mike's web log/comments

Sure, I'll go for three weeks in a row. It's a streak! This Friday we have, as in weeks previous, a word new to me and a surprising (again, to me) eymology. (Plural today: etymologies.)

Word: schooliness, adjectival form schooly. This comes from Clay Burell, who writes about being a teacher. Burell doesn't precisely define the term—in fact, he invites others to propose definitions—but suggests that it means something like "of and for school, but with no other intrinsic value." It's a kind of insititutional opposite of what we'd really want school to teach—critical thinking, imagination, creativity. For example, he experimented with having his students blog, but blogging became schooly: "just another way to turn in homework." This extends to extracurriuclar activities that students undertake primarily to pad out their college admissions. Burell acknowledges that schooliness echoes Colbert's term truthiness.

Ok, etymologies. These are only half-surprising, so today we get two. Both pertain to the names of dog breeds. I heard these from Helen Zaltzman on The Allusionist, her entertaining and educational podcast.

The first is poodle. This comes from the German word Pudel (pronounced just like "poodle"), which comes from the same root that gives us puddle. Because poodles are water dogs, hey! I don't know why, but I find this inordinately amusing. Perhaps because my early reading experiences involved text like this:

When beetles
fight these battles
in a bottle
with their paddles
and the bottle's
on a poodle
and the poodle's
eating noodles

... they call this
a muddle puddle
tweetle poodle
beetle noodle
bottle paddle battle.

(From Fox in Sox, thank you Dr. Seuss.)

And the second breed is basset hound. Short story here is that basset is related to base (also bass), because basset hounds are low to the ground. Funny.

As an aside[1], the other famously low-slung dog is a dachshund, which has a more scenario-oriented name: Dachs is the German word for badger, which is what those dogs were bred to hunt. Hence their demeanor, which tends toward the confrontational. Please, for the love of all things language, do not pronounce this as "dash-hound." It's "ducks-hoond," ok? Thank you.

[1] I'm not counting this as a surprising etymology, because it isn't surprising to me. :-)