Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  Labyrinth

  LACONIC

  In a word. Brevity. Concision. Abruptness. To say more would mean less. During the Peloponnesian War, Philip of Macedonia (Alexander’s father) sent a messenger from Athens to Sparta, the center of Laconia, warning, “If we attack Sparta, we will raze it to the ground; we will not leave a single stone unturned.” The Laconian general looked him square in the eye and carefully measured his word. Then he replied, “If.”

  LADY

  The woman of the house; a well-mannered, proper, and virtuous woman. According to linguist Owen Barfield, our English word lady derives from the “homely old Teutonic word loaf-kneader.” The connection provides remarkable insight into the central importance of bread in medieval households and the lives of those who provide it for others. In medieval England a lord was hlaford, earlier hlafweard, guardian of the loaf or loaf-ward. Similarly, as Coleridge cites, lady was hlaefdige, a woman who kneads, which consists of hlaef, bread, and dige, knead. Together, they provide a medieval word portrait; as Barfield writes, “So the lady kneaded the bread and the lord protected it.” These leavening words gave rise to two everyday words in modern English: hlaef is the ancestor of “loaf,” and dige gave us “dough.” Companion words include ladybird, lady’s slipper, ladylike, and bread-winner (bread being a euphemism for money), and “loaf of bread,” which is Cockney rhyming slang for “head.” In the parlance of East Londoners, “bread” rhymes with “head,” so someone might say, “Use your loaf” when they mean “Use your head!” Circuitously, we come back to a lady being the real “head” of the household because she bakes the bread. The temptress Mae West said, “Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.”

  LAGNIAPPE

  An expensive word for a cheap gift given to a customer. This coinage comes from New Orleans, deriving from la napa, Spanish for “the gift,” from the American Indian or Cajun word yapa, a present from a trader to a steady customer. The impulse behind this form of gift giving is alive and well in the form of tchotchkes and gewgaws such as T-shirts, pens, pads of paper presented as little gifts, reminders, gratitudes. Funk cites our greatest wordsmith, Mark Twain’s, clever usage in Life on the Mississippi: “The English were trading beads and blankets to them [the Indians] for a consideration and throwing in civilization and whiskey ‘for lagniappe.’”

  LOGROLLING

  A 19th-century American custom in which neighbors roll logs together into a pile for burning; a contest among loggers in which they balance on floating logs while trying to knock each other off. This terrific term passes the first test for the revival or spread of a word—it’s terrifically catchy—and it’s catchy because it’s visual and fun to say. Furthermore, it is an American original. The contest is sometimes referred to as birling or burling, a game of skill among lumberjacks, which has its roots in the old Scottish word birl, to whirl round and round. Figuratively, logrolling refers to the tricky ability to keep your balance when everything is moving and slippery under your feet, but also, in politics, to the trading of votes or the scheming of legislators to slip a desired bill through without actually persuading fellow lawmakers about its merits—in other words, to knock them off the log. In an article published in 2003 in Aquatics International, Judy Hoeschler, who first learned how to logroll on water when she was 12 and won her first logrolling championship at 16, exulted, “Being a logrolling family is so much fun! It kinda blows people’s minds when they see we’re logrollers and none of us fit the Paul Bunyan image.” The word also applies to making concessions to the other party (like your opponent on a whirling log) in conflict resolution.

  LOUCHE

  Of questionable reputation, in a raffish sort of way. An outlaw with a touch of class, a rake with a hint of glamour, a hipster in some neighborhoods, riff-raff in another, all might be described as louche. The word conjures the decadence of bohemians who want to live on the outskirts of society. Its origins provide a word picture. The Latin luscus, one-eyed, shady, disreputable, evolved into the French louche, for “cross-eyed” or “squint-eyed.” Its evolution from rabble to raffish resembles the evolution of some outlaws’ reputations; think of Bonnie and Clyde. The verb form, to louche, became popular in 19th-century Paris to describe the phenomenon of “clouding over,” as when some louche characters poured water into their glass of anise-flavored drinks such as Pernod or ouzo, hence “the ouzo effect.” In case you’d like to use it conversation, a poem, or song lyric, it helps to know that louche rhymes with baba ghanoush.

  LOVE

  The deep force that moves the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heart. An abiding affection. A word that transcends ordinary definition, and yet demands it, since it is often either misunderstood or trivialized. Etymologically it comes from loamy turf, the Proto-Indo-European leubh, which sired many progeny, such as German liebe, Dutch liefde, English lief and liege, dear or pledge, and even libido, strong desire. Many Western European words for “praise” come from the same source. The commingled meaning of “pleasing” and “praising,” plus “satisfied” and “trust,” all converge, as ancient poetry and modern psychology will attest, in our heart-swelling English word love. Where to begin with its innumerable uses? Why not at the very beginning, or near the beginning, in the single surviving line from Sophocles’ play The Loves of Achilles: “Love feels like the ice held in the hand of children.” Twenty-five hundred years later, in Ulysses, James Joyce wrote the following lines, which were inexplicably stricken in the original 1922 edition but restored in the 1980s. About to leave Ireland in “silence, exile, and cunning,” Stephen Dedalus reflects, “Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men….” And later: “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men. Love.” Companion words include the murmurous lovely and the lamentable loathed-loving, another lost child from the first edition of the OED, referring to “hating oneself for being attached to somebody who is bad for you.” When Pompeii was excavated in the 18th century, this touching piece of graffiti was discovered: “Lovers, like bees, enjoy a life of honey.”

  LULLABY

  A nighttime song to lull children to sleep. One of the perennials on Most Beautiful Words lists, dating back to c.1560, a natural protraction of lull, from the Swedish lulla and Dutch lullen, prattle. Ultimately, a reassuring echo of the syllable lu or la, joined with a second element, perhaps from by-by , good-by. In the late 1960s, Lennon and McCartney of the Beatles gave us one of the loveliest of modern lullabies when they adapted “Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes,” a 17th-century poem by the poet and early dictionary maker Thomas Dekker. But rather than sing it themselves, they handed it over to Ringo to sing. His warmly avuncular version, which rounded out the Abbey Road album, has helped lull children and lovers to sleep ever since: “Sleep, pretty darlings, do not cry, / and I will sing a lullaby. / Golden slumbers fill your eyes.” Companion lullabies include the incantatory Irish “Tura lura lura,” which “lures” our children to embark on a long, safe tura, or pilgrimage, across the Land of Nod, the world of sleep between dusk and dawn.

  M

  MEERSCHAUM

  A mineral used for crafting tobacco pipes. Meerschaum has long been found on certain seashores in “rounded white lumps,” and is believed by the folk to be petrified sea froth, as evidenced by the German Meer, sea, and Schaum, foam or scum (an early synonym for “foam”). This derives from the earlier Latin spuma maris, the spume of the sea, and before that, the Persian kef-i-darya. Easily shaped and sculpted, meerschaum is now synonymous with the frothy-appearing tobacco-pipe bowls carved by sailors with time on their hands. Brewer notes that when meerschaum is dug out of the shore, “it lathers like soap,” which is exactly what it’s used for by the Tartars to this day. Herman Melville’s biographer, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, describes the famed author of Moby Dick in later life: “Most evenings he just sat in his rocker puffing his meerschaum pipe and watching the great fireplace swallow down cords of wood as a whale does boats.�
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  MELANCHOLY

  Overwhelming sadness, merciless moodiness, grief’s house. Hovering on the edge of chapfallen, sullen, gloomy, and petulant. The word first appears in English in 1303, from the Greek melancholia, from melas, black, and khole, bile or gall, an excess of which was said to cause plunging fits of depression, or irascibility. Traditionally, melancholy was regarded as the result of an overabundance of this “black gall,” a belief that’s survived in the expression “You’ve got a lot of gall,” suggesting someone who is rude, impertinent, or bitter. Medieval physicians believed the accretion from the spleen, one of the four “humors,” led to depression, even insanity. Eventually, four types of melancholy were distinguished: melancholia attonita, gloomy; melancholia errabunda, restless; melancholia malevolens, mischievous; and melancholia complacens, complacent. And we might add a fifth, melancholia romantica, as in “Melancholy Baby,” as sung by Judy Garland. Surprisingly, down in the dumps comes from dumpin, Swedish for melancholy; dimba, to steam, reek; and Danish dump, dull, damp, as in “to damp one’s spirits.” This was John Milton’s sense when he wrote in Paradise Lost: “A melancholy damp of cold and dry, / to weigh thy spirits down,” by which he is saying that melancholy damps, as in suffocates, the human spirit. Virginia Woolf wrote, in Jacob’s Room, “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, about his life of “active melancholy .” On the walls of the Lion’s Den pub in Greenwich Village we find: “Neurosis is red / Melancholia is blue / I’m schizophrenic / What are you?” Companion words include moanworthy, sad; doleful, full of grief; lugubrious, mournful; and crepehanger, a gloomy Gus, a pessimist.

  METAPHOR

  One thing that stands for another. A metaphor is a brief expression that compactly, often surprisingly, describes a thing as if it were something else. The word has survived almost intact from the Latin metaphora, a transferring of a word from its literal significance, in the fine definition of Skeats, and before that the Greek metaphorein, from meta, over, and pherein, to carry, bear across; hence, to transfer. The operative word here is transfer, whose modern sense dates from 1533, Middle French metaphore, to transfer from one context to another in a memorable way. Consider Raymond Chandler’s description in Farewell, My Lovely of Moose Malloy, who “looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Shakespeare’s work fairly explodes with powerful metaphors, such as this one on aging, from Sonnet 73: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet bird sang…” As a kind of scavenger after metaphors, I find Jorge Borges’s reflections on “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by Saint John of the Cross, very moving: “After he had an unutterable experience, he had to communicate it somehow in metaphors.” In 2004 the new Athens subway, called Metaphoros, was completed just in time to carry fans across town to watch the various Olympic competitions. Some of them also used “transfers.”

  MONDEGREEN

  A mishearing of a song lyric that leads to a fresh new meaning, generally humorous, sometimes poignant. When she was a little girl the writer Sylvia Wright was listening to a mournful Scottish ballad, “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” when she thought she heard: “Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands / Oh Where hae you been? / They hae slay the Earl of Murray / And Lady Mondegreen.” Her mishearing of the last line, which is actually “And laid him on the green,” has spawned a modern generation of malapropisms in its name. Wright became smitten with the common and often witty mishearings in songs, poems, and speeches, and eventually published an essay about them in a 1954 article. Common mondegreens include “round John Virgin” (for “round yon Virgin,” from “Silent Night”) and “You and Me and Leslie” (for “you and me, endlessly” from the Rascals’ “Groovin’ “). And from the Beatle’s immortal “Michelle,” submitted by my niece of the same name: “A Sunday monkey bored playing piano songs,” her mishearing of the French “Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble” (“These are words that go together well.”) For the record, mondegreens and word play do “go together well,” in any language.

  MUM

  “Shush! Silence!” In Dr. Johnson’s time a mome was “a dull, stupid blockhead, a stock, a post,” an insult that derived from French momon, a game of dice played in masquerade in strict silence, from which comes mum, for silence. Eventually, we arrived at the marvelous injunction “Mum’s the word.” Or in Hamlet’s famous mummery, “Words, words, words; the rest is silence.” Its origins merge with that mythic Greek mu, closed lips, or as Skeats writes beautifully, “to express the least sound made with closed lips.” Roy Blount Jr. adds, “Since it’s not merely a sound, mmmm, but a word, to say it we have to move our lips.” Thus, the difference between mum and mmmm is the effort to break our silence. An imitative word from the gentle sounds mum or mom, once described as “used by nurses to frighten or amuse children, at the same time pretending to cover their faces.” Remarkably, most words for mother from around the world begin with exactly that mmmm sound, from a child’s satisfaction with her mother’s mammary glands and her earliest effort at baby talk, mama. Companion words from this matrix of mother-inspired words include mumble; mummer, a mask, buffoon, one who goes a-mumming; and mummel, a German bugbear. Typing all these m’s somehow summons “Hey, Baby (They’re Playing Our Song)” by the Buckinghams, a Sixties love song with the infectious chorus “Mmm-my-my-my baby, mmmm-my-my-my baby, hey, baby, hey, baby…”

  MURMUR

  To speak softly; to grumble. One of the perennial favorite words on Top Ten Lists of the English language. Originally, however, it was an “expression of discontent by grumbling.” Slowly it evolved from Old French murmure and Latin murmurare, a hum, muttering, rushing—which may be marvelously imitative of what’s heard around a crackling fire, as evident in the Sanskrit murmurah. If you listen closely to murmur, you will hear traces and tones of “mother,” “myth,” “mystery,” and those “crackling fires,” all audible in the lowing sounds of the natural world, a babbling brook, a voice in an adjoining room, or, in the modern medical sense, the beats of an abnormal heart. The modern sense of “softly spoken words” is first recorded in 1674. My own first recollection of catching this word is from reading a book of essays by D. H. Lawrence in a bed-and-breakfast home in Dover, England, in 1980, and feeling the hair rise on my head when I read this: “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.” The savvy English commentator on modern mythology Marina Warner writes, “In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights,’ Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become.” Companion words include whisper, as beautifully expressed in the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow.’”

  Murmur (Grow, Grow)

  MUSE

  The personification of inspiration. According to Greek thought, when a human being felt a sudden infusion of inspiration or sensed a presence, it was the breath of a god or goddess. Every expression in the arts was personified by the Muses, one for each of the nine arts. When the first artifacts and books were collected, their new homes were called museums, such as the Alexandrian Library, which housed some 700,000 scrolls in its Museion, “The Place of the Muses.” The nine Greek goddesses of the arts were daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, from mnemon, mindful, and mneme, long memory. This is not so surprising, as Isaac Asimov points out, since all poetry was memorized in ancient times. Companion words include music, divinely inspired harmonies of sound, by which virtually all ancient Greek art and drama was accompanied; mosaic, pieces of memory; and mnemonic, the art of memory—all influenced by the flow of mneme, the continuing e
ffect of past experience on an individual or the race. Memory’s shadow words are disturbing, like amnesia, not-knowing, forgetting, and the French oubliette, a room whose only opening is a ceiling, where a prisoner is immured in order to be forgotten. Also, the quirky Forgettery, an invented word by Carl Sandburg, who recommended we build one so we wouldn’t be plagued with remembering things that are best forgotten.

  MYTHOSPHERE

  The atmosphere of myth that surrounds and permeates our lives; the source of the sacred stories and images that tell how it all began. Coined by former Time magazine art critic, eminent mythologist, and all-around bon vivant Alexander Eliot, mythosphere is a brilliant invention, reflecting a lifetime of reflection about myth. “We’re all aware,” Eliot writes, “that [the atmosphere] surrounds, protects, nourishes, and energizes the world ‘out there.’ The mythosphere does all that too, but for the world ‘in here.’” It was thousands of years in the making, he adds, and exists in our psyches as stories that “ineffably touch the heart.” They are part of the cultural air that we breathe, and can help us reconnect to a dimension outside time and space. For this reason, myths have “shuddering relevance,” and in most ancient cultures myths have been regarded as truer than so-called fact. During the Renaissance, artist and scholars breathed deep from the mythosphere and helped revive Western culture. In the modern era, novelists, poets, and film-makers have tapped the mythosphere to help liberate their creativity and explain the dynamics of their psychology. For these reasons, and many more, Thoreau said, “Myth may be the closest man has ever gotten to truth.” By that he meant psychological truth, the mother of all stories, the truth of the soul. Again, Marina Warner: “Writers don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew.” Companion words include mystery, mystagogue, mythomania, mythopoeia, mythmaker.