February 2007 Archives
Action words: verbs: asperse, bloviate, racket, scud, insidiate, thrum, eruct
The Vulgar Tongue: raphe, rantallion, ithyphallic, karezza,
fiesty, manustupration, onanism
Eponyms again: priapic,
procrustean, Jonah, Goliath, negus, sandwich
Miscellaneous Words: labile, percipient, wabbit, agalaxy, soporific, divagate, tzigane, zeitgeber
Action words: verbs
We'll
take action this week. That is to say, we'll look at some verbs.
In yesterday's word aspergillum [a tool for sprinkling holy water] we
saw a root that means 'to sprinkle'. That same root gives us today's word,
which has both literal and figurative senses of sprinkling.
asperse 1. to sprinkle 2. to spread false or damaging
charges or insinuations against [more familiar is to cast aspersions]
Most of them have been accurate. Others have
been lightly aspersed
with errors. One or two have been more seriously
blemished.
Guardian Unlimited,
They curse, asperse, deprecate and detract but they will
not utter the words that would make matters clear
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
International heritage disputes are private feuds writ large. Rivals contesting
sovereign icons resemble siblings squabbling over parental bequests.
John R. Gillis, Commemorations
bloviate to speak or write verbosely and windily
[This word is almost entirely restricted to the
Is it a slightly different use in the last quote, for 'putting one's foot in one's
mouth'?
each self-declared candidate is given time
to bloviate among other serious candidates
Toledo Blade,
The blogosphere allows people who previously had to interact with other people
to bloviate anonymously.
Newsday,
Biden, who admits he has a tendency to bloviate, has made
indelicate remarks before.
MSNBC, Sen. Biden apologizes for remarks on Obama,
racket [verb] to make or move with a loud distressing noise (also,
to lead an active social life)
Get out!
Take your family and run! Now!
The renegade slave leader Nat Turner was coming with a band of vengeful slaves,
rampaging from farm to farm, killing white men, women and children. George
Henry Thomas, 15, piled into a carriage with his mother and sisters and racketed
along dirt roads into the darkness.
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2007, recording 1831 events in the life of Civil
War General George H. Thomas
scud [verb] to move fast in a straight line because or as if
driven by the wind (noun, literary: clouds or spray driven fast by the
wind)
The participants stood silent and motionless
as dark clouds scudded overhead and ocean waves pounded the beach
motionless below and behind the sidewalk where they stood.
insidiate to lie in ambush (for); to plot (against)
A very rare word but, in my judgment, a very useful one. OED lists it as
"obsolete," but here's a recent example.
Underminers are saboteurs of the moment;
they make statements like "That's a lovely dress. Lose five pounds and it
will fit perfectly."
They lie in ambush to spring forward with
negativity precisely when you most need to feel confident. They insidiate,
pounce, and level your good feelings about yourself at crucial moments. And
they justify these underminings with statements like, "I'm telling you
this for your own good," or, "I'm entitled to my opinion."
Michelle Beaudry, The Slam Club: How to Stop Miserable People from Making
You Miserable (2001)
thrum to make a continuous rhythmic humming sound [with the
suggestion of suppressed power about to break fourth] (noun: the
sound itself)
[The dictionaries have differing or further definitions. But what I've written
seems to match actual usage.]
Authors of romance novels seem to love this word, as in our last pair of
quotes.
And then at last the train thrummed
to life and we slid regally out of Sydney Central. We were on our way.
Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country
A waterfall thrummed in the distance.
Nick Nolan, Strings Attached
... he kissed her passionately while she stroked him. Her body thrummed
with heat
Sherrilyn Kenyon, Night Play
the denim tightened over his hips. A pulse thrummed in her
throat.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Heaven,
A reader notes: I once ran across an excellent
definition that helped me remember this term
. It was described as a
"throbbing hum", which was not only somewhat mnemonic, but (by the
same dubious source) the combiniation of the terms was purportedly the origin
of the term. True or not, it's helped me keep the idea of its meaning in mind.
Don
Quixote explains today's term and its place and importance in the language.
"Be careful, Sancho, not to chew on both sides of your
mouth at once, and do not on any account eruct in company."
"Eructing" quoth
Sancho, "I don't know what you mean by that."
"To eruct," said Don
Quixote, "means to belch, but since this is one of the most beastly words
in the Castilian language, though a most significant one, polite people,
instead of saying 'belch', make use of the word 'eruct', which
comes from Latin, and instead of 'belchings' they say 'eructations'.
And though some do not understand these terms, it does not much matter; for in
time use and custom will make their meanings familiar to all, and it is by such
means that languages are enriched."
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Signet Classics edition)
eruct to belch (literally, or metaphorically, as to eject in large
quantities)
slogans are eructed by
politicians without a second thought
Europe Intelligence Wire,
When the Avalanche [hockey team] should have erupted, it eructed.
Denver Post,
the SUVs and trucks, the coal-fired power plants, the deregulated industries,
all eructing tons of carbon dioxide into the air
OnEarth,
The Vulgar Tongue
Controversy
has erupted in the world of children's books. Reports the New York Times (site here requires subscription, but free copy is here):
The word "scrotum" does not often
appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter. Yet
there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by
Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious
award in children's literature.
Per
that controversy one of our members, who is a children's librarian, has suggested
a theme of scrotal words. We'll broaden that theme a bit to naughty words,
beginning with a scrotal one.
raphe the seamlike union of two halves of a body organ (as the tongue)
[pronounced rā'fē. Greek rhaphe seam, rhaptein
to sew]
Wei fitted an arrow to his bow, shot and
wounded Ts'ao Ts'ao just in the raphe of his lip. He turned and
fell.
Guanzhong Luo, C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, Robert E. Hegel, Romance of the Three
Kingdoms
The raphe is
a generally neglected part of male anatomy.
Lisa Sussman, Sex in the City
Grose's
1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue provides many of our words this
week. Gross often has a witty way with his definitions, such as this one:
rantallion one whose scrotum is so relaxed as to be longer than his
penis, i.e. whose shot pouch is longer than the barrel of his piece. (See here.)
I find no useful quotation for this word. But one otherwise-forgettable website
claims to be a "support group" for rantallions. How jocular!
Grose
records that that a constable was sometimes called a thingstable, which
he calls "a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the pronunciation
of the first syllable in the title of that officer, which in sound has some
similarity to an indecent monosyllable." The monosyllable or venerable
monosyllable is, of course, the "pudendum muliebre".
As you might expect, Grosse gives numerous synonyms, often with an interesting
definition or explanation. I quote:
c**t the chonnos of the Greek, and the cunnus of the
Latin dictionaries; a nasty name for a nasty thing: un con miege.
Carvel's ring Ham Carvel, a jealous old doctor, being in bed with his
wife, dreamed that the Devil gave him a ring, which, so long as he had it on
his finger, would prevent his being made a cuckold: waking he found he had got
his finger the Lord knows where.
commodity the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of
a prostitute
Eve's custom-house where Adam made his first entry
fruitful vine has flowers every month, and bears fruit in nine months
hat because frequently felt
ware a woman's ware; her commodity
Other synonyms include bite; black joke; bottomless pit; cock alley; doodle
sack; dumb glutton; man trap; Miss Laycock; money; mother of all saints; notch;
tuzzy-muzzy; and water-mill.
ithyphallic having the penis erect (typically applied to statues)
(also: lascivious; salacious; obscene; lewd)
Fruits and vegetables advertise themselves
with varying degrees of discretion. The red tomato makes no secret of its
ripeness, but ready green beans dangle impotently under their leaves, and even
the zucchini at its most ithyphallic has a way of greenly
lurking, like a crocodile temporarily disguised as a log.
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14, 1998
Moreover, the Boy President's ithyphallic behavior continued in
the White House as was made luridly clear with the 1998 national debut of Monica
Lewinsky.
Today's
illustrative quotation is from Margaret Sanger (18791966), whom Time Magazine
named one of the 20 most influential leaders of the last century. On a list
that includes Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, Lenin, Pope John Paul II, Hitler,
Thatcher, M.L. King, Walesa, Mao, etc., she is the only one who is little-known
today.
Sanger insisted that each woman is "the absolute mistress of her own
body". "Woman must have her freedomthe fundamental freedom of choosing
whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have."
In an era when time "contraceptive information was so suppressed that it
was a criminal offense to send it through the mail," Sanger fought a
"decades-long battle to legalize birth control" (a term she coined).
Her effects reached even farther, for when contraception finally became a
fully-protected right in the
With that introduction, we turn to today's word.
karezza coitus reservatus; the male refrains from (not merely
delays) ejaculation
[coined 1896 by Alice Bunker Stockham, from Italian for 'caress'. Dr. Stockham
claimed that the bady requires two weeks to a month to recover from orgasm, and
that frustration results if one 'drains the basin' before it has been
replenished.]
Thousands of well-intentioned people
advocate continence as the one permissible means of birth control. Few of these
people agree with one another, however, as to what continence is. Some have in
mind absolute continence. Others urge continence for periods varying from a few
weeks to many years. Still others are thinking of Karezza,
or male continence, as it is sometimes called.
[1.] Enforced continence is injurious; often
highly so. Can anyone knowing the facts ask that we recommend continence as a
birth-control measure? Few who advocate the doctrine of absolute continence
live up to it strictly.
[2.] Such continence as is involved in
dependence upon the so-called safe period is not practical. It simply does
not work. Women are learning from experience that the safe period is anything
but safe for all women.
[3.] In the same category as the safe
period, as a method of birth control, must be placed so-called male
continence Karezza. Those who regard it as a method of family
limitation are likely to find themselves disappointed.
Summing it all up, then, continence may meet
the needs of a few natures, but it does not meet the needs of the masses. To
enforce continence upon those whose natures do not demand it, is an injustice,
the cruelty and the danger of which has been underestimated rather than
exaggerated.
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, in ch. 9 (1920)
(ellipses omitted)
fiesty aggressive, excitable, touchy
Why, you ask, is this familiar word in our 'vulgar tongue' theme? Because it
traces to an old word for farting.
Old English fisting, meaning "stink," led to four words for
"a fart" or "to fart": fise, fice, and fist
(all pronounced with a long i) and fizzle. Grose teaches that fizzle
means "an escape backward" (one can see how today's meaning is
related), and that a fice is "a small windy escape backwards, more
obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their
lap-dogs."
One can understand that a farting-word could be used as a general insult (just
as the other f-ing word is used), particularly when smell is involved. A small,
mangy, smelly, no-account dog came to be called a fysting cur, later
shorted to a fice or a feist. And still later, feist led
to the word feisty to describe the personality of such a dog.
manustupration masturbation [from Latin manus
"hand" + stuprare "defile"]
Grose gives several terms for the same thing, including:
to mount a corporal and four (Grose: " the thumb is the corporal, the
four fingers the privates.")
to box the Jesuit (Grose: "a crime, it is said, much practised by the
reverend fathers of that society.")
A further synonym begins this week's theme: eponyms, or words from personal
names.
onanism masturbation (also: coitus interruptus; an interesting
pairing of meanings!)
[from Onan in the Bible, Genesis, ch. 38. Onan's name is almost always
used in the first sense, although in the bible he acted in the second sense.
The Lord deemed his onanism a capital offense.]
And Er,
Eponyms again
We
return to one of my favorite themes: eponyms, or words that came from the
proper name of a person, etc.
priapic 1. phallic 2. overly concerned with masculinity
[priapism persistent, usually painful penile erection, esp.
from disease rather than arousal]
[ultimately from Greek Priapus, the god of procreation]
I'd thought this was a rare word, but it seems to be much more commonly-used
than I had thought. Recent examples:
Like most women, I am ready to believe that
John Prescott is a priapic old goat.
Rachel Cooke, The Observer, March 4, 2007
Turtle eggs were once thought of as being a source of arousal, and arugula has
been considered an aphrodisiac since the first century A.D. Rhinoceros horns
are still so prized for their alleged priapic powers that the
species has been hunted nearly to extinction.
Richmond Times Dispatch,
His cruder language suggested an interest that was more priapic
than romantic.
letter, Concord (NH) Monitor,
procrustean acting with mindless and harmful disregard of natural
variation or individuality
[Some dictionaries suggest ruthless means to produce conformity.
I think of it more as an arbitrary, one-size-fits approach, disregarding
individual differences. An attempt to fit all pegs, whether square or round,
into square holes.]
[after Procrustes, mythical robber of
So the
Hagerstown (MD) Morning Herald,
Greek mythology contains a story about an
innkeeper [actually, a robber] named Procrustes, who took in travelers.
If he
was too long for the bed, Procrustes chopped off his legs to the right length.
If he was too short, Procrustes tied the traveler to a rack and stretched him
to the right length. You didn't want to have to spend the night at Procrustes'
place.
When I thought about this story, I realized
it pertained to how we have gone about educating our children. We have offered
them a one-size-fits-all education, and if they didn't fit the bed we made for
them, the consequences were sometimes dire.
we must discover alternatives to
our Procrustean approach to educating.
Paul D.
The
traditional meaning of today's word is "a jinx" (see last quote). But
the word has developed a new usage, not yet recognized in the dictionaries,
which has become quite common and has persisted over the years. In fact, it
seems to be the more common meaning nowadays. Our thanks to Mr Quentin Letts,
British news commentator, for bringing it to our attention.
Jonah
1. one who brings ill-fortune to those around him; a jinx
2. a prophet of doom and gloom
meaning 2:
the moralistic Jonahs attacking him represent old Conservatism.
Quentin Letts, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 2007
Despite the recession predictions from certain Jonahs, I
find that
consumers are ready to reach for their wallets and spend
New York Times, May 6, 1990
Some Jonahs muttered darkly as they recalled another internet
boom exploding only a few years back, but the cheerleaders were adamant: this
time it was diffferent.
The Independent,
meaning
1:
Fear spread through the ship as people whispered about impending disaster and a
Jonah on board.
The Telegraph,
goliath or Goliath a giant
[after the Biblical character Goliath, whom David slew]
Albertus Magnus entered the shelter about a
week ago, a Goliath of a cat whose girth made some of us wonder:
If that's how big he grew as a stray, what if he'd been given free rein at the
fridge?
Today,
two words (one familiar, one antique) for the price of one.
negus wine and hot water with sugar and lemon juice and nutmeg
[from Colonel Francis Negus (d. 1732), who reputedly invented this
drink]
sandwich two pieces of bread with a filling between them. (verb:
sandwich between: to insert between
two people or things)
[John Montagu (1718-92), 4th Earl of
I dare say your own hands are almost numbed
with cold. Leah, make a little hot negus and cut a sandwich
or two: here are the keys of the storeroom.
Charlotte Brontλ, Jane Eyre
Miscellaneous Words
No
theme this week; just miscellaneous words. We start with one that's used as a
technical term in psychology, but deserves broader usage.
labile liable to change; easily altered. (chemistry: easily
broken down or displaced)
AHD says "open to change; adaptable; an emotionally labile person",
which would seem a positive trait. But OED confirms my reading that the word
implies instability. To demonstrate that reading, I'll present more quotes than
usual.
What he could positively diagnose is that
Anna Nicole was "labile: all over the place with her
mood very up and down" right before her daughter's birth and well before
her own death.
Radar Online, NY,
Being an American you are doubly handicapped. Your womanly sentimentality is
compounded by your American frivolity
You American girls are so audacious,
animated
[e]specially compared to our serene, self-effacing English girls.
Clearly, you have been encouraged to indulge your ebullient, labile
emotions to an excessive degree.
Connie Brockway, A Dangerous Man
he [Shakespeare] wished to demonstrate in Romeo and Juliet how
reckless, labile, and ephemeral the emotion of love is,
especially in young people
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History Of Love
What I do know is that people who were already labile -- more
upset, more unstable -- are now even more labile.
percipient 1. perceiving 2. having perception;
discerning; discriminating
Last week's storm, which began around
Middlebury Campus (VT),
[regarding the independence of the
David McCullough, John Adams
also,
as a noun: percipient one who receives a telepathic impulse or message
This procedure can be used as a test of
telepathy (a "sender" looks at each card while the "percipient"
tries to discern its identity)
Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So
Today's
word is often seen in the sense of "that wascally wabbit", but is
rare in its original sense.
wabbit Scottish: exhausted or unwell
Mothers, do you remember what it was like to have a newborn babe in the house?
"While Ian catches his mornin' nap,
Mistress McKie, suppose ye join me in the kitchen.
" Neda looked down at
her, compassion lining every feature. "Might that be a blithe pastime for
a wabbit young mither?" "Aye." She rose to her
feet, pressing her hands into the small of her back, stiff from too little
sleep.
Liz Curtis Higgs, Fair Is the Rose
Today,
a very obscure word of new-motherhood. It is similar and related to a familiar
word of very different meaning, which may help you remember it.
An ancient, knowing no astronomy, would see in the night sky pinpoints of light
sprinkled in a dark background. He'd soon notice that those pinpoints are
always in the same pattern, night after night, not moving relative to each
other. Despite a few moving objects (the obvious moon [a non-pinpoint], a few
planets, the occasional comet, and fast-flashing meteors), the general pattern
is fixed points of light. Finally, the pinpoints are randomly scattered across
the sky, not forming obvious patterns like lines, circles, etc., or grouping to
make clumps or vacant areas, beyond what you'd see in a random scattering.
But one anomalous
object, though in a fixed position night after night, is not a pinpoint
and is not matched by other like objects, randomly spread. It is a
vague, irregular, milky-white band of light across the sky. The ancient Greeks
called it galaxias or kyklos galaktikos, meaning "milky
circle".
Today we know that the stars are in fact not
randomly scattered: they cluster. Each cluster has millions or billions of
stars, but the clusters are so far apart that the ancient's naked eye could see
only in our own cluster. Now as it happens, our cluster is disc-shaped, and we
are out near the edge of that disc. So the ancient would see more of the disc
(more stars) if he looked in one particular direction along its plane, rather
than above or below it especially if looking towards the disc's center. In
that direction he would see so many stars that they blend into a milky band,
the one he called the kyklos galaktikos. And that is why we call such a
clump of stars a galaxy.
In other words, our word galaxy comes from the word for 'milk'; it is
cognate to lactation. It thus connects with new mothers, and with
today's word.
agalaxy failure of lactation; failure of the due secretion of milk
after childbirth
soporific 1. drowsy 2. inducing drowsiness or
sleep (noun: a drug or other thing that makes one drowsy)
The debate, not yet half over, then settled
into a soporific argument over figures, especially on the
economy.
Montreal Gazette, Mar. 14, 2007
I tipped my head back and felt the cold sea air on my cheeks. The rocking of
the boat was soporific, the muted creak and hush of the
wind in the sheets and the sails.
Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
divagate 1. to wander or drift about 2. to ramble;
digress
But he tends to be far too loquacious, and
his arguments are far too likely to divagate from the essential
point. I, on the other hand, write with a more relaxed, friendly style,
supplying facts, and reasonably developing cogent arguments.
- ZDNet,
But the short story concentrates her strengths; the very conciseness of the
form doesn't allow her to dawdle or divagate.
tzigane (accent on 2nd syllable) a Hungarian gypsy
[also seems to be used to mean 'gypsy music', though I don't find that
definition in the dictionaries]
... a woman dressed as flamboyantly as a tzigane
stepped out of the car.
Jodi Picoult, Second Glance
I couldn't follow the words, but the melodies sounded like Hungarian tziganes.
They were heavy and touching.
Maya Angelou, The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
zeitgeber an environmental cue (as the length of daylight, or
the temperature) that helps to regulate an organism's biological clock
Unfortunately, three's no wonder pill for
jet lag. Instead, you can speed up the adjustment process by helping out the zeitgebers
(don't you love it? It's German for 'timegivers')
the most important ones
being meal times, sleep times and exposure to bright light.
Isabelle Young, Lonely Planet Healthy Travel
A 'zeitgeber' can be as simple as the