A Tiding on Tides

What with bright sunshine, on a very cold Nordic sort of morning, illuminating our still standing or hanging Christmas decorations, my mind suggested that soon, thus on or around January 6 of the year that dawns tomorrow, I would have to return this household to its ordinary state. Yes. For me the Christmas season began in childhood on December 6, St. Nicholas day. In Hungary we put our nicely shined shoes into the window on the evening of December 5. By morning Mikulas (as we called him) arrived; he filled our shoes with candies and fruits nicely highlighted with red paper and silver ribbons. Random thought: if a fat man can get down through a small chimney in the U.S., he can certainly breach a pane of glass in Hungary… Now at its other ends, the Christmas season always ended on January 6 for me, the day of the Magi.

Making sure that I still had all this correctly, I checked on the dates. At my age such exercises are recommended; various problems with memory surface as you overstay… In my brief research, I encountered the word “tide” multiple times, as in Christmastide and Yuletide. Very well. In eighty and counting years I’d simply accepted that word; today the question arose: Whence tide? Good question.

If you use a smart-phone as your computer—no need to get up—you rapidly learn that the only tide that seems to exist is that caused by the moon on ocean shores in two kinds of forms, ebb and flood. But in Yuletide the word must has some other root. Upstairs, therefore, to consult a real computer. Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that “tide” comes from proto-Germanic tidiz, or “time division,” thus meaning a period or season. The use of the word for shore tides came late, in the mid-14th century… The word tidings, as in news, shows how a useful concept comes about. It is rooted in the fact that as time changes, things happen. Tidings come from old English tidan, “to happen,” and that word arises from the original tide as well. The Dutch for “newspaper” is tijding pronounced exactly like “tiding”; the German is Zeitung, a word in which the z present in tidiz is prominent still.

Contemplating such mysteries, I might add, refresh one’s mind when the only tidings on TV seemingly center on how in card games one kind, or single card, trumps all the others.

When Reading Are You Genre-Neutral?

The word genre is most commonly associated with literature—as in literary genre. Its root is, ultimately, the Latin genus. That word means (per Online Etymology Dictionary) “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species, sex.” So it is a kind of something. So far as novels are concerned, historical, romance, and detective are all different in kind. Genre-neutrality (not that I’ve ever seen that phrase used) thus means a total indifference to differences in literature. Poetry is equal to fiction.

But what about another word, gender? Well, it so happens that gender comes from Old French gendre, a variant of genre. It meant the same thing as genre and, pronounced, had the same sort of sound. That sound? Well, take the word jaundice. Forget about the dice part and pronounce the jaun; then add a fain r-sound. “Jaunre”. Both versions of genre have roughly the same sound; in gendre, the r is a little more audible. The meaning of the word in both cases is still the same, thus kind, category, type, or sex.

In English, with the tailing re changed to er—thus making the d clearly audible—the word has become almost exclusive a description of a person’s sex, not necessarily or exclusively in the physiological sense but also or predominantly in its sociological or cultural sense (gender roles, gender identity).

I’m not genre-neutral, to be sure. And as for gender-neutrality, I believe that the striving for total equality can go too far. The inspiration for this post was a note from my old friend Phil Cavanaugh which reminded me that, like him, I too have had a vague sense of unease when seeing that word—or not seeing it—on questionnaires when invited to indicate whether I am an M or an F.

A byproduct of the research I conducted to see what gender means was the discovery that in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere the word hijra is in common use to mean a third sex—thus transgender persons who were born but do not feel male. The word—and it has endless variants—goes back to antiquity. It looks as if we here, in the West, are just starting to make peace with the recognition that ambiguity is part even of the sexual experience. The Wikipedia article on the hijra is here and well worth reading.

A Very Fine Distinction

Word-lovers will, I think, appreciate what I stumbled across last night. I was reading Volume II of Phantasms of the Living, a classic in parapsychology by Edward Gurney et al, the real focus of which, broadly speaking, is telepathy; in detail it is filled with reports of people seeing apparitions, usually associated with the death of the person seen. Phantasms was the result of the first effort to conduct research by the Society for Psychical Research after its founding in 1882. In every meaningful regard, it is a classic and laid the groundwork for all future research in paranormal studies, not least its very rigorous reliance on statistical analysis of findings.

The story of the book itself, in a modern context, is amusing in its own way. I’m reading Volume II in the original, you might say: print-outs from a gigantic PDF produced by direct photocopying of the original. That task was then followed by digitization of the image, both tasks performed by Google. The actual reprint of the book, made from the digitization, turns out to be essentially unreadable.  The text has been reprinted—but without any attention paid to layout. Footnotes are reproduced as paragraphs wherever they fall—not at the bottom of pages—and without change in typography. New Chapters begin simply as new paragraphs in  the middle of pages. And so on. The photo images I’m reading, however, are clear, sharp, and laid out with the meticulous care applied in 1886.

Now to my little discovery. It comes from Chapter XIV, p. 58 of Volume II. It is yet another case (Number 239) of an apparition, written by one J. Merrill. In the commentary on the vision, Mr. Merrill says:

Moreover, I used the Scotch word ‘wraith’ instead of ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit,’ as I had an idea that the former word was applied to appearances before death.

The comment is added because the subject revolves around this issue: was the person whose apparition had been seen dead at the time—or still alive? Mr. Merrill thought it was best to assume that the answer was “still alive” hence the use of the word wraith. Well, I didn’t know that there was such a distinction expressible by choice of word.

Indeed, it turns out, there is. My 1961 unabridged Webster’s International provides the following as its first definition: “1a an apparition of a living person in his exact likeness seen usu. just before his death.” The word is further defined as a “ghost” in 1b—but the first definition agrees with Mr. Merrill’s sense expressed in 1885.

Webster’s does not indicate a Scottish origin, but Online Etymology Dictionary does; that source, however, says nothing of the fine distinction in J. Merrill’s mind.

Now for those who have little interest in obscure words, never mind phantasms and such, this post is presented, also, as perhaps of some future value. Ever wonder how people in their very late 70s and 80s spend the ample time and leisure they have from housekeeping, gardening, and shopping? Here you have an example. Words, particularly for those who’re almost-wraiths (there ought to be a word for that too) are a great source of amusement, indeed of merriment. Merriment, incidentally, finds its rooting in mirth.

Fashions in Words

A discussion on spontaneity had me asserting that what the word had once meant in popular speech say in the time of World War II—namely untaught, natural behavior—has had an odd lift in the Age of the Media to mean something more. The word derives from the Latin sponte, of one’s accord, willingly. The new meaning carries the flavor as of a characteristic which rises above the behavior of ordinary humans. To make this point, I also tried to find a word that has lost rank in popular usage. Neurotic came to mind. It seemed to me that it had been on everybody’s lips in the 1950s. The word shrink arose in this context. I headed off to look at these words and Brigitte wanted me to look up shrink as well. Her feeling is that it has also lost status.

Google Ngrams to the rescue. Herewith the contrast between “spontaneous” and “deliberate”:

Spontaneous has certainly had a quite marked rise beginning circa 1925. The word peaked in 1982 but is still beating Deliberate in 2000. Deliberate, meanwhile, was at essentially the same level of usage as in 1800.

In the next one I contrast “neurotic” and “psychotic”:

My gut feel turns out to be right. Neurotic made a mountain that peaked in 1952—and its been downhill since. I used Psychotic as the contrast, which began rising later, peaked in 1972, and is now used somewhat more frequently than neurotic. Perhaps things are getting worse.

Shrink comes from head-shrinker, slang for psychiatrist. Plotting its use using Ngram is not much use because the short version can mean anything from physically shrinking something or the slang phrase, which may not be much used in written documents. Since 1940, however, that word has lost about 7 percent of its usage, so Brigitte’s feel is also justified.

Game of Drones

I owe that title to a headline in our local version of the Erickson Tribune. Sometimes you see a headline that produces literal envy. I wish I’d thought of that! That article tells the story of drones, as it were, replacing the milkman and the UPS/FedEx delivery truck. My subject is the word’s etymology. We’re having another word-centered morning. The word that set us off on that, however, goes back into the past—and the origin of drone sort of capped our morning’s “round” (in the musical sense). Percept began, precept followed, and we ended on drone.

Percept surfaced late last night as Brigitte read an article titled Philosophy of Nature published by International Catholic University (link)—an odd word when stared at. We know it all too well in its verbal form, perception, but its noun form, meaning “a (thing) taken (in),” but with emphasis on that unsounded thing, is almost never used except in such philosophical context as in the referenced paper above. Per in this concept means “thoroughly” the cept comes from the Latin capere, “to take, to grasp.” 

In precept the pre comes from prae, meaning “before”; the cept is once more “grasp.” Thus “that which comes before,” presumably, we’re properly capable of grasping something. The word means a maxim, rule, an order, or instruction. Percept is solidly objective; precept is a quite immaterial “rule” or “guidance.” The preceptor, therefore, is a teacher or a guide.

Now for that famous drone. I have what follows from English Language & Usage (here). Evidently the drone has quite a history already; it’s actually older than I am. It originated in 1935 when the British Royal Navy demonstrated a remote-controlled aircraft in target practice. That plane was called DH 82B Queen Bee. A U.S. admiral attending that demonstration, one William H. Standley, returned home and there asked Commander Delmer Fahrney to develop something analogous for the U.S. Navy. It was Fahrney who originated the word by naming such flyers drones “in homage to the Queen Bee.”

By the time of World War II, two kinds of drones had been fashioned and were being tested: target drones to be destroyed and assault drones to do the attacking. In the dim future lay the drone that accidentally landed on the White House lawn and in the immediate future will deliver the papers—once targeting has been tuned up a little more.

Incidentally, George R.R. Martin, the man whose novels gave birth to Game of Thrones, was a man I’d known slightly in my science fiction days. Once, while assembling an anthology of stories, he included one of my novellas in his collection. I still glow faintly from that close contact with future celebrity.

Cross or Pile?

In an obscure academic paper titled “Bonus Scarabaeus—an Early Christian (?) Magical Gem from Pannonia” (Brigitte discovers the strangest things)—I came across images of a magical coin with its two sides designated as “avers” and “revers.” The missing e’s may have to do with the translator, but, in any case, I got to wondering. Were sides of coins once called by these names? The answer seems to be No. The sides of coins are folk designations. But sticking with avers for a moment longer, that word is Old French derived from the Latin adversus, which had the meaning both of turned away (against), and turned toward (confronting), thus face-to-face, hence “heads.”

Wikipedia informs me that the Romans’ heads or tails was navia aut caput, thus ship or head; the head, of course, was the emperor’s. The Germans say Kopf oder Zahl, head or number, Hungarians say fej vagy irás, head or writing, the Spanish say cara ou cruz, face or cross, the French say pile ou face, pile or face (but more about “pile” in a moment). The English once used cross or pile—so there is that “pile” again.

The pile in this context is not a “mound” or an “accumulation” but, rather, a pillar, the pier of a bridge. In France the reverse of coins was often a bridge. A pile also means a javelin, thus a stout rod with a sharpened tip; in German the word Pfeil means both an arrow and an architectural pillar. The English pylon (from the Greek for “gate”) is not seemingly related—although great gates often have pillars.

Avers and revers had me instantly remembering the Superbowl. At the Superbowl the “visiting” captain calls the toss; in the last one that would have been Tom Brady. I was imagining Brady calling the toss by saying “Avers” or “Ship” or “Pile.” Ahhh. The sorts of thoughts that fill a snowy morning… That morning, thanks to the Cross, has now turned sunny.

That Time of Night

Having just last night heard Miss Marple refer to a fortnight, made me curious about the origins of that word. I learned that its rooting is “fourteen nights,” with fourteen contracted. Evidently it was ancient Germanic custom to count time by nights. Sennight was also once used in English, meaning “seven nights”; but that word is now classed as—the direction in which fortnight appears to be trending. To be sure, while laboring at Gale Research, which had its roots in old-fashioned publishing, senior editors and such were required to file fortnightly reports… This made me nod. We have two choices: count time by day or by night. Sure enough, such is human diversity over time, once in Germanic lands nights were the basis of counting. Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that Tacitus (56-117) made a note of this back in his own time. Mankind has followed every conceivable conceptual path available. One that came up in our morning discussion was the fact that one branch of Mazdaism, Zurvanism, held that God was Time. Time is a mysterious enough experience to stimulate human innovation.

Placebo Humor

A while back, discussing the placebo effect (link), I came across another interesting usage of that word in Wikipedia’s article on the subject (link). The word in Latin means “I shall please,” as in the 9th verse of Psalm 114: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum.” That is the Vulgate, the Latin version used by the Catholic Church. “I shall please the Lord in the region of the living,” usually translated as “I will walk before the Lord…” in English, there using Psalm 116:9. (How the verse wandered from 114 to 116 still remains unresearched.) Well, the Latin version was once recited as part of the Catholic funeral service, that phrase being a response by those attending. Now back in those days of yore, some people in no way related to the deceased—or to his or her family—used to arrive at funerals and claim such a relation strictly in order to take part in the funeral festivities and the meals there served. Such people were once called “placebos,” and in that context the word meant a “mooch.” — Which reminds me that, not quite as far back as that, mooches were also referred to as “nosebaggers” with reference to horses that, wearing a nosebag filled with oats, would worry and worm them avidly when they got to the bottom of the bag. I’m one of few people left alive who actually saw such “nosebagging” done by horses “parked” near a store somewhere harnessed to a cart…

Soul Source

The roots of the word meaning soul in Greek and Latin are both from “breath,” thus pneuma in Greek and spiritus in Latin. The English soul is rooted in Proto-Germanic saiwalo and takes all sorts of variant forms in Germanic languages from Seele in German to ziel in Dutch. If you produce a list of the meanings of these three words, they all agree. At the most exhaustive level, the words mean “life,” more narrowly “an animating principle,” more narrowly yet a being that “feels, thinks, and wills.” Both the Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) and the much earlier (1852) and exhaustive German Dictionary produced by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm state that the Germanic word is of “uncertain origin.” Both, however, continue on to suggest that the root may be the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, meaning “sea.” The Grimm brothers speculate that the sea might once have suggested “waves” that mark the interior swings in the soul’s inner life. OED suggests what sounds much more plausible to me. Herewith OED’s addendum:

Sometimes [soul is] said to mean originally “coming from or belonging to the sea,” because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death [Barnhart]…. Klein explains this as “from the lake,” as a dwelling-place of souls in ancient northern Europe.

This struck me as strangely wonderful for a reason. Back about three years ago I put up a post on Borderzone (link) in which, commenting on Tony Hillerman’s The Dance Hall of the Dead, I had discovered a very curious aspect of Zuni religious beliefs. It is that souls come from and return to a sacred lake in Arizona called Ko-thuwallawa, literally God-Town. What do they do there? They dance.

It is not very likely that the Zuni peoples originated in ancient northern Europe—however similar the beliefs might be. What we glimpse here is something else. While in these bodies we’d better be breathing at right regular intervals. The Greek and Latin words are centered on this vital but also mundane activity. But as for that much less fragile structure, the soul, it may also be seen as a “substantial entity” (OED) that keeps on dancing on….

Merci

A while back (here) I had a brief not on greeting—where, incidentally, I pointed out that in my own childhood we said “Hi” by using the Latin word “servus”; in Hungary that’s spelled szervusz. Today the French merci came up; words keep doing that in our morning conversations. I went searching for it in that post on “Hello” but could not find it.

My spontaneous inclination was to derive it from a longer phrase, as in the English “I’m at your mercy.” The French have a very similar phrase as in the following: “Monsieur le Président, c’est un honneur pour moi d’être ici, et je vous en remercie.” Now in that usage, the speaker is re-thanking the President because, one assumes, the invitation was itself a form of “grace” or gift, hence the Spanish gracia. It’s not a bad guess to assume that endless repetition of the “je vous en remercie” would eventually been shortened to merci. The English “I’m at your mercy” no doubt was taken from that phrase. The Wiktionary (here) derives merci from the Latin mercēs, meaning pay, reward, wages. Hence the English “I’m in your debt” would be equivalent to be at someone’s mercy. Complicated, all this. It seems that in French saying merci means receiving something—and acknowledging that situation by using the generic for “a gift”—for getting one. Suppose that we said “dollar” instead of “thanks.” Wouldn’t that give foreigners a fit in understanding English?

But the complications associated with a word like merci are incomparably simpler than to explain that little word en in that French phrase. For that task I’d have to apply to someone who understands French at a much deeper level than I understand English. Some things you simply know—and even waterboarding could not elicit a meaningful response unless you were a highly specialized linguistic scholar.

Paramedicine

Reading the chapter on Hypnotism in Frederic W.H. Myers’ Human Personality—which describes the state of this art or practice at the end of the nineteenth century, the thought occurred that hypnotism might be classified as a branch of paramedicine. I use that term in a new way. The word, I just discovered, is already in use in connection with emergency medical services—in which the paramedics are highly active. But in that usage, the para prefix (meaning “beyond”) is here derived from parachute, seeing that the earliest use of “paramedic” was to designate medical corpsmen arriving on the scene after jumping from airplanes.

In my usage here, the analogue is parapsychology—thus the extension of psychology into regions where the scientific proof of observations or diagnoses are difficult-to-measure or difficult-to-replicate, neutrally described as alternative medicine (much as acupuncture is), aggressively derided as hokum.

Hypnosis fits this designation because its uses are not as unfailing (or as close to unfailing) as the dominant mechanical or chemical approaches; yet when they work, they are rather spectacular. The main variables in this art are the personalities of the hypnotist and of the patient. Significantly enough the practice has, from its days of inception under Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) tended to be associated with unusually charismatic figures—of which the last I am aware of was Milton H. Erickson (1901-1980). Thus the practice appears to resist “institutionalization” —much as talents in parapsychology effectively decay when put to use in, say, trying to play the stock market, as shown by the parapsychologist, J.E. Kennedy (see papers here).

It appears to me that hypnosis involves that famously mysterious borderland between mind and body—much as does faith-healing and a very well-known but not-at-all-understood phenomenon, the placebo effect. The “faith” part of the placebo effect is indicated by its name; it derives from the Latin for “I shall please” and comes from doctors giving patients innocuous pills, thought to have no effect at all, just to please the patient. Yet, miraculously, the white flour just worked. Somehow.

Two views of hypnosis divide the field today (Wikipedia tells me). One theory is called the Altered State, thus it is “an altered state of mind or trance, marked by a level of awareness different from the ordinary conscious state” (link). The other is called Non-State and viewed as imaginative role-playing. If the first theory is correct, the state of mind can be produced by an individual without the help of a hypnotist: self-hypnosis. The most famous teacher of that technique was Émile Coué (1857-1926), the French psychologist, he of that famous “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The field’s second and perhaps most influential practitioner, the Scot James Braid (1795-1880) thought that hypnotism was induced by concentration; he also believed, and indeed successfully practiced, self-hypnosis in pain control.

A state of the mind? A certain level of awareness? Reached by concentration when fully relaxed with external stimuli maximally muted? We’re starting to think that meditation has something to do with it. Parameditation perhaps?

Some Fade Away

Yesterday in a telephone conversation, I heard Brigitte say: “So they were at loggerheads?” The caller, who was a younger sort, had never heard that phrase. Both of us knew it, but we didn’t know its origins. Online Etymology Dictionary to the rescue. Once long ago a “logger” meant a “heavy block of wood”—rather than “a timber man”—or, perhaps, mindful of the new correctness, a “timber person.” Joined to “head” the word signified a “stupid person.” A close relative is the “blockhead.” That was back in the sixteenth century. It took another century before the still lingering meaning of “at loggerheads” came to mean “to be in disagreement”; the phrase was first recorded in the 1670s. It is the season of peace and harmony, but some people are still at loggerheads. In this particular instance, a daughter and her mother. Well, well. Some things never change—even as old words are gradually crowded out of circulation by inundations of the new. I’m not LOL.

I’m Culturally Parochial

Thus the shortest day for me is certainly on the 21st of December—because my parish lies in the Northern Hemisphere. Parish is the root of that word, parochial, from late Latin parochia, a parish, dated to 600 A.D., thus with Christendom having learned to walk. But even back then—reassuringly in this age of excessive change—this day was also the shortest. Some things remain reliably the same, and clinging to certainties, I rarely fail to note this day, parochially, because in the regions below (another parochial designation) the Equator, today is the Summer Solstice. And that’s something my viscera can’t quite believe. The night tomorrow will be just as short, subjectively, as tonight, but there is the knowledge, anyway, that light will grow until June 21st of 2015—when another period of mourning will begin. Right now we celebrate the Light’s Return.

When that Drawing Board First Surfaced: 1941

I learned that the phrase I used yesterday, “back to the drawing board,” was originally “back to the old drawing board.” It originated March 1, 1941 in a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno. Here is the cartoon: link. This courtesy of Wiktionary (here).

Old Soldiers and Old Habits

Brigitte was clipping papers this morning early when two thoughts occurred to her. The first was: “I’m such an inveterate clipper.” The second—which is quite natural with her—was to wonder about the etymology of that word, inveterate.

Sure enough, telling me about it, and asking what my guess was—“And just tell me, don’t look it up yet!”—she provided her own guess at an etymology. It was that that veterate portion might have something to do with veterans. My own clumsy attempt is not worth wasting time on. She was quite right.

And that is because the word veteran comes from vetus (generic veteris) meaning “old, aged, advanced in years; of a former time.” This much courtesy of Online Etymology Dictionary. By a slight twist and turn, the root is used in inveterate as meaning “of long standing” and therefore “chronic.” The “in” here means “of.” Brigitte is a paper clipper going way, way back. Old clippers never die, you might say, they just snip away…

Which made me wonder about that phrase. Here is what seems to be its origin. I found it here. General Douglas MacArthur used the phrase and made it newly famous. As always with true wisdom, it had is roots in everyday life, here of soldiering. The text follows:

Old Soldiers Never Die

There is an old cookhouse, far far away

Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.

Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea

And we are gradually fading away.

cho: Old soldiers never die,

        Never die, never die,

        Old soldiers never die

        They just fade away.

Privates they love their beer, ’most every day.

Corporals, they love their stripes, that’s what they say.

Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will

So we drill and drill until we fade away.

Another and perhaps more authentic version (it dates from 1900 and was written by an anonymous soldier) is to be found here.

Marescence

To keep Alzheimer’s at bay, learn a new word every day. Or perhaps one every month. This month’s word is marescence. It stems from the Latin for marescere, to wither or to shrivel. The subject presents itself every fall, but the energy to dig up the facts is not present every autumn. This time I went on a search to discover why it is that virtually all deciduous trees loose their leaves more or less on schedule—thus, hereabouts in the Midwest, they are mostly down by today. But some hang on for dear life. And some keep them until well into the coming spring. Such species, among them Oaks, Witch-hazel, Hornbeam (musclewood), Hophornbeam (ironwood), some species of Willow, and American Beech display marescence, meaning that their leaves turn color but remain attached to the branches until new budding pushes them off. The evolutionary value of this tactic is debated but not resolved.

To get this list I had to find a helpful post (link) at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Endless blogs and chat rooms go on and on about leaves, but all are incomplete and rarely roam farther than the nearest oak.

Well, in the center of our large back yard rises a rather young American Beech. It still has all its leaves although, at the tip, they are beginning to turn brown. Finding the name of a tree merely by looking at its leaves is very time-consuming. You have to be retired to do it. One step leads to another. The images you see displayed above are the leaves of some of these species, in the order listed above. They suggest that my Fall raking will have its Spring complement as well. My images are courtesy of Wikipedia commons.

Third-Guessing the Second

A baseball story in today’s New York Times (appropriately, it turns out) used the word second-guessing far too often not to capture my attention. The realization came that I couldn’t actually “picture” that phrase. I know what it means—in a vague sort of way—but what does it really mean.

As always Online Etymology Dictionary cleared the matter up for me. And (that “appropriately” above comes into focus): the phrase had its origins in baseball slang. The second-guesser is that rude, loud fellow bellowing in the stands and shaking his fist at the umpire. And the umpire, OED informs me, is actually the first-guesser. That is because, in baseball slang, the umpire was once known as the “guesser,” no doubt so labeled by the same cynical people who doubted that he saw things correctly.

It surprised me further that the phrase is younger than I am, by a year, having first been put in print in 1937. The verb form of it, “to second-guess” is even younger: 1941.

Third-guessing, thus the process of explaining word origins by copying other people’s documented wisdom, is a form first introduced, here, on October 19, 2014. May it sail on…

The Wood and the Crick

When uprooting of a household after a quarter of a century, things are set in motion. Life because very physical. Everything’s always displaced. Where is my knife? That knife lived in a cup on my desk for decades, used only every now and then. It is a great knife, mind you, a gift from my sister Susie—she who still remembered that a pocket knife’s a great gift for a male. Now that knife has been used on countless boxes and lost twice or three times every day. And where’s the tape? It was here just moments ago.

In midst of such turbulence, one depends on luck—and prays to St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of finding things. Quite often, during this busy time, luck was with us, sometimes even quite amazing luck—and we would be knocking on wood. That happened again yesterday, and then we got to wondering about the origin of that phrase: “Touch wood” or “Knock on wood”—accompanied by the action.

Wikipedia calls such an action apotropaic, thus a warding-off gesture. Things get very complicated here. We knock on wood when good things happen. So what are we warding off? Well, the opposite of the good. We don’t want to claim the good as our possession, as our right. Arrogance is punished; the good may be taken away again. Therefore we knock on wood. But why are we knocking on wood? Wikipedia has the answer to that as well. It tells me that the phrase may point back to a time when people believed in benevolent tree spirits, nymphs. The Greek word for those creatures is dryads. And that word itself comes from “oak.”

The ordinary human heart is humble. It’s quite naturally so. We don’t really believe that we deserve good luck, that we merit it in any way. We acknowledge that such things are gifts from a higher source. An old friend of mine, Joe Dennis, used to say quite frequently: “Good willing and the crick don’t rise.” Apotropaic sounds too academic in such contexts. The root of touching wood was no doubt giving thanks to the wood nymphs—rather than to our egos—and hoping that the Dryads agree. The Arabs say Insha’Allah, meaning “God willing,” just like my old friend. Back then I didn’t know that phrase. Things change over time. We were fighting communism then, in Vietnam of all places. And the crick was actually rising then. I also discovered, by the way, that the Arabs also knock on wood, just like we do: “duqq al-khashab.”

Two-Faced Monger

Tinker, Tailor

Manager, Dealer

Merchant, Trader

Monger, Manger.

Eight I hold here in my mitt

But one of them just doesn’t fit.

In one of our MyWord games the other day Brigitte gave me FISHMONGER. The word came from one of her many, many word-lists, but later she discovered that Michael Gilleland had posted the picture of a lovely vase showing a fishmonger on Laudator (link) earlier that day. Nice coincidence—and then discussion. That word is still in circulation, obviously, but when was the last time we’ve heard anyone say, heading out to Kroger or to Ace Hardware, that he or she was going to visit the fishmonger or ironmonger. In such contexts a monger is a seller, dealer, merchant, or trader.

I concluded that a different use of the word—in the political sphere—as in warmonger or scaremonger, would be much more common. Brigitte was not so sure. Well, these days, Google Ngrams (a facility that tracks the usage of words in print back to 1800) can resolve disputes. Turned out that Brigitte’s hunch was better. In 2000, both fishmonger and ironmonger were much more used in print than warmonger. But the meaning in the latter case is more akin to “promoter,” “activist,” or agent provocateur.

Monger comes from the Latin mango, meaning salesman and, especially, slave-dealer. I got curious about other words with a similar spelling, like manager and merchant. Manager has its roots in the Latin for hand, manus. Our own usage comes from the Italian maneggiare, meaning to handle, particularly a horse.  Merchant derives from the Latin mercatus, thus the market, trade, and such. Last and definitely least, I got to wondering if “manger” has some linkage to “monger.” The two words are spelled almost the same way. Furthermore, we link manger so closely to Christian origins, we tend to overlook its actual function: presenting fodder to our beasts. And yes. That is the origin. It comes from the Old French for mangier, “to eat,” to which the suffix -oire was added (mangeoire). The suffix signifies some kind of implement or device: eating-thing, eating-device—the word, in my revised nursery rhyme, which doesn’t fit.

Humor me!

The word was disparate, uttered without conscious thought, simply because it fit the context of our morning’s discussion—triggered by a New York Times story this morning titled “Statistics 10, Poets 0.” I ventured the dismissal, having glanced at the headline, saying: “Statistics takes things apart, poetry puts things together.” But then, recognizing that statistics actually does put things together, by counting disparate but also quite distinct but similar things, I was off on that. Then Brigitte said to me: “Hand me that dictionary. Humor me!”

Our exchange and the request for a dictionary—which is on the floor of the bedroom by the window, underneath a tiny bookshelf, overshadowed by a vast and glorious orchid which takes all the light from the huge window—is a pretty routine sort of thing during our coffee-drinking moments in the morning.

Brigitte was looking up a word, but I didn’t know which until she confided that it was disparate. “I’m looking for additional meanings,” she said. “Words—I can’t help myself. Absolutely everything. Words. Words.”

That makes two of us. In the silence of looking for disparate, her last words, Humor me!, were revolving in my mind—and a wonder arose how that word, which originally described the body fluids the ancients thought were at the root of every state of mind—yes, blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile—could have produced this phrase…

Well, Online Etymology Dictionary on my screen, the tracing becomes easy. Yes, the humors determine the state of the mind. But the meaning is relaxed, not absolutely deterministic. We have a certain freedom to pick the humors we need to deploy in any one situation. Therefore, eventually, the notion of deploying more of one humor, rather than the other, came into usage. And the meaning of “indulge me,” arose, although quite late, in the 1520s. The humor used for that purpose is probably “blood,” which is ardent and sympathetic.

Now as for that article, it is about numbers and metrics—and how these are displacing feelings, I suppose they mean. Not the experience but the duration of sexual encounters is measured—measured in some fantastic way by using apps and cell phones and no doubt secret feeds from the NSA. And mapped—so that we can look down on regions where sexual encounters are of the shortest duration. But I’m not going there.  But here’s a brief quote to get the flavor across:

That God-shaped hole in the universe? It’s been filled with social science. Whereas once we quoted politicians or preachers, now we quote Gallup or Pew.