DUENDE (SPANISH)
The blood surge, the vital force, the source of all impassioned art. When passion pales as an expression, duende is a fierce alternative to sentimental notions of inspiration. The Gypsies gave us this word for “little folk,” or “the blood of the earth,” from the Spanish duen de casa, master of the house. Duende eludes ordinary definitions, such as the pallid “power to attract via personal charm,” according to one usually reliable dictionary. Instead, duende is a lapidary word, with more levels than Troy. Traditionally, duende was simply a “playful hobgoblin,” a prankster spirit. To comprehend it, you need to turn to a poet like Federico García Lorca, who knew of an older, deeper aspect of the word in his native Andalusia: a power that could be found in the “deep songs” of certain poets, on the dance floors of flamenco dancers, the cries from truly gifted guitar players, and the flourishes of toreros; from artists who possessed—or were possessed by—duende. More than virtuosity, different from inspiration, duende, Lorca believed, couldn’t be developed; it needed to be wrestled to the ground, subdued, then absorbed. For Lorca, art, poetry, music, playwriting were a quest for the truth of life, not entertainment; it was irrational, earthbound, and profoundly aware of death, down in the “bitter root.” “The duende,” he wrote in Deep Song, “is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.” Later, plumbing the depths of duende, he wrote that it is “the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art.”
Duende (Lorca in Havana)
DUNCE
A fool, a backward thinker. “Introduced by Aquinas’ disciples in ridicule of disciples of John Duns Scotus, from Dunce, Berwickshire, supporter of old theology vs new theology, opponents of progress.” A contemptuous word, named after the controversial Scottish philosopher John Duns Scotus, who was widely read in the Middle Ages, then widely reviled in the Renaissance. His influence led to a veritable war of words between the old learning of the Dunsmen, Dunses, or Dunces, and the new scholasticism. As usual, Dr. Johnson had a thing or two to say about them: “It was worthwhile being a dunce then [in the days of Swift and Pope]. Ah, sir, hadst thou lived in those days! It is not worth while being a dunce now, when there are no wits.” Companion words include dunce’s cap, as worn by Alfalfa in The Little Rascals, whose punishment for his antics was to sit in the corner of the one-room schoolhouse with the traditionally conical hat of shame plopped on his pointy little head. A dunce’s corner is the place where bad kids, like Dennis the Menace, are banished. The clever website that is also named Dunce’s Corner includes this witticism: “Oh, you play chess, huh? That’s sort of like checkers, right?”
DUPE
One who is easily fooled, a chump, patsy, sap, sucker, or pushover. An old hunting term from the French duppe (first recorded in 1426), and le huppe, the hoopoe, an extravagantly feathered but easily caught bird. The hunters knew a metaphor when they saw one, and the name naturally evolved into dupe, the personification of one who is equally easy to catch, or, in the argot of thieves, “a deceived person.” Thus a dupe is one who is easily gulled, an imitative word for an unfledged bird, and gullible, easily fooled, possibly from gullet, the esophagus, which tightens up whenever we try to swallow a lie, while its verb form, to dupe, is “to fool, to deceive, to take advantage of.” Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary offers gobemouche, French for “swallowing flies,” a person who swallows anything, as in gullible. An illuminating antonym is morosoph, a wise fool. Speaking of which, the On the Road journalist Charles Kuralt once defined a dupe as someone “trying to learn how to fool a trout with a little bit of floating fur and feather.”
E
ECLIPSE
To leave out, fail, overwhelm, pass by, suffer. In Skeat’s phrasing, “a failure, especially of the light of the sun.” The word’s origins are overshadowed only by its euphony. Our current word dates back to Middle English eclips, and the Greek ekleipsis, a leaving out, and ekleipein, to omit, forsake a usual place, fail to appear, from ek, out, and leipein, to leave. Eventually, eclipse came to refer to the complete or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another, as well as the passing into the shadow of a celestial body; figuratively, it came to mean “falling into obscurity, decline, the shadows,” as to one’s reputation. Companion words include the celestial ecliptic (c. 1391), “the circular path in the sky followed by the Sun, whose light is eclipsed when the moon approaches the line.” In a letter to Galileo, in 1611, Kepler wrote: “The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse.” Almost four centuries later, Stephenie Meyer presents the dilemma of the vampire hero of her novel Eclipse: “The clouds I can handle, but I can’t fight an eclipse.”
ELDRITCH
Eerie, uncanny, terrifying. A 14th-century word that stretches over the moors of language like a supernatural mist. The Concise Oxford Dictionary has only “weird, hideous,” as if it’s the scary uncle in the attic. We do know that by the late 18th century it had come to mean “frightful, repulsive, inexplicable.” and that eldritch is possibly a compound of elf and rich, kingdom. Thus, James A. C. Stevenson tracks down eldritch to the scratching sounds at the door, at midnight, in a cabin deep in the woods, which is a nastifying echo of the shenanigans of elves. Not the Keebler Cookie kind, but the ferocious spirits of the forest who guard a loathsome treasure that we may or may not wish to dig up. The Scottish national poet Robert Burns wrote, in “Address to the Deil”: “I’ve heard my reverend grannie say, / In lonely glens ye like to stray / Or where old ruined castles gray / Nod to the moon, / You fright the nightly wandering way / With eldritch croon.” Writer and essayist Cecil Day-Lewis wrote, in From Feathers to Iron, “Do not expect again a phoenix hour, / The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining, / Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease / Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.”
ENCYCLOPEDIA
A comprehensive book or collection of books. In every sense of the word, an encyclopedia attempts to provide a well-rounded education. If you look it up, you’ll find it derives from the Greek enkulclios, which originally meant “cyclical, periodic, ordinary,” plus paideia, learning. This led to the Latin cyclo, circle, and pedia, learning. As Skeat defines it, “circular or complete instruction,” from encyclo, to circle, and paeda, instruction. Such was the influence of Johnson’s prodigious English dictionary that when the French attempted to translate it they appointed the essayist Denis Diderot, who promptly gave up and forged ahead with a completely original work, the Encyclopédie, which became a hallmark of the French Enlightenment. Diderot’s goal was, he wrote, “to assemble the knowledge gathered over the face of the globe and to expose its general system to the men who come after us, so that the labors of centuries past do not prove useless to the centuries to come.” The most surprising interpretation of the word I know of comes from baseball star Yogi Berra, whose young boys once asked him to buy them an encyclopedia. His response deserves an old Bob Seger once-over-twice: “I had to walk to school, and so do you.”
Encyclopedia (Diderot)
ENIGMA
A secret, a riddle, a shadowy saying, a puzzling person. An arcane mystery, obscure or hidden meaning, or even more precisely, “a dark secret.” If you peer behind the curtain, you find the Greek enigmae, to speak darkly; enigmarein, dark sayings (“I speak in riddles”); aivos, tale, story; and finally enigmatic, meaning “from the stem.” Altogether, we find “a dark riddle told as a story from the stem.” Jane Austen wrote often about dark, mysterious strangers: “One cannot love a reserved person. … He’s my enigma.” One of the century’s most memorable lines was delivered by Winston Churchill in a description of Russia in a 1939 radio broadcast, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Later, he evoked the “dark saying” for the name of his “Enigma” project, which helped keep secret the Allies’ battle plans during World War II. Italia
n essayist Umberto Eco updates Churchill when he writes, “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” And the Riddler’s name in the Batman comics was Edward Nigma—E. Nigma.
ENTHUSIASM
Commonly reckoned as the luster of inspiration. More precisely, to the ancient Greeks enthusiasm signified the glow of “the god within,” or “to be full of the gods,” from the Greek enthousiasmos, possessed by a god. To my lights, enthusiasm is a form of inspiration but with the addition of passion and joy. By the early 17th century, the French evolution of the word, enthousiasme, took on the connotation of “religious fervor,” such as the ability to speak in tongues, but possibly also referring to persons who were mentally unbalanced, full of violent passions, suspicious because they claimed God spoke to them. Dr. Johnson wrote that an enthusiast was “one who vainly imagines a private revelation; one who has a vain confidence of his intercourse with God.” Personifying this posture for Johnson was poet John Milton, whom he denigrated as being “no better than a wild enthusiast.” But the shift to the modern sense was already under way, as evidenced by Boswell’s prescription for the well-lived life: “He who wishes to be successful, or happy, ought to be enthusiastical, that is to say very keen in all the occupations or diversions of life.” The eminent microbiologist René Dubos writes, “The phrase ‘a god within’ symbolizes for me the forces that create private worlds out of the universal stuff of the cosmos and thus enable life to express itself in countless individualities.” For Marlene Dietrich, “Latins are tenderly enthusiastic. In Brazil they throw flowers at you. In Argentina they throw themselves.” Companion words include the verb enthusing, as in “the critics were enthusing among themselves about Pavarotti’s performance,” and giddy, from the German gudiga, also possessed by a god. Thus, the modern figurative sense of enthusiasm evokes the God or gods or the divine in all of us.
EPIPHANY
A sudden shining forth, a blazing insight. This luminous word comes to us like light from a distant star. The Greeks saw the light first, as epiphaneia, a manifestation, striking appearance, from epiphanies, manifestation, and the earlier epiphainein, to display, from epi- on, to, and phainein, to show. This was the Greek word the New Testament used to express the advent or manifestation of Christ, and later used as the name of the Festival of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, Epiphany, celebrated on January 6. By the 17th century it was used to describe the appearances of other divine beings. Its current literary sense was established by Thomas De Quincey in 1822, and James Joyce in his famous short story “The Dead.” Joyce uses it doubly, setting the action in Dublin on January 6, the Epiphany, but also figuratively to suggest the sudden blaze of painful light and truth about the marriage of his two main characters. A modern, mythic example of an epiphany took place thousands of miles above the earth, as described by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “On the return trip home, gazing though 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious. My view of the planet was a glimpse of divinity.” Companion words include phantom, a vision, specter, or apparition; pharos, lighthouse; and fantastic, a display of the incredible. And then, whoops, there is the near epiphany sometimes called presque vu, French for “nearly seen,” a kind of epiphany-manqué, or frustrated light.
ESPÉRANCE (FRENCH)
Hope. But not just any pie-in-the-sky wish fulfillment. As the beloved French Provençal writer Jean Giono used it, there is a quality of hope that keeps the heart kindled and the soul intact, despite the degradations of life. Giono’s translator, Norma Goodrich, wrote that hope pervaded his novels and short stories, reflecting his own boundless but sober confidence in the future. Furthermore, she adds, his use is more closely aligned with the feminine noun espérance, “designating the permanent state or condition of living one’s life in hopeful tranquility,” than the masculine noun for hope, espoir. Giono’s brand of hope sprang, she wrote, from literature and poetry. Compare the Portuguese esperança, and Spanish esperanza, and the related aspiration. Thus Giono’s careful, life-affirming use of espérance, stands in dramatic contrast to the often effete use of “hope,” what the 16th-century writer Robert of Gloucester called “overhope ,” a much-needed word to combat the fatuous faith that the future will turn itself around without our own avid participation. The legendary Knoxville songwriter, playwright, and poet R. B. Morris cites a memorable use of the word from the mountains overlooking his hometown. “Up on the mountain, the word hope is used as the past tense of ‘help.’ It’s a fairly common phrase usage in the mountains, like ‘He hope me good’ as in ‘he helped me out.’ I’ve always liked the way it seemed to imply that to help someone was to give them hope.”
ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER (FRENCH)
A brilliant comeback, witty response, quick rejoinder—that comes to mind too late. Coined by the French philosopher Denis Diderot as he walked downstairs after a party at the home of Joseph Necker, wishing he had been wittier during dinner. Hence, “the spirit of the staircase.” A figurative expression, it refers to that universal feeling of wishing we’d had the esprit, the spirit, the inspiration, the wit to say just the right thing, un bon mot, a few moments before, at the party or in the business meeting. But words that lodged in your throat don’t come up until you’re on the way home, or as you’re on the staircase, leaving the room. The redoubtable Oxford Book of Quotations renders it as “An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room.” Companion words include the German Treppenwitz and Yiddish Treppverter, from treppe, steps, and verter, words, those you finally think of on the way down the steps and out of each other’s lives, and their distant cousin, the Spanish ocurrencia, a sudden, bright idea or witty remark, whether on the staircase or in the subway. Then there is O’Hara’s Disease, the great S. J. Perelman’s term for “the ability to remember all the cunning things I did last night.” Unfortunately, no one knows which O’Hara he is referring to. Once in a while someone tries to conjure up an English equivalent for these foreign expressions; sometimes they’re embraced, sometimes not. The American humorist Gelett Burgess, best known for coining the word blurb, also thought up tintiddle, defined as “a witty retort, thought of too late.” Not too late, though, if a few kind-hearted readers begin to use it.
F
FADO (PORTUGUESE)
A Portuguese song of sadness and longing. One of two must-translate untranslatable Portuguese words (see also: saudade), the better to understand the complexities of human longing. When I lived in a 200-year-old stone house in Penedo, on the west coast of Portugal, in the early 1990s, a local Portuguese friend, Fernando, told me that the only way to understand the national soul was to know the almost excruciatingly nostalgic feeling of yearning for something once loved but now irretrievably lost. He described it as “the melancholy that lurks behind every happiness.” As may be expected, fado issues forth from Latin fatum, fate, on the collective as well as individual level. All extraordinary words fill a void, and fado is one such word, expressing the deep sorrow of Portugal’s lost national destiny after the Age of Discovery. This is reflected in mournful songs about sailors lost at sea, somber dances about lovers wrenched apart, and lugubrious poetry about brave explorers, all performed by fadistas who infused their work with saudade. In Stephen Olsson’s documentary Sound of the Soul, a fado singer, Katia, explains, “Fado is the most pure expression of the Portuguese soul. And our soul, our saudade, stays in our soul, in our way of living all the time. And the faith is very strong. The faith that everything will be okay just believing in something bigger.” And she sings mournfully: “Forget the time and the pain, / and think only of our love / Come now, give me your hand, / Climb the mountain with me / Because when we love someone / No one can silence the heart / Climb th
e mountain with me / Because when we love someone / No one can silence the heart.”
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