Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  Mythosphere (Alex Eliot)

  N

  NEMESIS

  Righteous retribution. We all have felt its sting; we even may have stung someone else with it. It’s human nature, or should we say, superhuman nature? The word hails from the Greek nemein, to distribute, apportion, which gave rise to lot, and allotment. Nemesis was the goddess of vengeance, the daughter of Zeus and Hera who embodied something more than pure revenge, closer to karma. She represented indignation at the injustices of the world, and was depicted as the bitter relative who ruined so many weddings and relished so many funerals that the invitations stopped coming. In Greek myth she is the embodiment of the avenging spirit, a quality that arises from the depth of her bitterness at being treated like a second-class goddess. Thus, Nemesis was the “distributor” of justice, she who gave what was “one’s due,” their “lot in life,” which came to mean “your number is up,” as in allotment hunting, or in your fated death or punishment. By the 16th century nemesis came to mean “retributive justice,” one’s fate if one has lived dangerously or selfishly. Nemesis is the strange cousin in the attic of Narcissus, with his attendant narcissism, and gives birth to the psychological condition called nemesism, an obscure but valuable word that embodies inward negative feelings, a kind of cosmic soul rust. British novelist, short story writer, and playwright Brian Aldiss defined science fiction for all-time when he wrote that it is primarily the story of “Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.”

  NOCTAMBULATION

  Night walking, studying; guiding one’s way through the night. A gift for the young, a curse for the old. Nightly companion words are as numerous as the bats escaping caves at dusk: noctiflorous, blooming at night, not just flowers but night writers and night scoundrels; noctuary, a place for nighttime studies; noctivate; nocta-collector; noctivagator, one who wanders around at night; noctiphobia, fear of the night; nightertale, the nighttime, the whole night long; and the wondrously named acronicta noctivaga, the Night-Wandering Dagger, a dragonfly of British Columbia and the Yukon. Finally, consider the night-blooming cereus, a flower that blooms but once a year, in the middle of the night, when only the lucubrators, those working by candlelight, are still awake, relishing the darkness. Henry David Thoreau immortalized the feeling when he wrote, “I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.” The Hungarian photographer Brassaï was a notorious nightwalker, shooting the gaslit Paris streets and its brothels, cabarets, and all-night cafés. His close friend Henry Miller wrote of his visit to the Hotel des Terrasses, where he pored for hours over the “nightly harvest of photographs which were spread about the pieces of furniture in Brassaï’s room.”

  NOSTALGIA

  Mythic homesickness. The word was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, an Austrian medical student, who joined two Greek words, nostois, return, and algos, pain, to describe the longing for home of Swiss soldiers stationed in the mountains. But Homer used a version of it in the sense that many of the stories-within-stories of his epic poem, the Odyssey, were inspired by the nostos, the homecoming stories, or the nostoi, the popular tales of sailors’ homeward bound journeys told and retold in ports all around the Mediterranean. His hero, Odysseus, spurred on by the memory of Penelope’s arms, the loyalty of his dog, the face of his son, defied the gods to “get home again” after the ten-year war against Troy: this panorama has been absorbed by English as nostalgia. Though often derided as sentimental, the real thing is a tidal pull of feeling, an undulating wave of emotions that can be triggered by a whiff of burning leaves, a ballgame on a radio, an accent, a taste of home cooking. As if derision weren’t enough, in 1844 Dunglison reduced nostalgia to an “affliction produced by desire to return to one’s country, commonly accompanied by slow wasting and [which] … may speedily induce death.” Thus, a word as many-leveled as the ruins of Troy, the painful urge of a fierce desire to go home again. Who says you can’t? We do it every time we feel nostalgic, whether for the past or, as physicist Stephen Hawking says, for the future, which is his definition of synchronicity. When we do get home, we’d best be ready, because as Will Rogers reminded us, “Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.”

  NUMINOUS

  Conveying divine power. A mystical word revived in our time by the German scholar Rudolf Otto, from the Latin numen, a divine power or spirit that brings life or guidance—a hint of the spirits that dwell in nature, and one aspect of its original and transcendent meaning of a “nod” of the gods. Numen refers to the spirits or geniuses that dwell in a place and have the potential to inspire creative efforts, and numinous refers to the sacred essence, the supernatural dimension, magical forces, in dramatic contrast to phenomena that can be apprehended by the senses. Numinous describes the otherwise inexplicable power emanating from a megalithic site in Brittany, or a painting of a storm at sea by Turner, that reveals a presence in nature and that touches a presence in us. Figuratively speaking, Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst or the temples of Bali may be said to be numinous if they fire our imagination. In one of my favorite books, The Star Thrower, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley evokes the numinous without ever actually using the word: “As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it. … Judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. ‘Very well,’ you will say, ‘Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.’ But let me tell you it is not done—not on an empty road at midnight.” That’s presence; that’s numinous.

  O

  OBFUSCATE

  To render obscure, darken, make unintelligible. A dusky word to suggest the murkiness around twilight, the witching hour, the time when the gates were locked all over the world for fear of what might come knocking. A 16th-century word that emerged from the Latin obfuscare, to darken, from ob, over and fuscare, to make dark. Figuratively speaking, from the camel markets of Beersheba to the hog markets of Wall Street, obfuscation is a timeless marketing ploy that allows things to be sold in a shadowy way, a deliberately befuddling manner. Confounding companion words on the dark side include fusky, darkened, and obfuscatrix, Alexander Theroux’s terrific coinage to describe Gertrude Stein, writer of polysyllabic novels. The moral of this word story is simple: Sedulously eschew obfuscation.

  OSTRANENIE (RUSSIAN)

  To strangify. An invaluable word for a process most artists know well, the trick of making something ordinary seem extraordinary; something recognizable, unrecognizable; something dull, sharp. Have you ever stood before a painting and stared and stared at an object that seemed familiar—a horse, a curve in the road, a starry night—and felt a frisson, a shiver of unfamiliarity? As if you’ve never seen it before? This is one of the least understood but most compelling aspects of the creative process: the strangifying of the world so we can see it as if for the first time. The origins of ostranenie attest to as much, being from the Old French estrange, strange, and Latin extraneum, on the outside, foreign. Howard Rheingold refers to it as a “perceptual cleansing tool.” Companion words include defamiliarize and the Old English estrange, “the making strange,” which brings us full circle. Consider the peculiar last moments of Robert Louis Stevenson as he lay dying in Samoa, his words echoing the pathos of his novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde: “What’s the matter with me? What is this strangeness? Has my face changed?”

  P

  PANACHE

  Effortless style, easy swagger. If you can picture José Ferrer in the classic black-and-white movie version of Cyrano de Bergerac, leaping across the battlements of the castle, flashing his sword, and flourishing the white plume in his hat, you can begin to appreciate the connection between poetry and panache. The play’s author, Edmond Rostand, explained his use of the word to the French Academy: “A little frivolous perhaps; a little melodramatic certainly, the panache is no more than a charming gesture. But this charming gesture is so
difficult to make in the face of death and supposes so much strength that it is a charming gesture I would wish for all.” The first historical reference is 1553, when it is mentioned as “a tuft or plume of feathers,” from the Middle French pennache. Figuratively, it means a style infused with flair, élan, dash—pleasingly flamboyant, like Myrna Loy and William Powell in the Thin Man movies. Curious companion words include aplomb, cool, classy self-confidence, from “true to the plumb line,” and sprezzatura, the art of performing a task effortlessly. In a review of the 1937 movie Toast of the Town, Donna Moore describes an actor who embodies all of the qualities above: “Cary [Grant] plays the charmer,” she writes, “with his usual panache and is a sight for sore eyes in his top hat and tails.”

  PERIPATETIC

  Walking and talking, in the interest of philosophy as much as exercise. After the Peripatetic School of the Lyceum, founded by Aristotle, whose custom was to teach and dispute while meandering around Athens. His students became known as peripatetics, from Greek peripatetikos, given to walking about while teaching, from peri, around and patein, to walk, plus patos, a path, and the expression peripatikou, “I walk about.” Likewise, peripatos means “covered walk.” Since the 17th century, peripatetic has described a person who wanders all over, the Western equivalent of the Native American elder as one who “walks his talk.” Not so obscure a word that it couldn’t be tapped by lyricist Edward Kleban for “One,” the hit song from A Chorus Line: “She’s uncommonly rare, very unique, / peripatetic, poetic and chic.” Curious companion words include gyrovagus, an Irish pilgrim, from gyro, circle, circuit, and vagus, wandering, roving. Walking our talk here, as our Native American elders say, we come to the marvelous speculation that our word vague, meaning “unclear, vacillating, rambling,” from the Middle French vague, might just be a kind of folk memory of wanderers, rovers, ramblers, and vagrants. Other familiar forms of peripatetic souls include pellegrino, Italian for “pilgrim, wanderer”; gallivanter; and rolling stone, which inspired the naming of the band and the Dylan song.

  PETRICHOR

  The smell of rain rising from the earth. A niche-filling word to describe the seemingly ineffable smell of rain as it wafts off the ground, particularly after a long spell without rain. Coined in 1964 by I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, two Australian anthropologists, in an article titled “Nature of argillaceous odour” published in the journal Nature. Wisely wanting to avoid the clunky technical word for smells coming out of the argillaceous, clay, they borrowed the Greek words petros, stone, and ichor, blood of the gods, and provided us with a rainy-day word for all seasons. Since there isn’t a common word for the head-reeling, swoon-inducing smell of rain wafting off a paved road, I hereby nominate pluviaroma, from the Latin pluvia, rain, via, road, and aroma. Hence, road-rain-smell. Fellow words include Jupiter Pluvius, the god of rain; pluviograph, a rainfall gauge; and interpluvial, the period between rains, a vitally important calculation in drought-ridden areas of the world. For fans of new words, consider the estimates of the number conjured up by Shakespeare, which range from 1,700 to 21,000 words. What follows is a partial list: accommodation, advertising, besmirch, castigate, champion, dextrous, dialogue, dishearten, ladybird, love-letter, lustrous, moonbeam, radiance, undress, whirligig, and zany.

  PHANTASMAGORIA

  A flickering series of phantoms, apparitions, visions, or illusory images. From an ancient Greek word, phantasma, to show, to display, to shine, that later illuminated such words as Pharos, the famous lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt, and epiphany, the shining forth of divine light. Soon after the French Revolution, the showman and entrepreneur Etienne Gaspard Robertson opened a son-et-lumière show in Paris he called Fantasmagorie, from the Greek phantasmagoria , and introduced a new kind of “magic lantern” show with a new projector, the Fantascope. In 1801 the word reappeared in the French phantasmagorie, courtesy of the French dramatist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who combined phantasma, image, with agora, assembly, marketplace. Thus, phantasmagoria truly means “a showing of fantastic images in public.” The next year, it was borrowed as the name for a magic lantern in a Paris exhibition. In 1822, five years after Brewster’s invention of the kaleidoscopic, the meaning of phantasmagoria becomes more dynamic, more modern; now it means “a shifting scene of many elements.” Companion words include the indispensable fantasy, a shining vision. The English critic Marina Warner writes, in Phantasmagoria, a collection of essays about spirit visions, horror films, and dreams, “Whereas the dioramas and panoramas concentrated on battles, modern cityscapes, or exotic scenery, customs, and people—they are the forerunners of the wide-screen epic films—the phantasmagoria shadows forth the great silent movies like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu [1922] and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920].”

  PHONY

  Calculatingly false, unctuously insincere. A robust example, as Cassidy claims, of how an honorable word from classical Irish, fainne, devolved into street slang of the English-speaking empire. Fainne, ring, was corrupted to fawney, a fake gold ring, which inevitably became phony, street slang for “fake or sham” anything, from gold rings to politicians. As the story goes, the use of the word by Irish immigrants in Britain filtered down to “thieves and swindlers” in need of “secret code words.” These no-goodniks sold the spurious gold rings as if they were 24 karat, but they were really imitative. When I started teaching screenwriting at the American Film Institute, in the early 1980s, I was warned by one of my fellow instructors not to take the movie business too seriously. “Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood,” he said, forgetting to tell me that he was quoting Oscar Levant, “lies the real tinsel.”

  POCHADE (FRENCH)

  A quick sketch; a rapidly done watercolor. A concise and useful loan word, inspired by the practices of artists like Matisse who made the pochade one of their daily rituals. Sitting in his customary seat at a Paris café, Matisse set himself a daily challenge to quickly sketch (from Dutch schets, things rapidly done) or paint a few pedestrians in the time it took them to pass by his table. Originally, pochade just meant “pocket,” but soon it stood for “a pocket painting,” like the City Lights pocket paperback series, or medieval vade mecums, pocket prayer books. The American Society of Portrait Artists defines a pochade simply as a “hasty sketch.” More broadly, it is a small painting done quickly on location, either for its own sake or for later reference back in the studio for a large-format work. I first caught up with the word from an old friend, the New York painter John O’Brien, who lived and worked in Paris. He regarded the act of painting as having three acts, a complete dramatic structure, the first act being the croquis, a quick sketch by pen or pencil as a reminder of a scene, the second act the pochade, which adds color atmosphere, and the third and final act the culmination, the portrait or landscape, which included the details, faces, gestures, shadowing, and so on. Typically, after an inspired morning of work en plein air, outdoors, the artist would retreat to the studio, where he or she placed the sketchpad or canvas on the easel, from the Dutch ezel, donkey, that old reliable beast of burden that had been used for centuries. .The word has lumbered on for four centuries, losing the memory of the donkey but retaining the image of the steadfast easel.

  POLTROON

  A good-for-nothing coward. Its 16th-century roots paint a not so pretty picture. The Middle French poultron is a rascal, from Italian poltrone, a sluggard, a lazy fellow, and possibly poltro, an unbroken colt, and even poltrare, to lie in bed. Together, they become poltroon, a word that filled a niche in English for a lazy kid who won’t get out of bed, won’t get his hands dirty in the real world, like the colt that hasn’t been broken (initiated) yet. Thus, within a single word we find both a rich etymology and the plot for a melodrama that could be called “A Coward Is Born.” Tangentially, Dr. Johnson passed on the old chestnut that poltroon derives from an Italian punishment called truncato, which means “thumbs cut off,” based on a practice of cowards who cut off their own thumbs so they didn’t have to serve in combat. Spe
aking of which, coward derives from the Old French couart, from coe, meaning “tail” (which gave us coda), as in the lion couard, the “cowardly lion,” illustrated in medieval heraldry as having its tail between its legs. Now, there’s a vividly painted word. Coming full circle, NPR’s Nina Totenberg once said, “Every moment of the fashion industry’s misery is richly deserved by the designers … and magazine poltroons who perpetuate this absurd creation.” Companion words include the dubious chucklehead, jackanapes, craven, and dastard.

  PORTMANTEAU

  A made-up compound word. Originally, a large suitcase or travel trunk that opened into two compartments, from port, to carry, and manteau, coat; it was cleverly appropriated to describe how two words can also be folded into one. The ingenious Lewis Carroll borrowed this idea, in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty, who said, “There are two meanings packed in one word,” and created a locker full of doubled-up words. As if packing for a very long voyage, Carroll folded together “fury” and “furious” to create frumious; “chuckle” and “snort” to form chortle, and “gallop” and “harrumph” for the glorious galumph. If you look up portmanteau, you’ll eventually catch sight of the word luggage, which makes me think of the ballplayer Yogi Berra’s assessment after leaving one particularly hospitable hotel: “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.” All card-carrying word lovers have their own favorites, such as the lovely spindrift, from spin and drift, to reflect the actual movement of sea spray when it hits rocks on shore or the side of a ship. One of mine is the Appalachian bodacious, from bold and audacious, as in “I’m bodaciously ruin’t.” And who hasn’t smiled as wide as the sea after reading e. e. cummings’s hyphenated portmanteaus, “The world is / mud-luscious and / puddle-wonderful.”