Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  ATLAS

  A volume of maps or a catalog of illustrations, named after the demigod who was said to support the world on his shoulders. The mythic association reaches back to 1585, when the first collection of modern maps was published by Gerhardus Mercator, the inventor of the Mercator projection. His son Rumold used an engraving of Atlas on the title page of his father’s book. His inspired choice has inspired mapmakers ever since. Atlas had been one of the Titans, who were defeated by the new reign of gods, and he was condemned for all eternity to carry the world on his shoulders—an echo of atlas, being old Greek for “support, sustain, bear.” Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable relates how Atlas came to call home the mountain range in Morocco that was later named after him. Figuratively, Atlas was resurrected as the poster boy for muscle men everywhere, such as circus strongmen and weight lifters. A young bodybuilder named Angelo Siciliano adopted the moniker Charles Atlas, after a buddy flattered him by comparing him to the statue of Atlas that straddled a hotel on Coney Island. His fitness ads focused on “97-pound weaklings” having sand kicked in their faces by bullies at the beach, a threat that persuaded untold thousands of adolescent boys to send in a dollar for his popular workout program. “Step by step and the thing is done,” he advised. “I’ll prove in only seven days I can make you a new man.” Which proves that men have long had a hankering to develop shoulders wide enough to support their world—and to avenge insults to their manhood.

  AUGUR

  One who reads the signature of all things. A Roman priest who interpreted the auspices, the signs observed in sheep’s intestines, bird flight, the waves on the sea, and the stars in the sky. Since the augurs were believed to have the power to read the will of the gods, they were expected to declare whether the signs were favorable or unfavorable. Virtually every decision of public importance during the reign of the empire was taken “under the auspices.” Consider the Roman historian Livy: “Who does not know that this city was founded only after taking the divinations, that everything in war and peace, at home and abroad, was done only after taking the divinations?” Plutarch distinguished between details that the augurs discovered on the left, or sinister side of the sacrificial animal, which foreboded evil because left was associated with the setting sun, (as were death and departure); and the details on the right, or dexterous side, which augured well because it symbolized the sacred East, the rising sun, the return of life. To “augur well” came to mean a favorable prediction, as did the later phrase to “bode well,” a bode being a herald or messenger. Companion words include inaugurate, to begin; auspicious, favorable signs; and euphemism, to use words of good omen, as the great Skeat wrote; plus portent and portentous, to point out, stretch toward. While scrying crystal balls may be rare these days, there is no lack of sources for trying to predict the future, such as reading tea leaves, interpreting horoscopes, playing the stock market, and betting the odds on sporting matches. After reading the troubling augurs of history, novelist Rebecca West predicted that the modern world would be marked by “a desperate search for a pattern.” Speaking of which, the desperate quest can also lead us astray, seeing patterns or connections where they ain’t, which is the very definition of apophenia.

  AWARE

  The great sigh of things. To be aware of aware (pronounced ah-WAH-ray) is to be able to name the previously ineffable sigh of impermanence, the whisper of life flitting by, of time itself, the realization of evanescence. Aware is the shortened version of the crucial Japanese phrase mono-no-aware , which suggested sensitivity or sadness during the Heian period, but with a hint of actually relishing the melancholy of it all. Originally, it was an interjection of surprise, as in the English “Oh!” The reference calls up bittersweet poetic feelings around sunset, long train journeys, looking out at the driving rain, birdsong, the falling of autumn leaves. A held-breath word, it points like a finger to the moon to suggest an unutterable moment, too deep for words to reach. If it can be captured at all, it is by haiku poetry, the brushstroke of calligraphy, the burbling water of the tea ceremony, the slow pull of the bow from the oe. The great 16th-century wandering poet Matsuo Basho caught the sense of aware in his haiku: “By the roadside grew / A rose of Sharon. / My horse / Has just eaten it.” A recent Western equivalent would be the soughing lyric of English poet Henry Shukman, who writes, “This is a day that decides by itself to be beautiful.”

  Aware (The Great Sigh of Things)

  B

  BAFFLE

  To confuse, discombobulate, or foil. A word that could be cited to describe its own curious origins, which was the baffling punishment of a knight errant, or should we say, an erring knight? The word dates back to 1548, and paints a bewildering picture of public disgrace worthy of Brueghel. Richardson writes, “baffull is a great reproach among the Scottes, and is used when a man is openly perjured, and then they make of him an image paynted reuersed, with hys heles vpwarde, with his name, wondering, cryenge, and blowing out of [i.e. at] hym with hornes, in the moost despitefull manner they can.” So a disgraced knight, or an effigy of him, was hung upside down by his heels for perjury or other dishonorable conduct. Richardson adds that the word may be a Scottish corruption of bauchle, to treat somebody contemptuously, or to act tastelessly, which possibly traveled across the North Sea from Icelandic bágr, uneasy, poor, also a struggle. Others speculate that baffle is linked to the French bafouer, to abuse, hoodwink, and baf, a natural sound of disgust, like bah, still heard in Parisian cafés, as bof. The legendary Associated Press reporter Mort Rosenblum describes the word as unspellable and the delivery as being “in the aspiration, like getting unwanted air out through fluttering lips, impelled by colossal ennui, with a rolling of the eyes, and a slight tossing of the head.” Thus, to baffle is more than confuse but less than vilify; it is to turn somebody upside down with contempt, disgrace them ten ways from Sunday, with your reproach. Biologist Edward O. Wilson writes, “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it’s wrong.” Companion words or senses include the baffle in a sound studio or mechanical device, whose first published use was in 1881.

  BAKSHEESH

  A tip; a favor, gratuity, charity; a reward. A benevolent bribe offered to smooth out service in the bazaar or market; a subtle gift to grease the wheels of a business deal; alms for the poor to fulfill a religious obligation. As an integral social custom in Islamic cultures, baksheesh is a familiar, almost incantatory word, heard on the streets from Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem to Baghdad, Beirut, and Calcutta. It is an echo of the American cry of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” but carries the spiritual overtones of the medieval practice of giving alms, whereby spiritual merit is earned. Its roots are in the Persian bakhshish, a gift, which stems from the verb bakhshidan, to give or forgive. The first written appearance in English dates back to 1625. A passage in the classic travelers’ tale The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux, illuminates the custom as practiced in Iran in the 1970s: “It is an old country; everywhere in the gleaming modernity are reminders of the orthodox past—the praying steward, the portraits, the encampments of nomads, and on what is otherwise one of the best run railways in the world, the yearning for the baksheesh.”

  BAMBOOZLE

  To fool, guile, trick, or hoodwink. Those long o’s and that hard z lends the word a “grifterly” feeling, to coin a phrase, evocative of an Elmore Leonard detective novel riddled with deceitful women and swindling men. Bamboozle is first recorded in 1703, a slang or cant word, derided by Johnson as “not used in pure or grave writings.” However, Brewer traces it back to the Chinese and Gypsy bamboozle, meaning to “dress a man in bamboos to teach him swimming,” which gives rise to an image of a kind of human raft. Even though it’s nearly impossible to rhyme in a poem—bamboozle and ouzel?—it is still a raffish word that lifts a smile on the face of anybody who uses it. The Scots can take credit, tracing it back to bombaze, to perplex, though it may also be connected to the French bombast. If you can feel a wild animal w
rithing around in the word when you say it out loud, you’re not far wrong. There was a popular epithet in Old French, “To make a baboon out of somebody,” an uncanny reference to embabuiner, to make a fool out of. Not all have been charmed by the word. Jonathan Swift included it in his dubious index expurgatorius, his list of words to be expunged from the language. Nonetheless, it could not be repressed, and Benjamin Disraeli used it deftly in a letter: “It is well known what a middle man is: he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other.” Carl Sagan warned, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Finally, if you just happen to be using bamboozle in a poem or song lyrics and you’re stuck for a rhyme, you might try gongoozle, a rare but useful word meaning “to stare at, idly watch,” as those whose leisure activity centers around watching boats drift by in the canals of England.

  BANDERSNATCH

  A monster so horrible, so terrifying, nobody has ever stayed around long enough to get a description of it. Beware, for it is outside your door, licking its chops. If you look up the hideous verb transmogrify, you’ll find the bodacious bandersnatch nipping at its heels. Try to picture the horripilating (“hairraising”) incident in the Voyages of Sinbad in which the sailors are driven to mutiny by the strange cries of unseen monsters and the terror of the churning sea. If asked about the origins of the dreaded beast, a researcher into such things might say it is born of the scritching at the door of our imagination, and our eldritch fear of the unknown. However, the doughty Lewis Carroll dared name the dreaded beast in his diabolic poem “Jabberwocky.” “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious Bandersnatch!” Companion words include catathleba , “a noxious monster,” which Pliny mentions in his Histories, and according to Coleridge, the deutyraun, which was “some monstrous animal.” Finally, there is the odious beast in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” cartoon strip, which he introduced “offstage” as the unseen but memorably named Lena the Hyena.

  BARBARIAN

  An uncivilized, uncouth, uneducated foreigner. The Greeks and Romans disagreed on many issues, but they held fast to this suspicion of the outsider. Those who couldn’t speak their language were barbaros, stammerers or babblers. To both cultures, the speech of strangers was incomprehensible, reeking of roughhewn sounds like “bar bar bar to bar.” No inconsequential prejudice, this. If you couldn’t speak Greek you couldn’t compete in the Olympics, own land, or vote. If you couldn’t speak Latin, you were forever regarded as pagan. Dr. Johnson holds forth on the evolution—or devolution—of the word, tracking down its origins in the fear and loathing of strangers: “[Barbarian] seems to have signified at first only foreign, or a foreigner; but, in time, implied some degree of wildness or cruelty.” Since then barbarians have arrived at the gate in virtually every land, as immigration and exile is now a constant in modern life, reviving the ancient disdain for strangers in the now universal phrase “It’s all Greek to me.” All is not lost. After being criticized by August Strindberg for the paintings he made in Tahiti, Paul Gauguin wrote, “You suffer from your civilization. My barbarism is to me a renewal of youth.” Companion words include gringo, a regional Mexican-Spanish expression for the dreaded Yanqui, often used, with almost shocking similarity, to describe gibberish spoken by strangers. Word maven John Ciardi traces its derivation back to griengar, “to speak like a Greek,” suggesting that American English was barbaric to Mexican ears, which brings us full circle, like Odysseus, back to Greece.

  BATHOS

  False depth, sentimentality, triteness, mawkishness. Bathos is the sinking feeling of being pulled down by sentimentality, dragged down by false emotion. Bathos is exaggerated pathos, which, as readers of James Joyce, Thomas Aquinas, or Greek tragedy know, is the “quality that arouses pity or sorrow.” The original sense of pathos is “what befalls one,” related to paskhein, to suffer, and penthos, grief, sorrow. So powerful were the old associations with pathos that when bathos, the old Greek word for “depth,” was floated by Alexander Pope, in 1727, its echo was clear to most educated people. Current usage suggests that bathos sinks to the depths of what used to be called “low writing,” in contrast to “high writing,” which is reputedly loftier. Bathos is also a synonym for anticlimax, the sudden descent to the depths, in the pejorative sense, in speech or writing or at the end of a work of art. Otherwise known as third-act problems. Or as Napoleon famously remarked to De Pradt, the Polish ambassador to France, a drop “from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” Charlotte Brontë evoked its true profundity (profundus, depth) in Jane Eyre, when she wrote: “I like you more than I can say, but I’ll not sink into a bathos of sentiment.” Companion words include bathykopian, deep-bosomed, from bathos, deep, and kolpos, cleft; bathyscape, a small submarine designed to explore the depths of the ocean; and bathetic, which is a pathetic drop in the gravitas of the word pathos.

  BEAUTY

  The quality or perception that pleases. Some say beauty is the inner quality that brings calm to the observer. Others, like Stendhal, say it is “the promise of happiness.” Beauty is a beaut’, as we use to say of a gorgeous shot on the basketball courts of Detroit, where I grew up. She dates back to around 1275, from the Anglo-Saxon beute, and Vulgar Latin bellitatem, the state of being handsome, from Latin bellus, fine, beautiful, used mostly of women and children. Companion words include beauty sleep, the rejuvenating rest taken just before midnight, beautician, beauty parlor, beauty shot, beauty shop, and bonify, “to make good or beautiful. Callipygian means “gifted with shapely buttocks,” such as those of prehistoric goddess sculptures. Callisteia was the name of a sought-after beauty prize won in beauty competitions in ancient Greece. Callomania is the delusion that one is beautiful, after the goddess Callisto. Calligraphy describes the ability to write beautifully. Kalokagathia is the harmonious Greek worldview that joins the beautiful (kalo) and the good (agathia). The subtle French jolie laide combines “pretty and “ugly” to describe an unconventionally attractive face you can’t stop looking at. The sublime Navajo hozh’q refers to the ultimate aim in life being the beauty that can be created by human beings. Shakespeare’s Romeo sighs of Juliet, “I never saw beauty until now.” Art critic Elaine Scarry underscores all the above when she writes, “Beauty is sacred.” “Beauty in art,” Charles Hawthorne told his art students, “is the delicious notes of color one against the other.” And in an old leather-bound book of travel poems at Ansel Adams’s cabin in Yosemite, I catch the tender dedication that Everett Dawson wrote to Ansel and his wife, Virginia: “Beauty has its roots in the fitness of things. May 27, 1930.”

  Beauty

  BEDSWERVER

  A wandering, lusting lover. A lubricious Shakespearean term, from A Winter’s Tale, for a woman who swerves from the marriage bed. In 1753, Dr. Johnson defined a bedswerver with avidity, as one who “is false to the bed; one that ranges or swerves from one bed to another.” A playful euphemism for an adulterer from a time rife with bed references. Consider the lubriciously descriptive bedganging, a beguiling bedventure in which a lover seeks a bedworthy partner, an ibedde, or bedsister, whom Herbert Coleridge calls a “concubine,” or a bedfellow, in “a bed of sin.” The male equivalent to a bedswerver was a bedpresser, a john-among-the-maids, knave-of-hearts, or belly-bumper. Companionable bed words include curtain-lecture, which Dr. Johnson defined as “a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed.” Memorably romantic terms from Old English include hugsome, huggable, and kissworthy, worthy of a kiss; and in hipster slang, bedwarmer, bed partner, and bedroom furniture, a woman, doll, or dame. Figuratively, essayist E. B. White described his bedfellows as Fred, his pet dachshund, as well as Harry Truman (in the New York Times), Adlai Stevenson (in Harper’s), and Dean Acheson (in A Democrat Looks at His Party). Recently, I caught up with shr
imping, a clever coinage from Sarajevo writer Aleksandar Hemon, which he describes as “curling up in a fetal position” with a lover, which is a remarkably clever alternative to the Victorian spooning.

  BEKOS

  Bread. Not only the most famous Phrygian word, but some say the very first word, period. According to Herodotus, bekos meant bread, and he then said why. In his Histories he tells the yeasty story of Pharaoh Psammetichus, who believed there was one proto-language, the source of all languages, like the mythic source of the Nile. To attempt to prove his point, he exiled two babies to a hut in the mountains and left them there to live in silence, visited occasionally by a shepherd who brought them food. Eventually, the story goes, the children spoke. What they said was bekos, which the Pharaoh interpreted as meaning that Phrygian was the mother of all languages. Never ones to leave a colorful folk etymology alone, modern linguists connect bekos with the Albanian buke, also meaning “bread,” and to the eventual English bake. Companion “first” words include one that many of us devour with the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. A historian of dictionaries, Jonathan Green, recounts a study in Chasing the Sun about the search for traces of the earliest words common to all Indo-European languages. After the elimination of thousands of words, the true and noble survivor was the noble friend of bagels everywhere, lox. Hmmmmm, you say, and I say we’re on to something. Roy Blount Jr. cites Stephen Mithen’s work in The Singing Neanderthals , “that the first stirrings of language were hmmmmm.” All origin stories have the strange contours of poetry. The physician and etymologist Lewis Thomas speculates: “‘Kwei,’ said a Proto-Indo-European [PIE] child, meaning ‘make something,’ and the word became, centuries later, our word ‘poem.’” Incidentally, the oldest phrase in continuous use in English is the still popular “Woe is me,” which first appeared as “Woe unto me,” in the Old Testament, Job 10:15.