Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  INSOLENT

  Rebellious, arrogant, with a tincture of realizing a higher justice. Richard Chenevix Trench’s definition, trenchant as it is, deserves to be quoted: “The insolent is, properly, no more than the unusual. This, as the violation of the fixed law and order of a society, is commonly offensive, even as it indicates a mind willing to offend, and thus insolent has acquired its present meaning. But for the poet, the fact that he is forsaking the beaten track … in this way to be insolent, or original, as we should now say, may be his highest praise.” First recorded in 1386, “proud, disdainful, haughty, arrogant,” from Latin insolentem, which may be related to sodalis, close companion. The modern sense of being contemptuous of authority dates from 1678. Aristotle is credited with the pithy saying “Wit is educated insolence.” Sharing a piquant observation about her friends Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis said, “She matched his insolence.”

  J

  JAZZ

  In a word, Louis; in two, Ella Fitzgerald; in three, Charlie “Bird” Parker; in four, Irish heat or passion. Its origins are as hip as its syncopated rhythm. Jazz jumped out of Black America’s juke joints, those cheap bars in the South that flailed with bump-and-grind dancing and bad-ass music, as intertwined as two lovers on the dance floor swaying to an Eartha Kitt song. So jazzin’ was slang for getting it on, jazzy became an adjective to describe the slick moves of a Pete Maravich on the basketball court. Cassidy’s Irish- American dictionary offers the Irish teas, pronounced j’as ch’as, and meaning “passion, ardor, excitement, sexual heat and excitement.” His persuasive research tracks the word to as early as 1917, in the Bay Area, where it was a “hot new word” heard in music halls and whorehouses and on baseball fields. He writes, “Jazz was so full of jasm and gism (iteas ioma, an abundance of heat) … It was a word you learned by ear—like jazz music.” Often used together by the immigrant Irish, jasm and gism had a kind of bluesy “call and response” relationship, which resulted in tch’as pronounced, drum roll, please—jazz. Originally a kind of “spark.” it appears in Northern California sports pages, in the 1890s, to describe ballplayers who performed with gis, sass, zest, pizzazz. In hipster slang, jazz means having sex, as in “I Want a Jazzy Kiss,” by Mamie Smith, 1921. Companion words include jazzbo, boyfriend; jazz water, bootleg alcohol; jazzed, excited. Jive, as indispensable in jazz as syncopation, is defined in Hip Slang as “to kid, to talk insincerely, to use elaborate or trick language”—immortalized in Cab Calloway’s crepuscular dictionary of Jive Talk in the 1920s.

  JINX

  To curse; an evil spell; a person or article that brings bad luck. Traditionally cited as O.O.O. “of obscure origin.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate, hold up a mirror, to the popular word, no matter how baffling it is to scholars. Long associated with witchcraft and witches, who used a certain wryneck bird for divination. Pindar and Aeschylus cite iunx as a peculiar contraption called a witch’s wheel that turned with a “hapless bird,” the Jynx torquilla, that is able to rotate its neck 360 degrees. Reportedly, onlookers were charmed. Biologist Lyall Watson traces it back to jynges, for “unspeakable counsels” in ancient Chaldaic philosophy. Lexicographer and poet John Ciardi roots it in “Iunx, the wryneck, squawking European bird that can twist its neck in an extra way.” Not until the 1910 does the word resurface—in the sports pages again—in a reference to a couple of hapless ballplayers who hadn’t escaped “the jinx that has been following the champions.” The New York Giants’ Christy Mathewson, in his 1912 book Pitching at a Pinch, described a jinx as “something which brings bad luck to a ball player.” Actress Gina Gershon says, “I’ve seen it too many times in Hollywood. Talking about a relationship in public can jinx it. And if you have your picture taken together, you might as well start packing your bags.”

  JUGGERNAUT (HINDI)

  A huge wagon; an unstoppable force; an act of sacrificial devotion . A word with the strength of its image. What is now considered anything with runaway force, a team of horses, a locomotive, a political campaign, comes from an ancient Hindu ritual where a few thousand ardent worshippers pull a colossal statue or icon of a god in a religious procession, predominantly the Puri Festival in Orissa, India. The Sanskrit Jacganatha, from jagat, world, and nathas, lord, lends the immediacy of the image of an idol of the “Lord of the World,” Krishna or Vishnu, parading through the streets and causing a rapturous havoc. Unsubstantiated to this day are those dispatches from early Western reporters who claimed to see worshippers throwing themselves under the wheels of the juggernaut, inspired by their religious fervor. Nonetheless, the stories inspired the metaphor of an inexorable, wild, crushing force, such as an invading army. At Caffè Trieste, in San Francisco, in the early 1970s, a young screenwriter named Francis Ford Coppola wrote in his script for Patton: “Meanwhile, the main body of Patton’s army … resupplied now and rolling like a juggernaut, slashes toward the Saar.”

  JUKE

  A roadhouse; music box; to,fake in basketball. Street slang for sex, dancing, music, great basketball moves, funky roadside shack for food, music, and sometimes, good lovin’. Evidently, juke derives from juke joint, a kind of off-road brothel. Sociologists would describe a juke as a transgressive or liminal space. Etymologists trace the word to two languages in West Africa: the Gullah word juk, infamous, wicked, and the Wolof jug, disorderly, and zug, to live wickedly. Closely related is the Bambara jugu, a naughty person. Of course, other theories flail about, like those roadhouse dancers, tracing the word back to the French jouer, play, and Scottish jouk, hide, evade, dodge, and jookerie, a secret place where “marks” are swindled. So, like a good gumbo, the word was seasoned by many influences from the sensual subculture of New Orleans, which thrived in the juke joints, where “barrelhouse music” was played and “barrelhouse liquor” was served by the cup on a make-shift bar with a plank set across two barrels. Eventually, juke became shorthand for the music machines. Essayist Michael Ventura suggests that juke came from Storyville, in New Orleans. Originally, he writes, it meant “to fuck,” while jelly roll was a risqué reference to the sex organs of both men and women. Buddy Bolden, it was said, “had the old moan in his cornet.” Bolden was famous for his trance-inducing performances, playing so holy it transformed the juke joints into churches, and so sexy his music could “make women jump out of the window.” Before each performance he used to say, “Let’s call the children home.” Can I get a witness? Can I get a witness?

  K

  KALEIDOSCOPE

  An optical viewer that diffracts light into beautiful geometric shapes. The Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster modeled his 1817 invention on the telescope, calling it simply an instrument for observation of “rotating patterns of colored glass.” Turning it around and around in his hand, and then in his mind, he finally arrived at its melodic-sounding name by joining the mellifluous Greek words kalos, beauty, eidos, shape, and skopeo, to see or view. The words combine to create a marvelous little verbal machine, “an observer of beautiful forms.” Metaphorically, its adjectival form kaleidoscopic has come to mean an unexpectedly beautiful, playful, or fantastic display. Receiving a kaleidoscope as a gift from his publisher, Lord Byron appreciated not only its beauty but its metaphorical power, marveling at its “constantly changing patterns” in a letter from 1819. Describing his work habits, trumpeter Ornette Coleman said, “When I have them working together, it’s like a beautiful kaleidoscope .” A distant cousin would be telepathy, which combines telescope and pathos, to suggest turning the lens of the soul on one’s “far-flung feelings.”

  KAVLA (TURKISH)

  The thrill of deal-making, the excitement of anticipation, the enjoyment of prolonged pleasure. An untranslatable but desirable word for the delicious, held-breath moment between the end of haggling and the consummation of a deal, between the turn of the last lap and reaching the tape at the end of a race, between the inspiration for the painting and the ecstatic initialing of the artist’s name, between the lifting of the loins and th
e climax in lovemaking. I caught this word in an article in Smithsonian magazine presenting the nefarious dealings of a looter of antiques, who described in near-erotic terms the kavla of the deal. The eponymic origins of the word go back to the city of the same name, Kavla, in ancient Greece, which was known for its rapturous customs for sealing a deal in its famed markets. Figuratively, kavla is now used for stretching out our most sensuous moments in order to make the pleasure of anticipation—rather than consummation—last as long as possible. Curious connection: Kavla, a Greek pop music group, retains a hint of the old meaning of the word in a few lines from the title song of its album: “Speaking and breathin’ like crazy / Only the feelings remain … (It’s Kavla).”

  KENNING

  A figurative usage, usually a compound metaphor, mostly found in epic poetry. Traditionally ill-defined as a circumlocution used where a good noun would do, a kenning is actually a noble member of the family of similes, metaphors, and riddles, what Seamus Heaney calls, in his translation of Beowulf, the “genius for analogy-seeking … and compound-making,” such as “word-hoard” for vocabulary. As epitomized by Norse-speaking Vikings and Anglo-Saxon bards, a classic kenning from Beowulf is “whale-road,” which vividly depicts the migration path of whales across the sea. In Grendel, John Gardner’s prose translation from the monster’s point of view, Gardner writes, “Such are the tiresome memories of a shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird roads.” Examples include “battle-sweat” for blood, “enemy of the mast” for wind, “raven-harvest” for death, “moons of the forehead” for eyes, and “storm of sands” for battle. Thus, kennings are metaphorical phrases that allow the writer and listener to know a thing better by describing it not so obviously, but allusively. Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien might appreciate his work even more knowing that he worked on the OED for a year in his twenties; one of his proud contributions was “horse-whale,” a vivid kenning for walrus. Speaking of which, it is well within our ken, our knowledge, to track its origin to the Old Norse kenna, to know, perceive, and the Germanic kannian, to be able. I am keen to try to keep this practice alive in my “wolf’s joint,” my wrist, so “Odin’s lip-stream,” my poetry, keeps running wild in my soul.

  KERFUFFLE

  An outburst, a commotion, a tempest in a tumult. Though the word is usually designated as obscure and unknown, a riffle through a Scottish dictionary reveals that it is an adaptation of carfuffle, derived from Scots car, which comes from Scottish-Gaelic cearr, wrong, awkward and fuffle, disheveled. Thus a kerfuffle is not only an outburst, but an awkward disruption, a badly motivated disturbance, a too-clever-by-half way of saying much ado about nothing. A CNET headline from summer 2009, “The 1984 Kindle Kerfuffle,” played off the alliteration. The author seems to be asserting that the rhubarb over censorship was no more than a kerfuffle in a teapot.

  KIBOSH (IRISH)

  To put a lid on it, put a stop to, squelch. A kinesthetic verb that knocks on whatever it modifies. To take the lid off the mystery of this old Gaelic word we need to hop across the pond, as the Irish say, and revisit the Irish funeral practice of placing a kibosh, a black cap, on the deceased, a solemn form of saying farewell. Across the Irish Sea, in England and on the continent, a black cap was often worn by judges passing a death sentence. Thus, to put the kibosh on someone is declare them as good as dead. The Irish fairy tale collector Padraic Colum explains the word in a letter to etymologist and dictionary maker Charles Earle Funk: “Kibosh, I believe means the ‘cap of death’ and it is always used in that sense—‘He put the kibosh on it.’ In Irish it could be written ‘cie bais,’—the last word pronounced ‘bosh,’ the genitive of bas, ‘death.’” A neoclassic citation comes from Crazy Joe DaVola in an episode of Seinfeld: “I know you bad-mouthed me to the execs at NBC, put the kibosh on my deal. Now I’m gonna put the kibosh on you. You know I’ve kiboshed before, and I will kibosh again.”

  KINEPHANTOM

  An illusory motion, a kinesthetic word. This is one I’ve been looking for all my life, at least since noticing the weird phenomenon of the wheels of my boyhood friend Steve’s bike appearing to spin backward as we were riding to Dynamite Park, in our little hamlet of Wayne, Michigan. Its origins are kine, to see, and phantom, illusion. The perception of the wheels of a vehicle moving backward when they are actually spinning forward is a familiar kinephantom . Speaking of spinning, kinetosis is an Old World word for motion sickness, from kinesis, motion, and osose, sick. If I’d only been able to pronounce it when I had to ask my dad to pull off to the side of the road in our 1960 Falcon, as we were driving to Lake Nipissing, Ontario, on family vacation. As a Grecophile, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so sick of hearing me moan, “I’m carsick.”

  KITE

  An airborne toy made of the evergreen spirit in human beings to watch things fly. First recorded in 1664, a kite usually consists of a body of paper or cloth attached to a ribcagelike frame, and a tail of various materials. Kite is a doubly echoic word of a phenomenon commonly observed and admired by the folk for millennia—the soaring of a hawk called a kite since the Middle Ages. Deriving from Middle English kyte, from the Old English cyta, a hawk, kite is a word that soars. John Ciardi suggests that it echoes the call of the kite, as heard in the German ciegan, a piercing ki-ki-ki. In dramatic contrast, the rudely dismissive phrase “Go fly a kite!” reveals the diminishment of the modern imagination, as well as being dismissive of the body’s natural desire to play, as if flying a kite were immature, something to grow out of. Consider the marvel of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite in a storm, or the exultant Iraqi boy in The Kite Runner. To fly a kite is an act of joy, an emblem of freedom, an echo of the hawk in all of us. The prolific diarist Anaïs Nin captured the figurative meaning when she wrote, “Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new country.” Likewise, Lauren Bacall said in an interview, “Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.” For a soaring companion word, the Scots say skite, to fly, in flight.

  L

  LABEL

  A description, prescription, or depiction. Originally, from the world of heraldry and medicine, from Latin diminutive labellum, the little lip, depicted in old caricatures and graffiti. The Romans drew them as proto-word balloons hanging from the mouths of the figures in their wall frescoes and in chalk drawings to suggest what the character was saying. This appended lip received the name labellum, or label. The practice of writing “lip balloons” was carried over to the world of medicine by doctors who wrote on a piece of paper and tied or taped it to the lip of a phial; the term was even applied to the little ribbon attached to the sealing wax on old documents. By the early 14th century the Latin word and practice had been borrowed by the French as label, lambel, ribbon, fringe, and lambeau, defined by the Collins French- English Dictionary as “a strip, rag, shred, tatter,” which should make us think twice about the tattered jerseys at the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field. In case you were wondering, record label dates all the way back to 1907, described then as a “circular piece of paper in the center of a gramophone record.” This in turn inspired the use of label to stand in generally for the record company, in 1952. To label, as a verb, dates back to 1601, and its meaning, “to categorize,” to 1853. Thus, a label is a time-honored way to put words in someone’s mouth, a way to describe, to give vital information.

  LABYRINTH

  A place of twisting passageways. Usually used interchangeably with a maze, which is designed to confuse with dead ends, a true labyrinth has but one path to the center. Famously mythologized in the popular story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which dwelled in the Knossos Palace on Crete. The twisty word derives from the Greek labyrinthos, a mazelike building with intricate passages, based on an earlier Lydian word, labrys, a two-edged axe, which symbolized royal power. The story goes that King Minos seduced an apparently irresistible cow, resulting in the birth of his monstrous son, half man, half bull, which he hid in a labyrinth devised by Daedal
us. The word entered English in 1548 in a figurative sense, to represent anything meandering or confusing, as expressed by labyrinthine, an adjective depicting a place of intricate and confusing passageways. Companion words include labyrinthodonts, a type of amphibian, and labyrinthitis , an inflammation of the inner ear, which is a maze of canals filled with fluid. Half of the ear’s labyrinth is the snail-shaped cochlea, which conveys sound to the brain; the other resembles a gyroscope, which transmits information about the position of your head relative to the ground. If your gyroscope is thrown out of whack, vertigo can result. With incantatory cadences the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, “Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the path of the hero.” Thus, the labyrinth is the mythic map of the path of the soul as it meanders back and forth through the world.