Word To Use Today: tiffin.

Here's something sustaining to help us through to the end of the week.

So what is tiffin, exactly? Well, that depends on where it is.

Tiffin in northern India is traditionally a light meal, especially one taken at midday.

(Yes, most of us would call that lunch, but lunch is a hasty gulp of a word whereas tiffin is a light popping-in-of-morsels, a nibbling of delicious tidbits.)

If you're in Southern India, however, then tiffin is probably a between-meals snack, especially something offered to visitors by Tamils.

On the other hand if you're in Mumbai then tiffin is a packed lunch, which might be delivered by a tiffin wallah in a container called a tiffin:



In Britain nowadays, though, tiffin is usually a cake. It's basically a mixture of biscuit crumbs (that's the crumbs from a British biscuit....something like a US graham cracker, I think) stuck together with syrup, and with a layer of chocolate on top.

I'm afraid that despite the name this sort of tiffin is so lacking in lightness that its other name is chocolate concrete.

Still, sustaining, though.

Word To Use Today: tiffin. This word first appeared in English in the 1700s, and probably comes from the sadly now disused tigging, which comes from tiff, which means to sip.

Dead-head: a rant.

Sadly, according to Britain's i newspaper of 22/10/14, 'the head of Iran's top clerical body has died'.

Well, I'm really very sorry for his loss, and I hope he doesn't miss it too much.

Of course what I really thought was that the above passage displays a slightly unfortunate collision of metaphors written by a hard-pressed journalist. But then something three short paragraphs further on began to make me wonder.

'In the case of his death,' it says, 'the body has to take steps "within the shortest possible time" to appoint a new leader.'

Really? Good heavens.

Well, I'm really looking forward to the film version.



Word To Use Today: body. This word comes from the Old English bodig and is related to the Old Norse buthkr, which means box.

Nuts and Bolts: ignotum per aeque ignotum

No, no, not ignotum per ignotius, we've hopped around that subject in The Word Den before. This is ignotum per æque ignotum.

They're different. Ignotum per ignotius is where you explain something really easy by referring to something much more obscure.

'Why is that lady walking like that, Daddy?'

'She has a festinating gait, darling.'

Ignotum per ignotius makes perfect sense, but it probably only conveys any meaning if you already knew what you were talking about in the first place.

Ignotum per æque ignotum displays one small but vital difference from ignotum per ignotius: ignotum per æque ignotium is nuts.

You see, ignotum per æque ignotium explains something by referring to something that's not known to be true.

'What is fire hot, Daddy?'

'Because coal is made of dragons' poo, darling.'

Nuts?

Yes.

But on the whole the world would be a duller place without it.



Nuts and Bolts: this phrase is Latin for the unknown by the equally unknown.

 

Thing To Do Today: remember.

The media here in England have been full of headlines asking people not to remember.

The trouble is that the crowds at the Tower of London to see the poppies have been so large that when I visited recently it took me twenty minutes just to shuffle the fifty or so yards from the Tube Station to the road that runs round the Tower.

Last weekend I'm told there was a one-way system in place even for pedestrians.

What poppies, you ask?

Well, today, which is Armistice Day, there are 888,246 ceramic poppies planted in the Tower of London's moat. Each poppy represents a British or Commonwealth person killed in military service during World War One. They form an artwork called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by ceramic artist Paul Cummins with setting by stage designer Tom Piper.

Each poppy represents a young life cut short.

Oh, and there are so many of them. So many.

'I had to come,' an old lady told me, 'because my uncle was killed. He was blown to pieces and they never found so much as a scrap of him.'

The poppies have all been bought by members of the public, at £25 each, raising millions of pounds for military charities.


Photo by JeyHan This picture was taken some time ago. Now the moat is completely filled with hundreds of thousands of red poppies.

People are determined to remember: and, you know something?  

It warms my heart.

Thing To Do Today: remember. This word comes from the Old French remembrer, from the Late Latin remormorārī , to recall to mind.

 

Spot the Frippet: autochthon.

What I love about words is...ooh, that would be a long list...but apart from the crispness and the bite and the sweetness, it's largely the looking-at-the-world-in-a-new-way thing.

Just about every word in a language tells you something about the way people think. In fact it's probably the best way to find out about other people's intimate lives short of taking up a career in burglary.

So, autochthon.

An autochthon is one of the earliest known inhabitants of any country - or, sometimes, someone descended from one of them. It can also be an animal or plant that's native to a particular region.

But that's not quite as easy as it sounds - I mean, I live in England and for quite a lot of time nothing lived here because it was largely covered in ice. In warm periods, like the one we're having at the moment, some plants and animals came along of their own accord.
So, are those sort-of-native oak trees and roe deer autochthonous?

I suppose the chalk this house sits on is autochthonous because it's made of crushed sea creatures, and presumably they didn't move about much once they were crushed: except that, as the house is now 400 ft above sea-level, perhaps not.

Suddenly even the earth under my feet is shifting uneasily. One word, and a whole life-time of assumptions are crumbling.

Is there an autochthon near you? Are you sure?

Good luck with finding one, anyway.

Spot the Frippet: an autochthon. This word comes from the Greek autos, self, and khthṓn, earth or soil.

Sunday Rest: plaudit. Word Not To Use Today.

All languages are interesting, and some are bizarre (Russian, for instance, always sounds to me as if it's being spoken backwards). I even like non-human and alien languages.

And the word plaudit must surely have been borrowed from an alien language. I mean, it's so plainly the sound a robot makes as it engages its translation program.

"Plaudit! Is this the planet Sol?"

"Plaudit! Why do you have only one nose?"

"Plaudit! Why do you keep that bipedal hairless creature on a lead?"

The great shame is that plaudit means great approval or applause. A plaudit is a thing a joy and pride: 

So why on earth does it have to sound like a love-sick frog, that's what I want to know.

Well, it was the clever-clever Latin speakers of the 1600s who first started using it.

Huh.

And I bet a lot of them were robots or frogs, too.

Word Not To Use Today: plaudit. This word comes from the Latin plaudere, to applaud.

Saturday Rave: Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The other week on the Isle of Wight I walked from The Needles (they're pointy spikes of chalk sticking out of the sea):


Off the Needles, Isle of Wight, by Edward William Cooke, 1845.

 along the cliff tops to the Tennyson Memorial:



The wind at the Needles was so strong that in some places I couldn't keep my footing.

 There was no other person at the Tennyson Memorial, which was put up by public subscription as a signal to shipping, but the earth round the base of the cross was churned to black mud by cows.

Tennyson lived for many years near the place where his memorial stands, but when I re-read his poem Ulysses, which was published in 1842, I wonder if he was happy to be bounded as he was by the waves of his island.

...Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die...

 

 

But of course the fact that Tennyson was a poet means that he could go on vast adventures without so much as stirring from his chair.

Still, I can't help but wonder.

 

Word To Use Today: furrow. This comes from the Old English furh, from the Latin porca, which means exactly the opposite of a furrow, that is, a ridge between them.