Word to your mother

Hummus doesn’t sound like hummus. That is, the word itself doesn’t sound like what it describes. Hummus the delicious edible is a paste or a dip, usually made of chickpeas mashed with oil, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini. It’s delectable. Hummus the word sounds like it’s describing a fungus growing on the underbelly of a wet log. It sounds like a crust forming around the dried orifices of a dead sea creature, or a tracheal disease suffered by saxophone players. It’s not a word that should be describing food.

It’s a rare misstep in a generally elegant language. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about that language, and not just because I sit here week after week trying to find delicate ways of describing armpit farts. Being a bibliophile is part of it; I’ve often got my nose lodged in a book, which is far less painful that it sounds. A lot of it, though, is a preoccupation with history, and a fascination with how things evolve over time.

Because language, like any living thing, experiences an evolution, doesn’t it? All you need as proof is a romp through Dickens, where you’ll immediately encounter outdated words like “coddleshell,” “thither,” and “rantipole” – which, surprisingly, are not descriptions of bizarre sexual positions.

That linguistic evolution means all words have an origin, which is an interesting thing to think about. (Especially when you’ve got time to spare, and no cable. Check and check.) What’s amazing is that most words sound exactly like the object or concept they’re meant to represent. Take “rock,” for instance. Maybe this is simply because we’ve lived with the word for most of our lives, but doesn’t it sound exactly like it’s describing a rock? It’s hard, blunt, and no nonsense – the way a rock should be. Same goes for rock music, by the way, which helps explain why much of that tribal art form feels like a glorious bludgeoning from a brick-fisted brute.

Come to think of it, “bludgeon” is a pretty spectacular word, too. You can almost feel the blows. Too bad the mere utterance of a phrase can’t summon its corresponding sensation in its entirety, or else I’d spend the end of every day sprawled face-down on my couch, muttering, “Back massage, back massage...”

Ugly things deserve the word “ugly,” a glottal and cumbersome adjective; “beautiful,” appropriately enough, is delicate and flowing. You get the idea. If biological evolution is a product of natural selection, whereby the fittest genes survive, then language must evolve by much the same process, with the most appropriate words surviving the rigors of time and culture. “Twerking” may well be the most fleeting of slang, here and then gone, but “diamond” is forever.

Evolution is never perfect, though, regardless of what’s doing the evolving. In the animal kingdom, look no further than the duck-billed platypus, nature’s awkward goober. If the platypus was a person, it would be Andy Dick or Flava Flav – that weird little creature at the party that nobody wants to talk to, but no one’s quite sure how to avoid. Have you ever seen one of these things? It’s a bizarre and nonsensical mix of seal, duck, and five-pound sack of flour. It’s not a bad animal, certainly, and deserves to live life unperturbed as it goes around doing ... well, whatever it is the platypus does. But it’s a curiosity. Nobody really knows why it’s here.

Then you look at language, and there are platypuses all over the place. Take “kumquat.” A kumquat is a small fruit, vaguely orange-like, but the word itself sounds like it’s describing some congealing secretion oozing from a lump of roadkill: “Hey Sally, check out that dead skunk! It’s leaking kumquat all over the road!” Come to think of it, words that describe food are often incongruous and strange. We take a small cup of tasty fruit-filled goop, and we call it “yogurt.” We shouldn’t. Because while yogurt is yummy and contains some healthful ingredients, the word is better suited to embody the dry gunk that forms around the lips of a dehydrated mountain climber. “Hey Bertrand, here’s a tissue for that yogurt. Drink some water, fool!” And on it goes.

When I was in grade school, my friends and I would play a game – a common one, I’m sure – in which we would pick a word, like “road” or “limit,” and repeat it over and over again until it shed its meaning and became just a string of nonsensical sounds. Aside from fulfilling our obligation to be annoying nine-year-olds, it also highlighted the elasticity of language, and its apparent arbitrary nature. Not that we would have been able to articulate it in those terms, exactly, but on some level I think we realized that a lot of words are just inherently silly. We don’t think about it because we use words every day. But who’s to say that a tangerine couldn’t have been called a “waggleflop,” or a snow lion a “donglebutt?” It’s all just meaning ascribed to letters and sounds.

Amazingly, there are linguists who make a living thinking about this stuff, albeit with less absurdity. I’d love to pick their brains sometime. If I was more socially ambitious, I could envision a grand, wine-fueled dinner party choked to the rafters with tweed-wearing linguists and writers, merrily debating the etymology of “bucket” and “hose,” “poet” and “prose.”

Maybe someday, if I ever move out of Maine and into an art-house period film. But what would you serve a crowd like that? For an entrée, I’m thinking hummus.