Wordcatcher
Page 22
Taylor, Joseph. Antiquitates Curiosae: The Etymology of Many Remarkable Old Sayings, Proverbs, and Singular Customs. Originally published 1820. Reprinted, San Francisco: Familiar Productions, 1995.
Wilton, David. Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
______. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
AFTER TALE
There is a coda at the end of George Plimpton’s wonderful posthumous collection of essays, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, titled “Wish List,” in which he lists the many things he would like to do before he dies. In that spirit of wishful thinking I offer here a final section of words, some untranslatable but indispensable, that I wish could be revived, used, and enjoyed for their sheer delight.
Charles Mackay titled his 19th-century dictionary Lost Beauties , to describe unfortunately abandoned, deleted, or misplaced words or derivations. Edifying examples abound, such as emersal, what a light wood does when released as it bops to the water’s surface, perhaps inspired by emerge. Also hurkle, to shrug shoulders. Acnestis refers to the part of an animal’s back that it just… can’t…reach to scratch. Brewer defines merry-thoughts as “the furcula or wishing-bone in the breast of a fowl; sometimes pulled asunder by two persons, the one holding the larger portion being supposed to have his wish.” Fellow words include merry-go-sorry, a story that conveys joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, at same time: good news and bad news. If Mackay can immortalize a raft full of “lost beauties,” I can rescue a handful of “lost love-lies,” such as skyme, a glimmer of light, and spoffle, to look busy while trifling over little matters. Stevenson’s Scottish dictionary lists the wonderful mouthful clishmaclaver, idle talk, gossip—a word Scotland’s Radio Three describes as having built into it “a feeling of tongues wagging endlessly.” The OED provides us with the pugnacious bully-scribbler, a nasty writer. And one of the most charming derivations of all is Diane Ackerman’s discovery of the Aramaic origins of the word poet, which denotes, says she, the sound of water rushing over pebbles.
The Scottish tartle means “to hesitate in recognizing someone or something.” Far more fun—and forgivable—to say than that we’ve gone “brain-dead” when we meet somebody and can’t conjure up their name. An eye-popping illustration of this comes from the old Scottish term groping, which, according to Cox, 1828, was “a mode of catching trout by tickling them with the hands under rocks or banks.” Stevenson calls this Highlands and Borderlands practice guddling, “to catch fish with hands by feeling way into places in a stream where they may lurk. The ability to guddle trout is an admired skill.” Stevenson reports that in 1987 one Glasgow hospital averaged 21 soccer and rugby players “hirpling through the doors every week.” I can personally attest to the still widespread Scottish use of the hilarious-sounding hirple, to walk with a limp, to hobble. When I was hospitalized for pneumonia in northern Scotland in the summer of 2007, I overheard one nurse joking to another, “Did ye see the Yank hirpling in here this afternoon?”
And finally, a last word to consider reviving: the Greek aposiopesis , which means “becoming silent.” Remember the old radio comedy Fibber McGee and Molly? Each show ended with Fibber saying , “I’ll just look here in the hall closet, and—” followed by crashing sounds and then pure, golden, cleansing silence.
Photo by Jo Beaton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Cousineau has been a wordcatcher since he was a boy growing up in Wayne, Michigan, a little Civil War-era town outside Detroit and reading Homer, Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Superman comics, and baseball biographies. From the age of 16 he has been a freelance writer, and for the past twenty years a filmmaker, creativity consultant, and youth sports coach. He has published over twenty-five books, written or co-written eighteen documentary films, and contributed to forty-two other books. Currently, he is the host and co-writer of the nationally broadcast television series Global Spirit, on LINK TV.
1 Words in italicized bold are “headwords” that are defined, described, and derived later in the book.
Copyright © 2010 by Phil Cousineau.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Viva Editions, an imprint of Cleis Press Inc., 2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, California 94710.
eISBN : 978-1-573-44550-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cousineau, Phil.
Wordcatcher : an odyssey into the world of weird and wonderful words / Phil Cousineau.
p. cm.
1. English language--Etymology--Dictionaries. I. Title.
PE1580.C68 2010
422.03--dc22
2010004252