Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  PREPOSTEROUS

  Absurd, ludicrous, insane. A marvel of a word, both literarily and pop culturally. Every time I come across it I can’t help but hear Snaggletooth’s lisping voice in the old Warner Brothers cartoon: “Pre-pos-ter-ous!” His mincing pronunciation actually helps us break it down so we can appreciate its surreal meaning even more. It derives from the Latin prae, before, and posterus, coming after. Something is preposterous because it seems “bass-ackwards,” as my Uncle Cy used to say. Skeat says, “hind side before,” which lends an image of an animal walking backward into an onlooker. So something that is preposterous can seem as if it’s already happened and is bound to happen again. To say it another way, if you don’t know whether you’re coming or going, you’re in an absurd, or preposterous, situation. Herman Melville wrote bitingly, “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, “Any reviewer who expresses rage or loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on a full suit of armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

  PRETZEL

  A bagel with its knickers in a twist. Abbots have always had a problem disciplining their monks. Many a monastery has been rent asunder by the sound of snoring friars. Eventually, one abbot, it is said, promised he would bake his somnolent monks a special piece of bread, and shape it in their honor. He called it a pretiola, Latin for “praying,” and it was offered to them only if they could stay awake during prayers. His innovation was this: he took some bread strips and folded them across each other to resemble the folded arms of a praying monk. Ever since, pretzels have been marketed as a reward, a comfort food, for one good deed or another, such as sitting still in front of a television with a football game on. Competing etymologies come from the German Prezel, from Latin brachitellum, a baked biscuit in the shape of folded arms, from bracchiatus, with arms. It’s not for nothing that a pretzel is called a snack, which comes from snatch, Lowland Scottish for “a sudden snap of the jaws.” In jazz, pretzel is a nickname for a French horn. Fellow words include bagel, a New York invention and delight, heartily described as a “donut with a college education.” The croissant was born one night in Vienna in 1656, in honor of the Austrian army’s turning back the hordes under a crescent (croissant) moon.

  PROTEAN

  Shape-shifting; capable of change. After Proteus, the sea god, son of Poseidon. Homer writes that after the sack of Troy the Greek general Menelaus and his soldiers meandered across the sea for many years trying in vain to get back to Greece. Finally, they heard tell that the squirmy, shape-shifting Proteus held the secret to their reaching home again. They found him floundering on a rock off the coast of Africa, but every time they tried to seize him he changed shape, as a chameleon changes colors, from “lion to panther to serpent.” Finally, Proteus relented and revealed the necessary sacrifices the woebegone sailors needed to perform for a favorable wind to blow them home again. Ever since, his name has served as a colorful adjective for anything that freely changes shape, from opinions to bodies. A marvelous companion word, worthy of revival, is shape-smith, an old term for “body builder.” American computer scientist and futurist Alan Kay grabs hold of the ancient and slippery word and updates it: “The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.”

  Protean (Shape-shifting)

  PUBLISH

  To go public with print. Johnson’s Dictionary says it best: “The act of notifying to the world; divulgation; proclamation.” During the halcyon days of the Roman Empire public officials made regular announcements about state decisions, an act called publicare, to make public. The word moved from Latin to old French publier and ultimately to medieval English as publish, though it endured scores of different spellings. As publish, it has come to mean the dissemination of announcements or pronouncements, ranging from wills to weddings, laws to royal decrees. With the invention of Gutenberg’s press in the late 15th century, publication became synonymous with printing and distributing books or engravings. In Why We Say It, Webb Garrison cites one of the first self-publishing pronouncements on record, that of Sir Thomas More, who felt reduced (as opposed to Walt Whitman’s sense of feeling expanded) by its necessity: “I am now driven to the business of publishynge and puttynge and boke in prints my selfe.” My love of publishing goes back to my first job on the hometown newspaper when I was a 16-year-old cub reporter, but I caught a novel version of the word and the idea at a 1980 poetry reading by Allan Ginsberg. That night he exhorted all in the audience to remember the original sense of the word when he said that every public reading of a poem was a bona fide form of publishing, taking the good word to the people. For the last word on getting published let’s turn to one of the least recognized, in her own time, of all great writers, Emily Dickinson, who said, “Publication—is the auction of the Mind of Man.” Of her 1775 poems, only seven were published in her lifetime, which flies in the face of the academic exhortation to “publish or perish.” Dickinson rarely published, but her poetry is imperishable.

  PUN

  A play on words. For some, a pun is the height of cleverness, for others a punishment, like having one’s ears pounded—no mere coincidence, as that’s exactly the derivation. Pun devolves from the Anglo-Saxon punian, to pound. Skeat writes, as if mortally offended, “Hence, to pound words, beat them into new senses, hammer at forced similes.” To paraphrase Shakespeare, the lad doth protest too much. The bard couldn’t help himself; he punned precisely 1,062 times in his works. The technical term is paronomasia, but slang words proliferate, such as liripoop and quip. Everyone has their favorites, such as the “unspeakable” pun by Confucius: “Seven days on honeymoon makes one whole week.” In his risible handbook Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, Jim Holt writes, “Shakespeare’s puns, while chucklesome, are invariably bawdy, even when they are being made by clowns: Hamlet: “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” Ophelia: “No, my lord.” Hamlet: “I mean my head upon your lap.” Ophelia: Ay, my lord.” Hamlet: “Did you think I meant country [cunt-try] matters?” My punster father used to love to quote the famously droll Dorothy Parker’s “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think,” which she thought of when challenged to use the botanical word in a quipping contest at the Algonquin Club. Her notoriously quick wit was the mirror image of esprit de l’escalier, what we might call esprit de table, the spirit of the table. Companion words include the querulous quibble, originally meaning to pun or play on words, and only later to have reservations about them.

  PUSILLANIMOUS

  In a word, cowardly. Possessing little courage, less moral fiber, hardly any strength, and almost no resolution. In a phrase, a cowering soul. The roots tell us what the word was originally trying to convey. The Latin pusillanimis, from pusillanus, narrow, and animus, soul, evolved from the Greek oligopsychosos, small-souled, from pusillis, very weak, and animus, spirit or courage. A pusillanimous character is one who isn’t animated because their soul has shrunk, so they’re cowering, hence a coward, one lacking any semblance of courage. Several old European words complete the picture: old French couard and the Italian codardo, a hare, a skittish animal, and the Swedish kura, to sit quiet, all hunched up. Thus, to be pusillanimous is to be skittish, to shrivel in the face of danger, because one’s soul, the source of moral and physical strength, can’t catch up or is trapped—thus, a spiritless coward who doesn’t have the heart to face life. History is chock-full of infamous cowards who fully embody the word, even the lovable Cowardly Lion, from The Wizard of Oz. Jack London wrote, “Why, you pusillanimous piece of dirt, you’d run with your tail between your legs if I said boo.” Companion synonyms include chicken-hearted, craven, faint-hearted, lily-livered, unmanly, shrinking violet, all words with a tint of contempt because of the deep human desire to embody their opposites of strength, courage (heart), and wit (brains).
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  Q

  QUICK

  Alive, enlivening, ensouled. MacKay clarifies the older meaning of the word, “alive,” in what he calls the “fossilized phrase” from scripture: “The quick and the dead.” “Look alive” is also synonymous with “be quick,” or quicken, from the Middle European “to become alive” and the earlier Anglo-Saxon cwic, alive. By the Middle Ages, quick became the quickening, a theological term for the moment the soul enters the body—by tradition, in a spiral motion through the whorls in the top of the head. By some arcane form of reasoning, the Church calculated this mystical moment as occurring at precisely forty days for a male fetus—and eighty days for a female. When I pointed this out during a reading for my Soul: An Archaeology, in Berkeley in the 1990s, a woman called out from the back of the room, “That’s because women take longer to warm up!” In “Messenger,” Mary Oliver writes: “Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand…” To be quick is so aligned with the life force that the expression “cut to the quick” came to meaning cutting to the living core of a person. Figuratively, if you say to somebody “You cut me to the quick,” it means “You’ve wounded me, you hurt my feelings.” Thus, quick means speed, soul, spirit, essence; to be quick means to move from your very center, a sense perfectly captured by Sports Illustrated’s consensus for the greatest coach ever, John Wooden, who admonished his players, “Be quick—but don’t hurry!”

  Quick

  QUIRKY

  Peculiar, shifty, tricky, a hint of kinky. By any measure, quirky is eccentric, which originally meant “off-center,” or “out of orbit.” Old reliable Mackay defines a quirk as “An unfair turn in an argument; an evasion or twisting of the truth.” The word originates from the Middle Dutch kuerken, a cunning trick, and the earlier kure, a whim, or a cure, and from the German quer, twisted, possibly from unusual techniques in weaving. By the 1960s, quirky was no longer something to be avoided, but embraced, in the modern sense of idiosyncratic. Thus, to be quirky is to act differently, eccentrically, cunningly, as a way to cure yourself. So you could say Alfred Hitchcock was a quirky character in the pejorative sense of weird, or you could be more compassionate and say that Hitchcock’s quirky obsessions with guilt and innocence, police and pretty blondes, was his way of staying sane. One of the quirkiest actors in movies, William H. Macy, says, “Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror.”

  QUIZ

  A test, a question, a mystery word. Quiz is of obscure origin—but stories abound. So we can approach the word in its own spirit, quizzically: When is the first mention of the word? 1847. What are the roots? The first Latin question, Qui es? “Who are you?” asked in traditional grammar schools.

  What about that old chestnut, the Dublin bar bet? There is a popular though undocumented story that dates back to around 1836 about a man named Jim Daly, the manager of a Dublin theater, who laid down a wager in a local pub that he could coin a new word and render it famous within twenty-four hours. According to the legend, he won the bet by stenciling, as Brewer writes, “four mystic letters,” Q-U-I-Z, all over town, which prompted the indignant question, “What is this?” To which Daly was happy to answer something to the effect of, “What is this? Why, it’s Latin for ‘What is this?!’” Speaking of questions, the story goes that the question mark itself [?] is a kind of collapsed version of the letter “Q,” short for “question.” Quiz is also slang for an “odd character.” Irony of ironies, Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University English professor implicated in the scandal to “fix” the 1950s television quiz show “Twenty-One,” told a grand jury through his lawyer, “It is silly and distressing to think that people don’t have more faith in quiz shows.”

  R

  RANKLE

  To bother, to fester, to burn with hurt. That long, hard a takes a great “bite” out of anyone who uses the word, for a good reason. Look it up and track it all the way back to the beginning and you’ll find a “dragon’s bite” lurking inside the dark cave of its distant origins. Rankle is rooted in drakos, Greek for “eye,” close cousin to drakon, serpent, because of their burning red eyes. The Romans borrowed the word, changing it slightly to become the Latin draco, with its diminutive dracunculus, little dragon, which shape-shifted like a Druid priest into the Old French draoncles, a festering sore that resembled a coiled serpent, then rancler, an abscess or burning ulcer, and finally into the English rankle. Thus, rankle carries an echo of the folklore about the venomous and fiery bite of dragons, remembered with an insult or a slight from someone whose “bite” feels poisonous. Trusty old Ben Franklin wrote, “If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a temporary victory—sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.” And here is a piercing reference from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein … Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever.”

  Rankle

  RASA (HINDU)

  The aesthetic, spiritual, or emotional essence of a work of art. Rasa is the core of a work that is to be relished and tasted, its flavor, perfume, mood experienced through immediate perception rather than rational apprehension. This is art appreciation through synesthesia, the belief that art is so complex it needs more than our five senses to fully comprehend it. For centuries Hindu artists and philosophers have studied this phenomenon and arrived at nine levels of spiritual ecstasy, from the Sanskrit rasa, relish, taste, flavor, sentiments. According to the French essayist René Daumal, the nine essential rasas, or savors, are “simple, like the taste of a complex dish,” and “direct apprehensions of a state of being.” Daumal goes on to say that rasa or savor is “a moment of consciousness provoked by the mediums of art and colored with a particular pathos.” Traditionally, the nine rasas are: Shringara, the erotic; Hasya, the comic; Karuna, the pathetic; Raudra, the furious; Vira, the heroic; Bhayanaka, the fearsome; Bribhatsa, the odious; Adbhuta, the supernatural; and Shanta, the serene or tranquil. Rasa also refers to the limitless pleasure one can experience in painting, sculpture, poetry if appreciated through these nine tastes or moods. Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote, in The Divine of Shiva, “The ‘nine rasas’ are no more than the various colorings of one experience, and are arbitrary terms of rhetoric used only for convenience in classification: just as we speak of poetry categorically as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc., without implying that poetry is anything but poetry. Rasa is tasted—beauty is felt—only by empathy … that is to say by entering into, feeling, the permanent motif; but it is not the same as the permanent motif itself, for, from this point of view, it matters not with which of the permanent motifs we have to do.”

  REBATE

  To reclaim; to call or beat back. From two senses of the Old French verb rebatre, “to blunt a sword’s edge,” and “bringing back a bating hawk,” both emerging from re, back, and batre, to beat, bring. Thus, the rebate for the falconers of old referred to bringing back a hawk that left its perch on the gauntlet before being commanded to do so. The falconer who called the hawk back was “reclaiming” it, from the Latin re, back, and clamo, call. Similarly, the craft of the smith over the forge was usually to hammer the rough edges of a sword, but in certain cases, as when creating a practice sword, the goal was to “beat back or down” the sharp edges so no one got hurt. Taken together, the English sense of rebate emerged as claiming a discount so as to blunt the edges of the expenditure, to ease the pain caused by high prices. Filed under the category Unnecessary Quotes is this ad from the Kansas City Star: “When our Kansas City Chiefs shutout [sic] the hated Raiders on Sunday, September 9th, you will receive a rebate of all purchases $599 and up, thru Saturday only or until qualifying purchases reach $1,000,000. No purchase necessary.” As the New Yorker says, “Bloc
k that metaphor!”

  RED-HANDED

  Guilty. Originally, a 15th-century Scottish legal term based on the vivid image of a criminal caught with blood on his hands. Thomas Blount, in his Law Dictionary and Glossary of 1717, claims it derives from the term “bloody-hand,” which was one of the “four kinds of offences in the king’s forest, by which the offender is supposed to have killed a deer.” He adds, “In Scotland, in suchlike crimes they say, ‘Taken in the fact, or with the red hand.’ “ Sir Walter Scott uses the term in Ivanhoe, in 1819. In modern times, the phrase refers to the travelers’ custom of dusting the locks of suitcases with ninhydrin (nin) protein dye that turns bright red on contact with the skin of any thief trying to break the locks. Thus, one who is “caught red-handed” has been busted, caught, guilty. Today, the phrase is virtually synonymous with in flagrante delicto, Old Latin for a “blazing misdeed”—in other words, caught with your pants down. The Urban Dictionary website updates the phrase as “to quote red-handed,” as “when someone comes out with a witty comment or funny line which they have taken from a film or television show. The embarrassment comes when they are caught out, and someone reveals to the rest of the group that what was just said was not their own wittiness or quick thinking.” Thus, to be caught red-handed today is to be caught with blood on your quotes if you quote The Sopranos without crediting the show. Ah, fuhgeddaboudit!