CORNUCOPIA
An inexhaustible source. We say that a great bookstore is a cornucopia of reading pleasure, a farmer’s market is a cornucopia of food, or, as my son reminds me, an Apple store is a cornucopia of computers. When we use the word we are echoing an old story that comes down to us in the Latin capricornus, from cornu copiæ, literally a “horn of plenty.” There is myth aplenty stored up in the word. According to the old taletellers, Zeus placed his wet nurse, Amaltheia, the “horned goat,” in the sky in thanks for acting as his nursemaid when he was an infant. So grateful was he that he took one of her horns and transformed it into the “horn of plenty,” one that would replenish itself forever with food at the mere whim of the owner. In literature, the word is often used metaphorically, as when William Styron answered George Plimpton’s question, in The Paris Review, about competition in the world of writers. “I’m enormously pleased when one of my contemporaries comes out with a good book because it means, among other things, that the written word is gaining force. It’s good for us to be throwing these fine novels into the cultural cornucopia.” In art and architecture a cornucopia is usually depicted as a curved goat’s horn overflowing with flowers, fruit, and grain, signifying abundance. So a dictionary is a cornucopia of words; a cornucopia is a dictionary of myth. Companion words include capricornified, defined by the inimitable Captain Grosse, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, as “cuckolded, hornified.”
CRAIC (IRISH)
A good time, where the action is, the real thing. Old Irish, used in the most common expression from Galway to Dublin: “Where’s the craic?” [pronounced “crack”]. It is asked in pubs, streets, schools, after mass, and before leave-taking, meaning, “Where’s the fun, the good time, the best people, the night life, the craic?” To go in search of the craic could refer to the best pint of Guinness, the best seisun (a spontaneous music session), the prettiest colleens, or the hunkiest lads. In Ireland, craic is to social life as Joyce’s Ulysses is to literature, U2 to music, and Tullymore Dew to whiskey. Its discovery is the result of an all-day, all-night search, not unlike Leopold Bloom’s twenty-four-hour odyssey in search of love around Dublin. James A. C. Stevenson explains, in his Dictionary of Scots Words & Phrases, that the Scottish word crack as a sharp noise, as chat or conversation , and offers up the old Scottish expression, “Gie’s your crack” (“Tell me your news.”) In “Yesterday’s Men,” the Irish rock band Celtic Thunder sings: “Farewell to the paydays, the pints and the craic / Oh, We gave them our best years now they’ve paid us back.”
CRAZY
Cracked, off-kilter, cockamamie, insane. Originally a verb, craze, which meant to “break, crush, or shatter,” from Old French acraser and the Old Norse krasa, “to crackle.” The Swedish phrase “Sla I kras” renders a dynamic picture of its original meaning, to be “dashed or broken to pieces.” Figuratively, it came to refer to how the mind and spirit can be dashed or broken, and eventually led to the current sense of a psychological “crack-up,” worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In street slang, crazy means “good, superlative, wild, the best, real gone.” Companion words include craze, a mania or fad; crazy quilt, an eccentric pattern, and crazy, the Roaring Twenties slang for “cool, hip, with it.” Colloquial phrases include “Crazy as two left shoes,” “crazy like a fox,” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” his first hit song: “I’m crazy for crying, crazy for trying, and I’m crazy for loving you.” A vibrant companion word is derange, from French déranger, and Old French desrengier, disarrange, from the Indo-European prefix des-, to do the opposite of. Thus, Baudelaire was right when he suggested that a poet had to be a little crazy and intentionally derange the senses, as in rearrange them to reflect the shattered reality of life. Crazy as it sounds, the Swedish actor Peter Stormare tries to explain the secret meaning behind the cult movie The Big Lebowski, where he appears as one of the demented enforcers, like this: “The craziness of being a human being, and ending up in such a mess.”
CRUISE
To sail, cross, ease by, search for love trouble. The word didn’t begin with luxurious associations of bourgeois people cruising the Seven Seas. Cruise began as a term for pirate attacks. Around 1651 it arrived in the port of English usage from the Dutch kruisen, to sail to and fro, and kruis, cross, from Latin crux. Thus, to cruise is to cross a body of water, preferably exotic; figuratively, a cruise was closer to a crisscross, a medieval sailing pattern, up and down, back and forth, used by ships to avoid being captured by those dreaded pirates. Companion words include the naval cruiser from 1679, and 250 years later, in 1929, the police cruiser. Later, the rapscallion association was co-opted, like so much bohemian behavior, by the well-to-do who went sailing on their own leisurely schedules rather than officially ordained schedules, thereby operating outside protocol, outside usual time. To say they were cruising to be amusing wouldn’t be sailing off course.
CUSHLAMOCRE (IRISH)
A rarified expression for “darling” or “sweetheart.” A lullaby of a word, a sweet nothing with a brogue. The crusty Clint Eastwood played a boxing trainer who reads an Irish-English dictionary between training sessions in the movie Million Dollar Baby. While riffling those pages he discovered this honey of a word, which literally means “vein in my heart,” deriving from Cushla, from O cuisle, meaning “the vein or pulse of my heart.” Companion words include sweetening, sweetie, and sweeting, Old English for “sweetheart, lover,” used by Shakespeare in Othello: “All’s well sweeting, / Come away to bed.” A sweetheart in Yorkshire, in less-than-sweet contrast, is the rough-and-tumble wonder-wench. A ladylove in Italy is the more dulcet-sounding inamorata.
D
DAMN
A cuss world; a mild expletive-deleted; no small escape valve. Origin stories differ radically (from radix, root). The traditional but conservative derivation, issuing from the hallowed halls of The Oxford Book of Word Histories, traces damn back to the Old French dam(p)ner, from Latin dampnare , to inflict a loss on, from damnun, loss or damage. Damn, if there isn’t an alternative reading. Captain Grosse offers a far more picturesque source: dam, a small Indian coin, mentioned in the Genoa code of laws. Accordingly, the common English expression “I do not care a dam” arose, for “I do not care a farthing for it.” Not to worry. Recent research reported in The Week suggests that a little swearing after hitting your thumb with a hammer may be good for your blood pressure. It could just as well be called the “Professor Higgins syndrome,” after the speech teacher in My Fair Lady who falls hopelessly in love with the fetching Eliza Doolittle, singing, “Damn, damn, damn, I’ve grown accustomed to her face…” Companion words include damnation and damage, plus innumerable euphemistic variations such as darn, dagnabbit, and the Appalachian euphemism dad-burned.
DASTARDLY
A varmint of an adjective, a villainous word dressed up in a black hat and handlebar mustache, signaling cowardly, ignoble behavior. Although dastardly may sound as if it hails from a 1940s Western shot in Monument Valley, it actually derives from adastriga, an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dwarf; a poltroon; a man infamous for fear.” Ansel Adam writes in his memoirs about his seventh-grade teacher who scolded him for reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Shelley was a dastardly atheist!” If you’re wondering, as I did, whether there is a noun at the heart of the word, consider these lines by John Dr yden (not John Ford), who wrote, “Dastard and drunkard, mean and insolent; / Tongue-valiant hero, vaunter of thy might, / In threats the foremost, but the last in the fight.” Similarly, a certain George McDuffle alliterated this amazing apothegm: “He who dallies is a dastard, he who doubts is damned.”
DAYMARE
An anxiety attack, personal pandemonium. Obscure but useful, and dating back to 1713, daymare refers to sudden claustrophobic or crushing mood swings while wide awake. Today, we call them “panic attacks,” from pan, god of terror. Daymare is to nightmare as daydream is to nightdream. It is a circus mirror image, twisting, turning, elongating, foreshortening our worst fears. The Anglo-Sa
xon daymare derives from the old Sanskrit dah, to burn, and mare, horse, with possible influence from the ancient demon horse-god Mare. During medieval times the reigning belief about the cause of nightmares was that the spirit of a horse lay on the stomach of an anxiety-ridden sleeper. Dr. Johnson provides us with another of his inimitable definitions: “a morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” Thus, a nightmare is the mythic image that embodies the terror of being unable to breathe in the dead of night, and the torment of feeling crushed by psychological pressure, tormented by bad dreams; and a daymare is the mythic image of morbid fears that come like an incubus between dawn and dusk. In Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the silliest prince of darkness of them all, Leslie Nielsen, moans, “It is nighttime, so it wasn’t real. I was having a daymare.”
DELPHIC
An oracular word, a divine proclamation, a piece of ambiguous advice. During classical times Delphic meant divinely inspired wisdom and then reversed direction in modern times. Its origins are echoic, from the sacred site of Delphi, after the oracle who sat on her tripod in the Temple of Apollo. Her proclamations were famously ambiguous, even riddlic: “Thou Shalt Go Thou Shalt Return Never By War Shall You Perish,” For centuries afterward, the debate raged: Where does the comma go? The anonymous and ignominious Greek warrior who asked her the question chose to believe the comma went before the word never, rather than after it—and died in the battle he had been subtly warned about. Considering the curious fact that only seventy-three or so recorded utterances of the oracle have been identified, its hold on Western memory has been tenacious. To doubt its wisdom was inadvisable, as Aesop learned the hard way. When he mocked the oracle in one of his stories he was thrown off the cliff that overlooks Delphi. Thus, advice from Delphi was considered wisely ambivalent, revealing the character as well as the destiny of the one who asked the question. Companion words include oracular, from the Latin orare, to pray; Apolloniac , Apollo-like; and Sibylline, the Roman equivalent of Delphic, like the Sibyl of Montparnasse, Gertrude Stein.
DESULTORY
Unplanned, unconnected, unsatisfying. To be desultory means to jump around, meander from topic to topic without any rhyme or reason, a practice that makes it hard to finish anything. The backstory tells us why. The Romans called the circus performer who made the mob gasp by jumping from one horse to another a desultory, from the Latin desilio, to jump down, from desalire, to leap. Picture a cross between Ben-Hur, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Indiana Jones. The Roman orator Seneca wrote, “Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.” Since 1581 we have used the word in English to describe someone who leaps around in a conversation or speech. But the word has an upside, if you can stay with me for a moment. Consider the marvel of a fiercely focused horse-leaper, actually called a desultory, whose job it was to stay focused on the job at hand, an ability which also lent us the word consultant, as well as the word result, which is the consequence of an experience that “leaps back” at you. Companion words for the versatile desalire, from the Latin salire, include sally, to leap ahead (as in “to sally forth”) and the lascivious salacious, which originally referred to a male animal that lustily “leaps upon” a female. If you’re feeling slightly jaded about all these old words, remember that jaded is Middle English for a horse whose spirit has been broken, and has been crippled by old age.
DICTIONARY
A collection of words organized alphabetically, a collision of meanings, a river of origins, a garden of citations. “The universe in alphabetical order,” in the marvelous description by Anatole France. Historian Jonathan Green credits Aristophanes of Byzantium with the compiling of the first dictionary, which he simply called Leixis, or Words, in 200 BC. So now we know that folks have been consulting them for at least 2,200 years, but they offer more meaning than meanings alone. Théophile Gautier read them to improve his poetry, Walter Pater regularly consulted them to keep his prose warm and marmoreal. Of all people, Mae West may have the most memorable line about one. After learning that she had inspired the name for a life jacket, she said, “I’ve been in Who’s Who and in “What’s What” but this is the first time I’ve ever been in a dictionary.” What would she have said if she knew her ample bosom had also inspired the name for what happens to a parachute when one of the lines comes across the top and it forms a giant bra? Finally, I find it boundlessly charming to discover that one of the very first dictionaries for young people was called the Promptorium Parvuloru—in English, “The Prompt for the Young” or “Treasure House of Words for the Young.” Thus, a dictionary doesn’t merely give us a little information about a word or two we are looking up, but it prompts us to think longer and harder about them. Writing in a letter to Fransesco Sastres (August 21, 1784), Dr. Johnson said, “Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” For some reason, in Spain and Mexico dictionaries are called “donkey-killers,” perhaps because of the mulish demands on them to carry great loads of meaning across treacherous lands of meaninglessness.
DINOSAUR
A humungous, mostly carnivorous, occasionally herbivorous, now extinct reptile of the Mesozoic Era. Coined, in 1841, by Richard Owen, from the Greek deinos, terrible, and sauros, lizard. No ordinary neologism, but a dramatic coining that was minted shortly after Darwin’s radical publication of the Descent of Man. Together, the discoveries of fossils and human origins were arguments marshaled against the contemporary belief that the world was only 6,000 years old. Bishop Ussher, of Dublin, pinned the time down to the precise day and hour: January 1, 4004 BCE at 9 A.M. In its own way that historical fact underscores Emerson’s definition of language as “fossil poetr y.” In defense of science, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own. Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity.” Figuratively, a dinosaur suggests something or someone terribly outdated. Companion words include saurian, lizardlike, and the ever-popular lounge-lizard, a ladies’ man or a bar slut who slinks around bars chatting up rich women or men with come-on lines a million years out of date.
DRACHENFUTTER
An olive branch to your lover or spouse. This raspy but funny-sounding word is Old German for “dragon fodder,” or “food for the dragon.” According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, dragon derives from the Latin draconem, and the earlier Greek drakon, serpent, and derkomai, to see, which Skeat says reflects its “supposedly sharp sight.” If the reader dares to edge up close enough to feel the breath of this beastly word, you’ll learn that it refers to a timorous peace offering, a guilt gift, to an angry spouse or doubting lover. Think of a box of chocolates, red roses, a diamond ring. The word suggests that we starve the beast of lust, feed the dragon of love. For the temptations are never-ending, as suggested in that “sparkler of a word,” as Novobatsky and Shea call the old gems, gandermooner, a man who takes more than a gander at other women during the moon or month after his wife gives birth. Companion words include draconian , strict in discipline, and dragoon, a mounted soldier who bore a standard festooned with a dragon.
DUDE
A city slicker who vacations on a Western ranch; a flamboyant dresser; an informal greeting, as in “Hey, dude.” For centuries a dude was a dandy, a swell, a fastidious aesthete, according to Thorndike-Barnhart. For such a hip expression, its origins and definition have tended to be so hopelessly opaque in traditional dictionaries that some have simply surrendered, as the OED does in its attribution of O.O.O., “of obscure origin.” By far the most compelling definition comes from Daniel Cassidy, who devotes an entire chapter in How the Irish Invented Slang to the Irish root dúd, a foolish looking fellow, a dolt, a numbskull, an eavesdropper, and later, Irish-American street slang for young swells on a spree in the bohemian
circles of the concert halls, saloons, and theaters in late-19th-century New York. He cites a clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle in 1883: “A new word has been coined, d-u-d-e. … Nobody knows where it came from, but it sprung into popularity in the last two weeks and now ever ybody’s using it.” Thus, what began as a dud in Ireland, a dolt, a clown, a rubbernecker, came to America with the immigrants, evolving into the Irish-American dude. How cool is that—117 years ago everybody was saying “dude.” By the 1950s, dudes are “suave cats” hitting the bongos, which evokes an episode of Dobie Gillis on the old Philco. But as Bill Cosby says, I told you those stories to tell you this one. In 2004, I came home one night to several messages from a guy who claimed to be “the Dude.” I felt a Cheshire Cat grin crawl across my face when I looked up his website. His real name was Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for “the Dude” in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. As played by Jeff Bridges, “the Dude” is the love child of a hundred years of dude lore, a hippie slacker trapped in a Chandleresque detective story. The plot is baroque, the banter raunchy, and the humor as subtle as a machine gun. What holds it together is a word—abide, as in “the Dude abides.” To abide is to endure, outlast, continue, hold out, wait, prepare for; from a, to, and bide, dwell. Thus, a dude lives according to his or her own dudeness, which is a philosophy, a credo, a way to conduct yourself, a way to keep it together, stay cool, outlast everyone else who gives in, a way to stand by your friends, man, while the whole world changes around you.
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