ALLEGORY
A long metaphor; a story with an inner and outer meaning; a narrative with symbolic significance. An allegory is a description in which a place, object, or action is personified or holds moral, social, religious, or political importance. To fully appreciate the magnitude of this word, think of an average day in classical Athens. An indignant citizen walks down to the agora, the marketplace under the Acropolis, and delivers a heated allegoria, a veiled but critical speech designed to expose the actions of a politician he vehemently disagrees with. We’ve been speaking and writing that way ever since. Allegories abound in novels, songs, movies. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is an audacious adventure story, but its deeper power is as an allegorical satire on 17th-century English mores. Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker aren’t only movies about the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but allegories about the insanity of all wars in all times. What I find stirring is that the word picture still shines through. Our English word derives from 14th century French allégorie , via the Greek allegoria, from allos, another, different, plus agoreuein, to speak openly in the agora. Thus, to be allegorical means to express yourself openly but differently, figuratively, metaphorically, symbolically, sometimes furtively. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” was to the ancient world what Maya Lin’s Confluence is to ours. John Keats wrote of one who employed it most ingeniously, “Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments on it.” “The Allegory of Painting” (1665-67) by Vermeer features a drawn-back curtain that reveals the artist himself painting a model dressed as Clio, the muse of history; it was considered his own favorite painting. More recently, in Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones vividly describes Superman as “an allegory that echoed for immigrants and Jews: the strange visitor who hides his alien identity.”
AMAZON
A legendary river in South America; a mythic race of female warriors from Scythia. Today whenever we hear the word we think of the forests of South America, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Killer, Billie Jean King. But the word was originally used by the ancient Greeks to describe a tribe of warring women who lived at the remote reaches of the then known world, the shores of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains, in Asia Minor. The first historian, Herodotus of Ephesus, described them as fierce warriors who fought against the Greeks, a-masos, without one breast, allegedly to more easily let fly their arrows. According to travelers’ tales of the time, theirs was a society without men; any son born to an Amazon was either slain or exiled. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place the night before the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the Amazon queen. In 1541, the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana, who was the first European to navigate the length of the river, named it after the infamous warriors after being surprised in an attack by the Tapuya Indians, whose women, he reported, were as fierce as his own soldiers. Out of such unsettling events, a legend grew of a ferocious tribe of women warriors living in a world without men. Curious companion words include Amazonian chin, beardless, like a female warrior, as evoked in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “When with his Amazonian chin he drove / the bristled lips before him.”
AMUSE
To divert, entertain, occupy, please, or pleasantly bewilder. Its 500-year-old origins are rather…amusing, a revelation, rooted as they are in the Middle French amuser. Captain Francis Grose, in his scintillating 1811 dictionary of slang, deftly defines its earliest use: an attempt to deceive or cheat. But Grose adds a colorful use as a noun, and his definition is worth quoting in full. “Amusers,” he writes, “are rogues who carried snuff or dust in their pockets, which they threw into the eyes of any person they intended to rob; and running away, their accomplices (pretending to assist and pity the half-blinded person) took that opportunity of plundering them.” Some lexicographers insist on important degrees of amusement: amusing is a light and pleasant distraction, an activity that kills time; entertaining is an agreeable experience, as in a performance of some brio that heightens awareness; diverting suggests amusing ourselves to death, turning off the intellectual faculties, by a sporting contest or comedy. “Ha, ha! You amuse me, Mr. Bond,” snarls the slitherly villain Max Zorin in A View to a Kill. Companion words include amusia, the inability to hear or appreciate music. And, dare we add, the amusing term from the English countryside Ha-ha’s, which is humorlessly defined by the OED as “sunken fences bounding a park or garden.” This is an ungainly description for a clever invention that prevents animals from escaping because the fences or walls are hidden from view—until the last possible second to unsuspecting country hikers, who are so surprised and delighted they’ve been known to shout, “Ha-ha!” Now, that’s amusing!
ANIMATEUR
A teacher who infuses life into a subject. An obscure word from the French worthy of widespread use to vividly describe all those mentors, coaches, and therapists who teach with “a little bit o’ soul,” as they say in Motown, thereby animating their subjects and their students. The wordsmith Howard Rheingold suggests that animateur might even be able to bring to life the writing that deadens technical and scientific books. Similarly, the art of animation is the ability to create cartoons that appear to hum with life, such as the work of the Warner Brothers legend Chuck Jones, who brought Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, and Pepe Le Pew to life. Jones said in a 1999 interview, “Indeed, we wanted our characters to be alive. I take the term ‘animation’ very seriously. … The expression is what gives life, the movement of the eye.” Speaking of sketches that seem to move, the Swiss painter Paul Klee said that drawing to him was “taking a line out for a walk.” Thomas Pynchon writes in V., “All he believed at this point, on the bench behind the Library, was that anybody who worked for inanimate money so he could buy more inanimate objects was out of his head.” Companion words include animal, a creature that breathes, and the miniscule animalcule, a tiny creature observed under a microscope, a discovery by Dutch lens-maker Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek that sparked a worldwide interest in microbiology, thereby animating science. Look again, you’ll see anima and animus, the feminine and masculine aspects of the soul, respectively, according to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. And, as Bill Bryson points out, in The Mother Tongue, it is wonderful to know that among the many early names for movie theaters are phantascope, thaumatrope, and animatoscope.
APHILOPHRENIA
The haunting feeling, however fleeting, that one is unloved. Not to be dismissed as just another “inkhorn term,” but a case of an “invisible ink term,” a word to be borrowed because nothing close to it exists in English. Entire phrases, proverbs, or song lyrics are required to express what these six brief syllables say. Its roots are Greek a-philo, not loved, and phrenia, mental disorder. To name it may take some of the sting out of it, knowing we aren’t alone in this fear. If you listen hard to this word, you can hear an echo of B. B. King singing at the Cook County Jail, in Chicago, “Nobody loves me but my mama—and she could be jivin’ too!” The most moving expression of this universal fear I’ve ever heard came one night in 1989, at the Village Voice Bookstore in Paris, when Raymond Carver read his poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on this earth.” Mother Theresa concluded, near the end of her days, “I have come to realize more and more that the greatest disease and the greatest suffering is to be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, to be shunned by everybody, to be just nobody [to no one].” Companion words include the soft-sounding but hard-meaning amourette, French for an unloved lover. There is also the hard-to-translate Russian razbliuto, which refers to the amorous feelings you once had for somebody but just cannot conjure up again, which sounds far more like what it means than the clunky anagapesis, lost feelings for an old lover. And encompassing all of the above is erotomania, the melancholy that sweeps over lovers, as diagnosed in John Coxe’s London medical dictionary
in 1817.
ARACHIBUTYROPHOBIA
The fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. Curious, right? Every time I read or hear the word I think of spiders, from the Greek arachne. But it’s really a very long and potent word for a very peculiar phobia, stemming from the Greek arachi, a glutinous oil present in peanut butter; butryo, to stick or adhere; and phobia, fear. As someone who has been afflicted with esophageal and swallowing problems all his life, I can swear to what appears to be a universal fear of getting something stuck in the throat. So it’s not difficult to imagine someone, especially with a peanut allergy, being terrified of its buttery version clogging up her mouth. The problem is mythic, a larger-than-life fear, or phobia—a word that can be traced back to Phobos, son of Ares, god of terror, but the symptoms are real, persistent, an unrealistic fear that seizes the whole person, resulting in symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and shame. That said, there is no shortage of curious phobias, such as: erythrophobia, the fear of blushing; ablutophobia, fear of washing or cleaning; euphobia, fear of good news; chromophobia, fear of color; gnomophobia, fear of gnomes; catoptrophia, fear of mirrors; Venustraphobia, the fear of beautiful and alluring women; kakorrhapphiophobia is the fear of failure and hippomonstrosesquipedaliophobia , fear of long words, and perhaps longer definitions. Speaking of frightful words, a curious fear I’ve suffered from on occasion, especially on long airplane flights, is abibliophobia, the fear of not having enough to read. To be fair, let’s conclude with an antidote of a word, counterphobia, which refers to “the desire or seeking out of experiences that are consciously or unconsciously feared.” It’s not unlike the advice your mom gave you after your first bad fall from a bicycle—climb back on.
ARGONAUT
A bold and daring sailor. A smooth-sailing word that combines the ancient Greek argos, swift; the beauty of a fine ship, naus; and the sailor courage of a nautes. They merge in Argo, the galley on which the Argonauts set sail, which in turn was named after Argus, its ingenious builder. Webster’s succinctly defines an Argonaut as “any of a band of heroes who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece.” I vividly recall my father’s Heritage Club edition of the book by Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, which we read aloud as a family over one long Michigan winter. The legend recounts how Jason persuaded forty-nine sailors to accompany him on a perilous mission from Iolcos to remote Colchis, in what is now Georgia, at the far end of the Black Sea. Their mythic task was to capture the golden fleece, which hung on a sacred oak guarded by a fire-snorting dragon. Curiously, in 1849, many of those who left home and hearth for the California gold mines were called “Argonauts,” in honor of Jason’s adventure, as well as “’49ers,” an uncanny echo of the forty-nine sailors who traveled with him in search of the resplendent wool. The Argonauts adventure lives on in Argos, a constellation in the northern sky; Captain Nemo’s ship, the Nautilus, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; the spiral-shelled nautilus, which the ancients believed sailed underwater; and nausea, seasickness, from naus, ship. Another haunting echo of the word is found in one of the most touching scenes in all of literature, from the final book of the Odyssey, when the hero returns home to Ithaka after his twenty-year long adventure and is recognized by his faithful dog Argos—who wags his tail, then dies quietly.
ASSASSIN
A hired killer. The word comes hissing to us like an arrow across the battlements. It hails from the 13th-centur y Persian hashshashin, the hashing ones, those who smoke hashish. These were specially trained executioners, from the Shia sect, hired by Hassan ben Sabbah, the “Old Man of the Mountain,” and trained at his fortress of Almamut to punish their Seljuk enemies, and later the Crusaders in northern Syria. For 200 years they stealthily murdered infidels, princes, soldiers, sultans, and other mercenaries. Their training was singular and stealthy. As a reward for their dangerous work, the Old Man created a kind of paradise on earth for these killers, plying them with stupendous amounts of hashish, the lubricious services of nubile young women, and the use of luxurious quarters in the palace. Eventually, the group became identified with the thing they smoked. Steadily, the reference to hashshashin wore down, like a plug of hash, to assassin, and now is commonly used to describe any trained executioner. The troubadour poet Bernard de Bondeilhs wrote, “Just as the Assassins serve their master unfailingly, so have I served Love with unswerving loyalty.” Companion words include cannibidulia , the addiction to hashish, and the menacing murthering, as cited by John Bullokar in 1616: “A robbing, spoiling, or murthering in the highway.” Nearby lurks thug, the infamous East Indian brand of assassin whose specialty was strangling his or her victims.
ASTONISH
To strike with thunderous surprise; in a word, to be thunderstruck. When the Norse god Thor was provoked he hurled thunderbolts made of gold that stunned all who had invoked his wrath. Likewise, to be astonished in English is to be a-stunned, a vivid word picture we’ve inherited from the Vikings, as well as the Old French estoner, to stun, and the Latin extonare, to thunder. Thus, to astonish someone is to stun them with the thunder of your wit or ingenuity. Two stunning remarks I caught over the years help clarify our meaning. First, I recall how my father roared with laughter when he read in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest,” a line that he quoted for the rest of his life. Years later, living in France, I read in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne how the painter announced his entrée into the art world: “With an apple I will astonish Paris.” Recently, Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin confessed, “I want to read my own production and astonish myself, as if I were a reader coming to my own text for the first time.” It’s amazing to note that Van Gogh found Gauguin’s self-discipline “astonishing.” “Words, words, words,” as Hamlet said. “Explanation separates us from astonishment,” said Eugène Ionesco, “which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.” To hear the real thunder underneath the word, let’s remember Sergei Diaghilev’s challenging words to Jean Cocteau, as a way to demand better direction for a new ballet he was designing for him: “Astonish me!”
Astonish (Paul Cézanne)
ASTRAL
Coming from, influenced by, or resembling, the stars. Star-like; starry; star-crossed. There’s an Irish proverb that says, “The stars make no noise.” Maybe so, but they sure do inspire wonder-seeking words. Astral regards an intangible substance said to exist next to or above the tangible world, the astral plane, which has long been regarded as the source of the astral spirits or astral bodies. Our English word dates back to 1605, when it emerged from the Old French and Late Latin astralis, revealed by the stars; astrum, star; the Greek aster; and the even earlier Proto-Indo-European aster, simply, a star. This gives rise to a constellation of astronomy terms, including asteroid, a small star; astrolabe, star-catcher; asterisk, star-shaped; disaster, literally two stars, but in collision; sidereal, referring to stars. Asterism is the terrific term for the naming of constellations. Consider the marvel of consider, thinking under the stars. Astrobleme means “star-scarred,” craters from meteors; astrolatry, star worship; estellation was an ancient word for astrology, as uncovered by Herbert Coleridge. All these star-crossed words reflect the awe and wonder of our starry-eyed ancestors, who were undeterred by city lights and undistracted by the klieg lights of modern pop culture. Astral Weeks is the legendary album by Irish soul singer Van Morrison, which wanders celestially in the firmament of rock history. The medieval term dignities refers to the alleged astral advantages of a planet in a sign of the zodiac that strengthens “its influence, which is its Essential Dignity,” and if in a House that strengthens its influence is its Accidental Dignity. And now you know why astral is a cosmic term.
ATHLETE
One who competes in sporting contests. An athlete is to a competition as an actor is to a play. Few words exercise the imagination as much as this one. Since the very beginning of competitive sports, in the Ancient Olympics (776 BCE), the athlete has been on stage. The
Greeks believed that every athlete was an actor, every actor an athlete; every sporting event a drama, every drama a kind of athletic competition. This was acted out, in every sense of the word, since the Greeks used the same word for both, athlein, in the stadium, from stadia, the length of the ancient footrace; and in the theater, from theatron, a place for viewing, and the earlier theasthai, to behold. What is so compelling to me is what the root thea, to view, and its derivative theates, spectator, can tell us about why we love sports, theater, and the movies. They are all stages for transport. We compete or play, we dramatize our lives for others to see; we view the way that others play and compete. At the heart of these two dramas was the notion of the athlos, the competition, and athlein, contesting for the athlon, the prize. An athlete was someone who performed in a contest, in a gymnasium , from gymnos, naked, reflecting the rule that Greek athletes performed in the nude, to ensure no cheating. So a true athlete hides nothing, plays fair. The word first appears in English in 1528, in one of the first health books, The Salerno Guide to Regimen: This Booke Teachyng All People to Governe Them in Health, by Thomas Paynell. Athletics followed in 1727, athlete’s foot, in 1928. Thus, athletes play and compete for themselves and for the spectators as a way to stage the pursuit of excellence in mind, body, and spirit. When all three come together, everybody wins.
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