HZ: Yeah. Then these etymologists trying to find evidence that the testicle-swearing was ever a thing, and they can't really agree on whether it was. In the Bible, there are certain references to swearing whilst grapping someone on the underside of their thigh, which might be a euphemism, but it might also be just supplicating, where people sank to their knees and kind of grabbed whoever they were supplicating to around the legs. And then also it might be metaphorical, so when people were swearing on testicles, it might be referring to the testicles of the king, the most precious thing you can think of.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: The Bible has some crazy stuff, man. That is real insane rules of the world, when people had to swear on things, they had to grab the king's balls.
HZ: Which would probably get you killed if you tried in real life. If you even have a monarchy these days available for that swear.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Doesn't even have to be the king. It still could get you killed in real life.
HZ: It's invasive. Don't do it. I think the Old English term for testicles was a lot simpler. It was ‘herþan’, which meant something like ‘leather bag’. Less ambiguity there, I think.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, makes sense; it's not a flattering description, but maybe accurate.
HZ: And then the commonest slang terms for testicles in other languages are things like ‘stones’ and ‘balls’ and ‘nuts’ and ‘eggs’. So again, pretty basic, and then maybe related to this question from Alan, who has been discussing the etymology of the Spanish word for avocado: ‘aguacate’. Alan's roommate, with whom he's been discussing avocados, was wondering if the root of the word was in ‘agua’, since avocados have a relatively large concentration of water. Alan googled it, and found that "the word actually derives from 'ahuacatl', which is from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and that word meant 'testicles'. Can we confirm?"
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: And were you able to?
HZ: Now again, I found this challenging to confirm, but it wouldn't be surprising if this word, this object, was used as a visual comparison to testicles, because again, etymology is written by men.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: And, I mean we call it a stone, right? And as you just mentioned, ‘stones’, really, it's a kind of visual onomatopoeia, just naming the thing for the thing that looks like the thing.
HZ: I've been asked many times in the past to come up with a term for visual onomatopoeia. You got any suggestions?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I'll think about it.
HZ: I reckon a portmanteau could come in useful at this time. Or a pun. So in India and China, or bits of China, avocados are known as ‘butterfruit’, and in Taiwan ‘cheesefruit’.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Cheesefruit? I could see it. Yeah, I could see it.
HZ: So they've really simplified it again. They've taken out the whole testicle meaning.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Butterfruit seems like a great name.
HZ: Very appropriate. I also learned that cinnamon is from the bark of a tree in the same family as avocados. What a family. What a very capable family.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Such overachievers.
HZ: This one piqued my interest from Sarah, who says, "I was introduced to a new term while at work today. I work as a food stylist for recipe demonstration. I'm interested in anything about food styling."
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh, I think it's fascinating. I've learned some things about food styling in my other life as a photographer.
HZ: What? I didn't even know about the other life. How many other lives have you got?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: So many.
HZ: Tell us the secrets of food styling.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Well, when I was in college, where I was a photography major, I studied photography and graphic design, and in the photography part of it I spent one summer working for a commercial photographer in New York, and we had to do all kinds of different photo shoots, but some of it involved food. And one thing I learned is that when when you're doing a photo shoot of a food product, you can only use the actual food from that product. I think what we were doing was actually a frozen dinner or something like that, and you put it on the plate, but the peas on the plate have to be the peas from the actual frozen dinner. So what they do is they have 25 of the different dinners opened and cooked, and there's a food stylist who goes and chooses the most attractive 100 peas, or however many are going to be displayed on their plate from all of those different packets, to collect the platonic ideal out of all the different things, because they can't substitute some other more photogenic product.
HZ: So they couldn't go and make clay peas, or get them from a pea modelling agency.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Right, exactly, yeah.
HZ: Because it's false advertising.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah.
HZ: But they can make ice cream out of plaster or mashed potato?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: If that's not the thing they're selling, yeah.
HZ: Ah. Anyway, Sarah says: "Unless a recipe is sponsored by a specific brand, we can't use products that have any brand specific labels on them in our photos or videos. Today I had to remove the label from a jar of brand name peanut butter so that we could use it in a shoot, and I was told to 'just Greek it'." Are you familiar with that phrase as a food styling-adjacent person in one of your lives?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I'm more familiar with it as a TV and film-adjacent person. It's something that gets employed in shows a lot where they can't show the logo for the thing, and rather than just take off the label or something like that, there are some ways to cleverly mask the logo. Like have the actor put their hand around the label so you can't see the name.
HZ: I was watching Veronica Mars the other day, and in front of the apple on the top of her Apple laptop was a bowl of apples.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: That's pretty good. But a lot of times art departments are responsible for making a label that looks just like the thing that you're suggesting, but it doesn't actually have the product name or the actual logo. That's verboten.
HZ: So that practice is known as 'greeking’, and I gather it's from the saying "it's all Greek to me."
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Is that really where "it's all Greek to me"... no!
HZ: Which I think came out of typography, from placeholder text. So just the nonsensical text.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: The Lorem ipsum?
HZ: Yeah.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: But Lorem ipsum is Latin.
HZ: It is Latin. Much of Latin is derived from Greek, but I don't think that was what the phrase means. Apparently it's a medieval phrase from scribes who couldn't read or translate Greek, because they were used to writing in Latin. What I found interesting was I found a list of what other cultures say, and although Greek is a common language to pick on when you think something's incomprehensible, a lot of them go for Chinese instead.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: But all of this feels a little bit othering.
HZ: Oh, totally. There were a lot of languages that have a phrase that something like, "It's a Spanish village to me," and I didn't look into it, because I thought if I look into it I'll discover a bunch of different local prejudices against Spain and its charming villages, and I just didn't want to do that to myself. But the Chinese equivalent of "It's all Greek to me" is "These are chicken intestines," so, "this script just looks like a mess of chicken guts."
HZ: Peter says: "My understanding of the word 'caper' has always been 'an unsolvable mystery'." I'm not sure I agree with Peter.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: That's not what caper means.
HZ: No I think it's more like a bit of mischief or a prank or a crime, or a sort of silly adventure.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: A fun, mischievous adventure, yeah.
HZ: But Peter says: "Does this relate to the pickled garnish type of caper?"
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I actually know where the word, where the other caper comes from, the playful one. That comes from goats I think, like the same root as ‘Capricorn’, because of the playful sort of leaping way—or like ‘capricious’, the leaping from one thing to another, that's the way that goats move, and capricious people move that same way, and a caper is like a playful skip or a playful jump like a goat.
HZ: That's very charming.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: It derives from that.
HZ: Yeah. Well, I think it's that same root as the Italian ‘capriolare’, which meant ‘jump in the air’, which I think was the direct place that ‘caper’ came from.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Capriolare - that's the actual root, the jumping is the root, not the goat?
HZ: Well, I think the goat is at the root of the jumping.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh it is? OK, good, alright.
HZ: Yeah. So the goats would frisk around, and then that came to imply caprice, where your mind is frisking around like a goat. Not that goats are capricious. And then ‘caper’ is the act of frisking around.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Goats are also the Greatest Of All Time. Do you know that usage?
HZ: Yeah, that acronym. Serena Williams is where I most see GOAT.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, there's a lot of NBA debate about who the GOAT is. LeBron, or Michael Jordan, etc.
HZ: But then you have to wait for all time to elapse before you find out who the GOAT is.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Right. Wow, that's a good point. Yeah.
HZ: So you're just lining up candidates.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: It really should be GOATSF, ‘greatest of all time so far’. Which should not be confused with ‘Goatse’. Don't look that up.
HZ: Goatse was a bad time on the internet that I'd forgotten about, but thank you for...
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Sorry, sorry, sorry.
HZ: Anyway, capers.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: OK, so is any of this the pickled garnish?
HZ: No, nothing to do with goats, boringly. It's just from the Greek ‘κάππαρις’, which meant the caper plant or the fruits thereof, the little berries.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: There's nothing under that? It's just a word for the food?
HZ: Not that I can find. I think they predated the whole goat business. But again, it's just words coming to sound the same as other familiar words, because that's what we do.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Alright. Disappointing.
HZ: I'm sorry. But then I suppose if you had goat garnished with capers you could really go to town with that.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Goat to town.
HZ: There used to be a term ‘goatmilker’, it was a bird that was believed to suck milk from goats at night, but it was also slang for sex workers, and therefore slang for vulvas.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Wow.
HZ: Licentious men were known as ‘goatmilkers’, because they were frequenting these sex workers in the 17th century when this word was around.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Again, not enough poetry in that for me.
HZ: Too vulgar for you?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yes, for my delicate sensibilities.
HZ: You just want everything to be nicer, and for no one to steal milk from goats, literally or figuratively.
HZ: Let's deal with this from Charlotte, who wants to know the etymology of ‘shark’. Shark-lotte wants to know about sharks. Sorry. Which is a bit of a tricky one, because there are a lot of explanations, and none of them smell like the absolute truth.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Really? ‘Shark’? I would think that ‘shark’ would be similar to the plant ‘caper’, where it's just, "There's the thing, and this is the word for it that we came up with."
HZ: It's a real pisser. Some think it might be from the Mayan word ‘xoc’, because they were more likely to see sharks than English speakers of days of yore, with our smaller and less-toothy fish that patrol the British Isles. We just have little ones. But that word is later than the first citation of ‘shark’ as we now know it. So what it might be from is the Greek word ‘καρχαρίας’, which meant ‘the sea dog’, because sharks had rough teeth and a voracious appetite like dogs. That sounds alright. And then the other explanation batted around is that it's from the German dialect word ‘schorck’, which meant ‘rascal’, or ‘a dishonest person who preyed on others, or swindled people and was a villain’, and therefore when English speakers became aware of sharks, the fish, they were like, "those villainous fish that prey on other things".
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: That seems less believable to me.
HZ: I know. People just want a good story don't they?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I like the sea dog one.
HZ: Yeah, I can see it.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, sea dogs, that's a real thing, that's a creature from mythology.
HZ: And also people say ‘salty sea dog’ to mean a sailor with some experience.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, that too.
HZ: Is it fair on sharks that they get associated with dishonesty as well? They're just living sharkishly.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I don't know that a shark is dishonest. I would say that a lone shark, for example, is not necessarily dishonest. They might be extremely straightforward. They're just brutal and unstoppable when it comes time to collect.
HZ: They laid out their terms.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah.
HZ: And their terms are terrible.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Exactly. And if you're getting into water with a shark, they're like, "Look, here's the deal, I'm coming after you."
HZ: Alright, one more, Hrishi. Greg wants to know the origin of the word ‘allusion’, which I had never looked into before despite making this show for three and a half years.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I can't believe that hasn't come up before.
HZ: I've been a bit neglectful of my inbox, so this could have come up three years ago, and I've only dealt with it now.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Did you find anything interesting?
HZ: Not that interesting, to be honest. It's from "ad ludere" in Latin. "Ad" is "to", "ludere" is "to play". So is it "to to play"? "To play to"? It's playful, anyway.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Like a goat.
HZ: Well, I feel like our work is done. Thank you very much for joining us.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Thanks for having me. I'm so happy that you're well. That you're back to being the Well-usionist and not the Ill-usionist.
HZ: You can hear Hrishikesh Hirway on Song Exploder, and The West Wing Weekly podcasts. And he also makes music as the band Moors and The One AM Radio. And he's cooking up some new projects that you will hear about very soon. Many lives, so many lives.
Well, last time you heard from me I was not sounding so good. I was in hospital at the time. Probably shouldn't have been posting podcasts. Ended up being in there for three and a half weeks, during which I heard from a lot of you wishing me well, which was very sweet of you—and hurray, your well wishes worked.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is:
ylem, noun (astronomy, in the Big Bang Theory): the primordial matter of the universe originally conceived as composed of neutrons at high temperature and density.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me and Martin Austwick, who makes the music for the Allusionist. Seek me out on Facebook and Twitter, @AllusionistShow is the handle on both, and you can find the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words of the day, extra information about every episode, and all of the live show listings at theallusionist.org.
