WTN: philtre
James Harbeck
philtre
Kendy looked at her phone and wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, no.” She swiped left on the photo in her dating app.
Janille, who was sitting beside her, looked over. “What was it?”
“Felt fedora.”
“You don’t like hat guys?”
“That is an automatic fail. I’d set up a filter if I could.”
“Huh,” Janille said. “I’m kind of a sucker for a feutre, myself.”
“A what?” Kendy was used to Janille slipping French in at random moments, but that didn’t mean she’d just let it slide past.
“Felt hat. It’s one of my favourite features. Sets my heart aflutter.”
“For a moment there I thought you said ‘foutre’.”
“No need to be filthy. For me a feutre is a philtre.”
“A filter in, apparently.”
“No,” Janille said. “Not filter, as in coffee. Philtre, as in love potion.” She typed the word into her phone and showed Kendy.
Kendy looked at it. “I mean, filter coffee is my love potion, so it still sounds the same to me. But of course French would have a special word for a love potion.”
“It’s a word in English too!” Janille typed the word into her Merriam-Webster app. It said “chiefly British spelling of PHILTER.” She snorted as a Canadian would (“chiefly British!”) and tapped through to philter; it rewarded her with the definitions “a potion credited with magical power” and “a potion, drug, or charm held to have the power to arouse sexual passion.” She held up the phone for Kendy to see.
“Huh,” Kendy said. “So is it because the potion is filtered?”
“They’re not even related,” Janille said. “This philtre is spelled with a ph because it’s from the Greek philos, which refers to love. As in bibliophile. Lover of books. Or logophile. Lover of words.”
“I can think of another -phile that felt fedora wearers might be,” Kendra said, half aside.
“Well, maybe if they’re from Philadelphia,” Janille said with a giggle.
“Say,” Kendy said, “do you think that fedora and felt are related?”
“I know they’re not!” Janille said. “The fedora is named after a heroine in a play—”
“Wait, that was where we also got Svengali, right?”
“No! But great connection. Svengali comes from the book and play Trilby, which also gave us a hat named after a heroine. In this case, though, Fedora is the Russian version of Theodora, which means ‘gift of god’.”
“So no felt.”
“No felt, no feutre. But felt and feutre both have the same Germanic root, and that root also came to Latin as filtrum, which meant ‘felt’ but also meant the kind of cloth that you use a sieve. And from that we get our word filter.” She glanced over at Kendy’s phone, which was displaying another photo on the dating app. “Meanwhile, philtrum with a ph – from the same source as philtre with a ph – is the name for the groove between the nose and the upper lip.” She pointed at the distinct groove on the face of the fellow on screen.
“Wow,” Kendy said. She looked at her phone for a moment and swiped left. “Huh. You sure know a lot about words.” She looked at Janille again. “No wonder you like guys with fedoras.”
Janille winced. “I felt that.”
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