The author of the blog Bag of Anything is a righteous poet.
When I say righteous, though, I don’t mean it in the sense ‘not wicked but good’; I mean it in the sense ‘wicked good’. I mean it like the righteous in The Righteous Brothers: right on.
If you go to Bag of Anything, you will see what I mean. But here’s what drew the blog to my attention: Near the end of my word tasting on mosaic, I wrote, “Not immutable laws handed down by divine providence so that we can say who’s in the group and who’s out, who’s righteous and who’s wrongeous.” The author of Bag of Anything, who signed the comment as “Rain, Rain,” gave this poem:
Deplore cast stones? Sinner, avoid the righteous;
Likely they are spoiling for a fight. Just
Follow Jesus’ counsel: in a throng, us
Common folk are safer with the wrongeous.
(It’s available on Bag of Anything at “Avoid the Righteous”.)
You may reckon that wrongeous is something I made up on the spot and is not to be found in the dictionary. You’d be half right. I did make it up on the spot, but I figured it would also be in a dictionary, and I was right – although the preferred spelling is wrongous. I also figured it would show in the Oxford English Dictionary as at best a historical word now generally disused, and I was right about that too. And I figured that it would mean something in the order of ‘having a wrong quality; tending to be wrong; acting wrongly or wrongfully’. And I was right again.
So I guess that makes me a righteous person. Well, except that we don’t typically mean ‘correcteous’ when we say righteous. (No, correcteous is not in the dictionary. But I bet you caught my drift.) We mean ‘holy’ or ‘highly justified or justifiable’ (an act or state can be righteous too – “so righteous was his need” is a line from Steely Dan) or ‘admirable’ or similar approbative things.
Now I want to ask you: do you find wrongeous righteous or wrongous? And do you find wrongous righteous or wrongeous? Which works better, if either does?
I like the parallel with righteous, but we have a little problem: the t in righteous doesn’t stand for exactly the same sound as in right; it has palatalized and affricated due to the high front vowel after it, so it sounds like “ch.” The closest thing we could do with the ng would be to say “rongyus,” which would palatalize it and probably really convert it into a nasalized glide. But that’s not the pronunciation, according to Oxford: it’s “rongus.” So that e seems not to belong, although it is historically attested. So hmm.
To be fair, the e isn’t original in righteous either. Actually, the words righteous and wrongeous come from right+wise and wrong+wise, with a shift in the unstressed second syllable over time (a half a millennium or so) to match words such as perilous and integrous. If I listed the historical changes of form leading to the modern form it would more than double the length of this blog.
Well, everything changes. To try to cling to some fixed historical form, or to try to maintain some imaginary purity or fixity in the language, would be altogether wrongeous. To try to disallow unfamiliar but usable words is also wrongeous. But to have fun, and to write witty poetry… well, that’s righteous, dude.
Sesquiotica 