Wassap

IThe hook

• “Wassup.” The greeting — four friends on the phone, 1999, a beer commercial that the whole planet repeated for two years. What’s up collapsed into one whispered syllable: W-S.
• Wa-salām: “and peace,” the close of every Muslim greeting, the two halves of wa-ʿalaykum as-salām. And wassail: Old Norse ves heill, “be whole,” the toast the English drank from a bowl at Christmas — a greeting, in W-S, that means salām. Three greetings, three continents, one root.
• The last chapter of the Qur’an, an-Nās (114): min sharri l-waswāsi l-khannās — “from the evil of the whisperer who withdraws.” Waswasa, to whisper; al-waswās, the whisperer. The book ends on the W-S root, in a whisper.

IIThe sound

• Say V and pull the lip off the teeth: it is W. The root loses its teeth. V-S was the vessel and the voice; W-S is the whisper and the wisp — the same skeleton, one setting softer (Rule IV, V ~ W ~ B). What a sound does when it loses its teeth: it goes from what holds to what barely touches.
• The Throat: the lips, rounded, and the hiss — no seal anywhere. This is the root with the least contact in it; its words are all about the thing that almost isn’t there.

IIIThe word map

• Arabic w-s-w-s: waswasa, to whisper; al-waswās, the whisperer; wiswās, the misgiving — and Urdu waswasa, the doubt that whispers, a word every Urdu speaker uses (“mujhe waswasa hai”). w-s-l: wasīla, the means. wa-salām.
• Sanskrit śvas, to breathe; śvāsa, the breath — the whisper is breath with no voice; the permutation of the root (Rule II, Ibn Jinnī’s greater derivation: ś-v-s and v-s share the sense of breath).
• English whisper (Old English hwisprian, German wispern), wisp (a thread of smoke or straw; will-o’-the-wisp), whist (be quiet — the card game is named for the silence), whisht and hush, whistle (hwistlian), wheeze, whisk, whiskers, wist and wistful, wisp, wish (Old English wȳscan — the quiet asking; and the Proto-Indo-European root of wish, *wen-, gives Venus and venerate: the whispered desire), wash (wascan; the sound of water), waste (Latin vastāre — V to W across the Channel), west and vesper (the evening, the whisper hour), wasp (Old English wæps; Proto-Indo-European *wobs-, to weave — the wasp is named for the paper nest it weaves, and web and weave and wisp are its cousins).
• Whisky: Gaelic uisge beatha, the water of life — uisge, water, W-S-K: the whisper of water.
• Akan, Urdu, Spanish: to be filled from the host’s word bank. Spanish has no W of its own — every W in Spanish is a guest — which is itself a fact for the episode: the lips-barely-touching sound is one that a whole language declined to keep.

IVThe same and the opposite

• Rule VI. Waswās is the whisperer of evil; wa-salām is the whisper of peace. Wish is desire and waste is emptiness. The whisper is the softest sound and the wasp is the sharpest sting. Whist is silence and whistle is the noise that breaks it. The root of the almost-nothing carries both the blessing and the sting.
• The physician’s note: a wheeze is a whisper the lungs make when the airway narrows — the breath forced through a space too small for it. The stethoscope hears the root.

VNames remember

• Wasīm, Wisām (the medal — w-s-m, the mark), Wāṣif, Wāṣil. Wesley. Vesper (Bond’s Vesper Lynd — the evening). Wassail as a word that became a carol. Whistler. Wisconsin (Miami-Illinois Meskonsing, by way of French Ouisconsin — the W that the French wrote Ou, the lips barely touching, in the name of a state).

VIScripture and the close

• Qur’an 114 (an-Nās), 50:16 (“We are nearer to him than his jugular vein… We know what his soul whispers to him,” tuwaswisu), 20:120 (the whisper to Adam in the garden, fa-waswasa ilayhi sh-shayṭān). 1 Kings 19:12 — Elijah on the mountain, and God not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in “a still small voice,” qōl demāmāh daqqāh, the thin whisper. Genesis 3 — the serpent’s whisper.
• Close: the two whispers — the one in the garden and the one on the mountain — and the greeting that answers both: wa-salām. What the root loses in teeth it keeps in reach.
• Next time: Salām — the sel at the end of vessel.

VIISources