Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  THOLE

  To suffer, abide, to tolerate without complaint. “Endure,” according to Coleridge’s A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language. As they say in the Highlands, ‘Ye’ll just have to thole it.” A “lost beauty,” a missing link, or a word we miss and don’t even know it. Thole is of Anglo-Saxon heritage, immortalized in the 10th-century epic Beowulf. Obscure but still used in pockets of Gaeltacht country, as in “To thole the dool (doldrums),” which means to bear the evil consequences of something. When Seamus Heaney was translating Beowulf, he turned to his own family in Northern Ireland, who still used the word. His aunt used to say of those who were grieving, “They’ll just have to learn to thole.” In his classic Lost Beauties of the English Language, Charles Mackay regrets the way that the deeply mournful Old English and Scottish thole, with its long o, “was wrongly thrust out of the English to make room for modern substitutes from the French,” such as the weaker expression “to bear.” Companion words include the Old English tholemod, long-suffering; untholandlik, unendurable; untholeable, intolerable, not to be tholed or endured. Finally, a Scottish proverb that rolls around the heather of the heart: “He who tholes, endures.”

  THRILL

  To vibrate, to excite; originally, to pierce, to make a hole. One of the most penetrating words in the language, thrill has its roots in the sound and fury that a tool makes when it creates a hole, or an arrow when it hits its target. It comes from the Middle English thrillen, from thryel, hot, and thurh, through, meaning “to pierce.” By 1592, it had evolved to mean “a shivering, exciting feeling,” as when someone is “pierced by an emotion,” a distant echo of the heart-puncturing arrows of Eros. Metaphorically, thrill has developed into the sense of being filled with a quivering pleasure, as when listening to B. B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone,” or reading an Agatha Christie thriller. Cole Porter captures both senses when he writes: “I get no kick from champagne / Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. / So tell my why should it be true / That I get a kick out of you?” And on a poignant note, when Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, died, he was buried, as the newspapers said, “with some things of a personal nature,” including five of his own handmade arrows. To me, a thrilling detail.

  TOPSY-TURVY

  Upside down, crazy-making. The word is a brilliant example of a common but intimate daily practice metamorphosing into a colorful metaphor. The reeling expression comes from the old-fashioned hearths of rural Ireland where peat or turf was burned by the local bogtrotters, and refers to the way that it was stacked to dry. As Joseph Taylor defined it, in his 1819 dictionary Antiquitates Curiosae, the common practice was to stack turf “the top-side-turf-way,” which meant the wrong side upward. As W.B. Yeats might have said, “It’s all in a darg,” meaning “a day’s work,” Old Irish for completing the task of peat-cutting and carrying it back home in a wheelbarrow, as immortalized by Halliwell in his 1811 dictionary. Philosopher William James, ever wrestling with the unpredictability of the human mind, wrote, “Men’s activities are occupied into ways—in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.”

  TRANSLATION

  Carrying meaning from one language to another. A relic of a word. The derivation is from the Latin translatus and transferre, carry across, from trans, across, and latus, carry, borne, which easily slid into the English transfer, capturing the sense of movement of words across the borders of incomprehension and misunderstanding. But its earliest meaning is cultural and spiritual, anchored in the “transfer of relics” from one cathedral to another during medieval times. There is a curious connection between the translation of a relic, say the femur bone of St. Francis, and the translation of Chekhov from Russian into English, and here it is. For a site to qualify as a cathedral, a genuine relic was needed as proof of the holiness of the site. Inevitably, a brisk business arose in the transfer, or translating, of relics from one church to another, like soccer players switching clubs. Thus, to translate is to carry the meaning of one language across the great divide between cultures to a second language on the other side. Tragically, Henry VIII chose to publically burn thousands of those translated relics—the bones of saints—whose ashes eventually gave us the word bonfire, from “bone-fire.” In the Sunday Telegraph in August 2009, Alain de Botton reviewed the new translation of Marcel Proust: “The greatest praise one could pay this new edition of In Search of Lost Time is therefore to say that it allows us to forget both that we are reading the work of many different translators and, for long sections, that we are even reading anything that began in a foreign language at all. Like the best translations, it lets the author speak.” Amen.

  TRAVEL

  To take a journey; a trip. A universal practice with universal features—departure, encountering obstacles, returning home—all of which are reflected in the story of the word. Our English word dates back to 1375: “to journey,” from Early French travailen, to toil, labor, work hard. The earliest references to the word don’t have our—(sigh)—romantic associations; they refer to “pains; labor, toil, suffering, childbirth pains,” as James Murray defined it for the OED. The French verb gave us travail, hard work, but also a farrier’s (blacksmith’s) frame for unruly horses, and the earlier tripalium, a medieval three-paled (-spiked) instrument of torture. Tied together, the notion here is of embarking on a difficult journey, which will either torture you or stretch you. Historian Daniel Boorstin writes that the travel-travail connection evolved during the Middle Ages owing to the fact that “traveling entailed hard work such as learning the local language, studying its history, risking different cuisine, in contrast to tourism, where the guide does all the work for you. Travels as “an account of journeys” is recorded from 1591. Traveled as in “experienced in travel” is from 1413. Traveling salesman is attested to in 1885. Travelers’ tales are stories brought home by survivors, pilgrims, adventurers, and poets. Companion words include the lapidary trip, which can refer to a short journey, a clumsy fall, a slip of the tongue, and a bastard. Grosse pounds out a triple pun: “She has made a trip; she had a bastard.” And why, other than for diversion, do we hit the road? Hear out Mark Twain: “Travel is the death of prejudice.”

  TRIVIA

  Useless but fascinating facts. Trivia is the kind of thing you pick up or learn at a crossroads, and the derivation is exactly that, from the Latin for crossroads, from tri, three, and via, way or road. This allusion is potent, because in ancient times a traveler arriving at an intersection of three streets in Rome or elsewhere in Italy would have encountered a type of kiosk where a wide range of information was listed. If you were a novice, all of it would be valuable; if you were a veteran traveler, it would seem old hat, twice-told tales—ultimately, trivial talk, mere gossip, at the crossroads. At universities during the Middle Ages, educators taught the Seven Liberal Arts, known as the trivium, the three ways or three roads of learning believed to form the foundation of learning, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, followed by the quatrivium, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Companion words include the board game phenomenon Trivial Pursuit, which transforms the idea of trivia into must-know facts about pop culture.

  TROPHY

  A monument to victory. In ancient Greece a triumph in war was marked by hanging the spoils or prizes of war—weapons, shields, even body parts—in a tree near the battle site. These monuments were called, in Greek, tropaion, defeat, from trope, a rout, in the sense of turning back the enemy. By the early 15th century, the trophy had been awarded to the Romans, where it became the Latin trophæum, a signal of victory, a monument; it was then given to the French, among whom it become trophée by the 16th century. Figuratively, trophy first was recorded 1569 in English to mean any token or memorial of victory, a physical manifestation. By 1984, the phrase trophy wife was popular, according to my Dictionary of American Slang. Companion words include trope, a figure of speech. Thus, a trophy symbolizes the vanquishing of the enemy and a celebration of v
ictory, but is also something to hang above the mantel, as our ancestors hung theirs from a tree. Soccer star David Beckham once said, “With United, we’d all grown up together, we all wanted to win the biggest trophy in football. We did it together.” Regarding the difference between art and reality, singer Rufus Wainwright remarked, “Life is a game, and love is the trophy.”

  U

  UNTRANSLATABLE

  A word in one language that has no direct equivalent meaning in another, but strikes a chord and invites paraphrase. Let’s start with a word from the Fuegian language of southern Argentina, mamihlapinatapa, which means “a meaningful look shared by two people, expressing mutual unstated feeling,” listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘Most Succinct Word in the World.’ Another award-winner, voted ‘Most Untranslatable Word in the World,’ is the Congolese ilunga, which describes a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time, willing to tolerate it a second time, but cannot abide it a third time. In German a euphemism for “coward” is Handschuhschneeballwerfer , defined as a person who “wears gloves to throw snowballs.” The Flemish language provides us with iets door de vingesrs kijken, a phrase to describe the embarrassing behavior of looking through your own splayed fingers; figuratively, looking the other way. The Russian pochemuchka describes a person who asks too many questions. Running your fingers through your lover’s hair in Brazil is called cafune in Portuguese. To wipe your plate of pesto clean with bread, in Italy, is called faccio la scarpetta, literally “to wipe one’s shoes.” Mokita, from New Guinea, means a truth everyone knows but no one dares to speak. The Kiriana language of New Guinea provides us with Biga Peula which refers to potentially “unforgivable, unatonable, unredeemable words,” which we better think twice about uttering. Pidgin gives us wantok, “one talk,” meaning “we’re in this together because you belong to the village and the village has some responsibility to you and you to it.” An untranslatable Czech example is litost, a sudden insight into one’s own misery. A student at the 2009 Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers conference shared one of her favorite words with me: “The word is ‘remolino,’” she wrote to tell me. “My brother recalls it translating as ‘windmill’—as in a little windmill on the back of the head, but we couldn’t find anything like that in the online Spanish-to-English dictionaries. You’ll find it translating as a whirlwind, whirlpool, spiral, swirl, and cowlick. I’m afraid ‘cowlick’ is the mundane word they’re giving for it. When he lived in Spain, he was close friends with a man from Chile, and in the Spanish Wikipedia I found that in Chile they call windmills ‘remolinos, ’ while in other Spanish-speaking countries they’re generally called ‘molinos.’ So I guess that’s where he got the windmill idea.” Another personal favorite of mine is the Eskimo/Inuit word eyechektakok. One of the myriad words for snow in the Arctic, this one refers to the “crack in ice that is pulsating or opening and closing.” Finally, ubuntu is a venerable African word at the core of Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a concept word that recognizes the interconnection of all people, and which roughly translates as “I am human because you make me human, and you are human because I make you human.”

  URCHIN

  A mischievous child, a brat, a kid with a prickly temperament. An eerily echoic word from the Middle English yrichon and urchon, hedgehog, and the Proto-Indo-European prefix gers-, “spiny, to prickle, to bristle.” All told, our English word urchin is a visceral memory of how hedgehogs are forever poking their noses where they shouldn’t be. The word has gone through two evolutions. First, urchin was used during the 16th century to describe people who were believed to resemble hedgehogs, including hunch-backs and goblins. Soon after, by 1556, urchin had lost its bristles but retained its sense of raggedness, as applied to the appearance of poor and bedraggled children living in the streets, nosing around in search of food or money or lodging. Companion words include horripilation, hair bristling and standing on end, as during a horror movie. Similarly, that spiny echinoderm the sea urchin has bristles reminiscent of a hedgehog’s. Sea urchins were called “whore’s eggs” in Newfoundland. “In Memory of Dylan Thomas,” by poet Cecil Day-Lewis, features an inspired reference to the prickly creature: “The ribald, inspired urchin / Leaning over the lip / Of his world, / as over a rock pool / Or a lucky dip, / Found everything brilliant and virgin.”

  V

  VANILLA

  A neutrally flavored bean; a type of orchid; a euphemism for bland. A 17th-century word, from the Spanish vainalla, little pod, the diminutive of the vividly named vaina, sheath. The scabbardlike leaf that reminded Hernando Cortes’s randy soldiers of a vagina, which happens to be Latin for anything sheath-shaped. That’s what they named it, and the name stuck. Since the 1970s, vanilla has come full circle to suggest a nonflavor, anything neutral, common, or unimaginative, and by metaphoric extension, “conventional, ordinary sexual tastes.” According to the International Ice Cream Association in 2008, 29 percent of those polled preferred vanilla to chocolate or strawberry. Nineteen-fifties heartthrob Pat Boone admits, in retrospect, “When you hear my records today, you hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.”

  VAUDEVILLE

  Originally, variety entertainment from the French countryside; later a theatrical term for any performance in Tin Pan Alley. One of my proud French-Canadian father’s favorite word origins. I remember him pointing out the wonderful fact that the word was rooted in the soil of Vaude-Vire, a Norman town in western France where the 15th-century poet Olivier Basser lived and wrote scores of popular folk songs. Vaudeville became shorthand for the music of the people, and in the 1920s the rage of Broadway, where it came to suggest “a slight dramatic sketch interspersed with songs and dances.” My son’s favorite dancer, Donald O’Connor, said, “I grew up in vaudeville. All the hoofers used to get together in a drugstore down the street from the theater, or what-have-you, and if they knew a new step they would teach it to you. I learned hoofing steps that way. But going into ballet didn’t come until I made those pictures with [Gene] Kelly.”

  VENERATE

  To worship, honor, respect utterly. For the old Romans, Venus (Greek Aphrodite) was such a beloved goddess they worshiped her in temples all across the Mediterranean and honored her in everyday life for myriad reasons, mainly her influence in matters of the heart. Given that she was the mother of Eros or Cupid, this was considered to be hedging your bets in the chancy game of love. Her followers, and lovers of art, made pilgrimages to sites like Knidos and Milos to view statues of her that were considered so preternaturally real that, surely, the goddess inhabited the marble. This devotion to Venus came to be known by the 15th century as veneration, from the Middle French venerari, to worship, revere, from veneris, beauty, love, desire. Venus lives on in venerable, worthy of reverence, often used to describe what is old, like ruins, art, and the elderly. Longfellow expresses this respect when he writes, “I venerate old age….” But unguarded, unprotected, untoward behavior under the influence of Venus brings problems: consider the malady also named after her, venereal disease, long considered a punishment for sexual misconduct. Companion words contributing to the language: cupidity, from Latin cupido, desire, but generally a frowned-upon longing bordering on coveting your neighbor’s wife. Grosse’s dictionary describes a “bawdyhouse,” a brothel, as a “School of Venus,” and “clap” as “venereal taint.” To illustrate the venereal connection he cites a lubricious couplet: “He went out by Had’em, and came round by Clapham home”—that is, he went out a-wenching, and got the clap.

  VERBICIDE

  Word killing; language torture. Victims include the pronunciation “nuke-you-lar” for nuclear and the stupefying belief that people in Latin America speak Latin. Derived from verbum, an action word, and cide, killing, from Latin caedere, to cut, hack, strike. Thus, verbicide can be used to describe both the deliberate misuse of a word and the obtuse, unintentional murder of its meaning. The
consequences are not academic; they effect how—or even whether—we communicate. David W. Orr writes, in The Nature of Design, “We are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden.” Companions in word crime include the recently conjured memoricide, an officially recognized crime perpetrated through the intentional destruction of art or artifacts, which amounts to the murder of cultural memory, as in the destruction of the Sarajevo Library or the National Museum in Baghdad. Tomecide is “book killing,” used to describe the crimes of book censors and book burners. Another powerful term is logomachy, fighting over words, from logos, word, and machia, fight or struggle.