Black and White: words

Showing posts with label words. Show all posts

February 25, 2026

Words of the Month - Competence Porn

Some people love to watch dumpster fires or train wrecks, relishing the dysfunctional dramas in reality shows or the disastrous crashes in car races. I can’t stand that; I prefer to watch people doing things well. At the Olympics I want every athlete to perform to the best of their abilities, and in fiction I want to see characters do amazing things. I like competence porn. I was reminded of this term recently when it was raised at a panel I attended at Boskone about the lure of heist stories. One of the reasons people enjoy heists is for the pleasure of seeing all the members of the team perform their amazing special feats to pull off the seemingly impossible task: mastermind, hacker, con artist, safe cracker, thief… When they do their jobs well it’s competence porn.

Since this is a Words of the Month post, let’s look at the derivation of the term. Competence comes from Latin roots meaning “meeting together, agreement, symmetry,” which feels particularly appropriate for those heist teams, but the word actually has a somewhat tangled back story. In the sixteenth century the word competence had two definitions, both now obsolete. One was “rivalry,” deriving from compete, which feels particularly appropriate for the Olympics. In other words, that root of “working together” could be taken to mean either striving together on the same side of an issue, or striving together on opposite sides. But at the same time the other definition was “adequate supply,” as in competency, pulling on the idea of things coming together in a fitting way. In the early eighteenth century we got the legal definition of “capability or fitness to testify in court,” and by the end of the 18th century that sense had broadened to the definition I’m talking about today: “adequate ability, sufficient skill” for whatever task. By this definition competence is more like a minimum threshold, however. In today’s term competence porn we’re referring to things done not just adequately but done masterfully well.

Porn, of course, is short for pornography, the abbreviation not appearing in print until around 1960. (However, who knows how long people had been using the term in the sorts of conversations that didn’t get published!) Interestingly, the first pornography - to be called by that name, anyway - was obscene paintings in the ancient temples of Bacchus. This was around 1840, and English got the word from French which had borrowed it from the Greek word meaning “depicting prostitutes.” You can see the -graphy root that shows up in so many other words for writing, recording, carving, or describing things. It wasn’t long before the word pornography was applied to certain French novels, but apparently not until the early 20th century was it applied to pictures other than those original murals. In 1964 we got the famous Supreme Court opinion in which Justice Potter Stewart said that he couldn’t define “hard-core” pornography, “But I know it when I see it.”

Recently, however, the word porn seems to be acquiring a broader and generally more benign sense, starting with the term food porn. In 1977 Alexander Cockburn wrote “True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes,” in which statement the parallel is drawn between alluring food photography and provocative sexual photography. In this instance it’s less about any specific connection between food and sex and more about the ways the presentation of each can be made to appeal to the sensual and even to the voyeuristic allure of potentially “illicit” unhealthy foods. By the early 2000s, however, the sense of the “porn” in food porn was ameliorated still further to mean simply “material presenting something desirable in an especially aesthetically appealing or sensational manner.”

The term property porn appeared in 2005 to describe the luscious and alluring photos of desirable luxury properties in glossy magazines, and various other “porns” have been used, although I certainly have no intention of searching for porn on the internet in order to find you more examples. (I do hope the writing of this post won’t get me attacked by the wrong sorts of algorithms!) And finally we get to today’s term competence porn, which was coined in 2009 by John Rogers about the television show “Leverage,” which he created. So yes, heists are in fact the quintessential example of competence porn.

I don’t love this term or this usage of the word porn because in general I dislike the linguistic mushing together of positive and negative, healthy and unhealthy, such as “sick” or “wicked” meaning “good,” or “ kill” or “slay” meaning “to do a good job.” (On the other hand, you can read about some other examples of linguistic amelioration in my prior post Scary Good.) But I do absolutely enjoy seeing advanced skills performed with exceptional proficiency, so while I might wish for a better name for it, I still say “Bring it on.”

[Pictures: Okuda Sadaemon Yukitaka, woodblock print by Ogata Gekkō, 1902 (Image from The British Museum);

Detail from Ninja, woodcut by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1814 (Image from Artsy).]

January 30, 2026

Word of the Month - Sports

Sports. This one simple word, which we’ll be hearing an awful lot of as the Superbowl and the Winter Olympics take over conversation next month, actually has a lot of interesting linguistic stuff going on. The etymology goes back to Middle English, about 1300 when Anglo-French disport meant “pleasure, enjoyment” as a noun, as well as a verb meaning “to take pleasure or amuse oneself.” The roots here are dis- meaning “away” plus -port meaning “to carry,” as in porter, portage, import, export, deport, and even important (but that’s a story for another day). So basically, the roots of disport meant “to carry away.” Disport was shortened into sport around 1400. So it’s interesting to note that sports didn’t begin as serious competitions of physical skills and rivalry, but simply as escapist entertainment.

The second interesting thing about the word sport is that when it was shortened from disport, it was not broken at the etymological boundary, but in the middle of the prefix. This is a sort of metanalysis, which you can read more about in my post about The Wandering N.

Next, the more specific verb meaning “amuse oneself with outdoor exercise” arrived in the late 1400s, and the noun meaning “game involving physical exercise” arrived around 1520. But the broader meanings of general entertainment and pleasure still continued in use for quite a while. Although the broader meaning is now mostly obsolete you can still see it in the phrase in sport, meaning “just for fun, joking,” as well as in the nursery rhyme where “The little dog laughed to see such sport.” The noun meanings “a person exhibiting good or bad sportsmanship” and “a good fellow, amiable person” are later developments from the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Another interesting thing is the subtle difference in usage between British and American English. Both can talk about a single sport, such as “the sport of football,” or “field hockey is my favorite sport,” and both can talk about the plurality of sports as in “Medals will be awarded in 116 sports at the 2026 Winter Olympics.” But for the general, uncountable category of athletic activity, British English says “I love watching sport,” while American English says “I love watching sports.” One can make a logical defense of either version, but it’s really got nothing to do with logic. For some reason at some point the usage pattern diverged, but for this I can find neither explanation nor dates, I’m very sorry to say.

So, will you be watching sport or sports this February? Do you have a favorite sport or do you not care about sport(s) at all? And if what you really care about is block prints depicting sport(s), check out my prior posts Winter Olympics and Winter Games.

[Picture: Halted, woodcut by Lillian Scalzo, ca. 1935 (Image from Armstrong Fine Art);

Hockey Players, color woodcut by Louis Schanker, 1940 (Image from MoMA).]

December 31, 2025

Words of the Month - Happy Khanike and Merry Xmas

This month as I was once again dutifully attempting to correctly spell the holiday my Jewish neighbors were celebrating, I finally did a little more research into the issue and discovered some interesting wrinkles. First of all, transliteration causes problems right from the get-go. The Hebrew alphabet doesn’t map directly onto the English pronunciations spelled with the Latin alphabet, so already there are choices to be considered. Derived from a Hebrew verb meaning “to dedicate,” the two most common versions in English are Hanukkah and Chanukah. Some sources, however, claim as many as twenty different possible “correct” spellings, although admittedly those include versions back to the seventeenth century before the spelling of even normal English words was standardized to our modern expectations.

There are four primary points of variability: the initial letter (H or CH - or even KH), one N or two, one K or two, and whether or not to add an H at the end. The confusion of the initial letter is based on the fact that the Hebrew letter doesn’t have an exact English equivalent. The CH spelling reflects an attempt to capture the uvular fricative like in loch, while the H is how most people pronounce the word in English. But here’s the wrinkle: the ancient Hebrew pronunciation was actually closer to an H, albeit a throaty one, while the CH version is more modern. This means that Ashkenazic Jews generally prefer the modern pronunciation and CH spelling, which is consistent with lots of other Yiddish and Hebrew words, while Sephardic Jews generally prefer the older pronunciation and H spelling.

I’ll skip next to the question of how many Ks to use. This point of variability is based on the fact that the Hebrew letter in question has a diacritical mark making it geminate: doubled. This would be pronounced like the double K in bookkeeper, and thus spelled with two Ks. Once again, however, modern Hebrew pronunciation has shifted and the majority of Jews don’t pronounce a geminate K anyway, making it perfectly fine to use a single K in the spelling. So to return now to the question of how many Ns to use: unlike the K, there is no reason to use two Ns, either historical or otherwise, in the transliteration. Versions of Hannukah are sometimes seen and may even be considered acceptable, but there’s no justification for them.

As for that final H (or not), it’s simply a question of which version of English spelling seems to capture a final vowel sound better. For example, do you prefer to spell “Oh come, all ye faithful,” or “O come?” Sarah or Sara? To add one final wrinkle to the whole crumpled mess, Yiddish academics actually favor the spelling Khanike, on the theory that this is the most accurate transliteration of modern Yiddish pronunciation. I’d argue, however, that this is not how to spell the holiday in English, and therefore can be ignored by the average English speller. I think going forward I’m going to go with Hanukkah. What’s your spelling of choice?

Meanwhile, what about Christmas? The OED does include a number of different spellings, including such gems as Cristesmæsse and Kyrstemes, but since these are simply obsolete, we can ignore them. The only real competition for Christmas is Xmas, so what’s the deal with that? Many people think Xmas must be a modern version, and possibly even a secular one, but neither charge is true. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written around 1100 (when English was still Middle English), it was on at least one occasion written Xres mæsse. Here the X is not Latin but Greek Chi. Chi rho are the first two letters of Christ in Greek and were often used as an abbreviation both standing alone and in other words such as Xpian and Xpmas. The X (chi) alone as an abbreviation for Christ dates back to at least 1380, and the exact spelling Xmas in English is first recorded in the early 1700s. So definitely neither modern nor secular. I still think it’s hideous, though, and will stick to Christmas, myself! Only 338 days until Hanukkah and 359 days until Christmas, but I’m ready!

[Picture: December, woodcut by Wharton Esherick, 1923 (Image from Wharton Esherick Museum).]

December 1, 2025

Words of the Month - Gratitude

Today will be a quick and belated Words of the Month to look at the roots of gratitude. The adjective grate, meaning “agreeable, pleasant,” is now obsolete, but gave us quite a few words in which its spirit lives on. First grateful, which now is used entirely for thankfulness, but you can see the earlier “pleasant” usage in Milton’s “Sweet the coming on of grateful ev’ning mild,” for example (1667). Grateful is an unusual word because grate was already an adjective, so it didn’t need -ful to be turned into one.

You can see it very clearly in ingrate, which was originally an adjective in the 14th century, and originally meant “unfriendly, unpleasant.” The connection between pleasant feelings and thankfulness for the pleasantness is a recurring one, which I think is telling. By around 1670 ingrate had come to mean the person with that quality of being unpleasant and simultaneously failing to be thankful for gifts.

You can see the same Latin root that gave grate in congratulate, which essentially means showing pleasure with someone. Gratify comes from the idea of bestowing pleasure upon someone.

Another suite of words that come from the idea of giving thanks includes

gratis - meaning something done for thanks only, rather than payment

gratuitous - which originally meant the same as gratis, but by about 1690 (some 40 years later), meant “uncalled for, done without good reason.”

gratuity - the idea being that it’s money you didn’t have to give in payment, but rather bestowed in thanks

And speaking of thanks, that’s from all the way back in Old English, and seems to be related to think. Again, isn’t it suggestive that thinking of the things and relationships we have is so closely related to giving thanks for them? That’s why it’s important to count our blessings, even when there’s also so much to be concerned about.

[Picture: Mexican Fruits, wood engraving by Leon Underwood, 1927 (Image from The New Woodcut, by Malcolm C. Salaman, 1930).]

October 31, 2025

Words of the Month - Hearse and Rehearse

I haven’t had time for blog posts this week, (if you’re local, come see me at the Needham Open Studios Fall Pop-Up tomorrow!), but I couldn’t let the month end without at least a couple of Words. So here’s a very quick look at a linguistic question that occurred to me recently: what on earth do hearses and rehearsals have to do with each other?

Let’s start with the hearse that seems somewhat appropriate for Spooky Season. Would you have guessed that its root goes all the way back to an Oscan word that may have meant either “wolf” or “bristly”? Oscan was the language spoken in central and southern Italy before Latin took over. Latin also took over the word, with the meaning “harrow,” presumably because of the teeth or the bristles. A harrow, in case you don’t know, is a sort of large rake for breaking up soil, hence a harrowing experience feels like you’re being raked and broken up. But we still seem to be pretty far from a vehicle for carrying a dead person to the grave…

The next step took place when late 13th century Anglo-Latin used the word to refer to a large church chandelier or framework for candles to be hung over a coffin, presumably because it was sort of shaped like a rake with candles stuck on the spikes. From there the word was applied to any sort of display or framework built over a deceased person, and from there, in the 1640s, to the vehicle that transports the coffin.

So why, then, does rehearse not mean something like, “to transport a dead person again”? Well, go back far enough and it does mean “to rake again,” at least sort of. Old French took that “harrowing” meaning and applied it metaphorically for “to go over something again, to repeat,” which is a natural extension since after all we still have sayings like “let’s not rake that up again,” or “we keep going over the same ground.” By the mid-fourteenth century rehearse had entered English with the meaning “to tell again, repeat.” By the 1570’s (just in time for Shakespeare) it had gained the sense of “to practice in preparation for a public performance,” because you have to repeat your lines over and over. And there we are.

So as you’re raking the leaves from your lawn this fall, consider the connection with both hearse and rehearse.

[Pictures: Harrow, wood engraving by J.W. Whymper from An Illustrated Vocabulary, for the use of the deaf and dumb, 1857 (Image from University of California);

Hearse, wood engraving by John Henry Walker, ca. 1850-1885 (Image from McCord Stewart Museum Montreal);

Funerary carriage, wood engraving by Walker and James Lovell Wiseman, ca. 1875 (Image from McCord Stewart Museum Montreal).]

September 26, 2025

Words of the Month - Keeping Count

Our basic cardinal numbers are all based on Old English roots, which is not surprising. After all, it’s the most basic words that tend to stick around in languages, rather than being subject to borrowings. However, there are still a few interesting snippets to share about our words for numbers.

One - Have you ever wondered about the odd pronunciation of one? Why does it begin with a w sound instead of rhyming with alone, which indeed derives from “all one” (c. 1300)? Other words that retain the original pronunciation in their “one” root include only and atone. I can’t tell you why the w sound was added, but it seems to have begun as a dialect shift around the 14th century in southwest and west England. It’s hard to trace its spread, since obviously the spelling came uncoupled with the pronunciation at some point.

Two - While one has a w sound that’s not seen in the spelling, two has a w in the spelling but not heard in the pronunciation! It used to be pronounced, as heard in twain, which is derived from the Old English masculine form of the number, while two derives from the feminine and neuter form.

Eleven - This word derives from roots meaning “one left.” Instead of forming 11 from “1 + 10” as many languages do, we’ve got something like “1 left = 11 - 10.” This is quite unusual and in the whole world it appears only in Germanic languages and in Lithuanian, which uses it for all the teens.

Twelve - Formed like eleven, this means “two left,” and also sounds that original w pronunciation of two. But why does English, unlike Lithuanian, stop this system after twelve? Probably because Old English originally had many elements of a duodecimal system, based on twelves instead of tens (as in inches to the foot, for example). Old English had words that would have come down to us as eleventy (110) and twelfty (120) if we’d continued that system, but these words were already fading before Middle English.

Dozen - This word for twelve, or specifically “a collection of 12 items or units” comes from Latin by way of Old French. The Latin roots break down to “2 [+] 10” which is a more normal way to build in a decimal system. Plus the -en ending is a French addition that indicates “exactly.” Which means that, etymologically speaking, there’s something oxymoronic about a “baker’s dozen” being something other than “exactly 10 plus 2.”

Thirteen - Here English gets into a more standard method of naming numbers. (By the way, that shift of the placement of the r also happened in third.) As for the -teen ending, that comes from the root for ten, but specifically indicates “ten more than.” (Interestingly, the word teen, meaning “a person aged 13-19,” dates to 1818, although it was not in common use before the 20th century. That means it came before the word teenager, which isn’t attested until 1922.)

Twenty - This derives from two (and there’s that w again) and -ty, which means “a group of ten.”

Score - Another later Old English word for 20, this comes from Old Norse meaning “notch, incision.” This derives from the use of tally-marks for counting twenties. Counting by twenties, as opposed to tens or twelves, is more common in Celtic cultures, so the speakers of Old English presumably adopted this concept from Celtic languages. Our modern verb score, “to incise,” comes from this same root (but not until about 1400), as do all our various modern meanings of score such as “keeping track of the points in a game,” “a reckoning,” and even “printed piece of music,” from the sense of drawing all those lines.

Hundred - The simple version of 100 in Old English was simply hund. The -red piece comes from “reckoning, count.”

Century - From Latin meaning “group of one hundred,” century used to mean 100 of anything. Not until around the 1650s did it come to refer specifically to years.

Thousand - The end of this word comes from the OE hund meaning “100.” The thou- piece meant “huge, great, swollen.” So a thousand was originally just a really big number. It gained its more precise meaning when it was used as the English translation for Latin mille, meaning 1,000.

Million - A similar logic built million out of mille (1,000) plus a suffix meaning “big, great.” English got the word in the late 14th century from Old French, which got it from Latin, but it was used pretty much only by mathematicians for a couple of centuries before entering more common speech.

Count - Also in the late 14th century from Old French, English gained the word count, meaning “to enumerate, or to assign numerals in order.” It could also mean “to tell a story,” which we replaced in the late 15th century with recount. (If you put the stress on the second syllable, you tell a story. If you want to count again, you have to stress the first syllable.) The sense of “being of value” appeared in the mid 19th century.

So, that’s the word on English numbers! Do you have a favorite number? A lucky number? Hate math, or love it?

[Pictures: One potato and Two eggplants, potato prints by Diana Pomeroy from One Potato, 1996;

11 goose eggs, multi-block linocut by Christopher Wormell from Teeth, Tails, and Tentacles, 2004. More about these two books at prior post 5 Counting Books.]

August 29, 2025

Words of the Month - Lipstick of the Spheres?

What do cosmetics have to do with the cosmos? They share a Greek root, but took very different paths into modern English. The Greek kosmos meant “an orderly arrangement,” and the verb form of the same word was used in different senses including arranging troops for battle, establishing governments, and also adorning and arranging women’s dress, hair, and appearance. It’s easy to see how that last sense got us to our modern cosmetics.

Meanwhile, the sense of an organized system gave the word kosmos the meaning of “the universe.” Pythagorus was credited with being the first to use the word to mean “the starry firmament,” and it was first used in Middle English in about 1200. However, our modern sense of cosmos as “the universe as a model of order” didn’t really take off in English until the mid 1800s, when it was used in English

translations of Alexander von Humboldt’s masterwork Kosmos.

Between Pythagorus and Humboldt, meanwhile, the meaning of kosmos was expanding to include Earth in addition to the heavens. It was then sometimes used in Christian writings to refer to “the inhabited earth” or “the worldly life, as opposed to the afterlife/heaven.” That shift in meaning tied in with the word cosmopolite, which came from the Latinized Greek for “citizen of the world.” That word entered English around 1610, but not until about 200 years later do we get the adjective cosmopolitan, meaning “free from local prejudices,” and around 1840 it could also be applied to groups and mean “composed of people from many nations, multi-ethnic.”

As for the cocktail cosmopolitan, that was apparently invented in the 1970s, but, just like the word cosmos, it took a celebrity to popularize it. In this case, rather than Pythagorus or Humboldt, we have the television show “Sex and the City” to thank, in the 1990s. And that, I might argue, brings us back full circle to the connection with adorning and arranging women’s appearance.

[Pictures: Young Woman Applying Rouge, color woodblock by Hishiguchi Goyô, 1920 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Cosmogony, woodcut by Victor Delhez, 1926 (Image from Armstrong Fine Art);

In Cafe II, linocut by Marta Wakula-Mac (Image from Saatchi Art).]

July 28, 2025

Words of the Month - Tautological Pleonasm

Have you ever used an ATM machine, drunk chai tea, or visited the River Avon? Congratulations; you have benefitted from pleonasm, also known as tautology, in the English language. Pleonasm and tautology both mean "redundancy in linguistic expression." The etymology of both is from Greek, pleonasm from “to be in excess” and tautology from “the same word or idea.” (Note that tautology in logic is slightly different from language tautology.) This redundancy can include foolish or needlessly repetitive-sounding phrases such as “burning fire,” but today I want to highlight some examples that have found their way into common and generally accepted English usage. (Although some of these are still prone to fierce criticism from grammar pedants.)

free gift, safe haven, convicted felon - In all of these cases the adjective is wholly redundant since its sense is already included in the noun alone.

tuna fish - This may technically be redundant because a tuna is a fish, but to me the noun phrase tuna fish refers to the meat, as in a sandwich or casserole, while the word tuna by itself is more likely to refer to the whole animal, somewhat in the same way that English differentiates beef from cow and venison from deer.

Pleonasm is especially prone to cropping up in the case of acronyms. Once an acronym becomes the standard term for a thing and people stop saying all the words that go into it, we often find ourselves putting the base word back on for context and clarity. That’s the case for

PIN number (Personal Identification Number)

ATM machine (Automatic Teller Machine)

DC Comics (Detective Comics)

ISBN number (International Standard Book Number)

HIV virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus)

Please RSVP (Répondez S’il Vous Plaît, in which the s’il vous plaît is French for Please)

RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome) - This was coined in 2001, tongue-in-cheek.

The case of “please RSVP” brings up the point that tautologies often arise in the process of linguistic borrowing, when a phrase is really only redundant if you speak both languages involved. Examples include

with au jus - in which au means with in French. My college dining hall used to have this on the menu and I always thought it was funny, but another way to think about it is that perhaps the phrase “au jus” is not really French here. Maybe it’s simply become an English word for a particular kind of sauce, in which case adding “with” is perfectly proper.

tsetse fly - in which tsetse means fly in Tswana

the hoi polloi - in which hoi means the in Greek

chai tea, head of cabbage, and chestnut - You can read more about these three tautological foods in my prior post C Food Special.

the alfalfa, alchemy, elixir, algebra, alcove, and many others - Putting the article in front of these words is pleonasm, because they were all borrowed from Arabic with the Arabic article al- attached to them, meaning they all start with the already. (Read more in my prior post about Arabic Origins.)

Another place invisible linguistic-borrowing pleonasm often crops up is in place names.

River Avon - in which avon means river in Welsh

Sahara Desert - in which sahara comes from the Arabic for desert, (and also Gobi Desert, in which gobi is from Mongolian for desert)

the La Brea Tar Pits - in which la brea means the tar in Spanish

Torpenhow Hill - This one is a very popular illustration since it’s a quadruple redundancy, from Old English torr, Celtic penn, Old English hoh or Norse how, and Old English hill, each of the four elements meaning some variation of “hill,” or “rocky outcropping.” The one caveat to this story is that while the village of Torpenhow is in fact on a hill, there is not any geographic place actually called “Torpenhow Hill.” So our redundancy is merely triple.

I find all of these examples fun, but the point that seems most significant to me is that considering them redundant could depend on what meanings speakers actually assign to the elements in question. Tsetse fly, for example, is really not redundant because “tsetse fly” is simply the English name for a particular kind of fly, and the fact that its etymology involves another more general word for fly in Tswana is neither known to English speakers nor relevant. On the other hand, I would argue that free gift is indeed a stupid phrase! Do you have any particular loves or hates among these words?

[Pictures: Skipjack Tuna with Cherry Buds, wood block print by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1830s (Image from The Met);

Desert Storm, wood engraving by Paul Landacre, 1932 (Image from Bonhams).]

June 27, 2025

Words of the Month - Most Beautiful Words

Beauty being in the ear of the be-hearer, any arguments about the most beautiful words in the language are going to be purely subjective. When I say “in the language,” of course I mean any given language, but since different languages have different phonetic systems, their speakers are bound to have different judgements about what sounds the most mellifluous. I will say that one of my favorite words is the Spanish el tenedor, which I consider to be noble and heroic-sounding. My favorite word in German may be zurück, which is fun to say, like whipping around a pole on ice skates.

Focussing on English, however, many writers and linguists have put forth their opinions about the most beautiful words in our language. These include tremulous, murmuring, radiance, ephemeral, mellifluous itself, and the famous cellar door. Linguist David Crystal put together a matrix of ten criteria that he claimed contributed to a word’s auditory appeal. These include: 3 syllables, with the stress on the first, use of m and l, and avoidance of certain consonants (such as h, g, j, ch, sh, th). Crystal ranked tremulous on top, but also gave an example of a word that failed on every one of his criteria: zoo. I disagree that this word is particularly displeasing. It may not be pretty, but it’s hardly ugly, either. (For the ugliest word in the English language I have to nominate puberty.) It’s also worth noting that some words that may not be beautiful, are nonetheless delightful to say, such as kerfuffle, nincompoop, gargantuan, and grinch.

The other point about beauty is that even if we frame this as being a purely aesthetic question, people find it almost impossible to ignore the meanings of words. For that reason, most of the words on these lists have positive meanings to reinforce their positive sounds. Cellar door is more neutral than most, and one of the few truly negative-meaning words that made one list is nefarious. Demonstrating this even more strongly, according to a 2004 survey conducted by The British Council (among non-English speakers, interestingly) the most beautiful word in English is mother. Mother is certainly a wonderful concept, but I can’t say I find the sound of the word particularly euphonious.

So what are my choices of euphonious words? At the top of my list has long been clarity. Although Crystal might claim that the hard c and t disqualify it, my own opinion is that their sharpness adds a little sparkle that’s more pleasing than the undifferentiated blandness of something like murmuring. (That may also explain the appeal of a nonsense word that has currency in our family: skibbledee. Although perhaps that belongs more on the list of fun words than truly beautiful words.) I do also like cellar door and ephemeral that have been mentioned already.

This question at its most basic is simply an entertaining novelty. As a poet, however, the sounds of words can be just as important as their meanings, and picking the right words definitely includes consideration of their syllables, stresses, and sounds. That’s why I love it so much that English has so many synonyms, allowing me to rummage through all sorts of varied options when arranging words into a poem.

What words do you consider to be the most beautiful? Do you have certain sounds that you love (or hate)? How much does the meaning influence you? Do share your favorites!

[Picture: El Tenedor, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (Image from NydamPrints.com);

Closing Doors, reduction linocut by Lori Biwer Stewart (Image from the artist’s Etsy shop Lori.Biwer.Stewart.)]

May 28, 2025

Words of the Month - Vocabulary Tests

With my children graduated from college last spring, this has been the first year in my entire life that has not been explicitly tied to the academic calendar, and I’m feeling slightly unmoored! Still, the broader culture is certainly sufficiently affected by the academic calendar that I’m not in any danger of forgetting. So in honor of all those students who still have a few weeks left in their school year, and are probably thinking about all their final projects and exams, here are a few Words of the Month.

project - Originally a “plan or scheme,” project entered English around 1400 from Medieval Latin meaning “something thrown forth.” You can see how the sense could shift to “an undertaking.” Interestingly, in the verb form (which came after the noun), the sense of “to plan, scheme” came before the various physical meanings “to shoot forth,” “to protrude,” “to cast an image on a screen,” etc.

test - In the late 14th century a test was a small vessel used in ascertaining the content or quality of metals. The name of the vessel is ultimately from “shell.” By the 16th century it could mean the “trial of the correctness or quality of something” more broadly, by the 18th century it could mean the “means of examining something,” but not until the very early 20th century did it gain its specifically academic sense. (In general, the verb versions of these meanings followed behind the noun, often by about a century.)

exam - This is a mid-19th century slang shortening of examination. In this case, the verb was first, appearing around 1300, from Latin meaning “to weigh,” and thus “to ponder, consider, and judge.” The sense of “a test of knowledge” (as opposed to “a judicial inquiry”) dates to the early 17th century.

quiz - Since this began as slang, its origins are a little murky. The meaning “a brief oral examination by a teacher” first appears in 1852. The slang word quiz meaning “odd, ridiculous person” dates back to around 1780 (where we get the word quizzical), but it’s not entirely clear whether that’s the origin of the “test” meaning. If so, the derivation is probably by way of “to make someone look ridiculous by means of puzzling questions,” which appeared by the end of the 18th century. Another theory is that the test quiz derives from Latin qui es? (“who are you?”) which is said to be the first question in Latin oral exams in the 19th century.

essay - This comes from the same ultimate Latin root as exam, although in a different form. Also, English acquired essay after it had spent a lot more time in French, and it may have been coined in English by Francis Bacon in the late 16th century, under the inspiration of Montaigne. Bacon’s meaning “discursive literary composition” also had the sense of “trial, endeavor.”

assessment - This didn’t enter educational jargon until the mid-20th century. Its first use in English was from around 1530, meaning “the value of property for tax purposes,” a meaning that remains. It derives from Anglo-French assess, “to fix the amount of a tax, fine, etc,” from Latin for “sitting beside,” as in someone assisting a judge. (And yes, assist is ultimately somewhat related to assess.)

evaluation - I’ll throw this onto my list of synonyms, although there’s nothing very exciting in its etymology. It entered English from French in the mid 18th century, and simply means “to determine the value” of something. The somewhat less concrete sense of assessing performance as opposed to tangible goods is later, and “job performance review” isn’t until the mid-20th century.

Lots of other synonyms for tests, such as finals, midterms, orals, etc, are all simply the adjectives that described various types of examinations.

For anyone still dreading their exams, I wish you the best of luck. Summer is almost here!

[Pictures: A Study, wood block print from Orbis Sensualium Pictus by John Comenius, translated by Hoole and printed for S. Leacroft, 1777 (Image from Google ebooks);

Detail of color wood block print by Walter Crane from The Absurd A.B.C., engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, c 1874 (Image from Internet Archive);

“Y was a Youth” alphabet from The Hobby-Horse, or the High Road to Learning, published by J. Harris and Son, 1820 (Images from A Nursery Companion by Iona and Peter Opie, 1980).]

March 28, 2025

D is for Dreams

(My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Bittersweetness & Light, my new collection of hope-filled, joy-inducing fantasy and sci fi short stories, poems, and art. I’ll be sharing lots of excerpts, and I’ll also be sharing some of the background on why we urgently need joyful stories. There will be lots of other bloggers working their way through the alphabet this year, too, and you can find out what themes they’ve got planned at the Theme Reveal List.)

“Dreams” is another of the poems in the book. But rather than share the whole thing, today I’m sharing the illustration that goes with it. This one isn’t a block print. In fact, it’s a doodle. The original doodle was made nearly 30 years ago, during a faculty meeting. I found it so satisfying that I kept it in my notebook all these years. It seemed like an appropriate place to begin when illustrating a dream world, because what are dreams, after all, but the doodlings of the subconscious mind? To complete the illustration for my book, I added the doe, blue butterflies, fish, and quail, which are characters in the poem. The quail and butterflies are adapted from independent block prints, which I scanned and added to the image digitally, and I drew in the doe and fish.

In case you’re hoping for a Word of the Month on this last post of March, how about doodle? The definition “draw aimlessly” appeared in 1935, and seems to have drawn from a variety of influences. Doodle could be a verb meaning “to fritter time,” possibly associated with dawdle, and a doodle could also be a person: in the mid 17th century “a simpleton,” and in the mid 18th century “an idler.” (That definition can be seen in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”) Doodling may be a way to fritter away time idly, but humans have done it for millenia, and nowadays studies suggest that it’s an excellent way to increase memory, alleviate stress, and regulate the brain. And of course, now a doodle can also be a poodle crossbreed - which may also be good for alleviating stress!

D is also for Delight, which is what I hope this book will bring you. The ability to take delight in things is a muscle that sometimes atrophies as people grow up and become too “cool” or too “busy” to exercise it. If you want to know what delights me, well, of course a lot of it is in this blog. But you could also check out my Instagram, in which I post one picture each day of something that delights me, in the hope that it might delight others, too.

Marketing Moral: Not ready to buy my book? How about going to your local library and putting in a request for them to buy it for their collection. You’ll get to read it for free (eventually… It can take a long time!) and better yet, you’ll be helping to make it available for others, as well.

Proper Moral: Hang onto your dreams. Even when the world doesn’t live up to our high ideals, it’s still important to have dreams to point us in the direction we want to go.

Do you like to doodle? Or do you have something else to keep your hands occupied or your mind regulated during long meetings? Have you ever doodled something that surprised and delighted you?

[Picture: Dreams, illustration by AEGNydam from Bittersweetness & Light, 2025 (See NydamPrints.com).]

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