Corny/Grainy

In the previous post I ventured to put forth the greatest pun I ever invented, which climaxed with the line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Ruth amid the alien corn,” which you all knew from your expensive educations—or looked up in Google.

Now, all you North Americans out there—unlike the Brits—might have been wondering if that line was another of Keats’ historical whoppers—you know, like writing that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean.* How could a Biblical personage be anywhere near corn, when corn was native to a continent which was not to be discovered for more than a millennium in the future?

In this case Keats did not create another historical whopper. “Corn” is a native English word for “grain,” which happens to be a borrowed word, borrowed from Middle French. For residents of the New World, “corn” is applied to the native American plant maize, while “grain” has been delegated to denoting other plants, such as wheat and rye. Across the Atlantic, “corn” still equals “grain.”

From a language point of view the words “corn” and “grain” are classified as "doublets"—that is, words co-existing in a language or dialect from the same original source, but have come into that language or dialect via different routes. 

English is a part of the Germanic family of languages, which spun off from Western Indo-European (probably 3,000 to 4,500 years ago) and “corn” has been along for the ride. “Grain,” which we noted above, was borrowed from French (and was originally a Latin word**). 

Jacob Grimm (one of the fairy tale Grimm brothers) codified the consonant changes from Western Indo-European to Germanic, one of which was the change from a hard G sound to K sound. Over time some Latinate G words borrowed by English became a soft G (e.g, “genuflect,” which you do with your native English word “knee,” the initial consonant sound disappearing about half a millennium ago).

Now, another thing that’s interesting about “corn“/“grain” is the transposition of the vowel sound and the “r” sound. Transposition of sounds in a word (not only with the “r” sound) is known as “metathesis.” It has happened to other familiar English words, such as “grass,” “ask,” and “burn.”***

*

Note that not all “corn” words in English are native. Take “cornucopia.” That’s a borrowed word—from Latin—the “cornu” part is Latin for “horn,” a native English word. Think of the musical instrument the cornet—a horn. Here we have another of the sound changes of Grimm’s Law: Western Indo-European K (which Latin didn’t change) into Germanic H (initially). (There’s “casa”/“house” as another example.) We don’t have an English cognate for “copia,” but we have borrowed the root for “copious.” “Cornucopia,” is rendered in English as “horn of plenty”—a phrase that is half native and half borrowed.The Latin root of “plenty” we also find in “plenary” and other words. For a pure Latin example think of “Ave Maria plena gratia”—“full of grace.” “Plena”/full” is another example of Grimm’s Law****—Western IE P becomes Germanic F. Other examples; “pisces”/“fish,” “pedestrian”/“foot.”

Let’s end with a simple test: What can we say about “Gratia”/“Grace”?

You’re right. A native English word cognate with “gratia” would have to start with a K sound. So, “grace’ is a borrowed word.

Thanks for being gracious enough to read this.

*** 

* “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”—a superfluous footnote for some of you, I hope.

** The phrase “take it with a grain of salt” is a loan-translation of Latin’s “cum grano salis.”

*** Cf. German “brennen.” English “burn” and German “brennen” are "cognates"—words in different languages or dialects that stem from the same earlier word. Are you upset when someone says, "I'll aks him"? That's metathesis at work, and has been since Old English, whose texts alternated between ks and sk.

**** And another example of metathesis.

Note: The second greatest pun I ever invented came during a college class in Romantic Poetry. A fellow student who thought he was the world’s greatest Freudian was babbling on about “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” The professor, exasperated, finally exclaimed, “Look at the words, Mr. Schleimer. Look at the words!” 

Whereupon I turned to my neighbor and said, “But what are the words worth?”

Puns

Puns are great—except when they’re not great. And, unfortunately, most of the puns we come across in our daily lives—like those concocted by newspaper or magazine sub-editors, are tripe.

The truly great puns go down in history and are related over and over again. For example, there’s this classic of Dorothy Parker’s:

Challenged by one of her verbal sparring partners to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker came up with

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

Perhaps the most brilliant pun of all—because it needed only one word—was the classic (oops, pun there) message attributed to Sir Charles Napier* supposedly sent to London in 1843 after his capture of the Indian province of Sind:

Peccavi.

(Non-Latinists are encouraged to Google this word.)

*

During a few of the many idle moments that we all have now, I have come up with—what I think is—an exquisitely subtle pun (so exquisitely subtle that I believe resorting to Google will be necessary, the pun touching on vastly different areas of knowledge). If, because of social distancing, no one will come up and pat me on the back for the pun, at least everyone else will be out of rotten-tomato-throwing range.

At one point in the 1920s, during the baseball off-season, the leading batsman—nicknamed The Sultan of Swat—was hired to do a turn on the vaudeville stage. He enlightened the rapt audiences with demonstrations of his batting stance and his magnificent swing.

Unfortunately, his act was preceded by a pair of Irishmen who blarneyed their way through a series of moldy tales about the Auld Sod, and was followed by a couple of kilted Scots telling haggis jokes and singing (after a fashion) Robbie Burns songs.

The whole thing may be summed up as a case of Ruth amid the alien corn. 

***

* Research has shown that the pun was apparently coined by A. N. Other.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-James-Napier

The Greenhouse Effect

During our COVID-19 lockdown we have been offered tons of advice on how to survive our isolation. Lists have been offered of books, TV shows and movies, exercise regimens, and music to fill our time indoors. The offerings of advice that I most welcome—seeing that I have books, music, and movies overflowing the living room (notice I didn’t say anything about exercise)—are the lists of recipes to be attacked in my kitchen. 

The other day the ever-helpful New York Times offered up an article entitled, 

A Mediterranean-Inspired Menu to Keep You Going All Day
Savory spiced oats, chicken salad pita and spicy meatballs: These recipes offer a trip abroad, via your pantry.

I don’t know about those oats, but I love chicken salad and meatballs, and so I dug into the article, especially enticed by the author’s talk about finding the ingredients in my pantry (i.e., kitchen shelves, for us peasants) during the self-isolation.

Anyway, since I have a box of oatmeal lying around I did take a look at the recipe. To the oats, the author, David Tanis, adds “a fried egg, a bit of roasted pepper, a generous sprinkling of za’atar . . . .” Wait a minute; I’m supposed to have za’atar hidden away in my pantry behind the sardines and Oreos? I don’t even know what the hell za’atar is—a Persian god, perhaps? a Viennese musical instrument? 

Well, forget the oats.

On to the meatballs—“Spicy Meatballs With Chickpeas.” Turns out the meat in the meatballs is ground lamb, which I imagine I could harvest from one of the furry creatures munching on the grass outside my New Jersey window. I do have a can or two of chickpeas, but Mr. Tanis advises,

If you have the time, cook your chickpeas from scratch.

I wouldn’t know what a scratch chickpea looks like, and even if I did find a stray one hunkered down in my (ahem) pantry, I don’t have the temperament to “soak them for a few hours or overnight.” Cooking is now or never with me. Generously, Tanis allows us, if we prefer, to “serve the meatballs with couscous.” Right! substitute non-available couscous for the missing chickpeas.

One more recipe to go, and maybe for that one I can just pull stuff off the shelves.

Sorry, no. It’s for “Grilled Chicken Pita With Yogurt Sauce and Arugula.” Now, I sometimes have some leftover chicken cowering in the fridge, and if I’m careful I might be able to separate the yogurt from the fruit on the bottom in my breakfast yogurt cups, but arugula? Who has arugula? I could come up with some wilted lettuce leaves. Would that do?

*

A number of years ago, while I was at my car dealer’s waiting for an oil change one morning, I glanced over to the TV set where a chef was cutting something up with a big knife, with a fairly attractive woman observing him. After a commercial break, the chef had disappeared into the ether, and the woman was outside a house with an expanse of lawn behind her. She gestured with her arm and said, 

I like to have two greenhouses, one for something-or-other and another for this-and-that.

(Please excuse me for not implanting the real words in my brain.) By a leap of intuition I said to myself, “That must be Martha Stewart.” (I had heard about her, but didn’t know her.) I was right. 

Martha Stewart extolling the joys of having two greenhouses, and I didn’t have even one!

Now that I think about it, maybe I could get Martha to rummage in the something-or-other or the this-and-that greenhouse and fetch me some arugula.