Sunday, October 5: The A.D.D. Detective
X-RATED WORDS
by Leigh Lundin
We writers appreciate word play and several of us have written about words, their meanings, and sometimes their oddities. Tony Harris, physician, writer, and Criminal Brief reader, has contributed a couple of lists dubbed X-rated words.
Trix are for Kids
First are words that not merely end in –x but –trix, a feminine suffix in a language not renown for feminine endings.
|
administratrix |
curatrix |
janitrix |
Words ending in –trix come to us from Latin where some masculine forms end in –tor. Unlike English, nouns in many Romance languages are classified as masculine or feminine, or in some languages, neuter.
In contrast to Latin and Greek, where nouns are masculine, feminine, or neuter, French has only masculine or feminine, which means nouns are often arbitrarily one way or the other: cars are feminine and ships are masculine.
Some French nouns can be turned from the masculine into feminine by doubling the final consonant and adding a letter ‘e’: a male chat (cat) becomes a female chatte, and a male chien (dog) becomes a female chienne.
Whereas the –trix words above imply a woman, the following words have lost their feminine connotations as they evolved in the fields of math and science.
|
bisectrix |
matrix |
tortrix |
We recognize the masculine forms of rector and generator, but tector is less obvious. In Roman times, a tector (or tectrix) was a thatcher of roofs. These days, tectrix has come to mean the small (non-flight) feathers that cover birds. Tortrix is a Latin feminine past participle of "one who twists".
Brand X
Tony writes that in the 1950s, the letter ‘x’ in a word was thought to imbue the product with attributes of leading edge high technology. Some of these products include:
|
Ajax |
cleanser |
Next week, we attend the 2008 Bouchercon convention in Baltimore. See you there!
XXXOOO
Good column, Leigh — I love this kind of thing.
I found myself, after reading it, humming the old fifties jingle for Ajax cleanser.
Good morning and good catch, John. I’ll add that one in!
Ajax (Greek Aias), far from being high tech, is the name of two warriors (the Great and the Lesser) in Homer’s Iliad. The former is more usually indicated; he was renowned for his tremendous strength and stature, rather like Hercules, and like Hercules, is known best by the Latin version of his name. Presumably these associations are the qualities the name imbues the product.
Although it doesn’t feature a terminal x, another example of an invented word made to look futuristic by means of the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is Exxon gasoline, which wholly unnatural word has a very interesting history.
The French addition of an “e” confused me in 1945 when a Belgian family that treated me kindly had a daughter named Christiane and a son named Christian. Obviously neither was called Chris.
Like John, I love this sort of thing. But “dictatrix” is a bit too much to even imagine. Sounds like the cutesy name for a dancer at the Follies.
X marks the spot.
Xcellent article.
hmmmmm reminds me of pirates and….
well, you know….brushing teeth.
Which for some could bring about another x word—-exlax……
Back to my li’l corner now.
The X in the name of the Macintosh operating system — Mac OS X — is pronounced “ten.” Steve Job’s minions chose this term, not because it sounded high tech, but because Apple was finished with system IX, pronounced “nine.” Which leads to even more important trivia. Great Britain still has the government office called the Chancellor of the Exchequer — translated into yankee English, the Secretary of the Treasury. An ex-chancellor described the office in the following terms, “The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man whose duties make him more or less of a taxing machine. He is entrusted with a certain amount of misery which it is his duty to distribute as fairly as he can.”
Since the druids, this royal job of exchequer has been been charged with “checking the tens,” or counting the money. Going back even further, remember that the Romans ruled England for a long time, leaving many linguistic excreta for us to deal with.
(laughing) Good ones Tony and alisa.
More good catches: I’ll add in Ex-lax and Exxon.
Travis, I thought in your line, G marked the spot.
“X” can also stand for the unknown or mystery…
X can also be a movie rating, but does not mean it’s a “mystery.” XXX is a rating for kids when their parents are gone.
Somehow LAX got left off the list. How about some of you smart guys telling us what that X means?
All international airports have a three-letter identifying code. Many airports have runways that cross each other, forming an “X”. As lovely as this theory may appear at first blush regarding the designation of L.A.’s major airport, it is nevertheless completely wrong.
The two runways of Los Angeles International Airport are parallel, aligned at 240°/060° (000°/360° indicating true north). So much for that idea.
LAX was originally called Mines Field, after William W. Mines, a local real estate developer who sold the property to the city in 1929 to serve as its principal airport. The “LAX” designation dates from 1949. Presumably the “X” was added to fill in the third letter after (L)os (A)ngeles, but nobody actually remembers.
The L.A. area has a very rich history in aviation, including the Santa Monica Airport, formerly “Clover Field”, the launching point of the first circumnavigation of the globe by aircraft, and the World War II headquarters of the Douglas Aircraft Company; the Van Nuys Airport, the largest general civil aviation airport in the U.S. and the base of Howard Hughes’ private air force during the filming of “Hell’s Angels”; and Long Beach Airport, formerly “Dougherty Field”, the site of the world’s first aviation school. Among these, Mines Field was a relative latecomer. Originally, it was used as an aerodrome for racing.
(I know all this crap only because I’m working on a novel that takes place in 1927 in the world of aviation, I’ve done my homework, and I can’t help showing off.)
I have seen a few “X-Rated” flicks. The only mystery there is the, uh, “acting.”