WordsWordsWords

In addition to the A Word a Day email that I’ve mentioned before, I get a Spanish Palabra¹ del día message². PDD takes a different form than AWAD, consisting of a longer narrative about the word’s history. Because English has so many Latin-rooted words, I frequently learn something in this Spanish message that sheds light on the origin of one or more English words that I know.

A few days ago, the PDD was negocio, “business.” I had always assumed it was related to negotiate, but I had never looked into what the connection might be. I did know however, that ocio meant something like laziness in Spanish. What I learned from the PDD email was that Latin otium, from which ocio is derived, meant “leisure.” With the prefix of negation, neg-otium literally meant “that which is not leisure.” I guess the only other option is business! (Please note that the Spanish word for work—trabajo—comes from the Latin word for torture chamber, and is thus an even less desirable alternative to R&R.)

Negotium evolved into our current Spanish word negocio. Negotiate has been around in English since about the turn of the 17^th century. It comes from the past participle of the Latin verb negotiari, “to trade,” which also comes from negotium.

As I often do, I went in search of other words that might be related, and I found one that I believe was new to me. Otiose, pronounced either “OH-shee-ohse” or “OH-tee-ohse” means being at leisure, ineffective, or useless. I find it interesting that the meaning of rest or relaxation can so easily slip into laziness or worthlessness. I guess it’s a fine line between spending a little healthy time in the hammock and developing into a full-blown, do-nothing slacker.
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¹Compare palaver, “profuse or persuasive talk,” which comes from the Portuguese palavra, also meaning word.
²I receive the PDD from elcastellano.org. It has an etymological focus. Another PDD, meant as a vocabulary builder, is available from www.donquijote.org/pdd/

I’m currently reading The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by Michael Capuzzo. I’ve been a fan of murder mysteries, true crime, and legal dramas for as long as I can remember, going back to Nancy Drew in girlhood. I will choose to bury myself for hours in a whodunit any day rather than read something edifying. (Whodunit. Now there’s the most obvious of etymologies!)

Murder Room is the story of the Vidocq Society, a group of esteemed investigators and forensic scientists who banded together in the early ’90s with the intention of closing some of the most heinous cases they’d encountered over the course of their careers. Prominent in the narrative are the actions of an uncannily gifted profiler and a forensic reconstructionist who seems to work magic. The book takes the reader through a number of cases that these detectives worked over the years.

The book could definitely have used a stronger editing hand. There are several repetitious passages, seemingly moved from one place to another without being deleted in the original locations. And some of Capuzzo’s prose is so over the top that it detracted from the story for me. Witness this introduction to his account of a meeting of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children: “As the lights dimmed in the Texas ballroom, the faces of the dead appeared [in a slideshow], larger than life yet so young and small, to soft music accompanied by a staccato of gasps and sobs from the audience. Each child’s face brought another cry from a banquet table, another candle sizzling in the dark, until the great hall glimmered like a concert—a hushed and otherworldly concert where parents implored fate or God for an encore.” I personally think that murdered children are dramatic enough, making unnecessary this type of narrative.

Though it has a few faults, I’ve enjoyed the book and would recommend it to true crime fans. Naturally, in the course of reading it, I picked up a couple of new words. Enjoy.

Cenotaph—a sepulchral monument erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere
from Latin cenotaphium, ultimately from Greek keno (empty) + taph (tomb)

Borborygmus (adj. borborygmic)—a rumbling or gurgling sound caused by the movement of gas in the intestines
from Neo-Latin, ultimately from Greek borborygmos, intestinal rumbling

Now you know what The Professor’s life is like, living with me.

It must have been Word Week in the funny papers

Today’s musing starts out with another one of those words that I see just frequently enough to think I should remember what it means, but not frequently enough to actually remember: solecism. My brain tries to make it mean something related to the sun (like solar), or to aloneness (solo, solitude), but I know as I look at it that it’s in some other category altogether.

It turns out that it’s a word that takes its meaning from the characteristic speech of a group of people, and that the noun is derived from that place name. In Solo, a city in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, they spoke “a corrupt form of Attic Greek,” according to the dictionary.com Unabridged. (We’ll leave for another day the concept of what is “corruption” versus “dialect” versus “new language evolving.”) Thus soloikismos came to mean “incorrect speech” in Greek, passing to Latin in the similar form soloecismus, and in the late 16^th century to English as our current word solecism. It has broadened its meaning, encompassing now not only “a nonstandard or ungrammatical usage,” but also “a breach of good manners” and “any error, impropriety, or inconsistency.”¹

Interestingly, one of the other words I can’t remember (or couldn’t, until I did a blog post about it!) also comes from an ancient place name and refers to the characteristic speech of the people of that area. You can read about laconic here.

And, in a three-for-one, it so happens that today’s Word of the Day also spoke of a place-name speech characteric. That word, gasconade (used as either noun or verb), means “boastful talk” or “to boast extravagantly.” The word, first recorded in English in the early 18^th century, comes to us from the French gasconadde, from gasconner (to boast), after Gascon, a native of the Gascony region in France. This one I think I can remember, because it makes me think of gasbag, even though they have no etymological link.

So to summarize:
solecism—ungrammatical usage
laconic—reticent
gasconade—to boast, or boastful talk

Can you think of any words derived from some characteristic of the people someplace in the U.S.?
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¹ all dictionary.com

After 47 years, it has become apparent that I have malocclusion—irregular contact of opposing teeth in the upper and lower jaws when I close my mouth. Known colloquially as bad bite, the term malocclusion itself was invented around 1885-1890, when the science of modern dentistry was evolving. According to about.com, the first orthodontic classification system—detailed descriptions of crooked teeth that would aid in figuring out how to straighten them—was invented by Edward H. Angle (1855-1930). Angle started the first school of orthodontics in 1901.

Although my teeth have always looked fine, my malocclusion has revealed itself recently. Over the last couple of years, my dentist¹ has had to make three small repairs in quick succession in the same area of my top front teeth. By now you may be able to guess what I’m going to say: braces.

I’ve had my adult teeth for over 40 years, or about 15,000 days. You don’t have to be a math whiz to calculate that if chewing and talking creates uneven wear each day of only, say, 1/100,000^th of a millimeter in a specific spot, 40 years adds up to a bit of a problem. After consulting with my dentist and doing a bunch of research, I decided to go with Invisalign, the clear, tray-shaped braces that clip tightly onto the teeth and are remove only for meals. In about a year or so, I hope to have benocclusion (not a word—yet).

“Malocclusion” was formed by the “bad” prefix that we see in many English words—malignant, malfunction, malevolent, and so forth—and “occlusion,” which means closure. “Occlusion” is the noun form of the verb “occlude” (Latin occludere) which means to close up.

Previous to that in the etymological history is where it gets interesting for me. “Oc,” appearing before the letter “c” here, turns out to be a variant of the “ob” prefix (obsolete, obstinate, etc.). Linguists call this assimilation, where two sounds near each other that once were different become alike, or at least more alike. “Oc” combines with cludere, a variant of the Latin verb claudere, “to close.”

And that’s how I found out that “occlusion” is related to “claustrophobia,” the fear of enclosed spaces, “claustrum,” a barrier (anatomical term), and “cloister,” a convent or monastery, and even the word “close” itself!²

Here are other English words formed with the –clude root. Think of how each one literally or figuratively closes something in, out, or up:
seclude
reclusive (reclude, rarely used)
exclude
include
conclude
preclude

Did I miss any?
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¹The most fabulous dentist in the world, Dr. Lyly Fisher
²See the lengthy etymology at dictionary.com