Otters, tenebrism, and Arkansas vs. Kansas

MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK

SEE OTTERS

This week’s most popular HH fact is a rollover—the word chine first popped up on the Twitter feed last week, but ended this week as the week’s number one. It’s like the lottery, this thing. 

Chine, in case you missed it, is a word for the trail of bubbles that appear in a body of water and indicate where an otter is swimming beneath the surface. Yes, that word is genuine: it’s sourced from the first volume of the English Dialect Dictionary, which defines it as “the small bubbles rising from an otter as he dives across the bottom of the water.” 

The EDD pinpoints the word chine to the Northumberland region of northern England, and suggests that etymologically it’s just a local corruption of chain: lang-chines and short-chines are other Northumberland words for various types of farmyard equipment, while shoother-chines (literally, “shoulder-chains”) are the chains that link the panels of a yoke together. 

While we’re on the subject of otters, incidentally, a few more from the HH archives: a group of otters is called a romp; an otter’s droppings are called its spraint; and in seventeenth century English, they were variously known as water-weasels, dog-fishers, and river-dogs. Just when they couldn’t get any better. 

Elsewhere this week we found out:

• while a cank is a goose’s honk, a canking-place is a place in which to gossip or chatter 
• the act of saying precisely the right amount was named satisdiction in 1647
• like the turning screw on an apple press, a swirling flock of crows is a cider-making
• in the seventeenth century, there was a plant known as kiss-me-twice-before-I-rise
• and if you really like poetry—or poets, for that matter—you’re a poetolater. 

POPULAR THIS WEEK

LIGHT IN THE DARK

After mirror anamorphosis the other week, another artistic term popped up on HH this week: tenebrism is a word for the use of extremes of light and dark in a painting or artwork.

As art terminology goes, that’s a relatively recent invention: the OED has no record of tenebrism any earlier than the 1950s, while the word from which it’s descended, tenebroso, was only adopted into English from Italian in the the late nineteenth century.

Literally meaning “dark”, in the late 1800s tenebroso came to be used as a noun referring to any one of a number of Italian painters who incorporated these extremes of light and dark in their work. These Tenebrosi as they became known were greatly influenced by the Baroque artist Caravaggio, whose paintings often featured highly detailed and illuminated figures against featureless, near pitch black backgrounds.

Bonus fact. A more familiar name for this technique is chiaroscuro, which literally means “light-dark” in Italian—and, as such, joins the likes of sophomore (“wise-foolish”), preposterous (“before-after”), and pianoforte (“soft-loud”) as an example of an oxymoron bundled up into one single word. 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

WE’RE NOT IN ARKANSAS ANY MORE

Why doesn’t Arkansas rhyme with Kansas? It’s one of those questions you might never think to ask, but are probably curious to know the answer to—and the answer (or at least part of it) popped up on HH this week. 

The fact is that Kansas actually did rhyme with Arkansas originally. Prior to 1881, both pronunciations of Arkansas—the “AR-kan-saw” one that’s the norm today, and the looks-right-but-isn’t “ar-KAN-sas” one—were in widespread use in the United States. But it turns out that having two entirely different pronunciations of the one state name isn’t exactly a tenable situation. So a debate was held, championed by two opposing Arkansas senators, to decide which one was to be adopted as the state’s official pronunciation. And the “saw” pronunciation won out on the day. 

But why the confusion at all? Well, Kansas takes its name from the native American Kansa tribe, while Arkansas takes its name from Arcansa and Akancea, the Algonquin name of a related tribe properly known as the Quapaw. Both of those indigenous names were adopted into English via French, and it’s the French influence that ended up adding that muddlesome plural S to both names. It just so happens that with a little more English influence, that final S ended up being pronounced in Kansas, while a more French-style pronunciation ignoring the final S won through in Arkansas. 

AND FINALLY...

ANAGRAMS 43

Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? 

LUNGFISH

UNDERFISH

ACTORISH

BLOWFISH

Last week’s solution:

CHATTINESS, GRITTINESS, LONGITUDES, GHOSTWRITE