REMORSE
Anguish caused by guilt. The ancients personified the powers of conscience and remorse as the three Erinyes, a trio of sisters who relentlessly pursued guilty mortals. Those they caught were fated to suffer “lifelong misery,” as Isaac Asimov writes, for wrongs they’d committed. The career of this word began with the Latin remorsus, from remordeo, which splits into re, back, and mordeo, bite. Your conscience “bites” you “back.” Samuel Coleridge wrote, in his play Remorse, “It is as the heart in which it grows: If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, it is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, weeps only tears of poison.” Novelist George Moore adds, “Remorse is beholding heaven and feeling hell.” Thus, a painful word picture emerges: our inmost nature, our conscience, has a kind of mordant sense of humor, taking a bite of our soul to remind us when we are making bad.
RHAPSODY
A beautiful tribute. The sound, act, and triumphant feel go all the way back to the Greek custom of taking “loosely sewed pieces or rags, strung together, Greek rhapsodia, rhapto, sew, ode, song.” Its earliest sense in modern Europe, recorded in 1542, was “epic poem,” from Middle French rhapsodie, from the Greek rhapsodios, a reciter of epic poems, gifted in rhaptein, the ability to stitch together the odes, from oide, song. Over the centuries this ability to remember, sing, and inspire was so admired that rhapsody came to mean any exalted feeling or expression, a meaning that dates back to 1639. By the mid 1850s, it was used to describe “sprightly musical compositions.” Snarky times are suspicious of lofty expressions of art, and so rhapsody has devolved into rhapsodic, which in some circles can mean exaggerated enthusiasm. So if the meaning is still obscure, I recommend listening to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a work that stitches together the Russian’s passion with the Italian’s exaltation. In her essay “Building the House,” poet Mary Oliver writes, “Privacy, no longer cherished in the world, is all the same still a natural and sensible attribute of paradise. We are happy, and we are lucky…. We make for each other: companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody.”
RIVAL
An opponent in a contest. During the Roman Empire a man who had water rights to the same stream as another was a rivalis, from rivus, stream or brook. Since competitions often arose, rivalis took on the meaning of competitor. People living across a stream from each other, or near each other on the same side, have often quarreled about fishing rights, the right to build a dam, or other privileges. Our English rival commemorates such competitiveness. In modern terms it refers to the competitiveness of neighbors, as do rivalry and rivalrous. Al Gore writes, “The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives—and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.” Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong: “Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.” Companion words include nival, which rhymes with rival but derives from the Latin nivosos, for snow. Its murmuring meanings include the tenacious power of certain plants or animals to survive underneath a pack of snow. It’s uncertain whether the word can also refer to people with the same capacity.
S
SALARY
Wages, recompense. After the custom in the Roman army to pay a portion of the wages to its legionnaires in the form of a daily handful of salt, salarium, from the Latin sal, an allotment known as their “salt allowance.” For the salt-crazed Romans, who constructed their towns near salt supplies and fought wars to protect them, salary came to mean wages in general. Look it up and you’ll discover the phrases “salt away,” an echo of storing salt as some might stuff their pillows with cash, “worth his salt,” for someone who has earned what he’s been paid, and “salt of the earth,” an unaffected, natural person. The Via Salaria was the first imperial road built, to convey salt from the port of Ostia. The Roman Pliny wrote in the 31st volume of his Natural History, “[In] Rome … the soldier’s pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it …” Regarding the money she made as a writer, Dorothy Parker said, “Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.” Two-time baseball MVP Frank Robinson said, in 2002, “We keep talking about the salaries escalating, and how they affect the future. Well, they’re still going up. It’s still up to the individual if he wants to stay around. Players have to be healthy and continue at a high level of hitting home runs. That’s what it is going to take, and I don’t know how many are willing to do that.”
SARDONIC
Humorous in a bitter, biting, or mocking way; smiling grimly. This contemptuous word stems from the French sardonique, adapted from the phrase ris sardonien, a forced or careless mirth, as Cotgrave (1611) defines it. It derives in turn from the Greek sardonikos, a bitter laugh. If this seems like an oxymoron (“sharp dullard or fool”), remember that it comes straight from a folk memory about the nature of bitterness itself. The herba sardonia plant from Sardinia is so foul-tasting that it caused “a convulsive movement of the nerves of the face, resembling a painful grin,” as Virgil described its effect in the Eclogues, enough “to screw up the face of the eater.” Companion words include sardine, plus sardis and sardonyx, two precious gems found in Sardis, in Lydia (Asia Minor), resembling, as Pliny writes, the onyx in fingernails. A close cousin of sardonic is sarcophagus, a carved stone coffin, from sarco, body and phagein, to eat, a visceral word picture of “flesh-eating” stone, no doubt influenced by close observation of the effects of time on entombed bodies. We find a close cousin to the bittersweet sardonic in Byron’s “Corsair.” Of the corsair, who hailed from Sardinia, he wrote, “There was a laughing devil in his sneer”—sneer being from the Old German snereen, to cause a hissing noise, and Danish snaerre, to grin like a dog, show one’s teeth, which brings to mind the acrid response to eating herba sardonia. Somerset Maugham once said, rather bitterly, “Money is the sting with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.” And from Anne Sexton: “Either I’m just too paranoid or this is just my way of now playing the sardonic court jester instead of the ‘angry young man.’”
SAUDADE (PORTUGUESE)
The constant desire that hurts, the irrepressible yearning for something that may not even exist. This untranslatable but indispensable Portuguese word describes in two syllables what English can’t do in anything shorter than a dissertation: the longing for perfect love, the complete utopia, a perfect work of art, even a person who has gone missing, in war or tragedy. Still, the memory is deeply felt in the heart, though others would demean it as indolent dreamy wistfulness. When fado is consciously evoked in music, poetry, dance, and film, the feelings of excitement and passion live on as saudade, lingering like perfume, moving outward like ripples in a pond, which creates saudade, “a resigned, bittersweet, existential yearning for something we would like to change or experience, but over which we have no control.” A companion word in English would be the blues, a fiercely honest musical expression of joy-pain and sweet- sorrowful, transformed by the artistry of a Ray Charles or Billie Holliday into a triumph, however momentary, over the inevitable sorrows of the human condition. The fado singer Katia explains, “Saudade is a very deep feeling. It’s when you miss someone or something or a place very, very hard. Saudade is the only Portuguese word that doesn’t have any synonym in any other language. Saudade makes us feel good and sad at the same time.”
SAUNTER
To walk without a care. A Sunday stroll of a word. One of the most relaxed verbs in English, it comes by way of the French sauntrer, gloriously defined by Skeat as “to adventure oneself,” based on the Old French aventurer, to adventure or venture forth. Saunter stretches back much farther, to the 1,700-year-long tradition of walking to la Sainte-Terre, the Holy Land, in the footsteps of Helena, Emperor Constantine’s mother, who was in search of the Holy Cross. Her vi
sit to Jerusalem is considered the first Christian pilgrimage, which sparked untold thousands of others to follow along the “glory roads.” During medieval times the route to the Sainte-Terre was steadily smoothed, like a pilgrim’s sandals, to become our gently swaying verb saunter. By Henry David Thoreau’s time at Walden, in the early 19th century, it was a rather suave way of describing a contemplative walk. Thoreau wrote, in his journal, “The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.” Uncharacteristically, Grosse snipes at the very idea of those saunterers: “An idle, lounging fellow … applied to persons, who, having no lands or home, lingered and loistered about … [in] the Holy Land, Saint Terre, as waiting for company.” The ultra-long-distance walker and early environmentalist John Muir writes of his adventuring through the American Holy Land of Yosemite, in California: “The last time I sauntered through the big cañon I saw about two [rattle-snakes] a day.” Companion words include the Spanish paseo, a leisurely walk, and “suave around,” the Red Sox slugger Ted Williams’s surprisingly elegant description of the way that classy ballplayers moved on the field.
SCAPEGOAT
Someone who is blamed for the sins of others. Traditionally, a real goat, one that was allowed to escape, symbolically shouldering the sins of the community. Ancient annals tell us about the custom of the Day of Atonement, in which the sins of the people were ritually transferred to a goat that was then banished to the wilderness. Meanwhile, a second goat was sacrificed to the Lord, as the “sin offering.” Thus scapegoat came to mean a person who likewise shoulders the blame (from blaspheme, to speak ill of)—the sins of someone else—an echo of the apparently universal impulse to look for other people to slur, denigrate, or accuse for troubles we ourselves have caused. The terror of being thus accused is expressed well by none other than Rod Serling. “The tools of conquest,” he intoned, “do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, ideas, and prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. A thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”
SCHEDULE
A timetable; a wish list of things to do. As Wilfred Funk reminds us, most of the words connected with writing have their roots, so to speak, in the bark of a tree, the surface of a stone, or in some cases, the leaves of plants. Modern usage prosaically refers to inventories and supplements, which hardly captures the word’s redolent essence, with its smells of the Nile, the Aegean, and French cafés. Our use of schedule arrived right on time in America, like a locomotive chugging into a station, during the punctuality-obsessed 19th century. What it carried was a train of associations, from the Old French cedule, a scroll, which came from the Latin schedula, a small slip of paper, and scheda, a strip of papyrus, and the earlier Greek skede, a cleft or cleaved piece of wood. Thus, a schedule is a timetable written on a small piece of paper that we cleave to. The wonder-tracking naturalist Annie Dillard writes, “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”
SCOOCH OR SCOOTCH (SCOTTISH)
To move closer, closer, closer…to the edge. Scootching up to this word in a handful of dictionaries only provided me with the pallid meaning “to slide on over,” usually to make room for someone or something else. But serendipity struck recently on a visit to Ansel Adams’s cabin in Yosemite, where I plucked the memoirs of naturalist and legendary hiker John Muir off the bookshelves. By chance, Muir mentions a game he grew up playing in the north of Scotland called “scootchers.” According to Muir, it was a game in which kids challenged each other to scootch closer and closer to the point of danger, to advance slowly on a dare. In his case he and two friends scootched to the edge of a rooftop. Echoic of an action, possibly deriving from scoot, to move swiftly, possibly from scout, to seek out. Close cousins would be scrooch or scrootch, to hunch down, crouch. The episode of The Simpsons called “Insane Clown Puppie” features a hilarious Christopher Walken reading menacingly to a group of cowering school kids: “Goodnight moon, goodnight, moon, goodnight cow, jumping over the moon. Please children, scootch closer. Don’t make me tell you again about the scootching. You, in the red, chop-chop!”
SCRUTINIZE
To search carefully. An easy enough definition, but one that only begins to describe the tactile pleasure of looking closely, whether at dictionaries, advice, or cloud formations. Scrutinizing originally referred to looking closely at rags that could be pulped into paper, which brought a few pennies for the ragpickers. The word comes from the Latin scrutinium, a careful inquiry, and scrutari, to examine carefully, and scruta, broken pieces, trash, rags. Thus to scrutinize is look at virtually anything carefully, closely, like Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes, who believes “there’s treasure everywhere.” Compare speculate, to hold a mirror up to. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
SEEKSORROW
One who looks for trouble, sees sorrow everywhere. A classic portmanteau , from seek, strive, and sorrow, to be sick with grief, which implies a curious pessimist, an adventurous glutton for punishment, or possibly someone who feels the necessity of enduring the dark night of the soul. Dr. Johnson defined it as “one who continues to give himself vexation.” A candidate for one of the top ten words that need reviving. Who hasn’t felt oneself to be one’s own worst enemy? We’ve all known someone, perhaps a co-worker, who seems to go looking for trouble, but one word is swifter than five. One of the most heartrending usages is one of the earliest, in the 5,000-year-old Sumerian story of the king of Uruk, after his closest friend, Enkidu, has died: “Why, Gilgamesh, do you ever [seek] sorrow?” cries out the wise old man Utanapishtim. More recently, Edith Wharton wrote, “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.” Composer Franz Schubert once reflected upon the deep-seeking sensibility in his work: “When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.”
SHANGHAI
To kidnap and secret away aboard a ship. A clandestine word conjured up in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Gold Rush years. The story goes and goes that ships docking in San Francisco Bay had usually been away at sea for years, leaving their crews depleted. The solution for many a captain was to walk from the wharf up Broadway to Grant Avenue and into Chinatown, where they stopped at bars called “deadfalls.” In collusion with the bar owners, the captains plied sailors on leave with free drinks, often with a “Mickey Finn” dropped in for good measure. The unsuspecting Jack-Tars were then led to trap doors that dropped them into perilously dark basements, where they were bound and tied until the next morning. Then, usually still drugged, they were frog-marched to the harbor. As if in a bad movie, the hungover sailors woke up days later to find themselves halfway to Shanghai. Thus, to be shanghaied means to be fooled, with desperate consequences. Companion words include press-gang, a group of mercenary sailors who trawl the docks and back alleys for men they can strong-arm into maritime work. Surprisingly, crimp, from Dutch krimpe, meaning “a confined place for fish till wanted,” has similar origins. Smyth wrote in 1867 that ship agents loaned money to sailors on leave, a practice that “indebts the dupes, and when well plied with liquor are induced to sign articles, and are shipped off, only discovering their mistake on finding themselves robbed of all they possessed.”
Shanghaied
SKEDADDLE
To run away. No one knows for sure; the true origins themselves have skedaddled into the shadows of linguistic history. Speculation has it that the word was minted during the American Civil War as military slang, possibly from Scottish-Irish immigrant soldier
s’ use of the old Gaelic skiddle, to spill, scatter; this may be connected to an earlier use in northern English dialect, sket, rapidly, and daddle, to walk unsteadily. Thus, a word picture emerges of a terrified or disgruntled soldier “lighting out or leaving in a hurry,” and then, as the war dragged on, “breaking away and running from battle.” Companion words include scat, scoot, skidoo, as in “23-Skidoo,” probably from skedaddle. Medieval folklore ascribes skedaddle to “the wasteful overflow of milkmaid’s milk,” from Gaelic squit, wander, and allta, wild. Other memorable Irishisms of the period: so long, from the Irish slan, farewell, and the rambunctious shenanigans, which Robert MacNeil in The Story of English playfully traces back to the Irish “I play like a fox.” The explosive smithereens is rooted in smither, small fragment, the result perhaps of a few too many donnybrooks. Uncertainty never sounded so uncertain as it does in swither, as in “That put me in an eerie swither,” or the swithering factor in a hotly contested election in which the voters are unable to make up their minds, from Scandinavian swidder, uncertain.
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