I’m still writing and editing parts 2 and 3 of “Them Without Chests.” They allude to each other and the first part in ways that I want to keep well-balanced and good, and, well, they’re not there yet. But here are some rambling observations to tide you over:
Scattering. Scatter. Is it related to scat-, as in scatology? Pretty sure that’s Greek. Skatos. Genitive of skor, or excrement. Obviously shit has to be related to skatos, too. The OED cites its most direct relative as -scītan, Old English.
-Scītan is related to the Proto-Germanic word skit-, and of course Germans say Scheiße.
Skit- comes from the Proto-Indo-European word skheid-, meaning “separate, split, divide,” which relates to shed, “remove from the body,” as in shed hair, shed clothes, shed blood.
Skheid- is also a forebear to science, conscious, and conscience. The Latin word scientia, “knowledge,” comes from the verb scire, “to know,” but also to “separate or split up,” or “distinguish.” You can sense the notion of separation in discern. In German scheiden is “split up” or “divorce.”
In Latin scindere meant “to split”; Sunder; Schneiden, German for “cut"; Scissors.
The Greek verb for scatter is skorpizo, in which you can’t miss the kinship with the noun skor, so obviously, yes, scatology and scatter are cousins. Skorpizo is also Greek for shatter.
Skheid-'s Greek descendant is skhizein, “to split or rend or cleave.” You can see schism in that word, but also “a split mind,” schizophrenia.
There’s scatterbrain and -brained. And scattershot. For a long time, I actually thought the word scattershod was in common use and not my own neologism until I realized how absurd it sounds—unlike the word treacherize, which I would have sworn by and lost a game of scrabble defending. Somebody calledme on that one once. I can’t remember who. Very embarrassing.
I’ve heard Dutch people say “schetteren.” Looked it up. Not related to scatter. It means “blare” or “bray,” so it has to be related to chatter. Like little shivering chicks in a nest with rigorously wide-open mouths.
Schetterig? Schäterig? Schätterig? Schädderig? Schedderig? Shedderig? One of those words I’ve learned by speaking to people in Germany but never seen in writing. I gather from context it means old, threadbare, beaten up, or low-quality.
I’ve looked up Schäderig and every other orthographic variant I can think of but can’t find it. Algorithms aren’t helping me, either. No, Google, I don’t mean schattig. Thanks anyway, you fawning upstart. I might have to turn to a Plattdeutsch or Frisian corpus.
Meal and mill.
The word Mahl in German is roughly equivalent. But then again no German would ever say, "Lass uns mal ein gutes Mahl genießen." Not any more than an English speaker would say, "Let's enjoy a good repast."
Germans never talk about a Mahl as a meal, still office workers greet each other at noon not by saying “hi,” but “Mahlzeit”—“Mealtime.” Weird.
Germans actually talk about food in general as bread. And they talk about time as food. They don't say, “It's time to eat dinner.” They just say, “Es ist jetzt Abendbrot. (“It's eveningbread.”)
And at noon, they don't say, “It's lunchtime”; they say “Es ist Mittag” (“It's midday”), meaning both the time and the food.
“Hast du schon Mittag gegessen?” (“Have you already eaten midday?”), which sounds like the work of some merciless cosmic entity concocted by H.P. Lovecraft: Mahlthulhu, eater of time.
It's weird how you actually have to reshuffle whole mental categories in order to speak another language.
The Old English word for meal is mæl, which is akin to mal in Old High German, which means time.
And that’s derived from the Latin metri, meaning to measure.
How the hell do you get from metri to mal?
Modern Germans use Zeit for time, but they use mal for discrete pieces of time. “Nächstes mal fahre ich früher los zur Arbeit.” (“Next time I'm leaving earlier for work.”)
This helps explain the improbably gauche German word for breakfast: Frühstck. An early-piece [of time] is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Give us this day our daily bread.
Germans are always inserting that word mal into sentences.
Sometimes it means “once” or “before”—“Ich war mal in den Staaten. (“I've been to the US before.”)
Sometimes it means “at some point” or “some time.” “Ich möchte mal nach Sibirien. (“I'd like to go to Siberia some time.”)
But sometimes they just use mal to soften the blow of that most arch-German of qualities: pushiness. “Gib mir mal einen Kuli.” (“Give me ? a pen.”)
English speakers soften rudeness by using the subjunctive mood to make a request seem imaginary: “Would you mind if I borrowed a pen?”
In German, it is as if the most useful tool invented by humanity—the division of time into either measurable or at least nebulous, immeasurable, yet communally discernible pieces (see skheid- above)—has a shadowy effect quite the opposite of its ostensible one. To measure time is to wrest control over our perceptions; over the way waves of light, for one, diffract off objects and strike our retinas, and affect in us recognition—say of a pen—though this recognition, and even the “moment” we think we are experiencing, is “by then” already past.
“There is a pen—there was a pen once.” Once. Twice. Three times. Zwei mal zwei Kugelschreiber. Two times two pens. Four pens. Four instances of a pen. Two times two instances of a pen.
It's a wistful and colonizing impulse, this attempt to control time; and it's the subject of the most famous quotation in all of German literature: “Verweile doch,” Faust tells Mephistopheles, “du bist so schön.” (“Stay a while, you're so beautiful.”)
And yet, ironically, it was the Germans who had noticed another side to that impulse—another aspect to the pushing of time through the meat grinder, through the big bad Fleischwolf, to make little time sausages. The very notion of time as something countable—of “a time”—implies impermanence.
It won't last. “Go ahead and give me a pen. It won't be forever. Even if I never return your Bic, your Stabilo, it will be pulled back to you in the vortex made by the eidetic future. You and the pen will be together again in the belly of the whale.”
Meal—Three historical definitions:
The first one is the one I remember. Broken up chunks of time.
The second is obvious: the portion of food you eat during those chunks of time.
The third “coarsely ground and unbolted seeds of a cereal.”
How had that not occurred to me?
From Old English melu. Old High German melo. Latin molere, to grind. Greek μύλη, to mill or grind.
Aren’t they from the same root? Is it just an etymological coincidence? Piecemeal and the sands of time, are their origins only the obvious ones?
See more at malm: “a soft, crumbly, chalky rock, or the fertile loamy soil produced as it weathers.” The crumbly meal that wears from the face of Ozymandias.
Mill. Same story. Mühle. Mølle. Crush. Soften. Mallet. Malleable. Mollify.
It’s 1:20 PM. I’ve only got 20 minutes to pick up my kids. Shit