Category: Words Words Words

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Since I like to pick apart scientific names of plants, let’s look at the name of Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), whose fruits are just now ripening to red here in the mid-Atlantic. That benzoin is interesting; it suggests benzene. Do they have something in common? And which came first?

Well, it’s easy to figure out which came first, as Linnaeus named the plant in the 18th century, while Kekulé worked out the structure of benzene (the simplest aromatic hydrocarbon) in the 19th century, after Michael Faraday and others first isolated the chemical and named it earlier in the century. Benzene (benzin, benzol) was derived from benzoic acid, which in turn was derived from gum benzoin. Gum benzoin, known since antiquity, is an aromatic resin made from the bark of several species of trees in the genus Styrax.

So where did the word benzoin come from? Doesn’t sound very Latin. It’s traced back to Middle French benjoin, to Catalan benjuí, to Arabic لُبَان جَاوِيّ (lubān jāwiyy, “Javanese frankincense”).

And just to bring it back home, we have two native species of Styrax in Virginia, American Snowbell (S. americanus) and Bigleaf Snowbell (S. grandifolius). Both are found in the southern counties of the state.

A mystery: 31

A word that pops up in Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, both the stage play (1929) and the screenplay (1931):

SHIRLEY [to SAM, referring to ROSE]. I don’t see, just when you’re graduating from college, why you want to get mixed up with a little batzimer like that!

Shirley (played by Anna Konstant [or Ann Kostant]) pronounces it BATE-sim-uh, or something like that, which suggests that it might also be transcribed as behtzimmer.

The closed captioning on the TCM streaming version of the film doesn’t even try to transcribe the word.

Modulo some search hits on the name of a porn performer, the only thing that turns up is some semi-speculation in a comment thread, suggesting the word has a connection to bathroom. But I’m not convinced, because that would suggest a pronunciation like BAHT-sim-uh.

German bettzimmer is bedroom, perhaps more promising.

It could always be something that Rice heard wrong, or just made up.

How many houses

§18 Don’t let it bother you that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our own language is complete—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in to it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte

Some links: 105

  • Full of stars: It’s only been 100 years since we learned that there are other galaxies out there.
  • Ooh, I’ll have to root around in my botany glossary: “You scalar implicature!”
  • MLM mind games:

    They will often try to get you to accompany them to a conference or other gathering where you will be surrounded by people who are just as eager to tell you how successful and happy they are while complimenting you for being smart enough to sense the opportunity.

    I can confirm, from personal experience, a version of this practice.

And for the DOGEs in the back:

Some links: 100

  • Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.

    Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.

  • Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.

    The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.

  • The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
  • From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”

    This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?

  • Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”

Wren

So I’m finishing Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren and it occurs to me to check what sort of bird an Irish person means by wren. And so I pull out my lightly used (only one trip to Europe so far) Svensson’s Birds of Europe, 2/e (2009) (pp. 336-337), and it is indeed the bird we call Winter Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes.

And the species account is hilarious, as field guides go. On the plate, calling out field marks, is one word: “unmistakable!” And the species account has this gem:

IDENTIFICATION Very small, and this reinforced by ludicrously small tail that is usually raised vertically, also by short neck.

I wonder what other tidbits are to be found in this guide.

Ixnay

Beautiful ringing of the changes on synonyms for reject, in the sense of veto, in Sarah Vogelsong’s “Churchill Downs faces tough election night in Virginia:”

… voters decisively defeated both measures. Almost 59% of Manassas Park voters rejected the Rosie’s referendum, while almost 62% of Richmond voters nixed the casino project — a stark contrast to the 51%-49% split on the casino in 2021 when Urban One was the plan’s sole backer. (emphasis added)

Some links: 96

Some links: 94

Some links: 93