BERSERK
Ferociously out of control; displaying superhuman strength in battle. In 1822, Sir Walter Scott raided the Old Norse language for the right word to convey the sense of utterly blood-thirsty warriors for his novel The Pirate: “The berserkars were so called from fighting without armour.” After the book was published, berserk became all the rage. Within fifty years the word shape-shifted into its figurative sense of deranged behavior, so that “to go berserk” became the English version of the Malaysian “running amok.” North Beach photographer Mikkel Aaland, whose family hails from Norway, told me what his uncle told him, “The Berserkrs were a Viking tribe so called because they wore bear, ber, skirts or garments, serk. They were known as ferocious fighters who went to battle after eating psychedelic mushrooms. They were known to tear the flesh off their opponents with their teeth, and so, berserk, uncontrollable rage, is derived from this behavior.” Howling like animals, foaming at the mouth, and biting the edges of their iron shields, the berserkrs spread terror from Ireland to Russia, and were frenzied champions when they returned home to plow their fields and tell their tales in front of the home fires. Why the bear skin? Some say donning the bearskin was sympathetic magic. If you kill the bear, wear its skin, you absorb its fury, display its courage and strength. In 1908, Kipling wrote in Diversity of Creatures, “You went Berserk. I’ve read all about it in Hypatia. … You’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life.” Companion words include anger, from the Viking angr, their red-face response to injustices of the world; and Herb Caen’s “Berserkely,” or “Berserkelier-than-thou.”
BEWILDER
To confuse, bespudder, or discombobulate. A 16th-century folk memory from the days when most people in Europe lived either in the forest or in towns surrounded by woodland. Bewilder derives from the Old English be, thoroughly, and wilder, to lead one astray. Figuratively, it means to be lost in the pathless woods, and by extension to lure an innocent into the wild. Scholars suggest that it’s a “backformation” from wilderness, whose roots are in wilde’or, the wild deer that once roamed the untamed land. Companion words include bedevil, bewitch, and the wonderfully clangorous bewhape, an archaic English word from the 14th century meaning “confused.” According to the charming Charles MacKay’s culling of Lost Beauties, mask surprisingly meant “bewilder” back in the 13th century, and the verb maze meant “to bewilder and confuse.” As for the old saw that men can’t ever admit they are lost, let’s consider the ingenious response of Daniel Boone when asked if he’d ever been lost: “No, but I was once bewildered for three days.” His kindred spirit of a more recent time is Isadora Duncan, who urged other women artists, “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you!”
BIBLIOTHÈQUE (FRENCH)
A library, a paradise for book lovers. The earliest written record dates back 4,500 years to ancient Sumeria’s eduba, translated by its Akkadian conquerors as the “tablet house,” for its thousands of cuneiform books. Originally, bibliothèque meant “a box or warehouse of papyrus scrolls.” The word derives, drifts downriver to us like a reed along the Nile, from the Greek colony of Alexandria, whose famous library consisted of 700,000 biblion, papyrus scrolls, from biblios, the heart of the papyrus stalk, and byblos, rolled scroll or rolled book, the word used to describe what came from the Phoenician port that shipped papyrus rolls to Egypt. [Green] bibliophile Alberto Manquel describes the Library of Alexandria as “a very long high hall lined with bibliothekai, niches for the scrolls.” This was the Museion, The House of the Muses, The Place for the Cure of the Soul. Companion words: bibliography, a book list; bibliomancy, divination through books; biblioclast, destroyer of books; and biblioburro, “a rural book mobile system,” via donkeys, in Colombia. Bibliocaveat: beyond the uplifting aspects of libraries, a gentle warning about the addiction to books. H. L. Mencken tells us there are bibliobibuli, those who are book-drunk because they have read too much. “I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing, and hearing nothing.” Bibliophobia is the fear of running out of things to read, a familiar dread for those on long plane flights or train rides. Eudora Welty visited her local Carnegie library every day as a young girl for her “sweet devouring” of the two books a day doled out by the librarian.
BONA FIDE
In good faith, authentic, honest; without bad intentions, fraud, deceit, or deception. Today, we say, “He’s got the bona fides, he’s a five-tool ballplayer.” Or: “She’s got bona fide talent as a singer; she’s the real deal.” Figuratively, it points out authentic credentials. One of my favorites is the following example, from a pub custom in late-19th-century Dublin, Ireland. In those days the pubs closed at the traditional hour of 11:00 P.M., but it was also an hour when the back roads of Ireland still saw plenty of wanderers afoot, such as the gypsies, the traveling people. Often, they would knock on the doors of pubs they knew stayed open late for travelers, those who wanted a late meal or drink. But there was a law in Dublin that pubs could only sell alcohol to those who were true, authentic out-of-towners, so as to keep the locals from drinking after hours. Since those were days when many people still knew Latin, the phrase bona fide was used as a kind of password at the threshold of the pubs: “Aye, lad, are ye bona fide?” Meaning, “Are you telling me in good faith that you are truly from outside Dublin?” If so, the lad could enjoy a late-night whiskey. In the Coen brothers’ rumpus of a movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) asks his ex-wife, Penny Wharvey McGill (Holly Hunter) why she’s told everyone that he was hit by a train. Exasperated, she says, “Lots of respectable people have been hit by trains… What was I gonna tell them, that you got sent to the penal farm and I divorced you from shame?” Ulysses responds, “Uh, I take your point. But it does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny.” Rolling her eyes, Penny says: “Vernon here’s got a job. Vernon’s got prospects. He’s bona fide. What are you?” Companion words include the anguished antonym malafide, bad faith, a word well worth reviving.
BONDMAID
A woman bound to the land or the lord, as a bondman was bound. One of the notorious “lost words” from the first edition of the OED. It’s editor, the venerable James Murray, who was the very personification of “philosophical calm,” was mortified to learn that shortly after the “B” volume had been mailed to the publisher the white slip with the inscription of bondmaid was found under an unturned pile of fellow words. In 1901, fourteen years after the famed first edition appeared, Murray wrote to a caviling correspondent: “I am afraid it is quite true that the word bondmaid has been omitted from the Dictionary, a most regrettable fact.” Upon review of that project the omission becomes understandable, if you consider that Murray had to comb through 5-6 million slips or citations, from which he and his assistants in the “Scriptorium” chose 1.25 million headwords. Later lexicographers have rued the seemingly random process by which some words were included and others went missing, for lack of time or lack of space, such as the incandescent lamprocarpous, defined as “having shining fruit,” and the clangorous collide, to crash into.
BOONDOCKS
A distant place, the remote mountains, the farthest reaches of civilization . A favorite word of mine, popularized in books and movies, as well as by baseball announcers such as the legendary Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who used the word to describe long home runs: “Kaline swings—and it’s a long belt to left field—it’s long gone—way back into the boondocks!” Its origins are as surprising as they are fascinating: not the docks of longshoremen like Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, but the rice terraces and head-hunting villages of the far, faraway Philippines. The root word is bundok, a Kapampangan word for “mountains” learned the hard way by American GIs who were captured by the Japanese army during World War II while fighting in central Luzon. The few who escaped the Bataan Death March disappeared into the remote villa
ges of northern Luzon, where Filipino rebels and the last of the headhunters still controlled the rice-terraced bundoks. Those who survived described where they’d waited out the war as “in the bundoks,” which later became our boondocks. Companion words include the short version, the boonies, and its distant cousin boondoggle, a sonicky word, as Roy Blount, Jr. calls the ones that sound as great as they appear on the page, for a useless task, a futile project that wastes time and money, coined in 1929 by American Scoutmaster Robert Link.
BORBORYGMUS
Stomach growls; the rumble in the jungle of your tummy. Our word descends from the Greek borborugmos, from borboryzein , to rumble (no kidding) which meant the same then as it does now, the burbling sounds issuing forth from your intestinal passing of gas. This is a great word to pull out around the Thanksgiving table when the snarls and growls coming from within the bowels of your guests threatens to drown out the cheers and jeers coming from the football game on television. Kids tend to be especially delighted with this word because it sounds as goofy as the Looney Tunes sounds coming from their own stomachs. For those who are uncertain how the word can possibly be used, see Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada: “All the toilets and water pipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.” Companion words include eructation , commonly called burping, the expulsion of air from the stomach, and flatus, the explosion from the other end, an exercise school kids and “bromance” screenwriters call farting. And a severe case of borborygmi results in what my elegantly Victorian English Grandpa Sydney used to call collywobbles, severe cramping and diarrhea. Incidentally, the art of listening to the symphony of stomach sounds and discerning what they mean is called auscultation.
BOUDOIR
A private room where a woman goes to be alone to brood to her heart’s content. When dinner parties would break up during the glory days of France, the custom was for the men to withdraw to the smoking room for cigars, brandy, and manly talk. Women, in contrast, were expected to retreat to the boudoir, to brood, after the French bouder, to pout, sulk. If the reader is brooding over the origins of the selfsame word brood, it derives from the Anglo-Saxon brod, for “heat.” Centuries of careful farmyard observation taught farmers that when hens sit on or brood their eggs, their heat will help hatch the baby chicks. Eventually, that long, slow process stood for the prolonged meditations of those brooding over problems and “hatching” plots. “As she sallied forth from her boudoir,” wrote William Manchester, “you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.” Novelist Kathleen Winsor writes, “It was a woman’s bedroom, actually a boudoir, and no man belonged in it except by invitation.” A curious companion word is parlor, which was the room reserved in an otherwise silent monastery for speaking, from the French parlez. Companion words include gueuloir, a “shouting room,” which is what Gustave Flaubert called his study. More often than he liked, he spent hours searching for le mot juste, just the one right word to use in his stories or novels. So he tended to alternate the usual writer’s brooding with yelling at himself.
BRICOLEUR (FRENCH)
One who assembles, creates, puts together. Coined by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to explain how the “primitive mind” works. He writes that a bricoleur is “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. … Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage.’ … Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane. … The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks. … The rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand.’” Levi-Strauss’s work was enormously important in Paris during the 1940s and ‘50s, and he inspired artists such as Picasso and Braque. Psychologists such as James Hillman use the word to illuminate how the soul works: “Let us imagine the dream-work to be an activity, less of a censor than of a bricoleur. … The dream bricoleur is a handyman, who takes the bits of junk left over from the day and potters around with them.” Companion words include bricolage, the result of the bricoleur’s handiwork, “an assembly, montage, or reconstruction that is intended to reflect the complex and rich form of its subject”—a word soon discovered by French artists, who saw in the word an apt metaphor for the assembly process of many avant-garde artists. In 1965, American Anthropologist described man as a “creator of Culture, like a bricoleur … who makes constructions for the fun of the thing out of anything that is lying around.” From the French bricole, trifle, and Italian briccola.
BROADCAST
To spread the good word. Originally, it meant “to scatter seed,” which was recorded in 1767, and in many paintings, such as Van Gogh’s The Sower, which depicts a shadowy farmer throwing seeds across his fields. In The Yellow House, an account of the years in which Van Gogh and Gauguin lived together in Arles, Martin Gayford writes, “In addition to the familiar terrain, the sower broadcasting his seed was an image that had been with him almost since he had become an artist.” In 1921, only thirty years after Van Gogh’s death, at 37, the verb was applied to spreading the word over radio waves, casting word seeds so ideas might grow. During the war in Southeast Asia, the notorious Hanoi Hannah said, “Because the GIs were sent massively to South Vietnam, maybe it’s a good idea to have a broadcast for them.” Hall of Fame baseball announcer Ernie Harwell says, with his trademark modesty, “I’ve been lucky to broadcast some great events and to broadcast the exploits of some great players.”
BROWNSTUDY
Melancholic reflections in the soul’s own studio. As the lifelong melancholic Dr. Johnson defined it, “Gloomy meditations; study in which we direct our thoughts to no certain point.” Earliest mention comes in a 1532 book, Dice-Play, which augured the coming meaning: “Lack of company will soon lead a man into a brown study.” Here we have a 16th-century word for deep, or to some, gloomy, meditation, from the color brown, which used to refer to a gloomy mental condition, and study, which meant during the late medieval period any form of intense meditation. This monochromatic word was used by the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson to describe his melancholy in several letters. It derives from the French sombre-reverie, and later brow-study, as in “fevered brow,” from Old German braun or aug-braun, eyebrow. Today, in creative circles, it refers to abstraction, absentmindedness, deep thought. Brewer cites a verse from William Congreve’s “An Impossible Thing”: “Invention flags, his brain grows muddy, / And black despair succeeds brown study.” Judy Garland’s version of “Melancholy Baby,” in the 1954 movie “A Star is Born,” captures the heartrending emotion of one overcome in the brownstudy of life. There are many modern equivalents, the most colorful being “in a blue funk,” which the OED defines as “extreme nervousness, tremulous dread.”
BUCCANEER
A pirate, swashbuckler, adventurer. The first buccaneers looked very little like the debonair Errol Flynn in The Pirate, or even the demented Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean . Instead, they were ordinary islanders, boucans, who smoked meat on a wooden rack placed over an open fire. Boucan was what 17th-century French settlers heard of the original Tupi Caribbean word mukem, which makes you wonder how closely they were listening. Later, boucanier became a sobriquet for the privateers and outlaws who hid in the remote woods of the West Indies and later grew fond of barbecuing their meats over a fire. Speaking of which, if you look up buccaneer, you’ll soon come across the Dominican barbacoa, from which we get one of our favorite backyard activities, the barbecue. Companion word: pirate, as in the five-time World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates, so called in 1890 because of the reputed “piratical” practices of the new owners, who switched from the old American Association to the National League. Today, their nickname just happens to be “the Bucs” or “the Buccos,” short for buccaneer. Considering how many Pittsburgh Pirates star players have come from the Caribbean, such as Puerto Rico’s charismatic Roberto Clemente and the Dominican Republic’s versatile Feli
pe Alou, buccaneer is another wonderful example of how words can often go home again.
BUDGET
An idealistic plan to spend only what is earned. Originally, a budget was a small sack full of money, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has tried to keep to a budget ever since, but it evolved into the act of sorting money into several little bags. This is a useful visualization for sorting out expenses. Our English word derives from the Latin bulga, a bag, from French bouge, and its diminutive bougette, a pouch. Traynor writes that it was “a tinker’s traveling bag for holding implements of his trade; hence a tramp’s bag.” Companion words would have to include bankrupt, the condition of those who haven’t kept to a budget. This unfortunate word that dates back to 1533, from the Italian, banca rotta, a broken bench, from banca, a moneylender’s shop or bench, and rotta, broken, defeated, interrupted. The 18th-century lexicographer Brewer lends a colorful backstory in his indispensable Fables and Phrases: “In Italy, when a moneylender was unable to continue business his bench or counter was broken up, and he was spoken of as a banca rotta—i.e., a bankrupt.” Updating this observation, novelist John Updike writes: “Bankruptcy is a sacred site, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.” Companion words include banquet, from banchetto, and rupture, from rotta. The modern sense of “morally or intellectually bankrupt ” means ethically or mentally bereft. Consider also mountebank, a charlatan, from montare, to mount, banca, bench, figuratively, someone who lends money at usurious rates to bankrupt people.
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