Wordcatcher
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CATAWAMPUS
Awry, askew, askance. A bumptious-sounding Appalachian word, first recorded in 1840, for “mixed up; out of balance.” As the lexicographers say, it’s O.O.O., of obscure origin, but we can rest assured in this case that it is probably of “humorous formation.” If you’re on the mountain overlooking Knoxville and an old hunter says, “You’re all catawampus,” he means you’re lost, or you’ve lurched off track, or maybe you need a chiropractor, or maybe he thinks you’re as crooked as the road you just meandered down in your ’32 Ford truck. For some recondite reason that should keep the word mavens busy for a thousand years, there is a wide raft of companion words for this helter-skelter condition. They include farrago, another country word, meaning a mix of available grains to feed animals; mishmash, and mumblejumble. Hodgepodge is a French-Dutch corruption of hotchpot, a confused medley, according to Skeat. In “The Place of Humbug” Lewis Carroll wrote, “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, / And each damp thing that creeps and crawls / Went wobble-wobble on the walls.” Companion words include catawamptious, crooked, like a politician on the take, and Old Western slang for “chawed up, demolished, utterly defeated.”
CATCH
An 800-year-old word used to describe a game that’s been played for at least thousands of years. Recent excavations along the Nile reveal Egyptian tomb paintings forty-five centuries old of a pharaoh playing catch with his priests and swinging a black stick at a palm-leaf-wrapped ball. Compared with that veteran status, our English word catch is a rookie, first brought up from the minor leagues of language in 1205 AD. The sequence is familiar to all hunters and ballplayers. Catch ricochets to us from Old French cachier, to hunt, chase, from the Latin captare, to seize, and capere, to take hold. Thus, to catch is to take hold of what has been chased down, whether a long belt to left field or a long-tailed rabbit. The expression “a good catch” took on romantic connotations at the end of the 16th century as a way to describe a nubile young woman or a winsome lad as someone “worth catching.” Jane Austen adapted the phrase for one of her characters who was vying “to catch the eye” of someone who had caught hers. Companion words include capable, meaning “with ability,” and catchy, memorable. Catchword is a dictionary term for a word printed in the lower right-hand corner of each page of a book that signals what the first word will be on the following page. Catchy phrases include catch as catch can, recorded in 1393, and the foot-tapping song “Catch Me If You Can,” recorded by the Dave Clark Five in 1965. Catch-22 , Joseph Heller’s famous novel title, refers to a notorious “catch” (or gotcha) in military law that relates to a bomber pilot’s decision to fly or not to fly combat missions. If the pilot never asks to be relieved, he can be officially regarded as insane—and thus eligible to be grounded. But if he does ask, it is interpreted as him having the wherewithal to recognize the danger involved, a sign that he isn’t crazy. So he has to keep flying more missions. And there is the lesser-known, but to some of us just as stirring, “Catch 25.” Legend has it that during a break on the set of Citizen Kane the 25-year-old Orson Wells shouted: “Who’s got a baseball? Let’s play catch!” Finally, there is wordcatcher, an alert reader who is always ready for the coruscating catch of a particularly beautiful, unusual, precise, or eye-opening word in a book or conversation—and then equally ready to throw it over to the next reader, a playful act that keeps the game of wordcatching going on, infinitely.
Catch (Catch 22)
CHANTEPLEURE (FRENCH)
To sing and cry at the same time. A word to fill a void in our language, one that we’ve all felt and rarely been able to describe. Recall the time you attended your child’s school Christmas concert and when the sing-along time came at the end, with O Holy Night, you could barely lift your voice for all the emotion swelling in your heart. No English word fills the need to describe that beveled-edge moment on the verge of both elation and sorrow. But there is the lovely chantepleure in French, which defies precise derivation, other than from chanter, to sing, and pleurer, to weep. Perhaps it is the result of centuries of concerts in the bejeweled Saint-Chapelle, in Paris, or in that stone poem, Chartres Cathedral, or the triumphant tears inspired by the singing of “La Marseillaise” in the French classic Les Enfants du Paradise. Whatever its source, chantepleure is to language what sweet-and-sour sauce is to Chinese food. Companion words include chanticleer, clear-singing, as well as Chauntecleer, the proud rooster in the French fable Reynard the Fox. During the French invasion of Russia in 1812, those Russian prisoners who did not sing for their French captors were insulted as chanterapa. Then there’s merry-go-sorry, a merry-go-round of emotion, spinning you around from laughter to weeping. Synchronicity lives: as I type this word story, my son Jack brushes by me, casually chanting “Singin’ in the Rain,” the American equivalent of singing through your tears.
CHARACTER
An impressive life; the life that is incised on the soul. A sharp word with an incisive story. I’m reminded of the description of the face of a lovely old woman in Ballyconneelly, Connemara, where I lived in the 1980s. My neighbor, Mr. Keaney, called it a “lived-in face.” Originally, a kharacter was an engraving or stamping tool in ancient Greece, deriving from the verb kharassein, to sharpen, cut, incise, furrow, scratch, engrave. In Skeat’s dictionary of 13th-century slang, character has the meaning of “an engraved or stamped mark.” Not used in its modern sense of “distinctive qualities” until the 17th century, by the historian Clarendon (History of Great Rebellions), and later in the 18th century, when Noah Webster defines character as qualities that are “impressed by nature or habit” onto someone, distinguishing them from someone else. Thus, the early sense of kharacter, “to impress or stamp in a way that marked one thing differently from another,” has been likewise stamped deep into the language. Character is the etching of life’s trials and tribulations into our faces and souls, which distinguishes us from everyone else. Eventually, this sense led to character drawings and character portraits in literature and memoirs, and to character acting. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.” UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Sports don’t build character; they reveal it.” Annie Lamott, in Bird by Bird, writes, “Find out what your character cares about the most in the world, because then you will have discovered what’s at stake.” An obscure but compelling meaning for character, in Skeats, is as a synonym for “handwriting,” a belief that lives on in the work of handwriting experts. Companion words include characteristics and character flaw.
CHICANERY
Tricky talk, clever deceptions, unfair artifice. The deliberate practice of obscuring the truth that this tough-sounding word evokes is similar to the speculation about the word itself. The root word here is the unfortunately lost verb chicane, from French chicaner, to deceive, to wrangle. But the stratagem within chicanery reaches back to chicane, a dispute in the French bridge game described as “a whist hand without trumps.” The modern French verb retains the smoky atmosphere of an argument in a tense card game, “to quibble.” Skeat tracks it back even further to the Persian chuan, a crooked mallet, from mall, a club or bat. Still others insist it is an echo of a precursor to golf played long ago in Languedoc. In his day John Adams captured the pettifoggery of politics: “Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” The 19th-century Romantic novelist Ouida (a favorite of Oscar Wilde’s) wrote, “To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.”
CHIRM, CHYRME
Melancholic birdsong. A word you never thought possible for a moment you thought could never be expressed with mere language. Have you ever been outdoors in those air-crackling moments just before a rainstorm when a branch full of birds in a nearby tree begins to chirp or sing? Well, this is the word, in the lovely phrasing of
the 18th-century Scottish wordhunter Joseph Jamieson, “the mournful sound emitted by them, especially when collected together.” The OED’s definition is dolefully prosaic, chiming in with “noise, din, chatter, vocal noise, especially birds, with a secondary meaning of the noise of children on a playground, especially the mingled noise of many birds.” Murray’s anonymous contributor for this word must not have been fond of birdsong. Curious companion words include jargon, from Old French jargoun, twittering of birds. The Scottish chavish is second cousin to chyrme, defined by Rev. W. D. Parish as “a chattering or prattling noise of many persons speaking together. A noise made by a flock of birds.” We may collect these marvelous bird words in a “birdcage,” which in French is cajole, which gave us cajoler, to persuade by flattery or promises or to chatter like a blue jay. These words are birds-of-a-feather, what I like to think of as “observation words” that emerged from a lifetime of closely watching nature’s own theater, including bird behavior. It’s sweet to think that our own mating calls may have been inspired by untold generations listening to the cajoling, the flattery, the sweet-nothings of our fair-feathered friends, the birds, which adds a grace note to the romantically alluring power of Frank Sinatra’s crooning or Ella Fitzgerald’s scatting.
CLICHÉ
An overused, meaningless expression. Originally a printer’s term, from the French clicher, to stereotype, inspired by the sound cliquer, to click. The imitative sound is heard, The American Heritage Dictionary says, “when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a stereotype plate.” The stereotype block that reproduced the same word or image over and over led to the expression “stereotyped speech,” a word or phrase repeated time and time again, as if from a single engraving plate. Piranesi’s enormously popular engravings of the ruins of Rome come to mind because they were struck so often they darkened until their details were smudged and imperceptible, not unlike a word that can’t be seen or understood anymore because it’s been repeated ad nauseam. In 1946, George Orwell described his bottom line for cliché-busting: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” On the other hand, Jack Kerouac playfully reminds us, in his novel Big Sur, “Clichés are truisms and all truisms are true.” Thus, at the end of the day it boggles the mind that we’re still between a rock and a hard place when it comes to using incredibly unique words that are dead as a doornail.
CLOUDERPUFFS
Scarcely visible summer clouds. Coined by Conrad Aiken, exercising his poetic license, which should inspire the rest of us to use our own while cricking our head to contemplate the marvels of the clouds once in a while. Clouderpuff is as subtly sonicky as it is dulcetly descriptive. Can we call them “sound-alikes”? It’s a little less showy than onomatopoeia. Ironically, this is one etymology that isn’t cloudy; it’s origins call for clear skies. Cloud derives from the Middle English clud, a mass of vapors, which happens to be the same word as the Anglo-Saxon clud, a round mass, mass of rock, hill, from the Teutonic root kleu, to stick together. The American Heritage Dictionary points out that until the 12th century cloud and sky were essentially the same word in English, presumably because the skies were so often cloudy even seven centuries ago. These two seemingly unrelated words eventually gave us clew, and clod. If you look up cloud, so to speak, you’ll see the poetic classifications that weren’t officially decided upon until Luke Howard, an 18th-century amateur meteorologist in London, named the three basic families: cirrus, cumulus, and stratus. The mirror image for the melodic clouderpuff could be blunderhead, coined by essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg. In autumn 1870 the English poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins saw a flotilla of clouds and described them in his inimitable way: “One great stack in particular over Pendle was knoppled all over in fine snowy tufts and penciled with bloom-shadow.”
COMPANION
A close friend. In the Old World wayward travelers were so respected that if one knocked on your door and asked for food and shelter, you were bound by tradition to help. The Old Testament and Greek myths exhorted everyone to treat a stranger well because he or she could be an angel or a god in disguise. The custom evolved that once you invited a stranger inside your home and broke bread with them you were expected to treat them well; to harm them was considered an act of treachery, a breaking of millennia-old rules of hospitality. The custom of breaking bread in the spirit of friendship is present to this day in the intimacy of the word companion, which derives from the Latin com, together, plus panis, bread, and by extension, “someone to share bread with.” Thus, a companion is a friend with whom you break bread, a bread-brother or sister. Likewise, the marvelous phrase boon companion, which adds the yeasty boon, meaning “benefit, good fortune, or timely blessing,” and is related to the Scottish bonnie, by way of the Latin bonus, good. Boon reappears in bon vivant, one fond of good living. Taken together, boon companions are jolly friends such as Robin Hood and his Merry Men, or Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and theirs. As the English proverb has it, “Be kind to your friends; if it weren’t for them, you would be a total stranger.”
CONTEMPLATE
The act of thinking deeply, observing attentively. The ancients described it as the urge to consider “the signature of all things.” The word comes down to us from the 13th-century Latin contemplationem, the act of looking at, and contemplari, to observe. From con, with, and templum, an open space, originally an open space reserved for observation of augurs. Figuratively speaking, whenever we are thoughtful, deeply considering life’s perennial questions, we have stepped inside a temple, where we consider the signs within the sacred precinct. Traditionally, this was marked off with a line drawn in the ground by the augur, and was later demarcated with stones, gates, and doors. The earliest temples were where augurs read the signs; temple later entered English as the site for religious activities or musings of priests, ministers, and rabbis. In this holy place, from Old English haelan, to heal, and PIE kailo, whole, uninjured, the pilgrim believes he or she is closer to the gods. The Latin profanum—pro, before, fanum, the temple—provides an image of the profane person hovering outside the threshold or even being banished from the House of Holies. Closely related is fanatic, Latin fanaticus, one who is inspired by the gods to the point of frenzy, transported with “temple madness.” Of course, this has devolved to fan, one who has an obsessive, near-religious relationship with a celebrity or a team. Taken too far, the affection can be sacrilegious, Latin for “picking up and carrying off sacred things.” Of such matters, we can say of ecologist Rachel Carson that she believed it was sacrilegious not to ponder the sacred wonders of nature. “It is a wholesome and necessary thing,” she wrote, “for us to turn again to the earth and in contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.”
Contemplate
CONVERSATION
An exchange of words, thoughts, and friendship. Conversation is communication by way of dialogue. Its origins are a walk through history, reaching back to 1352 with the Latin conversatio, literally “to turn around with,” from com, with, and vertare, which also gave us versus. Slowly, this was adapted by the French to converser, to live or deal with—figuratively, a way in which people conduct themselves. By 1580, we can see a classic painted word beginning to appear: two or more people walking and talking together, which is the very heart of conversing. By the 16th century, conversation was a euphemism for “sexual intercourse,” presaging the expression criminal conversation, which became a legal term for adultery by the late 18th century. Companion words include conversant, familiar with, reversation, switching directions in talk, and tergiversation, the evasion of the truth in conversation. The euphonious eutrapely was Aristotle’s word for someone “pleasant in conversation.” His teacher’s teacher, Socrates, often invited to dinner a man named Deipnoso, “a wise and witty conversationalist,” which gave us the word deipnosophist . Conversely, deipnophobia is the fear of dinner parties. The cross-dressing Scottish poet and traveler William Sharpe’s middle name was “Con
versation.” According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson loved “the sport of conversation.” Companion words include persefleur, a banterer, persiflage, light conversation, subtilist, a subtle conversationalist, causeur, a talkative person. And from the great Canadian essayist Alberto Manquel, a reminder that in Turkish muhabbet means both “conversation” and “love.”
COOL
In the know, hip to the connotations. According to the Hipster Dictionary, cool is “A-OK, hep, unworried, calm, relaxed,” as in “real gone daddy, dig dong daddy, hepcat.” A very cool definition. Still, it’s a living paradox of a word. The moment anything is labeled cool it’s immediately something else, which is the sleeves-rolled-up job of street slang, jargon, argot, and cant. It’s cant that can do, a quality that an ordinary dictionary can’t cant. A cool caveat has been registered by jazz historian Ted Gioia in The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, where he writes that the term has become “a verbal tic expressing approval of any sort … applicable to anything that is current or popular or even just acceptable.” Cool is possibly from the Yoruba, where it was once defined thus: “Coolness is correct way to present yourselves to human beings.” Calvin confides to Hobbes in the Sunday funnies, “What fun is it being cool if you can’t wear a sombrero? ” Biographer Frank Buchmann-Miller writes, “Lester Young remains one of the great jazz icons—the first paragon of cool and an inspiration to countless musicians, from Charlie Parker to Stan Getz.” Thus, asking what cool is is like asking Louis Armstrong what jazz is: “If you have to ask, there just ain’t no telling ya.” You know it when you see it; you’re it without even trying. To dig the essence of cool, you have to know the depths of dig, which means “to get it, be in on it, comprehend, approve,” and which Cassidy claims for Irish tuig, to understand. The paragon of cool, jazz man Sidney Bechet, called his music “the remembering song. There is so much to remember.” Now that’s cool without ever uttering the word, a hip revelation of character.