The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s phrase is contango:
Contango is
A) the pidgin form of English spoken by stevedores working in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt
B) the period during which young men in certain sub-Saharan tribes undergo rites of passage
C) the situation in which the current or spot price for a commodity is lower than its forward price
D) the maximum number of shipping containers a cargo ship can carry
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It’s option C. Contango is often used in reference to oil markets because petroleum is a non-perishable good that can be stored indefinitely while owners wait for future contracts to mature. Contango is the reason why, for example, eight supertankers—each of which can transport up to two million barrels of crude oil—remain anchored less than a hour’s travel from the Dutch port of Rotterdam. These huge vessels are serving as floating storage as the facilities in Rotterdam are already at capacity. The information is taken from a report in NRC Handelsblad, “The world is swimming in oil,” which attempts to clarify the economics underpinning this stalled armada:
“It is what we call a contango,” says Pieter Kulsen, who has been working in the oil trade for thirty years. Traders buy cheap oil on the spot market and later sell it for much more on the futures market. The price difference is more than enough to pay for the cost of floating storage, especially since the tariffs on land are higher because of the capacity problems. Lots of people are taking advantage of this situation.
The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s word, antitragus, appears in a much-lauded first novel by Rivka Galchen entitled Atmospheric Disturbances.
Antitragus refers to
A) a fourth-century heresy that was condemned at the Council of Nicaea
B) a part of the anatomy of the ear
C) an aesthetic movement in Ancient Rome that criticised the staging of Greek tragedies
D) the name of the drug administered in a tetanus shot.
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It’s option B. As you might guess, the nub of cartilage above the earlobe called the antitragus is located opposite the tragus. (That pinch of a gap between them—the straits through which sound enters the conchea—is evocatively named the “intertragic notch.” The tragus, the knobbly protuberance that helps keep earphones in place, derives its name from the Greek tragos, “goat.” The fine hair fringing the tragus supposedly resembles a goat’s beard. (This reproduction from Gray’s Anatomy will instantly clarify any obscurities that my explanation might have thrown up.)
Galchen deploys the word while describing a less-than-attractive reader sitting opposite her troubled narrator (antitragus to his tragus, if you like) in the New York Public Library:
“The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red.”
This glancing observation presumably serves two purposes. First, it’s evidence that this writer’s eye can discern the microscopic details that, at a distance, blend to form what passes for “reality.” And second, it might be said to demonstrate that the author’s expensive medical education (the paperback’s inside page tells us Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine) has not been entirely squandered by the switch to literature.
The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s phrase, lapsus calami, crops up in the final 100 pages of a novel casting a long shadow over everything else published this year, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.
A lapsus calami is
A) a slanderous accusation made in the heat of an argument
B) a type of gem that is said to make the wearer forgetful
C) a mistake with consequences so disastrous as to blacken the name of the person who made it
D) an inadvertent or unconscious error made by a writer
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It’s option D. Literally meaning a “slip of the pen,” a lapsus calami might be considered as the written equivalent of the Freudian “slip of the tongue.” It shouldn’t be confused with the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli. (Incidentally, in this case calami is not the plural of the Latin word for a reed or a quill, calamus, but the genitive (”of the pen”). As far as I can tell, the plural form of this phrase might be lapsus calamorum. But don’t hold me to that.)
The phrase appears in an unusually light-hearted section of Bolaño’s novel in which various employees in a publishing house engage in a bantering discussion about slips preserved for posterity in print. For example, we have from Rosny’s Le Cataclysme, “With his hands clasped behind his back, Henri strolled about the garden, reading his friend’s novel.” And from Letters from my Mill, by Flaubert’s boon companion, Alphonse Daudet: “The duke appeared followed by his entourage, which preceded him.” Or, from Henri Zvedan’s The Death of Mongomer, “After they cut off his head, they buried him alive.” (Is Zvedan an invention of Bolaño? Web searches against the term “Henri Zvedan” yield only circular references to 2666.)
Present at this quote-fest is Archimboldi von Benno, an author published by the house and a cynosure for multiple characters that populate the novel’s 900 pages. Archimboldi’s favourite lapsus is taken from a lesser-known novel by Balzac, Beatrix. As with all the previous “slips” discussed, a refracted truth seems to shimmer beneath the superficial illogicality: “I can hardly see anymore, said the poor blind woman.”
The weekly “Words” post is intended to explicate painlessly some of the more esoteric words that crop up in mainstream books and journalism. The past few posts have addressed words with Greek, Latin, or Arabic origins; it’s slightly surprising that it has taken this long to select one that can be traced to French. After all, it’s estimated that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of words in the English language have Gallic ancestry. Today’s word, “saccade,” recently appeared in an essay in The New Yorker.
A saccade is
A) a rapid movement of the eye
B) an aspect of medieval warfare in which a besieged town pays a ransom to avoid being plundered
C) a ballet movement in which the dancer brings her heels together in mid-air
D) a mountain waterfall that forms suddenly after heavy rains
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It’s option A. Derived from the French word meaning “violent pull,” saccades are the ceaseless rapid eye movements that enable us to visually comprehend our environment. Essentially, the eye shifts focus up to 50 times a second building up a mosaic of images which is “stitched together” by the brain. The term was used in a recent profile of Ian McEwan in which the novelist defends the use of surtitles, which allow an audience to read an opera’s libretto during the performance:
To insure that the audience caught every word, the production featured surtitles. “It was a condition,” McEwan said. “It’s not so distracting. A saccade is all that’s required.”
It’s possible that McEwan became familiar with this term while researching his most recent full-length book, Saturday. In the opening section, the main character Dr. Henry Perowne performs a snap diagnosis of Huntington’s disease for Baxter, a borderline psychotic who appears ready to beat up the neurosurgeon following a minor car crash:
“As Baxter stares at the marchers, he makes tiny movements with his head, little nods and shakes. Watching him unobserved for a few seconds, Perowne suddenly understands: Baxter is unable to initiate or make saccades—those flickering changes of eye position from one fixation to another. To scan the crowd, he is having to move his head.”
