Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  GYASCUTUS

  An imaginary creature with four telescopic legs. Miraculously, these legs lift up and down, depending on which side of a mountain it is grazing on, shorter legs on one side of its body enabling it to walk easily on steep hillsides, and a long, tough tail that can wrap around rocks to keep it from falling down the hill. These are frequent creatures that freckle the hills of Sonoma on our way to visit Grandma, as I used to tease my son. Look at gyascutus and you’ll find a hillside full of fellow mythical creatures, such as the “sidewinder” and the “rickaboo racker.” Stranger than fiction, however, is the axolotl, the Mexican salamander with a face like Charlie Brown and a body like the Marvel comic book hero Madcap, who owns the mutagenic power to regenerate his damaged body parts at will. Companion word-animals include badger, defined by Sir Thomas Browne as having legs longer on one side of its body than the other.

  GYMNASIUM

  A site for exercise, a school for athletes. Literally from the Greek gymnos, and gymnazein, to exercise naked, a practice banned in 393 AD by blue-nosed Roman rulers who were offended at the sight of naked bodies cavorting in the gyms. Around fifteen centuries later the Germans, following their digs at Olympia, revived the word and applied it to their own upper school, whence it ran across to England and ultimately to the US. Fellow words include the 19th-century back-formations gym, gymnast, gymnastic, and gymnosophist, the last a peculiarly ambiguous description of a certain sect of Hindu gurus who taught buck naked. Curious citations include Vladimir Lenin’s “Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.” Companion words include the popular gym rat, originally used to describe basketball players who seem to spend every waking hour shooting hoops, but now taken to mean anyone who spends a lot of time working out.

  GYNOTIKOLOBOMASSOPHILE

  One who loves to nibble on a woman’s earlobes. A voluptuous name for a tremulous habit. And you thought there wasn’t a word to describe this kind of torrid lover. This mouthful comes from the Greek gyne, woman, plus otikos, of the ear, lobos, lobe, masso, chew, and philos, loving. Strung together, it makes for a rictus of risible pleasure, if whispered at just the right moment. Companion words include gynopiper, one who looks lewdly upon unsuspecting women; melcryptovestimentphilia , the love of black underwear, and nympholepsy , the throbbing trance produced by erotic fantasies of earlobes, black underwear, and other seductive triggers.

  H

  HAPPY, HAPPINESS

  Content, without a care, and since the 14th century, fortunate. “Oh, Happy Day,” sing the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Etymologically, it emerges from hap, a concise 14th-century word meaning “a chance occurrence, fate, fortune, befall.” Nothing haphazard there, nothing risky. A happy soul is a “lucky” one, a connection in many languages, with the poetically curious exception of Welsh where it meant “wise,” one who is “very glad.” Companion words include hapless, without luck; perhaps, by chance; and happenstance, what lies in store for us, originally meaning “very glad,” but the kind of happiness that comes to us by chance, by accident. There is also haply, by good luck. Curiously, perhaps is connected, through Old Norse, “by chance,” by the nod of the gods. Flakhappy means “frazzled from stress,” happy hour, “twilight drink discounts,” happy-go-lucky, “plucky,” and “happy as a clam,” which is a contraction of happy as a clam at high tide—happy to be left alone when the tides of time run over us, or, can’t be dug up this time! The lilting Italian cuor contento means a “happy heart,” suggestive of the way a happy, even-tempered person feels. Consider the felicitous words of young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a few hours before eloping with her lover poet, “I hope, indeed, oh my loved [Percy] Shelley, we shall indeed be happy.” Consider, too, the heart-stopping words of poet Jack Gilbert, in “Between Aging and Old”: “Lying in the dark, / singing about the intractable / kinds of happiness.” And we can’t forget the traditional Greek farewell Khaire! “Be happy!” There, fair reader, are you happy now? And, sadly, there is anhedonia, incapable of feeling happiness.

  HECKLE

  To harass, make fun of, criticize, disconcert, challenge, gibe, badger, or ‘question severely in a bid to find weaknesses.’ A harsher version of the Scots heckle, an 18th-century word from haeckle, a way to comb flax or hem, from the Middle Dutch hekelen, to prickle, irritate. The Scots borrowed the word to describe those who got in trouble with the clergy for doing this simple manual labor on the Sabbath, and the word steadily evolved to include any kind of public ridicule, including that of government figures. Ironically, heckle came to mean the opposite of what it originally meant; from the trouble you caused by doing innocent work to the trouble you made for others whose work or ideas you don’t appreciate. Years ago, at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco, I caught an up-and-coming comic who dealt with a rash of heckling from the audience. “Did you hear the one about the blind heckler who shouted: “Get off!” at a really lousy comedian? Well, he waited for a long, lonely moment, then he said, “Are you still here?” In 1996, the whiplash-quick comedian Phyllis Diller told Janeane Garofalo, “You’d have to make an appointment to heckle me. My timing is so precise that either the audience is laughing or I am talking. Hecklers wait for a pause. They wait for dead air, and there’s no dead air in my act.” Curiously, many strong verbs for criticism come from humble labor, such as excoriate, to severely criticize, denounce, from the Latin excoriare, to flay or strip off the hide, from ex, off, and corium, hide, skin. Thus, to “tear the hide off.” Companion words include excruciate, to torture, especially on a cross.

  HERO

  A demigod, a warrior, one to be emulated. A universal character, embodying the idea in ancient and modern cultures of someone who seemingly possesses superhuman abilities, but also lives for others as a defender of home and hearth, a protector. The earliest English usage dates to 1387, and defines a hero as “a man of superhuman strength or courage,” from the ancient Greek heros. The Middle English use focused on the mythological stories of persons with superhuman ability who were watched over by the gods. Later, the word came to mean more generally a model person, someone worth emulating, or as Emerson memorably defined a hero, one “who is immovably centered.” The late 17th century saw the word taken to signify the main character in a novel, play, or story. The first use of heroine was recorded in 1659, and hero worship in 1774. Companion words include the New York hero sandwich, an American version of the Mediterranean gyro (from gyrate, “to spin”); and heroin, which made early users feel heroic. Since the two World Wars the idea of what an individual hero can do in the face of real evil has taken a beating, giving rise to the antihero in literature and film, someone not ideal, perfect, or divine, but imperfect, often selfish, and usually irredeemably alone. The gallery is crowded: Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix movies.

  HIP, HEP, HIPSTER

  In the know, streetwise, keenly aware, socially clever, enlightened, sophisticated, inside the outside, in the pocket, someone who gets it. To be hip embodies the dance between the insider and the outsider, it is to see the truth that others don’t; the hipster is able to put it to words, music, paint, stone, or film. Imagine a combination of Mark Twain, Miles Davis, Billie Holliday, and Warner Brothers’ Chuck Jones. The author of Hip, John Leland, writes, “Hip is a term for enlightenment,” presumably in endarkened times. It was brought over on slave ships from Africa as the Wolof verb hepi, to open one’s eyes and see, to be aware. Cassidy offers an alternate derivation, tracing hip back to the old Irish aibi, pronounced “hipi,” for “mature, clever, quick, wise.” With common use in the jazz and blues clubs and the brothels of Storyville, New Orleans, the word was burnished and shortened into hip, street patois for those who see through the lies of society. Hipsters were the “holy fools” in the Beat circles of the Fifties. Perennially hard to define, like jazz itself, you know hipness when you see it. Jazz drummer Tony Williams recognized it when he saw Miles Davis play, saying later, “That�
��s the life I want to live.” Companion words include hep, hip, cool, righteous, in the know; hepcat, one who is hep, totally uncubistic (not square); and of course hippie, from the Sixties, as in the description of Jack Kerouac on the back cover of On the Road as the “Hippie Homer of the turned-on generation…” The hipoisie performers in the funky (from “heavy”) blues music world learned how to funkify, or frighten the straight world with darkly menacing bass lines and sensuous lyrics. No coincidence, then, that the name of the legendary backup band in Motown was The Funk Brothers.

  HOAX

  A ruse, trick, deceit. Etymologically, a curiosity cabinet. Short for hocus-pocus, a nonsense phrase uttered by medieval jugglers and tricksters to distract their audience, and sometimes poke fun at them. Another influence on hoax was tall tales about the incantations of alchemists. There are many charming claims for the true origin of the word. Skeat simply says, “Short for hocus, i.e. to juggle, cheat.” Others insist that hoax is a twist on the Latin words intoned at the moment of transubstantiation during communion: Hoc est corpus, “Here is his body.” Still others claim that it derives from the faux Latin Hax pax max Deus adimaxus, employed by conjurers as a magic formula. By the 18th century it had simply become a shorthand verb for tricking or misleading and a noun for a fake. Famous hoaxes include the Piltdown Man controversy, and the fake memoirs of Howard Hughes, conjured up by a down-and-out Utah garage mechanic, Melvin Dummar. Companion words include Hocus Focus, a cartoon game of visual acuity enjoyed by children around the world (and that’s no hoax), and several hoaxy words, including hokey-pokey, hokum, and that good old Tommy James & the Shondells song, “Hanky Panky.”

  HONEYMOON

  The time between the wedding and everyday marriage, thought to be as sweet as honey, but only lasting the length of one moon. The earliest reference clocks in with the 1546 recording of hony moone, and yet the notion of a new marriage being as sweet as honey but as fickle as the waxing and waning moon must be as old as love itself. Hunter wrote, in 1894, that the term derived from old Teutonic practice of drinking a honeylike liquid, metheglin, for thirty days after marriage. During this charmed month the bridegroom intended to hide his bride from family and friends, thought to be an echo of an the ancient practice of capturing women for marriage. The French version is lune de miel, a moon of honey, and the German is flitterwochen, from flitter, tinsel, and wochen, week, which works out to a tinsel-like romance that lasts but a week. When asked why she was late with a writing assignment while on her honeymoon, Dorothy Parker wired her editor: “Too busy fucking, and vice versa.” On the wall of a gas station outside Tucson I caught this graffito scribbled in red ink: “After our honeymoon I felt like a new man. She said she did too.” Not to be confused with gandermooner, a man who chases other women in the month after his wife has given birth, probably from gander, to take a look, and moon, as in the month after the wedding.

  HOPSCOTCH

  A jumping game for kids. A 17th-century word for a 2,000-year-old game. Originally known as scotch-hoppers, and rooted in another old English game called hop-score, in hopscotch children hop over scotches; lines marking the squares to be hopped are scored or scotched in the ground. Companion words include butterscotch, from “scotched” or “burnt” butter. I recall catching a cartoon some years ago that imagined a young Neil Armstrong watching two kids playing hopscotch on a city sidewalk, and hearing one of them chant, “One small step for Jan, and one small step for Malcolm.” In the early 1960s, jazz artist Calvin Hayes accompanied his record producer father, Mickie Most, to the Abbey Road studios to record the Beatles, and wandered onto the paving stones of Studio One. He recalls, “I spent a couple of hours being taught to play hopscotch by none other than John Lennon.”

  HYPERBOLE

  Wild exaggeration. Word conoisseur Wilfred Funk cleverly defines hyperbole as “a wild pitch.” If this seems a stretch, a tautology, consider that the word comes flying to us across the field of dreamtime from the Greek hyper, over, and ballein, to throw or to throw over. It classical times that would’ve referred to a javelin or the occasional gymnastic use of exercise balls, but today it means to pitch a ball over the head of a terrified batter, or in baseball parlance, to throw some “chin music.” Incidentally, “wild pitch” is an actual category in baseball, referring to any pitch too high, too wide, too wild for the catcher to catch. The ignominious career record in the major leagues is 277, held by the fireballer Nolan Ryan, and the single-season record is 30, by Red Ames, in 1905. These stats are—and aren’t—exaggerated examples of hyperbole! Companion “throw words” are no problem, from pro-ballein, to throw forward; symbolic, to throw together; and diabolic, to throw apart. And it wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that the German philosopher Heidegger wrote that human beings must not take anything in life as predetermined, but instead must practice “throwing-oneself-free.”

  HYPOCRITE

  A pretender, a phony, a poseur. The word twists and turns through the centuries, dating back to the Old French hypocrisie, in 1225, and reaching all the way back to the Greek hypokrisis, acting on the stage, and hypokrinesthai, to play a part, pretend, from hypo, under, and krinein, to sift, decide. As the playwright said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” However, some are acting authentic roles, and some are inauthentic. Thus, hypocrite describes someone who is adept at acting a part but is a persuasive pretender, one who exploits others with a phony sense of crisis. Companion words include hypocrisy, literally the acting of a part, according to the OED, and figuratively the “simulation of a virtue or goodness.” The mordant Ambrose Bierce describes it as “prejudice with a halo.” My father’s old book of proverbs offers this one from Russia: “Hypocrites kick with their feet and lick with their tongues.”

  I

  ICONOCLAST

  One who shatters graven images. The original iconoclasts were Eastern Orthodox Christians during the 8th and 9th centuries who violently disagreed with the use of icons, religious images, and some took to smashing those they found in churches, monasteries, convents. These medieval Greek eikonoklastes gave us iconoclasm, icon-breaking, from eikon, likeness, image, portrait, and klon, to break. Used theologically to describe the refusal of the Protestants after Luther to bow down before any man, and also by social historians since the 19th century to describe someone who shatters sacred cows or barriers. Thus, both Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. were iconoclasts in their own worlds, as certain artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, and Gloria Steinem have been in theirs. “Rough work, iconoclasm,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but the only way to get at truth.” Companion words include iconic, iconography, and that rare but great verb iconify. Icons as computer symbols seem to have been around forever, but only entered the language in 1982.

  IDIOT

  An ignorant person; someone with limited intelligence. Dr. Johnson succinctly defines one as “a fool; a natural; a changeling; one without powers of reason.” If this seems overly harsh, consider its true origins. To the early Greeks, idios literally meant “one’s own,” but figuratively meant “a private person,” one who was either unqualified for public affairs or far too much “his own man,” a loner, an inexperienced man. Eventually, idios came to mean a person incapable of holding public office; later it took on the meaning of a person with the (believed to be enormous) privilege of voting who didn’t participate in civic affairs or shirked his civic responsibility. One of the worst of epithets then and now, an idiot was someone who didn’t vote or attend the Senate. By the early 1300s, idiot referred to a mentally incapable person, from the Old French idiote, for “uneducated person,” Thus, an idiot has long been someone whose individuality far outweighs his or her commitment or connection to the community, as evidenced by its flowing into fellow words like idiosyncrasy, an individual’s peculiar behavior traits, and idiom, an individualistic expression; idiot box, a description of a television set, from 1959; idiot light, the red flasher on the dashboard, from 1968
. The sarcasm and disapproval that imbues the word is captured by Mark Twain’s aside, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Novelist Rebecca West, in an unguarded moment, suggested a subtle distinction: “The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.”

  IGNORASPHERE

  A layer of the sky sandwiched between the atmosphere and outer space. It is situated exactly where the word suggests, a place not-known, from ignore, not to know. This playful term refers to the most poorly investigated and misunderstood region of space, which is beyond the reach of ordinary aircraft and below orbiting spacecraft. A so-called derivative word, invented by meteorologists who wished to draw attention to a “sphere of air” surrounding the earth that other scientists had “ignored”: hence, the jocular ignorasphere . But not only ignored—unrecognized. Not until recently has it been understood as the source of natural phenomena such as lightning storms, and as the region millions of meteors enter at their peril—and then disintegrate. Actually, it is a playful synonym for the mesosphere, from Greek mesos, middle, and sphaira, ball, the layer of the earth’s atmosphere above the stratosphere and below the thermosphere, located between fifty and ninety kilometers above the surface of the earth. Thus, we ignore the ignorasphere at our peril, as it generates “atmospheric tides” and “gravity tides,” and even the eerily beautiful noctilucent, night-shining clouds. Companion words include atmosphere, steam sphere; troposphere, revolving sphere; stratosphere, spreading sphere; ionosphere, violet sphere.