All too infrequently, during these recession months, am I allowed to travel in the very front of an aircraft. But whenever I do, I take great pleasure when one of the flight attendants delivers the food and drink in a curious zig-zag manner: handing the champagne to the lady in 1A, then the kir royale to the man in 2C, then the gin-and-tonic to 2A, the hot tea to 3C, and so on back and forth all the way down until she reached the curtain. The first attendant I spotted doing this told me, brightly, that her technique was based on a writing and ploughing technique known to the Ancient Greeks as boustrophedon - the word derives from ox and turning - and which is defined as written alternately from left to right and from right to left, like the course of a plough in successive furrows.

All fine and dandy, and fantastically interesting to Classicists maybe. But I wonder: what about the poor guy in 1C. He  seems to lose out, and probably wonders why he ever paid to sit in the front of the plane in the first place.

I miss Scotland, and so when I came across the word soum, my heart promptly melted. This ancient word means

the amount of pasturage which will support one cow or a proportional number of sheep or other stock.

Would that it were so simple.  Dear Scotland having a charmingly perverse side, it also means its very opposite. It also stands for

the number of sheep that can be maintained on a certain amount of pasture. "A soum of sheep" varies, depending on the quality of land, between four and ten.

If that is unclear, then ask a Highlander to explain, especially if he's just had a wee dram...

This is the former name for the bird we now known as the thrush, the song-thrush or (an even less familiar term), the mavis. But unattractive the word throstle may be, it seems a positive joy compared to the Latin name owned by the poor creature: Turdus musicus, which sounds like something one might find in a Jonathan Franzen novel. This Latin also gives us turdine, which means thrush-like - and that still meaning the bird, not the infection.

With the Winter Olympics getting under way in (currently snow-free) Vancouver, it is perhaps reasonable to include a word for the terror or delight of coming down a slope at great speed. The French verb dégringoler can be dusted off: from it the English have derived a noun that is much more commonly used in the figurative sense, to mean

a rapid descent; deterioration, decadence; change from bad to worse

So, from a 1959 issue of the magazine Encounter (which underwent its own dégringolade when it was found to be taking money from the CIA) we have "...the hero...underwent a convincing but totally unsensational degringolade, taking, not to drugs or drink, but to an increasing sluggishness." We do not know what then happened to the aforesaid hero. Encounter, however, went bust.

As we approach St. Valentine's Day, a nod to the romance industry. Our chosen word is of Italian origin, from the sixteenth century, and means very simply

a little love, a cupid

It claims common cause with amoret, which since 1651, and only in the plural, has signified

looks that inspire love;  love-glances; "love tricks, dalliances"

Neither word has anything to do with that sickly-sweet concoction Amaretto di Saronno, much of which will nevertheless probably be consumed during dinners-for-two in the middle of the month.

]]> http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/amoretto/feed/ 0 http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/filibeg/ http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/filibeg/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:46:38 +0000 admin http://simonwinchester.com/?p=408

On 25th January Scotsmen around the world will get together in inelegant scrimmages at which much haggis and even more whisky will be consumed, all to honor Caledonia's greatest poet, Robert Burns, born 251 years before on this very day.
Not a few of the diners will be wearing the filibeg - the skirted garment of tartan cloth known in English, and defined by the OED, simply as

the kilt
The Gaelic phrase feileadh-beag means, specifically, a little thing of pleats (or a thing of little pleats, no-one is quite sure).

Old-timers in Scotland like to think of the filibeg as the little kilt, a shorter garment that displays the knees in a manner never known to the warriors of long ago. A sudden breeze can run the risk of the wearer showing even more, of course, given the current fashion for wearing little, if anything, beneath.