Complex Numbers

Plie

Another one for this month's "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...

Plie

I don't know everything.

This certainly comes as a shock to some of you, but it's true.

Usually, when there's a term I've never heard before (like plie) I take advantage of living in a pre-apocalyptic technological society and Google it.

But sometimes it's more fun not to.

The only clue I have is that the word is in the "dance" section of the JI prompt list. This may also come as a shock, given my name, but I know almost nothing about dance. It exists, and some people (who are not me) take great pleasure in performing or observing it.

My ex was (maybe still is; I don't know) a belly dancer, so I'm not completely ignorant of the art form. I know that they have names, usually derived from non-English words, for certain moves. I don't remember any of them, though.

I do have some small knowledge of French, which lends names to some aspects of dance (ballet, e.g.) but I don't recognize "plie" from my limited Francophone vocabulary.

So, to me, even though my eyesight is pretty good again a year and a half after cataract surgery, it just looks like someone misspelled "pile." Hell, my browser's spellcheck doesn't even recognize the word. It suggests, in this order: Pile, pie, lie, plies, and plied.

The latter two are pretty obviously present and past tense, respectively, of the word "ply," which has several meanings.

For one, as a noun, it refers to laminated or layered material. Like plywood. Or 2-ply toilet paper. Neither of which is directly related to dance, unless you're doing it on a plywood stage and/or acting like a mummy. Which is something different from a mummer, who can be, in fact, a dancer. I suppose you can get "plies" and "plied" from it, but that would be an odd construction in English.

As a verb, one can ply a a trade or profession, or ply someone with questions to try to pry information out of them. There are some less common usages, but they're all shortened from "apply."

One other option that doesn't come up in spellcheck suggestions is "plier," which can mean one who plies (as in the above verb) or the never-used singular version of "pliers," a grabbing tool that has two parts, so that when I was a kid, I imagined that "plier" was one branch of a broken pair of pliers (see also "scissors").

English is weird.

Despite its use as a prying tool (maybe it should have been called "priers" instead, resemblance to "priors" be damned because there's plenty of those homophones around), the noun form of "ply" comes from the French "plier" (which I'm guessing is pronounced plee-ay), which means something like to fold.

And with that, I think I'm close to the meaning of "plie": something to do with folding oneself. Let's check our work:

plié: a movement in which a dancer bends the knees and straightens them again, usually with the feet turned out and heels firmly on the ground.

Okay, I was thinking bending at the waist, but fine. Now I know. It's not like I haven't seen ballet before (I just don't know the words), and that seems to be a pretty common move. Doesn't look a lot like folding, though. "Bent" (past tense of "bend") is probably a better translation.

Now, see, I could have gotten there more quickly if the accent aigu (é) had been, in the first place... applied.