Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

FALSE FRIEND

  A word in one language that looks similar to a word in your own—but isn’t. False friends ( faux amis) are pairs of words in two different languages that seem to be genuinely similar (“to agree or be friendly”) but are actually “strangers” because they are so different. The French préservatif sounds and looks like the English preservative, a chemical added to cereal to give it longer shelf life. In fact, it is their word for “condom.” The English ale in Finnish means “sale.” A magazine in English is a publication; but magazin in Russian is a shop. Gorgon is not the root word for gorgonzola, the legendary blue-veined cheese from the ancient town of Gorgonzola, near Milan, Italy, but a stone-souled, snake-haired Greek goddess. The graphic cocksure isn’t a bawdy term for an overly confidant Lothario, but an allusion to, as Brewer describes it, “the cock of a firelock, much more sure to fire than a match.” Similarly, the old English word undergrope isn’t as naughty or improper as it first appears. Its proper meaning is “to conceive or understand.” A urinator is not a “urinal,” but “a diver, one who searches under water, according to Dr. Johnson. Fakir and faker are homonyms but not synonyms; the first is a member of a religious order of mendicants, and the second is a person who dupes others. And teetotaler doesn’t mean “totally tea” for those who’ve “given up the drink,” but has a stranger derivation in the stammer of a Lancashire temperance activist in 1830 who demanded “t-t-t-total abstinence.”

  FIREDOG

  An andiron, often featuring a sculpted dog. The name may seem arbitrary, but therein lies a tale or two. Technically, it is the name for the thin metal supports for firewood mounted on short “legs,” which are anchored in the stone floor of the hearth. Of unknown origin, but first appearing in 1309, possibly inspired by the Old French andier, from the Gaulish prefix andero, a young bull, an echo of the practice of throwing bull’s heads into the fireplace. The animal associations live on. During the Middle Ages meat was prepared over an open fire, often by rotating a spit by hand, which was hard, sweaty work. Eventually, a contraption was invented that allowed a dog to run on a leash, which turned a flywheel, which turned the spit. That is, until animal rights groups abolished the device as cruel. Thus, centuries of animal presence around the hearth, from the meat grilled there, to the resemblance to legs, and dogs that turned the spit, are compressed into the image that lives on in the iron shapes of dogs on the andirons. A curious footnote: The town of Abergavenny, Wales, has a museum that displays an old engraving of a turnspit, which happens to be the name for a small dog that was bred to run inside a wheel cage placed inside a fireplace. Eventually, the caption says, the canine mechanism was replaced by a clockwork mechanism that’ rotated the spit (I’m paraphrasing here), but the memory of the live dogs was honored in the name for the old andirons.

  FLNEUR (FRENCH)

  A soulful urban wanderer. Not someone who makes flans, as I once overheard from a misguided American tourist in a Paris café, but also not one who is merely “a loafer or idler,” as dismissed by the prim Mrs. Byrne in her otherwise delectable dictionary. Her suspicion has deep roots in the ancient enmity between townsfolk and those who are constantly on the move, such as Gypsies and bohemians, as in The Grand Panjandrum’s pointy-headed definition: one who is “usually not a vagrant, but an unsettled idler with little concern for others.” Hardly so. The flâneur comes from a noble tradition, strolling to savor the city, in contrast to the flashier boulevardier, who strolls in hopes of being savored by the city. The roots of flâneur would appear to be French or Flemish, but the word actually comes from Old Norse flana, a wanderer. Their patron saint, poet Charles Baudelaire, writes: “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it’s an immense pleasure … in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite; you’re not at home, but you feel at home everywhere.” Or as the great humorist James Thurber wrote, “It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.” Companion words include flânerie, the actual practice and activity of the flâneur; boulevardier, one who walks city streets in hopes of being recognized as an artiste or philosopher; and promenadier, saunterer, and ambulist. Those great hikers the Scots also gave us stravaig, to wander from place to place, from the Scots extravage, to wander about, to stray in conversation , from Latin extravagare, related to extravagant. Thus, a flâneur is an extravagant wanderer.

  Flâneur

  FLIRT

  To signal romantic or sexual interest, but more theatrically than seriously. So much romance compacted into such a short word. Curiously, in its 16th-century adolescence the Early Modern English word flurt was loaded with meaning, “to turn up one’s nose, to sneer,” “to flick something away with the fingers,” and even “a stroke of wit.” This evolved into the fluttering French fleuterer, to use flowery language or talk sweet nonsense, which creates a word picture of bees flitting from flower to flower. Similarly, flit is an old Scottish word for “moving house,” as the Anglo-Saxon flurt means “to move constantly from object to object, in short, quick flights.” Flirt is the love child of all this illicit commingling, a tricky word that signals many conflicting messages, from the witty to the cheeky attentions of a “flighty girl.” Dr. Johnson considered a flirt to be a “pert young hussey.” Shakespeare’s flirt-gill (Jill) was “a woman of light or loose behavior.” Altogether, the common meaning for flirt has changed little since its 1777 definition, “to play at courtship.” Ronda Rich writes in What Southern Women Know about Flirting that it is like making a mint julep: “making the drink even stronger is a recipe for a good time to be had by all.” Gregg Mortenson writes in Three Cups of Tea that the Pakistani word for flirt is Eve-tease . Companion words include the whirligigging flirtigig from Yorkshire, a giddy, flirtatious girl. Thus, to flirt is to flit from one sweet thing to the next, while flicking back the attentions of anybody who picks up on your signals. Ultimately, flirting is alternately frustrating, frenetic, and fun.

  FLIZZEN

  To laugh with every muscle in the face. To say it is to see it. Flizzen is another sonicky word, as well as an “eloquent tighten-up word,” like flinch, clinch, winch, and shrink—words that make you pucker up and contort your face. There’s just something about those double z’s. If you happen to look it up and keep riffling pages, you’ll find flodder, to disfigure [the face] in consequence of weeping. It contains an allusion to the marks left on the banks of a river by an inundation, from Swedish flod-a, to overflow. Wherever the cup of emotions runneth over, at roisteringly funny parties or dirge-sad funerals, we can feel a kind of sympathetic magic with the natural world. The antonym here is also illuminating: to ridicule is the polar opposite of hearty, full-faced laughter, for it really means “to laugh at,” and it wouldn’t be too much to add “with every muscle in the face.” To dig deeper into ridicule is to discover how words can turn in on themselves. Eventually, ridicule referred to words or actions that evoked sarcastic laughter, contemptuous language, derisive humor. Its roots are 17th-century Latin ridiculum, to make a joke out of, and ridere, to laugh at. And why do we need to laugh? One of the most heartbreakingly funny writers of our time, the late Frank McCourt, wrote in ’Tis: A Memoir, “We tell jokes because every joke is a short story with a fuse and an explosion.” And when we do, we flizzen with laughter, even if we’ve never heard of the word.

  Flizzen

  FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION

  The act of regarding something as absolutely worthless or useless, such as this very word. If you didn’t have a soft spot in your heart for long words that are fun to say and thrilling to hear, this one, from the halls of Eton, might convert you. A rhythmic example of a sesquipedalian word, one that’s six and a half feet long, floccinaucinihilipilification is often regarded as the longest word in The Oxford English Dictionary, notwithstanding James Joyce’s jawbreaker word for “thunder,” bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor denenthurnuk, which he created from untold numbers of obscure languages. (To deride his neol
ogism as a literary parlor trick would be a florid example of floccinaucinihilipilification .) The origins of our word are obscure, but possibly date back to a college parody of one of Eton’s lexicons, in which four Latin words were linked together: flocci-naucinihili-pilification . Sir Walter Scott gave the word its bona fides when he used it to describe money. If pushed to use it today, one might describe someone, let’s say an antique dealer, who is notorious for his habit of floccinaucinihilipilification , the belittling of his clients when they asked him to evaluate their artifacts. Companion words include floccify, to consider something worthless, which is a fancy way to say trivialize.

  FLOUNDER

  To fall, stumble, thrash about. A nature-based word, from folk observation of generations of fishermen watching the way in which the flounder dives awkwardly, clumsily, as if trying not to drown. Metaphorically, it is used in common parlance for failure. But the critic Jacques Barzun plays off a famous observation: “As Henry James said, ‘art is our flounderings shown.’ And in the light of contemporary art one must even say: our flounderings shown up.” Etymologically, it dates back to 1592, perhaps a corruption of founder, from the Dutch flodderen, to flop around, move clumsily. Alternately, it could be a blend word, bringing together blunder and founder. Figuratively, it now means to struggle awkwardly, in deep water, mud, or snow, or in action, such as getting lost in a speech or task. Margaret Atwood wrote, “We flounder, the air ungainly in our new lungs with sunlight streaming merciless on the shores of morning.”

  FOCUS

  Sharp concentration. Sit down by the fireplace and I’ll tell you where this good old Roman word comes from. Actually, I just did. Focus is Latin for “fireplace,” the hearth, the center of activity in the home for millennia. Over time other languages focused on their own related fire words, such as French feu, Italian fuoco, Spanish fuego, and English fuel and fusillade. When the astronomer Johannes Kepler, in 1604, needed a term for the “burning point” of a mirror, the point where light rays converge, chances are he stared into his hearth and said, “Aha!” and co-opted focus for science. The figurative use of focus for the “center of activity” dates to the early 19th century. Actor Lawrence Olivier used to focus on the farthest seat at the back of the theater; baseball slugger Mark McGwire would spend a half hour before a game staring deep into the recesses of his locker, focusing on imaginary at-bats so he wouldn’t be surprised by any pitches during the game. Tennis star Jennifer Capriati said, “You have to block everything out and be extremely focused and be relaxed and mellow, too.” And Mark Twain: “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Companion words include focal, focus group, and foyer, a public lobby used by audiences during intermission of a performance, or by guests at a hotel who may want to focus on their travel plans.

  Focus (Looking for Degas)

  FORNICATE

  To do the deed, to make the beast with two backs, to make love but not be too delicate when you describe it. The street-tough version of “making love” betrays its bawdy (from bawd, prostitute) roots, which is the Latin fornix, a vaulted brick oven or furnace often found in the arched subterranean rooms of ancient Rome. The fornix was furtive enough to be commonly used as a brothel by prostitutes; the noun evolved into a verb for visiting the place, then transformed into a word for the act itself in the brothel. Thus, to fornicate really means—nod, nod, wink, wink—to pay a visit to a small, dark, warm, vaulted place. If you think about it this way, it’s a far sexier word than that old reliable but crude Anglo-Saxon fuck, from Old English fokken, to beat against. According to folk wisdom, however, there may be an uncanny connection between the two potent verbs. The legend goes that when the Black Death was the scourge of Europe, during the Middle Ages, the ruling powers tried desperately to limit the populations of the peasants, even requiring couples wishing to have children to obtain permission from local lords, or from the royalty. Favored homes hung signs that read “Fornicating Under Consent of King,” which was shortened over time to FUCK. Companion words include the obsolete English swyve, to have sex, which was the slang term that was upended by fornicate by the 14th century.

  FORTUNE

  A large sum of money; luck, chance. As ambiguous as casting one’s fate to the winds. By extension, a fortunate person is one on whom the Fates are smiling, and an unfortunate person is one being ignored or cursed. Burrowed deep within the word is an important association. Fortune comes from the Roman Fortuna, the goddess of chance or luck, the Latin equivalent of the Greek goddess Tyche. The ancients believed that Fate ruled all, was even more powerful than the gods, but they also believed in the power of chance, personified by Tyche, the daughter of Oceanus, god of rivers, the flow of life. Mythically, one’s fortune was a turn of the “lottery wheel,” the dispensing of one’s “lot in life,” spun by the cosmic spinners, the Fates. In turn, Fortuna was depicted in medieval engravings in the center of a spinning circus wheel, which suggests that our fortune is in the flow of our future—but we have to do our part by actually moving the wheel, which requires taking destiny into our own hands. Companion words include fortunate, fortune-teller, and fortuitous, all variations on chance, luck, one’s allotment in life. From the Roman catacombs, circa 2nd century AD, comes a timeless piece of graffiti from a grieving mother who has just lost her young child: “Oh, relentless Fortune, who delights in cruel death. Why is Maximus so early snatched from me?”

  FREELANCE

  An independent worker, originally a soldier who was free to lend his lance to anyone. Since I first walked into a newspaper office at sixteen and sold my first sports story and photographs, I have relished the idea that I was a freelance writer, a word warrior, a pen-for-hire. The word has never lost its magic for me. Originally, free-lancers were medieval mercenaries who sold their services to kings, lords, and captains alike. Free-lancers, earlier called free-companions, were free to pledge their loyalties and their lancers to whom-ever they pleased—free of their own will, not free as in without cost. This freedom retains its allure to this day. Though the practice is centuries old, the word didn’t enter English until the prolific Sir Walter Scott introduced it in his novel of 1819, Ivanhoe, a book I recall reading aloud in a beautiful Heritage Club edition with my parents in the late 1950s. Scott wrote, “I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them—I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.” The modern sense of a freelance writer as independent, working outside the system, arose in the late 19th century, and is illustrated in the New York Times’s obituary for the poet Amy Clampitt: “She worked … as reference librarian at the National Audubon Society from 1952 to 1959. Through the 1960’s and most of the 70’s, she was a freelance writer, editor and researcher. From 1977 to 1982 she was an editor at E. P. Dutton. Initially self-published.”

  FRIBBLE

  To trifle, waste, dodder, potter, stammer, falter, totter, kill time. What we do when we’re procrastinating. Though people have been fribbling for as long as there were important things to avoid, the word didn’t enter the English lexicon until 1633. The 1913 edition of Webster’s isolates a fribbler as a frivolous kind of fellow. An idler. Companion words include fiddle, fritter, and doodle, truncated from “do little,” and the wunderbar German Dudeltopf, a fool, a simpleton, best remembered in the Revolutionary War ditty “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Despite the legions of famous doodlers from John Keats to Virginia Woolf, the implication is that those who are sketching in the margins of life are wasting their time. Thus, to fribble in all these cases is to kill time, which violates a central thesis in Western life, that people must use their time wisely (though the verb “use” betrays its own Calvinistic bias). You say “fritter,” and I say fribble. Fritter, fribble—let’s call the whole thing off.

  FUNGO

  A practice fly ball in baseball. One of the great unknowns and so one of the most fun words to speculate about. It dates back
to at least 1867, possibly to a similar practice in the game of cricket. For words like this we entertain all possibilities. A colorful one is that fungo refers to an early cricket exercise of tossing the ball up in the air, whacking it, then running after it. Hence, it’s “fun” to “go” hitting a ball and running after it. Fellow words do not include fungology, dating back to 1860, which is the study of mushrooms rather than balls thunked into the outfield. But they do include fungo hitter, a coach who specializes in hitting 300-foot-long fly balls to precise spots in the outfield, sometimes no larger than a silver dollar. It’s said that poet Robert Frost once told George Plimpton his dream was to hit a poem so high it would resemble a fungo that never came down. Fungo stories are as rare as good fungo hitters, but presumably what they have in common is a sense of awe and wonder for anything that reaches so high. Incidentally, fun is a word that seems to have been around forever but only dates to the 17th-century verb fun, to cheat or hoax, probably a variant of the early-15th-century fon, to befool, to trick, hoax, or turn practical jokes. Thus, fun came to mean “merriment, diversion, sport, make a fool of.” Cassidy makes a strong parallel case for the Irish fonn, delight, pleasure, song. Collecting its false friends is fun, too: funambulist, a ropedancer or tightrope walker, from fun, rope, ambulare, to walk.

  FURY

  A ferocious passion. If you are in a fury, you are enraged because you’ve been touched by the Furies. If you are furious you are more than angry, which derives from angr, an old Viking word meaning the emotions that arise from realizing the injustices of the world, but less than berserk. Fury derives from the Latin furia, a violent passion, rage, madness; furiosos, furious; and furere, mad, enraged. The Romans translated the Greek name Erinyes, the three personifications of vengeance sent by Hades to punish evildoers, as Furiae. Later, fury takes on the metaphorical, embodying a woman’s rage. Companion words include furtive, secretive, and the frightening verb furify, to infuriate. A companion quote to consider, by Francis Bacon: “A man who contemplates revenge keeps his wounds green.” John Dryden wrote, “Beware the fury of a patient man.” Shakespeare’s Macbeth declaims: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”