I’ve finally made another pronunciation tip video. Well, with the Olympics coming around, there are always names that English speakers are going to get confused by. So I’ve taken the occasion to give a quick lesson in what to do when you want to say a Chinese name – specifically one of the names of the Chinese figure skating team for the 2026 Winter Olympics: Jin Boyang, Zhang Ruiyang, Sui Wenjing, Han Cong, Wang Shiyue, and Liu Xinyu.
Posted in pronunciation tips
Tagged 2026, China, Chinese, figure skating, Han Cong, Jin Boyang, Liu Xinyu, Olympics, Sui Wenjing, Wang Shiyue, Winter Olympics, Zhang Ruiyang
It snowed a fair amount over the weekend, and then the ploughs got busy producing large heaps of snow along the sides of streets, often blocking driveways and pedestrian access points. So, obviously, the question is…
…what do you call this heap of snow?
I surveyed people on Bluesky, and for the most part they didn’t have a specific word for it. But those who did mostly called it one of three things – the same three terms I have used at various times.
The word I most often use for it is berm, though I don’t know whether that’s really common where I live or where I grew up; the Bluesky people who gave that word were from northern parts of the US. Also, I can’t find “long heap of snow left by a plough” as a definition for berm in any dictionary. Per dictionaries, a berm can be an earthen shelf at the top or bottom of a slope, or a raised bank along a canal, or a bank of earth used as a barrier, or the big pile of sand above the high tide level on a beach, or a roadside grass strip – which is what the word means in Dutch, where English got it from. Several of those things resemble these huge piles of snow, but they’re all dirt or sand. However, in snowboardcross, a berm is bank of snow at a corner – transferred from the bank of earth called the same thing in motocross and BMX. Of course the meaning can drift from dirt to snow. Why not?
The next thing I might call this niveous ridge is snowbank. But, speaking of drifts, a snowbank more usually is – as in “a drifted bank,” to quote the song “Jingle Bells.” Still, it may seem reasonable enough to call these heaps snowbanks, since, like other banks, they contain deposits that have been accumulated and saved up. Mind you, they do not get much interest, and everyone is hoping they won’t compound.
What? Oh, the other kind of bank? Like riverbank? Oh, yeah. But say, why do we have bank as in savings bank and bank as in riverbank? The answer is that they both come, ultimately, from a root meaning ‘bench’, a root that is also in fact the source of bench; one bank refers to a landform that’s like a bench, and the other refers to a money-handling business that was originally done at a bench, table, or counter. Which is a farther drift than merely going from a pile of dirt to a pile of snow.
But, to get back to that big pile of snow, there’s the third word, the thing that some Canadians – and only some Canadians – call it: windrow. Canadian cities, after snow storms, after all the ploughing, may talk about “clearing windrows” so people can get out of their driveways. So in the morning you look out your window to see if the windrow has been shoved aside or if you’ll have to shovel it yourself.
OK, but why is it called a windrow? Isn’t that a row of trees that keeps the wind off a field? Hm, that’s usually called a windbreak. Windrow is most often a word for a long heap of mown grass, hay, barley, corn, peat, or such like, that’s sitting being dried out by the wind, in some cases before being gathered into bales and in some cases before being burned. It can also (probably on the basis of conjecture from its form) be a word for loose vegetation that has been blown into long piles by the wind. And by drift from the first sense, a windrow can be any other thing that has been ploughed into long piles: dirt, gravel, or, of course, snow. Yes, there’s a wind there, even though windrows usually don’t get blown away (pity, perhaps), but that’s how things get piled together sometimes. A window is still a window even if it’s not letting wind through. And a shovel is a shovel even if you’re using it to heave snow rather than to shove it around (and yes, shovel is indeed etymologically shove plus a suffix).
Still, why windrow rather than berm or snowbank in these Canadian places? I don’t know for sure, but my suspicion is that it started with farmers, of which we have quite a few in Canada. If you’re used to calling the long heaps of hay and whatnot windrows, then calling long heaps of snow made by the same kind of process windrows seems sensible – certainly at least as sensible as calling them, say, berms.
But, again, that’s if you call them anything. Other than a nuisance or something less polite, that is.
Some people’s requirements are, in truth, nimious.
Do you know that word, nimious? It’s not in common use, but some of you are exquisitely literate.
If you don’t know it, what does it sound or look like it means? Does it have an echo of minimum? Or inimical? Or numinous? Or ominous?
It’s not well known and not easy to guess. So even though it’s not that large a word, using it casually might seem a bit much.
Which is appropriate. Because “a bit much” is one way of defining it. Another is “excessive.” And perhaps even “way over the top.” Or, as lawyers say, “vexatious.” Here’s a nice example quote from an 1861 Scottish law book, courtesy of Wiktionary:
But instead of that, they raised this prejudicial question, and upon that ensues a litigation, the most nimious I ever saw, even on the part of a corporate body, whose annals generally abound with instances of nimious procedure.
Here’s an 1883 one from the Edinburgh Evening News courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary:
The action was ex facie so nimious and unreasonable as to excite prejudice against it.
You may note that both of those citations are from Scotland. And indeed this word had its heyday – now well past – among the legal trade in Scotland.
But of course it came from Latin: nimius, ‘excessive, beyond measure’ – the adverbial accusative of which is nimium, ‘excessively’, which seems to my eyes to look a bit too much like minimum. And where does nimius come from? Nimis, also an adverb, also meaning ‘excessively’, from ne- ‘not’ and the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁-. I’m tempted to say that nimis thus means ‘not meh’, but *meh₁- actually meant ‘measure’, so it means ‘beyond measure’ – in other words, ‘too much’.
Of course we have plenty of ways of expressing that already; the vocabulary of English is itself arguably nimious. But the joy of having many ways of saying the same thing is that we can set different tones and echoes. So if you want to sound as though you’re saying, in an erudite way, that someone is being an ominous ornery inimical big meanie, why not trot out this word? I don’t think it’s altogether over the top or out of hand. Unlike some people’s demands.
It’s inevitable: after the activity of the holidays (Yuletide and the others, with their themes of nativity and invitation and conviviality with oodles of vittles), in the void of winter, you will look around your living space at the various piled items and feel motivated to titivate. You know, just tidy a bit… spruce it up… satisfy an appetite for prettiness. You have a boost in your attitude. But what about your mid-winter vitality? Are you activated to undertake the titivation? Or will it be vitiated by inertia and the prophylaxis of, say, sitting and writing about it?
Speaking of which. Nice word, titivate, isn’t it? It bespeaks not just a certain activity but a certain context as well. It’s not mere tidying, not mere accessorizing; it’s touching up the finer points of prettiness or aesthetic aptitude. It’s doing les petites choses to a t. So this word, which trips on the tip of the tongue, is quite apt.
And not only in sound. For, you see, just as when titivating you may take little things and match them in new and apposite ways, with titivate the speakers of the English language picked some pretty bits and put them together. But we’re not one hundred percent sure which bits came from where – or just what inspired what.
Here’s the thing. Wiktionary gives the etymology of titivate as “A modification of the earlier spelling tidivate, perhaps based on tidy + -vate, on the pattern of words such as cultivate and renovate.” And the citations you can find in Green’s Dictionary of Slang certainly support that: the first one, from 1823, is from a dictionary that says “Tiddyvated — i.e. made tidy, or neat.” But the reality is not quite so tidy, as you will find if you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Oh, the OED also speculates that its origin is “humorously < tidy adj. + ‑vate (in e.g. cultivate v. and activate v.).” But its first citation is from 1705, and it reads “He says he is shaved enough, and has his Whiskers tittivated to his content.” And its second is from 1785 and reads “I wish I could get a barber to titivate me up a little.” It’s not until an 1834 citation that we see the spelling tidivate. And we may recall that while in American English the pronunciation of titivate and tidivate would typically be indistinguishable, in most British English this is not the case. So it would seem that the derivation is a bit less tidy… or anyway those earlier citations are not timely. (And yes, that’s a pun: tidy originally meant the same as timely, just as tide’s original meaning is ‘time, season’.)
There is a titillating further suggestion in the OED: usages where the sense is evidently “excite or stimulate agreeably or pleasingly.” The influence of titillate can be seen in those – but the earliest among them is from 1833, so it’s more likely a matter of misconstrual of meaning by analogy with a similar-sounding word. There’s no suggestion that titivate started with that.
So what do we do? What can we do? Not everything can be sensibly tidied, at least not without doing damage. It is as when, in a fit of titivating, you spy a tchotchke on a shelf that doesn’t seem to fit its place. You could toss it, perhaps, but why? It’s pretty enough, and you’re kind of attached to it. So you arrange things around it and leave it as it is, and tell your friends, “Not sure where we got that, but it ties the room together.”
You’re sailing past the Hebrides when you unexpectedly hear music from a rocky islet. You look to the source and see several lasses on the shore. One is a deejay. Another one is singing. Next to them is one standing in the breeze, beckoning, ready to… throw you a rope to reel you in, perhaps? It all seems so inviting. But behind the others you see a short-haired, muscular one who appears, maybe, to have a knife of some kind…
Sail away! Do not give in to temptation! You have just encountered the Scottish sirens: the disc lass on the turntables, the sung lass who has sung for you, the wind lass who is ready to see you blown in – or wound in – and the cut lass, who will… need I say?
But let us say you let fascination get the better of you. You close the gap, and then you see that you are sailing not to a disc lass; you are sailing to disclass… to disclass them all, starting with disclass. For this is no lass with discs; it’s not a member of the class of persons at all – it’s a verb, meaning ‘remove from a class’ or ‘declassify’. (It’s been in English since the mid-1800s, but both parts of the word trace back to Latin – though class came by way of French.)
And, having closed the gap and disclassed, you now see not a sung lass but a sunglass. Sunglasses have travelled in pairs since the early 1800s, but from shortly before that, a singular sunglass has been a filter fitted to a telescope to reduce the sun’s intensity. But since the late 1500s, a sunglass has also been something quite opposite: a magnifying glass used to focus the sun’s rays to start fires. You are about to get burned. (Sun and glass, by the way, have come down to us from Old English.)
The wind lass is, you now see, a windlass, which is a kind of winch for pulling in (or letting out) ropes or chains. The source of the word, which first showed up circa 1300, is windas, which derives from the verb wind; the l just got wound in somehow, perhaps under the influence of windle, an old noun for a thing that winds rather like spindle is a noun for a thing that spins. You might think therefore that this should be pronounced with “long i” like the verb wind rather than with “short i” like the noun, but the I ended up short, and since the a is reduced, it is properly said like “windless.” The lass is gone with the wind.
And of course the cut lass is a cutlass – which also, properly, has a reduced a so that it sounds like “cutless” (which it is not). This word came, circa 1600, from French coutelas, which was formed from coutel – the source of couteau, ‘knife’ – and the suffix -as, also spelled -ace and related to others such as Italian -accio: basically, it can mean ‘big’ or it can mean ‘nasty’ or it can mean ‘big nasty’, as the cutlass is a big nasty knife (really a short sword), usually with a curved blade. Since coutelas comes from Latin cultellus, it has no known relation to cut. So both the lass and the cut are cut out – but the blade awaits you.
And now at last you are on the rocks, misled, come to a bad ending. A lass, a lack!
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged cutlass, disclass, sunglass, windlass, word tasting notes
The turn of the year is a time to turn the page on problems. For every problem there must be at least one solution, and New Year’s is certainly a time for solutions – often aqueous solutions of ethanol. Yes, yes, if we want to resolve our problems, we must be resolute in our resolutions; but if we want simply to dissolve our problems, their dissolution leads us to be dissolute.
Wait. Let’s solve this little matter first: Why can’t we just be solute? Isn’t dissolute the opposite of solute? And then isn’t resolute a repetition of solute?
Well, to start with, we can be solute… providing we wish to immerse ourselves in an acid bath, say. Because to be solute is to be in solution – that is, dissolved. Literally.
Hmm. If we are dissolved, we have a problem, which is the opposite of being solved – is that the reason it’s dis-solved?
Well, no. Latin prefixes are not so schematically simple: sometimes they’re virtually flammable or inflammable; they may be inspectable or inscrutable – or both. In the current case, we start with solvo, which means ‘I solve, untie, undo’ – wait, no we don’t, because solvo is from se- ‘away’ plus luo ‘I let free, loosen, satisfy’. So solvo is ‘I set free away’ – sort of like how in English we can sit or we can sit down, or we can end or we can end up, that kind of thing.
And then we add more prefixes. Re- means ‘back’ and implies that the loosening or undoing is returning it to a previous state (a problem is a tangle in the hair of your life; resolve it and you are combing that hair back to the way it was and should be). Dis- means ‘apart’ and so dissolve means, etymologically, ‘undo apart’ or, all untangled, ‘set free away apart’ – not just loosen it and let it hang but actually separate it. If you dissolve something, it is altogether undone and separated – usually chemically, in modern usage.
So if you are dissolute you are altogether undone apart away across the place, yes? Perhaps chemically? Hmm, well, perhaps, but it’s a bit more figurative: it is not you in physical entirety but your moral substance that is as dissolved as salt in water. Originally, yes, dissolute meant literally ‘disunited, separated, dissolved’; but then it meant ‘enfeebled, lacking in altogetherness’, and then ‘lax, careless, remiss’, and then ‘unrestrained or undisciplined in behaviour’ or – yes – ‘loose’, in the sense it is sometimes used in. And finally dissolute established its current sense of being morally dissolved, which is – unknot this one – the opposite of being morally resolved or resolute.
Resolute, once we resolve it into its parts, is in fact the word that has changed more in sense. There was a time when resolute meant what dissolute means now, and resolve meant dissolve – or condense like vapour, as in “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” When Hamlet said that, he was not in our modern sense resolute… yet.
But just as, over the course of the play, rather than resolving himself into a dew, Hamlet resolves himself into a doing, over time resolve focused its meaning on the conclusion of problems and the removal of obstacles, and resolute followed. When you have resolved problems, you have analyzed and separated them back into their constituent parts: water here, salt there. And, having resolved them that way, you can decide – decide coming from decido, ‘I cut off’ – and, being in a state of resolution, you are resolute: “This is this, and that is that; I have determined it and I am determined.”
Which is quite the opposite of being dissolute. When you are resolute, you have resolved and solved; when you are dissolute, you are simply dissolved. Sometimes you solve the problems, and sometimes the problems solve you.
And so the two sides of this lexicosemantic coin are like the two sides of the new year. You may be dissolute on New Year’s Eve; you are expected to be resolute on New Year’s Day. Or perhaps on January the second… after the effects of your solutions have been resolved.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged dissolute, dissolution, dissolve, resolute, resolution, resolve, solute, solution, solve, word tasting notes
It’s the day after Christmas. You’ve probably given and gotten lots of stuff, and you’ve probably stuffed yourself to the eyeballs with the usual dinner, featuring turkey with stuffing, and maybe you’ve sat down and watched a classic Christmas movie – A Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, Die Hard, Eyes Wide Shut… that kind of stuff. And now, if you’re where I am as I write this, you’re looking out the window and you’re seeing absolutely loads of the white stuff, falling without stop and covering the streets and stopping up traffic. If you have to step out, you’ll really get to show your Canadian stuff: you’ll be shuffling in a stiff breeze through it – your boots sounding like “stuff, stuff, stuff” – or shoveling through it – “Ssstufff! Ssstufff!” And at length you might catch a cold and get a stuffed-up nose.
Well, this is such stuff as Christmas dreams are made on – although, since in the world of clothing and fabric stuff refers to textile, some might take “such stuff as dreams are made on” to mean the pillowcases. What, not what’s inside the pillow? Ah, well, that fill can be stuffing, but it’s only stuff in the way that everything is stuff.
And everything is stuff. From the fabric of the universe to the moral mettle of a person, from the real good stuff to some pretty bad stuff (which are sometimes the same thing), from specific senses in the clothing business and the building trades, through whatever a feature writer or reviewer wants to sound especially authentically thing-y (“this is compelling stuff”), to the most hand-wavey generalizations, there is nothing that is not, in some sense, stuff. Stuff is all the stuff that is in the set of all sets. All that matters and all that is matter is stuff. It is the alpha and omega of mass objects.
But stop for a moment. Why stuff? Why this word consisting of three voiceless consonants – a stop and two fricatives – all said at the front of the mouth plus one neutral central vowel? Why three letters with crossbars, one snake, and one cup (not running over)? Its countable counterpart, thing, has ascenders and descenders, crosses and dots – all the things – and covers the length of the oral cavity, closing with a voiced nasal ringing like a soft gong. But stuff? Just some stuff. Don’t like it? Tough.
And where did we get stuff? Most immediately from Old French estoffer ‘provide the necessaries; equip; furnish’ – the verb and noun forms of stuff have both been around in English since the early 1400s. But, yes, the verb first meant the same in English as in Old French: to provision an army, a town, or a person with all the necessary stuff – arms, food, money. Following soon on that it gained the sense of ‘line or fill with padding’ and – at about the same, not expanding on the clothing sense – ‘fill the inside of a roasting fowl or other piece of meat with another foodstuff’. From those two and similar senses came all the extended versions of the verb that we use now, including any instance of stuffed up or similar reference to clogging and stopping up.
But keep an eye on that. We know that, although stuff can certainly get in the way, the noun stuff doesn’t refer specifically to things that stop things up; it first referred to provisions such as foodstuffs and the various stuff of armies, and has only expanded from that. Its German cousin, Stoff, is altogether neutral and general and is used broadly in compounds: Lehrstoff (‘learning stuff’) ‘educational material’, Lesestoff (‘reading stuff’) ‘reading material’, Kraftstoff (‘power stuff’) ‘fuel’… Say, stuff does seem like a Germanic kind of word, doesn’t it? Well, there is one line of thought that says that the Romance languages got it from a Germanic root, and then the Germanic languages – English, German, Dutch – borrowed it back; this wouldn’t be the only time that has happened. But the conjectural Germanic etymon meant ‘stuff up, plug up, stop’ – in fact, it’s the source of our word stop.
The problem is that, as I have just said, the earlier senses of stuff in English, and of Old French estoffer, did not relate to blocking and clogging and plugging; they related to equipping, furnishing, supplying. All the good stuff, not the bad stuff. So somehow the ‘stop’ sense would have had to stop, and from ‘stuff that stuffs’ it would have become just ‘stuff’ and ‘needed stuff’, and then later on, atavistically – as if revealing the true stuff it’s made of – the word would have had to come back to that original meaning. I won’t say that’s crazy stuff, but it is not quite the usual stuff of language history.
But anyway, we don’t know for sure. And that’s how it is. The world is full of stuff, and often you don’t really know where the stuff comes from, even if you have staff to deal with your stuff. Sometimes it seems like we have more than enuff stuff, too, ya know? But without stuff, what do you have? Nuffing!
What’s the difference between covert and overt? Just what you can c.
Well, that and what you conceive on the basis of what you can see. Sometimes some added variable can convert it. But also, a difference can be hiding (covert) in plain sight (overt), and it takes a change of perspective to uncover it.
It is the antonymy of these words, and their near identity in form, that causes them to cleave and yet to cleave. Of course covert is the opposite of overt; of course they are nearly identical: the only difference in pronunciation is the /k/ sound at the start – unless, as you may, you say covert like “covert” plus “t.”
Which gives us a bit of an opening here. I don’t mean an aperture – that might be malapert for covert, though it would be perfectly apposite for overt, which traces back to Latin aperire ‘open’ (etymon of aperture), which slid into the descendants of Latin as obrir and ovrir and then, in French, ouvrir, which gained the past tense ouvert, which gave us overt. But OK, how did overt gain a c to reverse the sense?
It didn’t. The question that will uncover the truth is in fact how the a in aperire became the o in obrir and ovrir. And the answer to that is, apparently, by imitation of its antonym operire.
Well, that’s awkward. How do you deal with two words that sound identical but mean the opposite? You can get by if they’re not often used (like cleave), and perhaps if they’re colloquial the uncertainty can leave you either chuffed or chuffed, but for words in regular use that need clarity to avoid disaster, you add something distinguishing to one – in this case, a co- to make it more (or less, depending on your perspective) cooperative. And so operire ‘cover’ became cooperire ‘cover together’, i.e., ‘cover’.
And from cooperire was descended French couvrir, the source of English cover. It is tempting to say that covert is a past participle of cover as meant is a past participle of mean, and in a sense it is, but not quite in an etymology: covert comes not from English cover plus t but from the French past participle, couvert, from Latin coopertus. And so the pronunciation we would expect would be like “cover” with a “t” – but the influence of overt is, well, overt.
In other words, overt has an o because it sidled over towards its antonym, and covert has a c to look less like its antonym but is said with a “long o” because it has sidled over towards its antonym. Opposites attract; the two words look like siblings but are not really related – they have covertly converged in overt form because their opposite vectors aligned them. What a trove!
Announcing the 2026 Sesquiotica calendar! My Patreon patrons above a certain level receive a Sesquiotica calendar, and I like to give a calendar to family and friends as well. And I have ordered enough of them that I have a few extras that I am happy to part with for $20 each plus shipping. If you’re wondering if you would like one – or even if you don’t want an 11×14 coil-bound calendar – here is a flip-through, followed by stills of the photos (all by me!) that are featured for each month.
Cover
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
If you’re interested in acquiring one, email me (if you don’t have my personal email, use the form at jamesharbeck.com/contact/ – I don’t want to post my email here because spam address harvesters will pick it up). I’ll let you know how much the shipping will cost (it varies a lot depending on where to and by what method) and we can make it happen!
December 9, 2000, was a silver day in Toronto: snow had fallen all the previous night, and everything was blanketed in shiny white as Aina and I posed for pictures and then went to the church and said our vows.
December 9, 2025, is also a silver day – well, the snow isn’t quite so fresh, but I bear a silver hue on the top of my head everywhere I go now, and today in particular is specifically silver for me and Aina. And it is high time for me to talk about Silberhochzeit.
Unless you speak German, you’re probably looking at this word Silberhochzeit as though it were a pile of snirt dumped on your dinner table. German is not famous for pretty-looking or pretty-sounding words, and not only does this word look like the speeding passage of a race-car (or a quarter of a century), /ˈzɪlbɐˌhɔxtsaɪt/ sounds more like an unfortunate bicyclist aspirating a bumblebee than it does a word for a silver wedding.
Which is what it is. It means ‘silver wedding anniverary’, but technically, literally, it just means ‘silver wedding’; ‘silver wedding anniversary’ would be Silberhochzeitstag, as ‘anniversary’ is Hochzeitstag, which is literally ‘wedding day’ – and even more literally ‘high time day’, because Hochzeit, ‘wedding’, is literally hoch ‘high’ plus Zeit ‘time’. Not necessarily as in “It’s high time you got married!” but just as in it’s an exalted occasion.
OK, but why am I plopping this German monstrosity in front of you when this is normally a blog about English words? It’s not because my surname is German, and it’s not because Aina loves sauerkraut, and it’s not even just because it’s one word whereas in English we use three. It’s because the tradition of silver (25th) and gold (50th) wedding anniversaries started in Germany. It seems to have begun around the 1500s there, and was quite well established by the time it ported over to the English-speaking world in the 1800s (the other anniversaries – a long list, including wood for the 5th, tin for the 10th, and crystal for the 15th – were mostly invented in the 20th century, by companies that sold gifts).
And while big celebrations of silver and gold anniversaries are not such a common thing in the Anglo world (the gold one moreso, because 50 years is a long time to be married), they are apparently still quite the thing in Germany, where, for the 25th, in some parts of the country friends and neighbours hang silver decorations on the couple’s door, and in other parts they come in and defenestrate the silverware.
Which will not be happening chez nous, thank you very much. Aside from the fact that I’d rather retain the wedding flatware, defenestration of objects is strictly verboten in our building – and it would be exceedingly unwise anyway, given that we’re on the 27th floor. But for that exact reason, even before we open a celebratory bottle of wine with dinner, we are guaranteed a high time.
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged anniversary, Silberhochzeit, silver wedding anniversary, word tasting notes
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