Last month, while honoring my Dad for Father’s Day, I spoke of the tools he taught me to use. One of those was the coping saw. I remember being surprised by the name of this tool. Until then the word “cope” and its gerund form “coping” was something you did when things were difficult.

Back then, when I was a teenager, I did not rush to look up the etymology of the word. I just asked my dad why it was called “coping”. Guess what? It got its name because its small flexible blade(s) allowed a worker to “cope” when working in tight corners or with disparate materials.

Historically, the root word “cope” has many potential sources. Some barely relevant to the saw: to argue, fight or to bargain, for example which you could argue is what a saw does with the material it is used on, I suppose. But the “cope” garment which is essentially an overly large cape seems pretty far removed from this tool.

Remembering my teenage confusion concerning the naming of this tool, reminded me of the delightful surprises I discovered in a small Scottish town’s museum of farming tools. There I found two instruments that suggested to me they could easily be the source for two words we use commonly today, heckle and hassle.

The first—heckle—was a tool for working with flax and resembled, in my opinion, an Afro comb. In effect it straightened, untangled, or broke apart the flax fibers. Its similarity to a comb, made me think of detangling my own hair, a very painful, irritating job. The jump from irritating in this way to irritating a stand-up comic, for example, seemed reasonable to me. It is right in there with the idiom of “raking” someone over the coals.

The hassle, or possibly hassler, in the old farm implements display looked like a large rake and was used to help clear a field. Its purpose was to pull the tangled weeds, or remains of a long-harvested crop from the field to ready the soil for new planting. Once again, the analogy to a comb works with this tool. But even more compelling is the likely frustration that the worker using the hassle(r) would experience. It is easy to imagine such a worker saying, “My muscles ache from hassling.” His contemporaries would understand what his job had been. Jumping from that to “being hassled” is quite a leap, but not unreasonable. If you are being hassled or “weeded out” from the crowd, is that not like being cleared from a field, with the old farm tool?

I admit my thinking may be stretching the imagination, but often this is how language works. One activity lends its terms to other activities while both are concurrent. Then as techniques change and culture shifts, the original use of the word is lost, leaving only the attributed use.

 

#EnglishLanguage #EnglishIdioms #Father’sDay

Non-poets lodge many complaints about poets and the way they write. One frequent complaint is that poets often upset the usual pattern of English.

But what is that “usual” pattern? It is true that communication in English depends rather strongly on the order of words. This is different in other languages.

English likes its subject to appear early in a sentence, and to precede any action word (verb) attributed to it—”The subject jumped” (or sang, or wobbled, etc.)

Poets do at times break this order, but they generally do so only when creating suspense or emphasis. Non-poets do not like this, always preferring to change the order into ordinary prose which robs the poetry of its opportunity to make the reader take notice of the thought, the meaning, the importance of the few words just read.

When lyricists do the same thing to the accompaniment of music, non-poets generally accept the “misplaced” word(s) and just sing along. Shouldn’t they allow the same courtesy to poets?

The lyric began as a poetry form, and a poet (not musician or lyricist for a musician) can still write a poem classed as a “lyric”.

Okay, okay, I hear your cries. I admit that some poets might not like to be lumped into the group writing “doo-wop, she-bang, nah, nah, nah” and similar nonsense sounds repeated over and over. This does not change anything.

I say that excellent poets are not torturing English when they choose the occasional inversion of word order. I will not, however, support the unconsidered or over-use of this technique which sometimes occurs in writing that wants to claim the title of “poetry”.

Non-poets and poets alike cringe when encountering such writing. But poets end up burdened with the calumny of this writing, plead though we might our innocence (notice the inversion in this prose sentence?)

#EnglishLanguage #PoetsandEnglish #EnglishandPoeticLicense

What is poetry? My mother, a poet, attempted to define this genre her poem, “The Uncontained.” Poetry for her was the art of chasing that which is rarely caught.

In her poem there is an allusion to this in the words: “no sooner born, beheld than slipped the fragile snare.” Even when a poem succeeds, that which is present for the reader may be merely a flicker of the familiar which is vaguely–unexpectedly–alien.

She at one time wrote about a “catch of changelings”. The idea was that the writer begins writing to capture some idea or feeling and when the poem is complete, the poet discovers that what has been captured is something other than what inspired the writer, in other words a changeling**. This is the challenge of writing poetry.

In her chapbook, Glass Rain, Golden Rain, she also speaks about a “safari into soul country.” I prefer this description. When city dwellers go on safari, they expect to see both that which is familiar and what is alien to our native homes. They will encounter the familiar—plants—but such as would never grow in their own gardens. Animals will appear, but nothing like they might see in a city neighborhood. Everything is at once recognizable and strange enough to inspire awe.

That feeling of wonder is what the poet is always attempting to hold within the framework of words we call a poem. A poem succeeds when the reader feels that sense of awe after reading the words the poet has provided.

*(see Glass Rain feature this week)

**For those unfamiliar with the term “changeling”, it come from folklore. Wicked or mischievous fairies supposedly would sometimes steal a human child leaving one of their own kind in its place—the changeling.

 

#EnglishLanguage #Poetry #PoetryCommentary

Boondocks is a seeming compound word that can trip you up. If it were then you could piece together its meaning. Boon is something beneficial or a favor, and docks a word for the structure to which you can secure your ship in port or device to link your PC with peripherals in the office.

The problem is obvious. What do these two definitions have to do with each other? Is a boondock some preferential mooring given only to some and not others?

Oh, and dock singular can also be a verb meaning to tie up or unload your ship. Oh, sure, that works well. Your benefit or favor gets tied to a wharf or unloaded from a boat. Even better is the definition of “cut off” as to remove an animal’s tail.  Pair that with “boon.” Some favor, huh?

But again, it turns out the word is not native to English. It came from the Filipino native language Tagalog. English-speaking forces occupying the Philippines before WWI struggled to navigate the interior which was mostly mountainous. The locals referred to the area as bundok meaning mountain.

These Americans, being English speakers, soon changed the word to “boondocks” referring to the mostly untamed wilderness between the city-populated lowland and the area which lay behind up into the mountains.

The same nation’s returning soldiers in WW2 even coined another word, “boondockers” for the sturdy boots required to survive the rough terrain. Could the shoes called “dockers” be related?

“Boonies” is another variation of this boondocks. It is not intended as a compliment but is used in the derogatory way as “the sticks” or “yokel town”—all referring to a rustic, mostly undeveloped area.

Really, if you are not a native speaker, or even if you are, when you first come across the word boondocks, what are you to think? Even English-speaking natives tripping over such words find themselves momentarily lost. Is it any wonder people find English a difficult language?

However, I love the way English willingly adopts words from other languages and cultures. I think it makes learning English a rather marvelous adventure where even non-native speakers may suddenly find a familiar word from their own language in regular use by English-speaking natives.

 

#EnglishLanguage #ESL

Do you remember the days when you were learning the alphabet? Perhaps your experience is like mine. When my schoolmates and I had barely mastered the oh-too-familiar alphabet song, we faced the test of recognizing the letters in words. That’s when the problem with consonants arose.

Vowels were easy. If you could make the sound without your teeth, tongue or by squeezing your lips, you had a vowel. Everything else should have been a consonant.

This is when we learned that W and Y could behave any old way they liked. At first I thought our teacher was just playing a joke on us. But no, she was serious. None of my classmates thought this waywardness was something we should have to learn or accept. Couldn’t those letters be forced to behave?

I developed my own almost fool-proof formula. I decided if a W or Y began a word, they were consonants. If they appeared anywhere else in a word, they were vowels. For example, W in window performs as a consonant at the start, and vowel at the end. The same can be said for Y in yummy.

Problem solved. But, oh no, next came the problem of the sounds they made when masquerading as vowels. Y could pretend to be a long I as in psyche,  a short I as in gym, or a long E as in silly. W wandered all over the place from uh, to oo to oh to ah. It just wasn’t fair!

Did you breeze through this phase in your learning, or are you like me—still harboring a resentment toward those recalcitrant letters W and Y? Be honest. I bet you are.

 

#EnglishLanguage #Consonants