morbido

Posted on May 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

I don’t often do tastings on non-English words, but this Italian word has always had an interestingly contrasty flavour for me, particularly because I come to it as an English speaker.

I should say, first, that the stress in this word is on the first syllable: “mor-bido.” So you really get that “more” sound. But in the context I usually hear it in, it’s not the mournful “mor” of a mortuary; in fact, it’s rather moreish. You see, I hear it mainly in cooking videos.

No, let me explain. I like to watch cooking videos in Italian. This is because (a) I like Italian food and (b) I like practicing my Italian comprehension. And this is specifically not because the videos are of cooking, uh, morbid things. I mean, yes, there are often dead animals in them (or anyway pieces thereof), but the morbidity and mortality are absolutely not the focus. So why am I hearing morbido? Because it means ‘soft’.

That’s right, it’s what we call a “false friend” – a word that resembles one English word but means a different one. A common example is French travailler, which resembles ‘travel’ but means ‘work’. Often people call these “false cognates,” but beware: not all false friends are false cognates. A false cognate is where two words appear to have the same etymological origin but don’t. A classic example is that cognate is a false cognate with cognitive – the two don’t come from the same root; cognate is from co ‘together’ and gnatus ‘born’ (from a root we also see as gen– as in generation and genital), while cognitive comes from co plus gnitivus, which is derived from gnosco ‘I know’. On the other hand, travel and travailler are not false cognates; they really do have the same origin, but they went in different directions: the Latin etymon was a word for a kind of torture, and the English used it as a word for voyaging while the French used it as a word for work. (Make what cultural inferences you will about that. Anyway, English also borrowed it separately as travail.)

OK, so is morbido a false cognate with morbid? No, it is not. Both words come from Latin morbidus, ‘sickly, diseased’ (which in turn comes from morbus, ‘disease’, which draws on the same mor- root as mortality). In English (and in several other languages), it kept that sense or at least stayed in the same sphere; we now commonly use morbid to refer to a focus on decay, disease, and especially death, but the medical term morbidity refers specifically to occurrences of illness, not of death – the collocation morbidity and mortality refers to bad things that happen in the course of medical treatment, both sickness (morbidity) and death (mortality). Whereas an Italian chef uses morbido to refer to good things – specifically soft ones – that come up in the course of cooking.

So… does that mean that Italians have, or anyway had, a negative attitude towards soft food? As though perhaps it is only for the invalid and valetudinarian? No, it seems not; rather, it was that disease and decay are associated with weakness and lack of strength and firmness, and so it came to mean that, and then it lost its negative tone and took on a positive one to mean ‘soft’, ‘docile’, ‘smooth’, ‘not rigid’. As the website Una parola al giorno puts it, “È uno degli esempi più splendidi di parola che si sia emancipata totalmente dalla sua origine scura e spiacevole, diventando una luce sensoriale potente, gradevole e gradita” (It’s one of the most splendid examples of a word being totally emancipated from its dark and unpleasant origin, becoming a powerful, pleasant, and welcome light to the senses).

It is not, after all, that morbido is used only for soft food; a pillow may also be so (“un cuscino morbido” is not only for your death bed), and, as Garzanti tells us, many other things may be called morbido (or, for feminine nouns, morbida): hair, fabric, skin, wine (smooth and well balanced), paintings (harmonious and delicate), personal character (tolerant, agreeable, sequacious even)… 

All of which inevitably seems a bit odd to my ear, and I can’t get around it. I’m simply too habituated to my English associations. The result is a dissonance that may not be morbid but is not morbido either. Meanwhile, to the person who grew up speaking Italian, the English use of morbid may also seem odd, perhaps feeling that when we talk of “morbid humour” and “morbid TV shows” and so on we have an eye on the cushions in the coffin and the softness of decay. On the other hand, they can associate it with the word morboso, which does mean ‘morbid’ or ‘sick’.

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droves

Posted on May 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

Every afternoon, on both sides of the building I live in, the driving force is cars, droves of them, like cattle crowding into chutes. Out my bedroom window, to the south, I see cars crawling on the expressway; on the north side, at street level, the street – which is meant to have one lane of traffic each way – often has three unofficial lanes jammed up one way and no room for human or beast or automobile in the other direction, just droves and droves striving in intense slowness to make it ultimately onto the equally torpid elevated highway. (Meanwhile, parallel to the expressway, trains carry commuters – each train carries up to 5,000 people, which is as many as you’ll see in the 4,000 cars that at any moment of rush hour occupy two lanes for the full 18 kilometres of the Gardiner expressway – and the trains are moving briskly… but I digress.)

Why do we speak of droves, anyway? Droves almost seem like groves, but mobile: large groups of like beings motivated en masse – leaving in droves, coming in droves, sometimes fleeing in droves or turning away in droves or arriving in droves. Often it’s fans, or voters, or customers, or tourists. People who exhibit group behaviour.

It doesn’t have to be people, though. Poets usually use droves about non-human things, and sometimes modified with an adjective: “the fireflies will rise in lucent droves” (Dave Lucas), “droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river” (Sheryl Luna), “the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves” (Jennifer Moxley), “They blossom, thick and fast, in droves” (Conor O’Callaghan), “Winged droves at evening wheeling!” (Ian Dall). But whatever is in the droves, it’s always the behaviour of a swarm or a herd.

Which is as it ever was, and if they move as though impelled, so much the truer to origins. For the first things to go in droves were cattle: a cattle drive drives a cattle drove. Yes, drove is formed from the same root as drive; in Old English the noun took the same form as the past tense – drāf – and both forms followed the same phonological trail under the whip of time to become drove. Only now, as the noun, you seldom talk of a drove, especially if you’re not talking of cattle or sheep; the multiplicity is an essential quality, and so why imagine just one drove being driven if you can imagine several, perhaps coming from different angles?

Which is like downtown Toronto traffic every weekday afternoon. Every street from whatever angle leading onto the Gardiner is backed up. In the morning, it’s the other direction, of course. Either way, droves and droves of drivers. Does it seem unkind to liken them to kine? Fair enough, they’re not cattle; cattle in a drove are hoofing it and actually moving, and may well make it to dinner first too…

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Pronunciation tip: My IKEA kitchen

Posted on May 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

This is the pronunciation tip I’ve been wanting to do for most of a year. As soon as we decided to get IKEA to redo our kitchen, I knew I wanted to do it. Of course I couldn’t do it until the kitchen was done. The kitchen was done a couple of months ago… but I need the opportunity to record and edit the video, and also, I needed to find out how actually to say the things. Which takes more time than with most languages.

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bizarre

Posted on May 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

Napoleon’s in the back, sweet Eugenie’s in the front
Sweating on the beach in the hot, hot sun
Suddenly Napoleon goes and splashes in the water
Folks all look around and say, “Do you think I oughter?”
Eddy calls up Oxford, says “Come for your appointment,
Meet me on the beach, you better bring the ointment”
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

Soldiers study in casinos, they’re bathing in the salt
Villa Belza’s run down but it’s nobody’s fault
Virgin’s on the rock, Basquing in the sun
Sharks in the museum but the seals have the fun
When The Sun Also Rises it shines upon the turf
But the director’s friend comes and shows us how to surf
This may seem incoherent, shading into weird
Want to know the sense? Hey, grow a beard
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

If you were listening to popular music in the mid-’90s – or, apparently, more recently in some circles – you will know instantly what song that’s riffing on: “How Bizarre” by the New Zealand group OMC. And if you know that song, you know it lacks the coherent lucidity of, say, “Down Under” by Men at Work. But you can make sense of the lyrics above… if you know about Biarritz.

Biarritz? Is that a bizarre place? Not exactly. It’s a seaside resort in France, in the Basque region near the Spanish border. But it has enough quirky things that a person can fill out some odd lyrics: 

  • After the French revolution, sea bathing went from a thing one didn’t do to a thing that fashionable people did do, and Napoleon himself did it at Biarritz.
  • Empress Eugènie, the wife of Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III, built a palace in Biarritz that is now a hotel.
  • Biarritz was also a popular spot with British royalty, and Edward VII caused a minor stir when he had the Earl of Oxford (H.H. Asquith) come to Biarritz to receive his royal appointment as prime minister.
  • There are casinos in Biarritz, though they were converted for a time after World War II to an American G.I. University.
  • There were salt baths – in water ten times as salty as the ocean – though they’ve been closed for 70 years now.
  • Among the sights in Biarritz are a statue of the Virgin Mary on a rock reachable by a bridge; the Villa Belza, a neo-medieval villa built in the 1890s that for a time was in bad condition but is now spruced up into apartments; and the Museum of the Sea, which has aquariums with sharks and seals.
  • When Peter Viertel was in town to direct the movie of The Sun Also Rises, a friend of his came from California and introduced surfing to Europe, and Biarritz is now a major surfing destination.
  • And the name Biarritz is originally from Basque – as is the word bizar, which means ‘beard’ and is not related to Biarritz (similarity notwithstanding) but likely is the origin of the word bizarre.

That took a long time to get not very far, didn’t it. And ended up raising even more questions. Well, at least one question: How do you get from ‘beard’ to ‘weird’?

It’s not that beardos were weirdos. The sense seems to have taken a quirkier route. The Basque word bizar appears to have been the origin of Spanish bizarro, which means ‘handsome, gallant, brave, noble’ (like Zorro, perhaps?). And somehow it came from that into French bizarre, which means pretty much the same as English bizarre – English got the word from French, so at least that’s no surprise. 

Now, the French word may actually have gotten bizarre from the Italian bizzarro, which means now means ‘quirky, weird’ but previously meant ‘quarrelsome’. There are duelling ideas of where bizzarro came from, but the suggestion that it came from Spanish and that ‘gallant, brave’ slid over into ‘quarrelsome’ is at least plausible. And ‘quarrelsome’ can plausibly become ‘incongruous, quirky, nonsensical’, so at the very least we have a possible trail. For that matter, ‘gallant, brave’ can also slide over to ‘extravagant’ or – as brave is sometimes used euphemistically to mean now – ‘extremely inadvisable’. (The alternative suggestion, that the French saw bearded Spanish soldiers and thought they were weird, and used a Basque word for ‘beard’ to mean ‘weird’, is frankly rather bizarre as far as I’m concerned.)

However it got to be what it is, bizarre now is a word for something that is pointedly incongruous. I like the distinction Littré gives between bizarre, fantasque, and extravagant: “S’écarter du goût ordinaire par une singularité non convenable, c’est être bizarre ; s’en écarter par une fantaisie qui tout à coup change d’idée, c’est être fantasque ; s’en écarter d’une manière contraire au bon sens, c’est être extravagant” (To depart from ordinary taste by an inappropriate peculiarity is to be bizarre; to depart by a fantasy that suddenly changes one’s mind is to be fanciful; to depart in a manner contrary to good sense is to be extravagant). So, for instance, if bathing in the sea was simply not considered rational behaviour, doing so might be bizarre. Not that anyone would use that word to describe the emperor.

Merriam-Webster gives a similar kind of distinction between fantastic, bizarre, and grotesque, noting that bizarre “applies to the sensationally strange and implies violence of contrast or incongruity of combination” – which could describe soldiers taking classes in a casino, but somehow that’s not quite it. No dictionary I’ve looked at points out that z is a letter that is often used in English to give a sense of the strange or exotic – as it’s uncommon in the language and features largely in imported and confected words – but the word bizarre is at the very least no less exceptional for having it. (It wouldn’t have that effect in French, where z is somewhat more common.)

But how about that song, now? OMC – short for Ōtara Millionaires Club – were from Ōtara, a low-income suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, not a seaside resort for the upper classes in the south of France, so their song is anyway not Biarritz. And their singer, Pauly Fuemana, wasn’t Basque (he was Niuean and Māori) and didn’t have a beard, but it would have been more bizarre if he was and did, all things considered. But how bizarre is the song? Is it bizarre enough, or is it bizarrely not bizarre (like Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” is ironically full of things that aren’t ironic)? After all, there’s an important distinction to make between bizarre and simply incoherent. Or is the sense of bizarre just getting gradually bleached from time in the hot, hot sun? Well, here, you decide.

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succour, secure

Posted on April 30, 2024 | 1 comment

Jacques’s job came with a certain security, but it was no sinecure. He worked at a branch office (“succursale,” en français) of an underwriter, and they were a bit oversubscribed. Although he was by nature carefree, at this particular moment he was overrun, and he called me up. “Au secours!” he said. “Can you run over?” 

“I’m not so sure,” I replied. “What can I give you?” 

Jacques shrugged audibly. “Succour?” 

“How about a sucker, au sucre?” I said. 

“Sure,” he replied. I grabbed a lollipop and my jacket and headed over.

Not that a sucker is necessarily appropriate succour; although some of us may think of succour as encouragement, it really means ‘relief’ or ‘help’ – if you run to give someone succour, a bit of alimentary energy is the bare minimum, and they might prefer lawyers, guns, and money.

And in a plurality, if possible. Succour is a fake singular – the original form English took from Norman French was socours, which was subsequently mistaken for a plural. But in fact it came from Old French secours (which became modern French secours, as in au secours, ‘help!’), which was from Medieval Latin succursus, a participle of succurrere, ‘run to help’, from sub ‘under’ and currere ‘run’ – so if you are overrun, you need someone to underrun. The sense of assisting also gave rise to the French derived form succursale, ‘branch office’ (there is an English word succursal, referring to a religious subsidiary or a ‘chapel of ease’, but I’ve never seen it actually used in the wild).

Secure may seem to be related, but don’t be so sure. In fact it comes from securus, from se- ‘without’ and curus ‘care’ – compare the nearly identical sinecure, from sine ‘without’ and curus ‘care’. Securus passed into Old French and became seür, which became modern French sur(e) and English sure. And of course English also borrowed the Latin more directly to make secure.

And sucker, and sucre? Sorry. The latter is from Sanskrit (via Arabic); the former is as English and Germanic in origin as any word can be (though it does connect at the Proto-Indo-European with Latin sugo, source of French sucer ‘suck’). So it goes. Etymology solely by sound is insecure and gives no succour – it’s for suckers.

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figment

Posted on April 25, 2024 | 2 comments

“I wonder what that fig meant,” Maury said, as we walked through the art gallery.

“What that figment what?” I said. “Which figment?”

“No, the fig,” Maury said. “In the painting.”

“Which one?” I looked around us to see which he meant; there were paintings in all directions.

He nodded his head back towards a room we had lately left. “The Bosch. The busy one.”

“I saw no fig,” I said. “Perhaps it was a pigment of your imagination.”

“No, I gave it a paints-taking examination.”

“Well, why would there a be a fig there? They’re not natural to the Netherlands.”

“Nor the netherworld, but no matter: it’s fiction, you know.”

“Ah,” I said, “a figment indeed, then: the ficus was fictus.” 

I will explain this: ficus is Latin for ‘fig’ and is where we get our word fig from; fictus (not related to ficus) is where we get our word fiction from, and is the Latin past participle of fingo, ‘I make’ or ‘I fake’, which is the source of our figment – and also our feign. Maury knew this, of course, since he is also a figment of my mind (you do know these vignettes are fiction, right? The narrative details, that is – the linguistic facts are facts. By the way, fact is from factus, which, like fictus, means ‘made’, but in a different way and from a different verb).

“But it was not just my imagination, running away with me,” Maury said. “It was Bosch who was the boss. He decided to inflict the ficus on us.” He halted and held up a finger. “Let us reconfigure.” He turned and headed back towards the Early Netherlandish room.

“And you decided to focus on it,” I said, following him. “But I think you were foggy. This fig leaves some questions unanswered.”

“Oh,” said Maury, feigning befuddlement, “there were no fig leaves in the painting. All figures were unimpeachably there.”

“And apple-y so,” I said. “The fruits were looming. But a fig? Under where?”

Maury rolled his eyes and turned the corner into the room. “In short, over there.”

We made a bee-line for the painting. “Is that it?” I pointed.

“No, that’s fragmentary. Over there.”

“That dab of pigment?” I gestured to a roundish pinkish patch.

“Yes, I think… oh, my word.”

“What is your word?” I asked.

“Nothing at all, in fact. It’s just a figure of peach.” He turned away in disappointment.

“Well, then,” I said. “That fig meant your imagination.”

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philtre

Posted on April 22, 2024 | 2 comments

Kendy looked at her phone and wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, no.” She swiped left on the photo in her dating app.

Janille, who was sitting beside her, looked over. “What was it?”

“Felt fedora.”

“You don’t like hat guys?”

“That is an automatic fail. I’d set up a filter if I could.”

“Huh,” Janille said. “I’m kind of a sucker for a feutre, myself.”

“A what?” Kendy was used to Janille slipping French in at random moments, but that didn’t mean she’d just let it slide past.

“Felt hat. It’s one of my favourite features. Sets my heart aflutter.”

“For a moment there I thought you said ‘foutre’.”

“No need to be filthy. For me a feutre is a philtre.”

“A filter in, apparently.”

“No,” Janille said. “Not filter, as in coffee. Philtre, as in love potion.” She typed the word into her phone and showed Kendy.

Kendy looked at it. “I mean, filter coffee is my love potion, so it still sounds the same to me. But of course French would have a special word for a love potion.”

“It’s a word in English too!” Janille typed the word into her Merriam-Webster app. It said “chiefly British spelling of PHILTER.” She snorted as a Canadian would (“chiefly British!”) and tapped through to philter; it rewarded her with the definitions “a potion credited with magical power” and “a potion, drug, or charm held to have the power to arouse sexual passion.” She held up the phone for Kendy to see.

“Huh,” Kendy said. “So is it because the potion is filtered?”

“They’re not even related,” Janille said. “This philtre is spelled with a ph because it’s from the Greek philos, which refers to love. As in bibliophile. Lover of books. Or logophile. Lover of words.”

“I can think of another -phile that felt fedora wearers might be,” Kendra said, half aside.

“Well, maybe if they’re from Philadelphia,” Janille said with a giggle.

“Say,” Kendy said, “do you think that fedora and felt are related?”

“I know they’re not!” Janille said. “The fedora is named after a heroine in a play—”

“Wait, that was where we also got Svengali, right?”

“No! But great connection. Svengali comes from the book and play Trilby, which also gave us a hat named after a heroine. In this case, though, Fedora is the Russian version of Theodora, which means ‘gift of god’.”

“So no felt.”

“No felt, no feutre. But felt and feutre both have the same Germanic root, and that root also came to Latin as filtrum, which meant ‘felt’ but also meant the kind of cloth that you use a sieve. And from that we get our word filter.” She glanced over at Kendy’s phone, which was displaying another photo on the dating app. “Meanwhile, philtrum with a ph – from the same source as philtre with a ph – is the name for the groove between the nose and the upper lip.” She pointed at the distinct groove on the face of the fellow on screen.

“Wow,” Kendy said. She looked at her phone for a moment and swiped left. “Huh. You sure know a lot about words.” She looked at Janille again. “No wonder you like guys with fedoras.”

Janille winced. “I felt that.”

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tatterdemalion

Posted on April 17, 2024 | Leave a comment

Little Italian tatterdemalion
fluttered a scallion at an Australian,
sat at a mullion, butt on a railion’,
frittered his bullion, glittering gaily, an’,
settling fully in, dabbled in paleon-
tology: million coccoliths salient…
Latter-day valiant butterflies flailion’
battled a stallion, prettily alien.
Startled, the silly ’un, muttering grayly in
medical dalliance sesquipedalian,
started to sally in, as he did daily in
pattering madly his tatterdemalion rag.

Well, it does get tattered and ragged by the end, doesn’t it? But still, there’s something pretty about tatterdemalion, even if it’s just another word for ragamuffin, more or less: one of the seedy dandelions of society, a person who’s not afraid of being a frayed knot. And, from that, it has made an adjective: “The perfectly appointed Letitia contrasted sharply with her tatterdemalion paramour.”

As illustrated by the patter above, tatterdemalion rhymes with alien and sesquipedalian and so on. But it didn’t always, and there’s a hint at its origin in this. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for it, from 1611, by one L. Whitaker, has “This Horse pictur’d showes, that our Tatter-de-mallian Did ride the French Hackneyes, and lye with th’ Italian.” A double l, and rhyming with Italian! Indeed, it is speculated that it was a fanciful formation meant to match Italian and other nouns of nationality; see this 1614 quote from one J. Cooke: “Puh, the Italian fashion? the tatterd-de-malian fashion hee meanes.”

We don’t know for certain, mind you; the cord of evidence is frayed and will not lead us to a definite end. But the tatter is just as it looks, the same tatter as in ‘shredded rag’, coming from old Scandinavian roots. The rest is just added fabric to flap inimitably gaily in the breeze.

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Pronunciation tip: Modern artists from the Albright-Knox

Posted on April 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

I love the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. It’s where I was first introduced to modern art. In 1987 my cousin Sharon bought me a book of 125 artworks from the Albright-Knox, commemorating its 125th anniversary. I’m using that as the guide for this pronunciation tip, which covers the names of really quite a lot of modern artists. Not 125 of them, though, because I skipped all the obvious American ones. It’s just a guide to how the artists’ names were pronounced in their original home languages, for those who want to know – and especially for those who insist they always pronounce names in the “original.” (If they don’t like modern art, well, I take no responsibility for the etiolated state of their existence.)

Names covered: Albert Bierstadt, Honoré-Victorin Daumier, Gustave Courbet, Alfred Sisley, Jean-François Millet, Camille Pissaro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jacques-Joseph (James) Tissot, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Édouard Vuillard, Raoul Dufy, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Henri Rousseau, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Max Weber, Giacomo Balla, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, Maurice Utrillo, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Giorgio de Chirico, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brâncuși, František Kupka, Juan Gris, László Moholy-Nagy, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Chaïm Soutine, René Magritte, Julio González, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rufino Tamayo, Piet Mondrian, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Max Beckmann, Auguste Herbin, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, Lucas Samaras, Victor Vasarely, Antoni Tápies, Jean Dubuffet, Francesco Clemente

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Scaramouche, skirmish, scrimmage, scrum

Posted on April 11, 2024 | 1 comment

“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?”

Well, he may or may not, but either way, he’s sure to boast about being the absolute best at it. That’s what Scaramouche (also spelled Scaramouch) does. We may think of Scaramouche vaguely as a mischievous character, or perhaps more to the point as a lowlife scoundrel, but the original Scaramouche, a character in the travelling Commedia dell’Arte troupes performing in France in the 1600s (he had a different name in the original Italian, but we’ll get to that), was in particular a conceited braggart of a soldier and – as conceited braggarts generally are – a coward.

So you can picture Scaramouches through history. 

In the 17th century, being a soldier was a common occupation, and a Scaramouche would be sure to boast about any skirmish he had been in – a mere bar brawl in which he received a kick to the pants would be transmuted in the telling to a glorious raid on a tavern in which he prevailed.

In more recent times, when sport has generally replaced military action as the main vehicle for civic pride and competition, a Scaramouche might more likely regale the bar with tales of the stomping he delivered in the football scrimmage the night before – a stomping he more accurately received.

And now in the world of business, a Scaramouche might talk about how he came out of the latest agile scrum with everyone following his lead and hanging onto his words, when in fact the phrase most often directed at him was not “That’s right!” but “Let’s put that in the parking lot.”

And in that other world of combat, politics? We know exactly what a Scaramouche would say, and much of it is not printable in a polite medium: vulgar braggadocio, with plenty of invective against his enemies. For examples, if your sensibilities aren’t especially delicate, google Anthony Scaramucci.

As it happens, Scaramucci is also the Italian name from which Scaramouche was taken – well, almost. The Commedia dell’Arte character was Scaramuccia, with an a on the end. His name meant ‘skirmish’. In fact, his name was the origin of the word skirmish.

Yes, that’s right. There is debate as to where scaramuccia came from – some propose a German origin, others say Lombardic or Frankish, but the true path of this rogue word has been lost in all the little linguistic sallies and raids of history – but the word gave rise both to the character Scaramuccia, who became Scaramouche, and also – and earlier – to the French escarmouche, which also means ‘skirmish’ and is the immediate source of English skirmish, which we have had since the 1300s.

But why stop there? English didn’t. Like the wanton wanderings of warriors on the field, fighting willy-nilly and making a mess of the best battle plans, this word entered into several more exchanges and took on subsequent forms under the influence of other English words. Scrimmage, for one, which started as another form of skirmish referring to little random battles and ended up on the football field. That morphed into scrummage, which was adopted by rugby for its combative huddles. From that we clipped scrum, which went from a disorderly tussle to a disorderly crowd to a press of journalists around a politician, and finally became a term used in “agile” project management.

Now, that’s quite the etymological fandango. And I’m not making it up.

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