Wordcatcher

by Phil Cousineau

  W

  WABI/SABI (JAPANESE)

  The aesthetic flaw in art that reveals the soul of the work; the patina that only age can bring to it. Though usually regarded as separate words, as early as the 1940s D. T. Suzuki had linked them as wabi-sabi, defining the compound word as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” According to Leonard Koren, roughly speaking, the nearest word in English is probably rustic, suggesting something earthy, primitive, unpretentious, unvarnished. Separately, wabi suggests a tough, humble spiritual attitude toward life and art, while sabi refers to the solitudinous, often melancholy quality in objects. The overlap between these often-hinged words is an affection and appreciation for imperfection. The old barn that was a little wobbly to begin with and has aged well with twenty coats of flaking red paint would be an example of wabi-sabi. If the barn was finally recognized as beautiful, perhaps after years of neglect and being taken for granted, then it could be said to illustrate shibui, “the beauty that ages beautifully.”

  Wabi-Sabi

  WEASEL WORD

  An empty word, but a full story. This phrase is inspired by the folk memory of watching weasels pierce a small hole in an egg and suck all the life out of it, while leaving it apparently untouched and whole. Thus, weasel words give the appearance of fact but are empty of any real meaning since they don’t include any proof or attribution. Examples include “It’s commonly known…” “Everybody knows…” “They claim that…” “Contrary to popular belief…” and “Scientists say…” In February 2009, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann interviewed political analyst Richard Wolffe, who said, “Look, the truth is that when you see these kinds of weasel words coming from the office of an elected official, you know they’ve got something to hide.”

  WEIRD

  Strange, curious, ominous. Weird’s own peculiar roots reach back to the Old English wyrd, fate or destiny, literally “that which comes,” and the Proto-Indo-European wert-, to turn, wind, bend. Together they suggest something eerie in the human condition, the sense that our fate is already known and that it is unwinding at every moment. The numinous power of wyrd has seen a revival in the recent spate of Beowulf translations, as in the passage, “Wyrd was very near.” As an adjective weird means ghastly, unearthly, witchlike; as a noun, fate or destiny, the sense that what will be will be. This haunting suspicion is personified in the Old Norse story of the Three Norns or Fates, who determined human destiny. Shakespeare made them out to be terrifying in Macbeth: “The weird sisters, hand in hand, / Posters of the sea and land.” The phrase conjures up the mythic image of The Fates, the three goddesses presiding over mortals’ destinies, who were known to the Scots as the weirds. During the 15th century, Scots repeated a legend that the Fates or weird sisters had appeared to Macbeth and lured him to his fate. By dint of Shakespeare’s portrayal of them in King Lear, people came to believe that the wyrd in the weird sisters meant supernatural or uncanny. Weird assumes its modern sense of “odd, uncanny” in 1815, and this is how the novelist Barry Gifford used it: “The whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” Helen Keller wrote, “To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” Thus, weird describes “how strange it seems the way things turn out,” or as is still heard in Scotland, “Dree your weird,” which means “Put up with your lot in life!”

  WHATCHAMACALLIT

  The brother of thingabob, sister to jigamaree, second cousin to whipplesnizzit, and distant relative of widget. Whatchamacallit is one of scores of terms that refer to indescribable everyday items. It’s an eccentric (from Greek ekkentros, out of center) family of words for things otherwise orphaned by their very namelessness, such as the stars you see when you’re dizzy (phosphenes), the flap of leather in your shoe (the tongue), the flared grip of wood on the end of a baseball bat (the knob), the ridge above your lip (the philtrum), the slight column of cartilage that separates your nostrils (the columella), or the flap of skin on the outside of your ear (the tragus). More companions here than Garrison Keillor, including doohickey, gizmo, jigger, thingamajig, doodad, thingummy, doodah, and a gazillion more, such as blivet, a terrific onomatopoeic word to describe a useless contraption. You can imagine the eccentric basement inventor down the street asking you to see one. As one wag described it, a really useless invention would be a toothbrush for a chicken. Clever rhapsodies on the theme of gizmos you know but just can’t name.

  WHISTLE

  To make a sometimes shrill, sometimes melodic sound by pushing the breath through the gap between the teeth or through the puckered lips. Whistle comes from the Old English hwistilian, which probably imitates nature’s own whistling sounds, such as the wind, bird cries, the hissing of serpents, or the steam escaping from a teakettle. To whistle can mean to signal, like a train approaching a crossing; to summon, like the neighborhood call to kids for supper; to make music, like Otis Reading at the end of his song “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”; or to flirt, as in the wolf whistles from construction workers when a pretty girl walks by. Over the centuries, inhabitants of a few remote sites around the world have developed sophisticated whistling languages. According to Charles Berlitz, people who live in the “Village of the Birds,” nestled in the remote valleys of Kuskoy, in Eastern Turkey, “perfected a system of chirps, tweets, and twitters.” At least three other “whistling villages” are known: Silbo, on La Gamora, in the Canary Islands; Aas, in the Pyrenees; and the village of the Chepang tribe in Nepal. For further instructions, you need go no further than the movie To Have or Have Not, and the scene where the sultry Lauren Bacall purrs to the startled Humphrey Bogart, “You know how to whistle, right? Just put your lips together and blow.”

  WISDOM

  Sagacity, prudence, the quality of being wise. From Old English wis, to see, and dom, quality or condition, hence, the quality of seeing; related to witan, to know, to wit. To “get wise” to Socrates meant to lead the well-lived life; to Dillinger it meant to “understand, learn something.” “Wise up” suggests that someone has been on the dullard side and needs to “get smart.” Companion words include wiseacre, a smart aleck, from the Middle Dutch wijsseggheri, soothsayer. Wisdom tradition has come to replace the loaded word religion for some scholars, such as Huston Smith. Figuratively, wisdom describes the capacity to act wisely, as in the famous couplet from the Tao te Ching: “A wise man has no extensive knowledge; He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man.” Companion words include the marvelous waywiser, an indicator of the way, an adaptation of the Dutch wegwijzer , one who shows the way. Wisdom, then, can be “way out,” as hipsters chanted unwittingly over their bongos, or “way in,” as that Taoist hippie, Lao-Tzu, might’ve said.

  Wisdom

  WIT

  Inborn knowledge, natural or common sense, good humor, entertaining, lively intelligence. It is not being too facetious to say that there are myriad expressions pertaining to wit, especially since facetious itself originally meant “mirthfully witty,” from Latin facetiae, and later meant “insincere.” Among the witty companion words are inwit, knowledge from within, conscience, remorse; and outwit, which first meant “knowledge from without, information,” and only later “to outmaneuver.” To be fat-witted is to be dull or stupid. A flasher is “one whose appearance of wit is an illusion.” The Five Wits are “the five sensibilities, namely common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory.” Unwit means “ignorance”; motherwit, “natural talent”; forewit, “anticipation”; gainbite/ayerbite, the agenbite of inwit, “the backbiting of guilt.” A witworm is someone who feeds on others’ wit. According to Herbert Coleridge, in A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language (1859), an afterwit is an afterthought. Coleridge registers biwit as someone “out of one’s wits.” To Johnson, a witling was “a pretender; a man of petty smartness. One with little understanding or grace but desire to be funny.” In Our Southern Highlanders, Horace Kephart describes a half-wit as a silly or imbecilic person, writing
, “Mountaineers never send their ‘fitified folks’ or half-wits, or other unfortunates, to any institution in the lowlands.” The witty Bill Bryson tracks nitwit down to the Americanization of the Dutch expression Ik niet wiet, “I don’t know.” The last (witty) word goes to John Florio, who translated Montaigne into English: “For he that hath not heard of Mountaigne yet / Is but a novice in the school of wit.”

  WORDFAST

  True to one’s word. What would a word book be without a few “word” words? Fellow words include wordridden, to be a slave to words you don’t understand, and wordwanton, having a dirty mouth. A wordmonger is a show-off with words, rather than using them to express meaning, emotion, facts. A witherword is hostile language. One blessed with word dexterity is a logodaedalus, after the Greek logo, word, and Daedalus, the inventor of the labyrinth, armor, and toys. Someone stricken with logophilia has caught the love of words; whereas logomachy is a fight or dispute over words. A wordroom is a place to indulge our passions for words, closely related to lectory, a place for reading. A scriptorium was a translation hall in medieval Ireland. A “lexicographical laboratory” was a backyard shed in London where James Murray and friends created The Oxford English Dictionary over the course of 49 years, comprising twelve volumes and 414,825 words, plus 1,827,306 citations to illuminate their meanings. “Words, words, words,” cries Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, “I’m so sick of words!” On the other hand, the Divine Sarah Bernhardt longed for them, as she wrote to her lover, Victorien Sardou, “Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.”

  WRITE

  To make a mark; to record, communicate. “To trace symbols representing word(s),” says The Concise Oxford Dictionary, “especially with pen or pencil on paper or parchment.” For as long as we have known, human beings have felt a compunction to record their thoughts, to reach out to one another using the magical letters of their respective alphabets. This effort began with a simple scratch on bark, or papyrus, which, incidentally, later gave us the word paper. It makes poetic sense, then, that the root of our word write is writan, Old English for “scratch.” Ogden Nash’s quip comes to mind: “Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.” Look that up and you’ll soon find “scratch” as a synonym for “money,” though writing for “scratch” has eluded many a writer trying to “scratch out a living.” Incidentally, “starting from scratch” refers to making a mark in the dirt for the start of a race, which is often then written about. And what do we write with? A ballpoint pen, which was originally called a “non-leaking, high-altitude writing stick.” When I first read that, I had to scratch my head before writing it down. As for the secret of writing, I was taught that writing is rewriting is rewriting. When an interviewer asked S. J. Perelman how many drafts of a story he was used to writing, the gag man for the Marx Brothers and others replied: “Thirty-seven. I once tried doing thirty-three, but something was lacking, a certain—how shall I say?—Je ne sais quoi.”

  WRITHE

  To twist and turn in acute pain. One of J. R. R. Tolkien’s favorite words, a 12th-century one from Middle English, from Old English wruthan; akin to Old Norse rutha, to twist into coils or folds or twist into distortion. Tolkien’s avid studies in Anglo-Saxon (he was the world expert on Beowulf ) provided the inspiration for his famously evil wraiths in The Lord of the Rings, which are the very embodiment—or enspiritment—of wrenching, wrangling, and writhing. Companion words include wraith, vividly defined by Mackay as “the supposed apparition of the soul about to quit the body of a dying person.” Curiously related is twistification, cited in Southern Appalachian Slang as a “pejorative term for dancing used by churchmen. Wherever the church has not put its ban on twistifications the country dance is the chief amusement of young and old.”

  X

  XENOGENESIS

  Creation of offspring with different characteristics than their parents’. Technically, xenogenesis is defined as “the supposed production of offspring markedly different from either parent,” according to The American Heritage Dictionary. Sometimes it’s distinguished from metagenesis, altered generation, or abiogenesis , spontaneous generation. Figuratively, it describes a certain fear and terror about the identity of your offspring, your own kids, as in, Are they really ours, honey? Are you sure they weren’t switched in the hospital nursery? The feeling arises at the age—teens—when your kids just seem alien to you (and you to them, by the way); this is just the word to describe that weirdness. But the technical definition doesn’t begin to capture the otherness of the situation. Better to evoke Sigourney Weaver’s cry of surprise and horror in Alien when the creature leaps out of the chest of one of her crew. Xenogenesis or not, we still love ’em, right?

  XENOPHILIA

  Admiration for, attraction to, or outright love for unknown, even strange, objects, peculiar experiences, or exotic people. Often, we remember negative words because of their sonicky power, words such as xenophobia, “fear or suspicion of strangers.” Not often enough do we explore their opposites, such as this obscure but still valuable word, from xenos, unknown or foreign, and philos, love or affection. This word could help you describe someone’s otherwise indescribable compulsive collecting, let’s say, or Joseph Cornell’s lifelong search for the oddments he placed in his shadow boxes, or Peter the Great’s secretive travels around Europe in search of the exotic for his Curiosity Cabinets. My 13-year-old son, Jack, reminds me of a character named Xenophilius Lovegood, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, who is known for his peculiar interest in “unusual or unknown objects, animals, and concepts.” Companion words include the even more intense philoxenia, the ancient belief that a stranger who knocks on your door might be a god or goddess in disguise, a motif explored in such beloved myths as the story of Philemon and Baucis. This core belief persisted through the centuries in Greece, producing one of the most hospitable cultures in the world. When I went to Athens for the 2004 Olympics I was hosted by a series of Greek friends—and total strangers—who took me in because I’d written a book about their country. One of them, George Tsakorias, explained, “Why am I hosting you? Because I am Greek and I believe, like my ancestors, in xenophilia.”

  Y

  YEARN

  To tremble with desire, be filled with longing. More than the vaporous wishing and less literal than the possessive wanting, yearning goes to the bone. Since its origins in the 11th-century Old English geoman and Middle English yemen, German geron, desire, it has meant “a strong, often melancholic desire, a persistent and wistful longing,” tinged with something missing in sheer longing—namely, deep pity, sympathy, as in the yearning for your child to make it safely home from school, or for the shooting to stop in the war-torn inner city. All these influences go into understanding the depth of Stephen Jay Gould’s reflection, “We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.” As usual, Goethe’s commentary is hard to improve upon: “I love those who yearn for the impossible.”

  YELLOW DOG CONTRACT

  Any contract that forbids employees to join a union. This cute and colorful term belies the red-faced American labor disputes that date back to the mid-19th century. The phrase yellow dog first surfaces in the spring of 1921 during a time when editorials began appearing, especially in the labor presses. Exemplary of the stance and of the folk etymology of the term is this excerpt from an editorial in the United Mine Workers newsletter: “This agreement has been well named. It is yellow dog for sure. It reduces to the level of a yellow dog any man that signs it, for he signs away every right he possesses under the Constitution and laws of the land and makes himself the truckling, helpless slave of the employer.” According to the Dictionary of Color, yellow is symbolic because “If someone is yellow it means they are a coward, so yellow can have a negative meaning in some cultures. Yellow is for mourning in Egypt, and ac
tors of the Middle Ages wore yellow to signify the dead. Yet yellow has also represented courage (Japan), merchants (India), and peace.” A yellow ribbon stands for hope, as we saw with the mothers of soldiers stationed in Iraq; “mellow yellow” was the singer Donovan’s way of saying laid-back; “yellow-bellied sapsucker,” a species of bird, was an insult in Ireland; yellow journalism, reportage that is biased and sensationalized, was practiced by Hearst. “Y’er yellah” was one of the worst insults imaginable in the old John Ford Westerns. And here’s why the Simpsons characters were drawn yellow—to catch the eye of channel-surfers.