Stan Carey at Sentence first has a post about the word coolth, which I’ve always liked and used; Stan starts by quoting a use by Edna O’Brien (“I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar”), then continues:
The word’s meaning is simple: ‘coolness’. Or, per Merriam-Webster, ‘the state or occasion of being cool’ – referring, like coolness, to temperature or style: mainly temperature. Its connotations are rangier: it’s labelled ‘chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous’ by the OED and ‘chiefly humorous’ and ‘usually facetious’ elsewhere.
Edna O’Brien’s lines clearly fall under the ‘literary’ label, but the word’s humorous/facetious side is more to the fore in other places, leading the Columbia Guide to Standard American English – rare among usage dictionaries in covering the word – to dismiss it as ‘tiresomely jocular’. 100 years ago J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that coolth ‘shows signs of losing its facetiousness, and may claim part of the territory of cool’.
Whatever about the first prediction, the latter has not occurred. Coolth has minimal currency and is omitted from most dictionaries – even online ones, which are far less concerned with space. That’s not a criticism. Editorial resources are finite and so cannot attend to all marginal words.
He lists other –th terms, adding: “Anyone who so chooses can still generate new words with –th: see the modern statistical term shorth.” But in the (very interesting) comment thread, mollymooly says:
Quibble: “shorth” is not “short” + “-th”, it’s from “shortest half”. (Not “shorter half” BTW; there are more than two ways to choose half of the available datapoints.)
Which is a very odd way to create a word, and makes me wonder: how do those who use it say it? Wiktionary doesn’t give a pronunciation.
It makes me think of sinh and cosh and tanh – pronounced ‘shine’, ‘cosh’ and ‘than’, so all bets are off when it comes to the pronunciation of shorth!
Finally I learn how those function names are pronounced ! Not so hyperbolic after all.
“shorth” for “shortest half” reads like the name a computer programmer would give a function or variable. J. W. Tukey invented the measurement and coined the name in the 1972 book cited at Wiktionary, which does include FORTRAN code. OTOH it uses “SHO” rather than “SHORTH” for the FORTRAN name; that’s because all the codenames are three letters or fewer, a conciseness impelled by the scarcity of RAM in 1972. Perhaps such exigencies meant that the naming conventions that nowadays might produce “shorth” from “shortest half” could not have developed by 1972… but even so it’s still my best guess.
As to the pronunciation, I have three different best guesses.
I heard the hyperbolic trigs prounounced sinsh, cosh (lax /o/), tansh: the two which are unpronunceable, by analogy to the one that is.
What pops into my head are the names Ina Coolbrith (poet, namesake of a San Francisco park), Ina Coolbirth (a pseudonym used by Capote, obviously after the former), and Jobriath (a glam rocker and early gay icon).
I was brought up to pronounce the hyperbolic functions “sinch”, “cosh”, and “tanch”, so pretty much the same as Y.
Of course “heighth” and “heightth” are still leading their nonstandard lives.
My pronunciations of sinh/cosh/tanh are the same as Y’s and Jerry’s, and I’ve never heard any others (I don’t consider sinsh vs. sinch to be a significant difference, that’s just the prints-prince merger). But I’m not surprised that there are variants. Wiktionary gives several pronunciations of sinh and tanh, including Jen’s.
Stan Carey also has a post on “heighth”, linked from the “coolth” post.
But no one says “cotch”.
Stan Carey also has a post on “heighth” …
Yes, I know somebody who says ‘heighth’ as standard — although they’re a bit non-committal as to the spelling.
-th (2) used to be a more productive abstractising noun suffix.
Missing from @Hat’s highthlighths is that Carey’s piece is named for Miles Davis: The Birth of the Coolth, the most influential jazz album of all time.
(Un)couth seems to be unrelated.
The Birth of the Coolth, the most influential jazz album of all time.
Your kilometraje may vary, but what about Kindth of Blue?
Kind of Blue may be the most popular jazz album of all time, but it’s far from the most influential. The Birth of the Cool overturned the loud-and-fast sound that had ruled jazz right through bebop and made all of ’50s jazz, from hard bop to West Coast to Ornette, possible. I was actually trying to think of a competitor for “most influential” but so far haven’t come up with one.
Of course, it’s a little artificial, because it wasn’t The Birth of the Cool as such that caused the revolution, but the music it collected, which would have had the same impact even if the album hadn’t been issued. Jazz has never lived by albums, whether LPs or CDs.
“I was actually trying to think of a competitor for “most influential” but so far haven’t come up with one. […] Jazz has never lived by albums, whether LPs or CDs.”
Personal preference perhaps, but for me the most influential was Coleman Hawkins, before the time of jazz albums, playing Body and Soul.
https://youtu.be/zUFg6HvljDE
Exactly. My first thought was that all the most influential jazz was on 78s or 45s: “Livery Stable Blues,” “Down-hearted Blues,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Singin’ the Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Moten Swing,” “One o’ Clock Jump,” Hawk’s “Body and Soul” (as you say), Bird’s “Ko-Ko,” and of course the early sides of Bud Powell, Miles, Monk, etc. Albums are useful collections but not primary facts.
I don’t see the connection to hard bop, though. That continues the loud-and-fast 50s sound, except even louder (you can’t really go much faster).
You’re probably right; I was thinking of the subtler elements it introduced, but on reflection that didn’t really need the Cool to happen.
The history of recorded jazz is now into its second century, so sweeping generalizations are hazardous. It had already gone on for considerable time before the 33 1/3 rpm LP record was a thing, but over the course of the Fifties jazz shifted rapidly toward being an album-oriented format, just in terms of that being the dominant modality in which newly-recorded material was packaged and sold, and this long before R&B or C&W or the new-fangled rock and roll made any similar shift of the same magnitude. And by the end of the Fifties some of the newer important voices were spreading their influence via albums-qua-albums. _Mingus Ah Um_* and Ornette’s _The Shape of Jazz to Come_, both released in ’59, are IMHO good examples of influential albums as “primary facts” (to use hat’s phrasing). Obviously if you go along with the examples in hat’s chronology in which the history of jazz apparently stopped somewhere during the Truman Administration, you won’t see this shift.
_The Birth of the Coolth_, however, was not really influential as an album-qua-album, for at least two reasons. Reason one is about timeline and causation – it was a retrospective compilation, released in ’57, of material from recording sessions in ’49 and ’50 that had mostly not been released at the time. What made it a big deal when it was released is that the “cool” style that Miles had helped innovate as an alternative to the original bebop style had in the intervening seven/eight years already become a big deal. But the way in which Miles’ innovations were propagated to and built upon by other players was obviously not via those unreleased tracks – I don’t know how specifically important the minority of the album’s tracks that had been released on 78’s in ’49 were as vectors of influence but they may have been significant. The second reason is that much of what’s distinctive about the album’s sound comes from the unusually-large nine-piece ensemble and the harmonic combinations that (plus the arrangements of Gil Evans) made possible. But for a variety of reasons, chiefly but perhaps not exclusively economic, the primary units of jazz production after BofC remained the usual post-big-band-era small combos: trios, quartets, quintets, and an occasional sextet and relatively few others put together a 9-piece ensemble like that that had produced BotC. Miles himself got back into the same large-ensemble thing (again with Gil doing the arrangements) on _Kind of Blue_, but never kept together a working band doing live gigs any larger than a quintet for any extended period until his electric era.
Speaking of which, his first two electric albums (and probably the second more than the first) are arguably the most “influential” albums-qua-albums in jazz history because without them the high Seventies style of fusion would not have existed in the form that it did. Which, you know, might be a good thing or a bad thing according to your taste. But it was an Important Thing. And indeed a strikingly high percentage of Miles’ sidemen on those two albums went on to make important High Fusion albums under their own names. I happen FWIW to be reading George Grella’s short book about the _Bitches Brew_ album, and he quotes the late Stanley Crouch (a man of strong opinions!) being over-the-top negative about Miles’ electric move, but then tracing the rot (as Crouch saw it) all the way back to Birth of the Coolth, which Crouch disdained as the result of Miles having been overly impressed by Julliard and thus making low-energy mood music of the sort that white people might be expected to like.
*BONUS LINGUISTICS-RELATED CONTENT: I’ve loved _Mingus Ah Um_ since I first heard it 40-odd years ago but never thought about the album’s title. It was only recently I came across the claim (there may be other theories?) that it’s a Latin-student joke, imagining a Latin adjective where the nom. sg. would predictably come out in masc./fem./neut. as Mingus/Minga/Mingum.
And by the end of the Fifties some of the newer important voices were spreading their influence via albums-qua-albums.
Very true, of course, and I considered The Shape of Jazz to Come myself, but the thing is that by then “jazz” was branching off in too many directions for any one album to have changed the music as a whole the way that Pops, Duke, and Bird did. Sure, the avant-garde was bouleversé by Ornette, but what percentage of the jazz-listening public did that affect? I thought about Bitches Brew too, but by then jazz itself was such a minority taste I’m not sure how much sense the subject of influence makes (not to mention that much of jazz continued on its merry way without funky electric wah-wah). Further research is needed.
Oh, and the Latin origin of Mingus Ah Um is so commonly accepted it’s stated in the intro to the Wikipedia article as a fact; I see from their footnotes that Leonard Feather stated it as such at the beginning of his 1959 review. It may even have been on the liner notes to the LP (which I no longer have); certainly I’ve taken it for granted for as long as I’ve known the album.
I think “Influence” is a coherent notion within a genre regardless of the genre’s commercial fortunes in the wider world, at least until it gets to the historical point of what the rabbis would call the cessation of prophecy. So in jazz you can plausibly say (there will inevitably be counterarguments and proffered counterexamples) that the age of formal stylistic innovation ended by the end of the 1970’s and everything after that (sometimes quite good indeed) was merely a continuation and/or ad hoc recombination of preexisting stylistic options. For rock music that happened sometime in the 1990’s; for blues probably prior to 1975.
There’s an earlier inflection point that’s somewhat harder to describe. Not everyone in jazz was personally transformed or even obviously affected in their playing style by Charlie Parker, but they sort of had to admit he was there – you had to as it were have an opinion on what he was doing and be somewhat self-conscious about the extent to which you were joining up with it or rejecting it. I think that continued to be the case in jazz either through Ornette up to the death of Coltrane or (even later) the dawn of electified Miles-et-seq. fusion – if you were playing jazz in anything other than an explicitly-nostalgia-oriented Dixieland sort of context you had to have an attitude pro or con towards what the innovation was. Whereas the last burst of formal innovation in the Seventies (like Anthony Braxton or the Art Ensemble of Chicago cats or in its own way the snoozy Keith-Jarrett-ECM stuff) you could probably get away with just ignoring if it wasn’t your bag. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I understand the “branching off in too many directions” phenomenon in a somewhat different way, timelinewise, than hat does. And it’s not all-or-nothing – you could as of ’64 have had a viable career in jazz where you paid no attention to Cecil Taylor in a way that you couldn’t pay no attention to Trane.
All your points are well taken, and I confess I no longer have any idea what I think. Progress!
sorry to be late for the party but I thot I should record that coolness or inverse temperature is an important physical/theoretical quantity, measured in joules^{-1}, cf eg
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/what_is_entropy.pdf (p 31) ;
it is in many ways more natural than temperature. Absolute zero is infinite coolness …
For the record, some other *lth nouns (obvious or not):
foul > filth
full > fulth
ill > illth
* > sowlth
[*SOED: Irish samhailt likeness, apparition; A formless luminous spectre; NOTE: Chiefly in the writings of W. B. Yeats.]
spill > spilth
steal > stealth
till (verb) > tilth
well (adverb) or weal (noun) > wealth
whole [or heal or hale?] > health
@Hatth I confess I no longer have any idea what I think.
You-th-lot hath thrashth the topic to death. = die + Proto-Germanic *-thuz suffix indicating “act, process, condition.” So apparently no relation.
(I nearly put “arguably …”, but no-one round here needs an explicit invitation.)
SOED also has gloomth, greenth, and roomth (along with roomthy). Of passing interest also:
bear > birth and berth
dear > dearth
[French has cherté, but it’s old and restricted in meaning to “costliness”; Petit Robert: veilli. État de ce qui est cher (II); prix élevé. ~ coût. SOED gives this sense of dearth as obsolete in English, except in Scottish.
Middle French has three senses for cherté, according to the Larousse Dictionnaire de moyen français of Greimas and Keane: Affection, tendresse (the dearness of dear friends); disette, pénurie (want, penury); prix élevé. I recall using dearth for cherté, when working on a team translating Christine de Pisan.]
Too lazy to look in OED today.
blow > blowth
young > youth
Etymonline has this for bath, even:
Old English bæð “an immersing of the body in water, mud, etc.,” also “a quantity of water, etc., for bathing,” from Proto-Germanic *badan (source also of Old Frisian beth, Old Saxon bath, Old Norse bað, Middle Dutch bat, German Bad), from PIE root *bhē- “to warm” + *-thuz, Germanic suffix indicating “act, process, condition” (as in birth, death). The etymological sense is of heating, not immersing.
Also from SOED:
lew* > lewth (warmth, shelter)
[lew: warm (adjective) but also itself as a noun = warmth]
rue > ruth
A productive suffix, in very truth.
the liner notes to the LP (which I no longer have)
Internet Archive to the rescue
Very cool, but that’s a 1998 reissue.
Was that the album where he devoted most of the liner notes to step-by-step instructions for training your cat to use a human toilet?
No, and as a matter of fact I just checked my CD booklet (which I should have done in the first place) and discovered that it reproduces the “extensive original liner notes,” which “were written by Diane Dorr-Dorynek, who by this time was not only Mingus’ publicist and agent, but also his lover” [reference]; they go into detail about the lives of the musicians but say nothing about the music or title.
I don’t know if he ever put his toilet-training instructions in liner notes (they don’t seem to be in any of the albums I own), but you can read them here.
Nowadays they call that “grooming”. I now see how nefariously easy it is, since even cats fall for it.
well, if nobody else is gonna…
*bhē- + *-thuz + beyond!
Hallucinant, quoi.
I once bought a t-shirt from one of Mingus’ stepdaughters – it had a reproduction on it of some of the sheet music of “Sue’s Changes,” which he had written for her mother who was the fourth (I think?) and final Mrs. Mingus. The last big Mingus shebang I went to was graced by the presence of his son Eric (I think the son of the wife just before Sue?), who is almost exactly a year older than me (I think not coincidentally born and named a few weeks after Eric Dolphy died) and who was apparently being recruited to be the “face of the family” at such events after Sue had finally passed away after over four decades of active widowhood and legacy-tending. (Which as far as I can tell she did an excellent job with.)