Of speech and song

Isn't it fascinating that the mere action of stretching out one's words produces the vocal phenomenon that we call singing?

At what point does talk end and song begin?

I learned today that the word "accent" comes from the same Latin root as "to sing." An accent, then, is a different way of speaking but it is also, in a way, a song, a song about your heritage.

"Cant"

I learned last night that the official term for a secretive language, used by criminals and such, is "cant."

It's a language not meant to be understood by outsiders. Unfortunately, outsiders eventually end up figuring it out and some of its terms even end up as popular slang. Thus, "big shot" and "to put on the spot."

Cant goes way back and is of course not restricted to English.

The most mysterious part of the article, to me, was this line: "Many escaped convicts went to California in the 1850s and a large part of their cant is still used there."

By whom? The criminal class? Hollywood? Surfers?

Does the expression, "Gnarly, dude, you totally caught that wave!" have secret underworld connotations?

A loaf of bread .... and thou!

Kumusta po kayo?

That's "hello, how are you," in Tagalog, the principal language of the Philippines.

It's the "formal" way to say it.

I find it fascinating that from England to Spain, Hungary to the aforementioned Philippines, pretty much all over the world, languages recognize a formal and an informal level of speaking. Spanish has tu and usted, Hungarian teged and on.

English has it, too. Or had it. In the old days, thou and thee were the informal, and you was formal. Eventually, all of us English speakers (except the Quakers, apparently) simply started speaking in the formal tense to each other and thee and thou became quaint, archaic, rarely used, its original intent forgotten, preserved and used only in ecclestiastical and scriptoral settings.

The risque world of etymology

We all know that English is just mutant German with a crust of Latin and a little spice tossed in from other languages of the world.

In many cases, perfectly good old English words were eventually replaced by Latin ones for reasons known today only to etymologists. Winston Churchill famously hated this phenomenon.

I discovered an odd example of such a transfer tonight. In a staid old book of Roman fables -- you can't get much more academic than the Loeb Classical Library -- I had no expectation of such a discovery, but there it was, and a dictionary confirmed it.

It seems that the word "yard" once served as a standard, English male, umm, anatomical term, one which we have replaced today with a Latin word that began, most oddly, as the term for "tail."

Gives painful new meaning to the title of that recent movie, Stomp the Yard.