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GALAXY
A vast group of stars; an assemblage of brilliant persons or things. Named after ancient Greek sky gazers who named the twinkling bands of light in the night sky galaxes, from their word gala, milk. Later, astronomers in medieval Europe described the “light-studded path” across the sky as a galaxy, from the Greek word for “a circle of milk” and its Latinized form, lacteus, lactate, milky. For centuries, the Western world has been able to enjoy the origin story of the myth of Hera nursing the infant Hercules. Never one to know his own strength, the infant bit her nipple; when Hera pulled away from him her milk went spurting across the night sky, leaving the bright white lights we’ve since called the “Milky Way.” Companion words or usages include the Ford Galaxy, one of the most stylish sedans produced by Ford Motor Company, in the 1960s, and the famous text crawl at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie, in 1977: “In a galaxy, far, far away…” When naturalist and mountaineer John Muir needed an exultant phrase to describe his tumultuous ride in an avalanche of snow down the side of a mountain in Yosemite he reached for a galactic metaphor: “This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced.”
GLAMOUR
Enchantment, a spell, a fascination; the illusion of beauty. A mysterious attraction that evokes the exotic. This Scottish beauty has cast a spell for centuries, as if it were created through sheer sorcery, which in a sense it was. Originally, glamour was a magic spell, and glamorous meant “magic, supernatural.” It is a cognate of the Icelandic glamr, a legendary ghost spirit, as well as “a kind of haze covering objects, and causing them to appear differently from what they really are.” The Danish glimmeri means “glitter, false luster, glamorous, supernatural.” Charles Mackay wrote, “Once supposed to be from the Gaelic glac, to seize, to lay hold of, to fascinate, and mor, great; whence ‘great fascination, ’ or magic, not to be resisted.” In 1851 Black wrote, “When devils, wizards, or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to ‘cast glamour’ over the eyes of the spectator.” During medieval times the word glamour described a certain power that modern people might call charisma. Eventually, these magical associations adhered to language itself. Mackay recounts how a certain Lord Neaves thought that glamour was a corruption of grammar, “in which magic was once supposed to reside.” According to the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, glamour was feared enough by the Inquisitors to be called an actual spell. Glamour is one of the more than 700 contributions of Sir Walter Scott, who introduced it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805): “And one short spell therein he read: / It had much of glamour might / Could make a ladye seem a knight.” Scott explained: “in the legends of Scots superstition, means the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality. … a special attribute of the Gypsies.” And who would know better than Marilyn Monroe about the silken cage of glamour: “I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything.”
Glamour
GLEE
Sheer beatific happiness. Originally, simply, music. The magic lies in those two gloriously long e’s, the joyful vowels of a child with her toys and the music fan shrieking in the front row at a concert. A happy word, by chance, borrowed directly from the Scandinavian glee. Mackay writes at first haltingly, then cheerfully, “by which by the progress of change and corruption, has come to signify that state of mind which music is so calculated to produce, joyfulness and pleasure.” In Songs of Innocence William Blake writes: “Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me, ‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again!’ So I piped. He wept to hear.” The Rolling Stones sang, in “Sympathy for the Devil”: “I watched with glee / While your kings and queens / Fought for ten decades / For the Gods they made.” From the melancholic genius behind “Peanuts,” Charles Schultz: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited. All the baseball games are lost, all the test scores are D-minuses, the Great Pumpkin never comes, and the football is always pulled away. … For me the operative response is glee. And its glee that I never get tired of.” Companion words include a glee, a part-song scored for three or more usually male and unaccompanied voices that was popular in the 18th century; gleeman, a singer, teller of tales; gleeful, happy; and glee-music, which Hunter defines as “merriment caused by minstrels.”
GLOM
To grab, grasp, grope, snatch, steal. This is a stealth word. It snuck in under the radar, quietly evolving from the Scottish glaum, the tool used to geld horses. The careful groping around under the horse and then the quick emasculating cut made a stark impression, coming to mean over the centuries any quick, dangerous, thieving move. A later influence was glam, Irish-American gangland slang, to handle awkwardly, grab voraciously, devour, thieve, snitch, nobble, nab. Over time, the two words merged into the popular street word glom, to understand, to get it. Curiously, Dashiell Hammett used the former spelling but took the latter meaning in The Dain Curse: “Looks like him and another guy glaumed the ice.” Cassidy offers an alternate reading, the Irish glam, to grab, snatch, and cites O’Leary’s Dictionary of the American Underworld: from glom, to grab, as in stealing. Either way, to glom on to something is to suddenly snatch it away. At the risk of being indelicate, it takes some balls to suggest the following companion words: glomerate, from Latin glamus, to collect into a ball of yarn, and conglomerate, to wind into a ball, heap together, as in having the balls to gather together a group of businesses. Our word globe rolls to us from globus, as if the gods rolled all of creation into a ball when they created the round world we live on. Uncannily, the original sense of glom lives on faintly, a faint echo—or is it odor—of the furtive behavior in Scotland’s horse stables, whenever we try to grasp the meaning of anything difficult to reach.
GNOME
An ageless sprite. Old reliable Skeat attributes the word to the alchemist Paracelsus, who suggested “the notion that gnomes could reveal secret treasures.” Now there’s a new light on the old gnome in the neighbor’s garden, rooted as he is in two old Greek words, gnosis, intelligence, and noetics, to know, especially hidden knowledge. Gnosis in turn gave rise to gnostic, a sect devoted to the teaching of immediate knowledge, from gnositiko, wise, good at knowing. To call somebody gnomic isn’t to say they’re annoying little garden spirits, but that they’re prone to “wise sayings or aphorisms,” like Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein—or John Belushi, who both looked and sounded gnomic. The astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s mysterious observation “Something out there is doing we don’t know what” is numinously gnomic. Marvelously related words include gnomon, the index of a sundial; and also from the Greek, gnosis, interpreter, one who knows. While researching my book Riddle Me This in the early 1990s, I caught sight of a book of gnomic verse in the San Francisco Library special collection of humor, Early English Poems, by Pancrost and Spaeth, published in 1911. Here is “The Book-Worm”: “A moth ate a word! To me that seemed / A Strange thing to happen, when I / heard that wonder,—A worm that / would swallow the speech of a man, / Sayings of strength steal in the dark, / Thoughts of the mighty; yet the / thieving sprite / Was none the wiser for / the words he had eaten!” Thus, it’s safe to say that a gnome is an elemental reminder that there are those who know the secret knowledge, maybe of time itself, one that eats and spits it out again.
GODSEND
A blessing, a gift from back of beyond. Originally, a term in Orkney and the Shetland Islands for the flotsam washed ashore from shipwrecks in the outrageo
usly rough North Seas. The god behind the word riddles much of the language. Godhopping is the act of pretending religious interest to get help from missionaries. Not as unusual a construction as one might believe. A goditorium is slang for a church, the place where one listens to a godbox, a rare but colorful term for a church organ. Our English word god has the oldest of roots, the Proto-Indo-European ghut, that which is invoked, which grew into the Icelandic guth, which sired such European words as the German Gott, Dutch god, and Danish gud. There are many euphemisms for the divine, such as Zounds! from “God’s wounds,” good-bye from “God be with you.” Gadzooks comes from “God’s looks.” Gee whiz is a contraction of “Holy Gee (“G”),” possibly from old Irish dia, God, a god. Gossip was overheard from an old expression for “a sponsor in baptism.” Skeats derives it from godsibb, a reference to relatives, which gave us godfather and godmother, a person related in God, someone regarded as spiritual enough “to have God’s ear.” All that intimate talk invariably involved some betrayal of secrets, which evolved into the “idle talk” known as gossip. “Oh, Deuce!” comes from “Deus!” A comic expression for God in the South is Old Wind-maker: “Old Wind-maker’s blowin’ liars right out of North Car’lina.” And ordinary stones are called “God’s biscuits” in the old saloons of Knoxville, Tennessee.
GORGEOUS
Showily, splendidly beautiful. The hidden meaning lurks in its French origins, gorgias, elegant, from gorge; and gorget, throat, throat-covering. A fully embodied word. In 1611, Randle Cotgrave pointed out in his French-English dictionary a tantalizing connection with the earlier French reggorger, which he cleverly traced to the habit of proud people to “hold down the head, or thrust the chin into the neck, as some do in pride, to make their faces look fuller.” Figuratively, this action evolved into gorgias and gorget, to reflect the proud behavior, “from the swelling of the throat in pride.” Thus, a painted word comes into focus: an attractive woman who coquettishly tucks her head down, exposing more of her beautiful neck, and thus appearing simultaneously more modest and more alluring. In a word, gorgeous, which when uttered is usually stressed—italicized, if you will—far more than the soft-spoken beautiful, as in “She’s gorgeous!” When I was teaching screenwriting at the American Film Institute, I searched through their library for a perfect quote for a talk I was to give on the history of humor in the movies. Finally, in Hollywood Quotes, I caught this sumptuous use of the word from flame-haired Lucille Ball: “Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.” Companion words include gorge, to overeat, an act which tends to enlarge the throat; gorge, as in the throatlike passage in a canyon; and gorget, throat-armor.
GORGONIZE
To turn to stone, demonize. The verb form of the infamous noun, as vivid as you’ll ever hope to encounter, deriving, of course, from the three daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, called the Gorgons, from gorgos, the very embodiment of “fear, fierce.” Originally, the three sisters, Medusa, Sthenno, and Euryale, were considered gorgeous, famous for their beautiful hair. But after Poseidon “obtained their favors” in Athena’s temple, the sisters were cursed, their fate repellent, their hair transformed into slithering snakes, their hypnotic eyes petrifying all who stared at them to stone. Together, the sisters personified different aspects of fear and trembling experienced by those entering into deadly realms. Medusa’s epithet was “lightning,” Sthenno’s was “thunder,” and Euryale’s “wanderer.” If a hero or hunter was foolhardy enough to gaze upon one of them, he or she was turned to stone. So lethal was their power that even after death their heads were placed on shields, as when Perseus slew Medusa and presented her still swithering head to Athena, as a talisman. For some mythically murky reason, Medusa was beloved by Poseidon, and when she died, their offspring, the flying horse Pegasus (later a symbol of the Mobil Oil Company), sprang up from the pool of her still burbling blood. Curious companion words include gorgonia, a sea-fan-shaped polyp that appears to turn to stone the second it is exposed to the air. Today, gorgonize is an obscure but still stone-cold word meaning, as it ever did, to “paralyze, petrify, or hypnotize.”
Gorgonize
GOSSAMER
Gauzy, silky, flimsy. A mellifluous word; a diaphanous derivation. Seven centuries ago in 14th-century England, “goose” was gos, and “summer” was sumer, and together they referred to “goose-summer,” the time when “summer goose” appear, what we now call Indian summer. As hunters and hikers know, it’s the time of year when the “summer goose” are most seen, and since seen, hunted, and eaten; it’s also the time of year for those silken filaments of goose down that float through the air like flying cobwebs. To picture the phenomenon, imagine the gauzy veils worn by the Three Graces in Botticelli’s Primavera. Also, remember the uplifting photographs and video of Paul MacCready’s invention, “Gossamer Wings,” the first completely man-powered flight. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.”
Gossamer
GRAMMAR
Originally, glamour was a version of grammar, alluding to knowledge, especially of the occult, and skill in words and syntax; originally, “knowing one’s letters.” The great Jamieson tried to comb out the knot of meanings between the two. He suggested that glamour was a subtle form of magic because of the folk belief that those who knew their grammar well were considered to be magicians by those who didn’t. This is borne out by the Old French grammaire, a grammarian, a magician, and the earlier Greek grammatike and techne, the art or technique of making letters, as well as gramma, a written letter. The term grammar school dates back to 1387, and described a place where “the learned languages are grammatically taught.” By the 17th century, grammar referred to any language taught grammatically or technically, but soon afterward Johnson saw the inherent pedagogical dangers when he coined the term grammaticaster , a mean and verbal pedant. The power to cast a spell for good or ill lives on in our word glamour, born of this sense of enchantment with words and education. Thus, glamour is the language of magical attraction, as grammar is glamorized language. To this day, if those 800-page issues of Vogue magazine are any indication, glamour is “magical beauty” conjured up to cast a spell, a fashionable enchantment, as The Devil Wears Prada revealed sulfurously well, designed to impress through a kind of hypnosis. Likewise, in literary circles grammar is language endowed with magical, mythical significance. Companion words include glamour puss, a person with an attractive face, and grammaticaster , a verbal pedant, low grammarian.
GREGARIOUS
Affable, sociable, agreeable. Words that flock together apparently stay together. Thus, gregarious literally means belonging to a flock of sheep, from the Latin grex, flock, but figuratively it suggests the quality of being amiable in a crowd, enthusiastic in the company of others. Companion words include aggregate, collect the flock, congregate, assemble the flock, and separate, keep apart the flock, plus egregious, standing out from the flock—figuratively, “excellent,” and only later corrupted to mean “outrageous.” The suave actor Peter O’Toole says of his own infamous social behavior, “I’m the most gregarious of men and love good company, but never less alone than when alone.” Together, this flock of words illustrates the powerful influence of our ancient herding instincts on our language. In this sense, collective nouns are a gregarious use of imagination: a skulk of foxes, a crash of rhinoceroses, a parliament of owls.
GROGGY
Tipsy from overdrinking; unsteady; hazy, as after a nap. Aptly named after the coarse-grained grogham breeches/pants worn by the English Admiral Vernon, nicknamed “Old Grog” (c. 1740), who began the practice of diluting with water the rum or spirits allotted by law to his sailors to prevent them from “intoxicating themselves.” Presumably, if they were only a little drunk—groggy—they would still be able to perform their naval duties for God and country
. Incidentally, there are hundreds of words in the OED for being zozzled, or spifflicated, in Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 dictionary. According to the BBC, in 2008 there were no fewer than 141 euphemisms for the besotted condition. However, wordsmith Paul Dickson has collected over 3,000 English synonyms for drunk, far surpassing Benjamin Franklin’s legendary list of 228 “round-about phrases” to describe the befuggered state, which appeared on January 13, 1737, in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Woozy companion words include besotted, befuggered, befuddled, blotto, crapulous, dipso, hooched, plotzed, shnockered, schnicked, soused, sizzled, stinko, zombied, and zonked. Not to mention the all too visual pavement pizza to describe the painted results of being such.
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