Yearly Archives: 2015

redolent

Posted on May 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Boy, it smells.”

“Smells? Smells of what?”

“Smells of something nice.”

“…”

“I mean, it’s pungent.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Sure, it has a nice odour.”

“Like, it reeks of good things?”

“Well, what? Is there another word for smelly that’s not freighted with negative associations?”

“Like a word that seems made to be said by a gentleman with an Italian accent?”

“Yeah, sure, a roll of the tongue, a tap, a liquid, a nasal, a final crisp point.”

“Do you mind if it makes you sound like a hackneyed newspaper scribbler?”

“…Um… should I?”

And so we come to redolent. It’s a delicious three syllables, more sapid than lentil, not as bright as red, entirely oblivious to rodent, rolling off the tongue like an Italian second dish. It’s not a verb, it’s an adjective – and it usually shows up with one of two prepositions: of and with.

So already it’s a little starchy because while you can use verb forms of some of the others (it smells, it reeks), you have to use a form of be plus a preposition to make redolent work. I mean, yes, you can say “That’s a very redolent cigar you have,” if you don’t mind sounding like the sort of self-consciously sesquipedalian person who will always say “reticent” where “shy” would be better. But normally you say something is redolent with a thing or redolent of a thing.

What’s the difference? “Redolent of X” means it has the smell of X, but of course in a rich, evocative way. (The writer thinks, “I want something lyrical here,” and grabs this word, which tends to come with a little flag sticking out of it, “Try me! I’m evocative!”) The air ­– most often it’s the air – is redolent of spices, garlic, perfume, onion soup. It borrows on reminiscent of (we will not say reeking of). “Redolent with X” means it is full-smelling, rich and evocative – the smell is saturated, red-lined even – and that the main element in this richness is X. It’s in the same vein as spiced with, alive with, rankling with, pregnant with, riddled with, that sort of thing.

Either way, it revs up with the opening /r/ and then readily rattles off three syllables. Etymologically, it uses the Latin re prefix as an intensifier; the d is inserted because there needs to be a consonant between the e and the following vowel. The olent has the same ol as in olfactory, from olere ‘emit a smell’.

And unlike smelly, pungent, odorous, reeking, and so on, it does not have a primary negative tone. Nor, on the other hand, is it flowery like perfumed. It is mellifluous, polysyllabic, literary. All of which make it ripe to be hackneyed by scribblers who want easy shortcuts to textual flavour and evocativeness. It is a sort of instant umami, a dash of nam pla – or more likely a sprinkling of powdered onion soup mix on the top of the casserole of words. Use it with care, therefore; you don’t want your text to be redolent of – or redolent with the odour of – junior journalists and other hacks.

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celerity

Posted on May 6, 2015 | 1 comment

If this word looks to you like it should be a famous vegetable, maybe it’s time to bring you up to speed on it. This is not food fast or slow, nor a star who’s fallen off the b-list; it’s more a characteristic of a tercel, if not always of a Toyota Tercel.

Celerity is what you have after acceleration (ac ‘to’ plus celer plus ation) and before deceleration. If you want to get somewhere in a trice – can we say get there tricely? – you need celerity or ye will be derelict. Let me add some clarity: celerity is speed, from Latin celer ‘swift’. It is a business-class or first-class word for speed. And just as business and first will get you to your destination at the same time as economy, but with more expense and ostentation, so celerity will serve the same sense as speed, but with a Rolex chronograph on its wrist.

There are other synonyms for speed, of course; Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus includes fastness, fleetness, haste, hurry, quickness, rapidity, rapidness, speediness, swiftness, and velocity. But they don’t all have exactly the same tinges and tastes. Some imply time pressure, some have a sense of carelessness; others are dryer or more positively toned. Several have that –ness that drags like a trailer. One thing nearly all of them do have, though, is a fricative at the start: /s/, /f/, /h/ (only sort of a fricative in English, admittedly), and the one voiced one the engine-rev /v/. Two others have the liquid /r/. Only one starts with a stop: quickness.

Of them all, celerity is truly the most rare and expensive – the only one that the average speaker might not even know. It is a shining silver streak of a word, soft and liquid with one lightly crisp tap as it passes. It may have a more lyric quality, even. It is ethereal and yet somehow slightly lesser in impact.

I do not think that this watch is truly a businessman in business class drinking his transatlantic Caesar with celery. No, it is a wisp of a lady in a diaphanous dress wearing not a watch at all but simply a silver bracelet, sitting in first class sipping Perrier-Jouet and talking to no one as she sees the Pacific slip quickly away below. Who is she? A starlet? A food guru? A simple skater? No one knows for sure, except for that bespectacled nerd sitting next to her reading impenetrable theory for relaxation. He is flying as fast as she is, and he will arrive with her at the same hotel room. And he knows what celerity is. Not haste. Not hurry. No pressure. Simply being everywhere before the slower ones.

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brash

Posted on May 5, 2015 | 2 comments

To be brash is to be rash – b rash indeed. It’s to be flashy and crashy and probably trashy, perhaps to be brutal and break things. It is to say to your brain “sh!” before it can finish. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of the adjective brash is “Hasty, rash, impetuous; (orig. U.S.), impulsive, assertive, impudent; crude, insensitive; flashy.” Ashes to ashes, but bashes to the brashest. It is a characteristic most especially of the young, and in particular of young men. Words it most often shows up with, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, include (in descending order) young, loud, style, bold, cocky, and arrogant.

Here’s another word you may see with it: water. As in water brash. This is a medical term. It’s not brash water; here, brash is a noun. A more technical term is reflux. You lie down, the acidic contents of your stomach – including excess saliva – flow up, it produces a burning sensation and a sense of unpleasant water flowing back into your mouth and probably some general gastric discomfort. So it’s water and it’s rather brash. But this is the noun, meaning ‘break, attack, assault, burst’. It’s the original brash.

In fact, brash the noun was around since the 1500s, while brash the adjective has only been around since the 1800s. It’s quite the brash upstart. But wait, there’s more: there are actually two each of noun, adjective, and verb for brash in the OED. The other noun version is ‘heap of fragments, such as rock rubble or crushed ice’. The other adjective version is ‘fragile; brittle’ and mainly applies to timber. The two verbs are an obsolete one meaning ‘assault, attack’ and a 20th-century one meaning ‘remove the lower branches of a tree’. They don’t all have identical origins as far as we can tell, but we can’t entirely tell for sure either. The main thing is that the sense we commonly use, like a couple of the others, seems to have imitative or sound symbolic origins – that is, it makes use of the phonaesthemes /br/ (as in break, brunt, brittle) and /æʃ/ (as in smash, crash, dash, splash). They were grabbed and rashly bashed together. But the result seems to hold water.

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Tiffany

Posted on May 4, 2015 | 3 comments

Today has been Audrey Hepburn’s birthday. She would have been 86 but she died in 1993, alas. For me, she is the quintessential gamine, a kind of divine apparition, and she is the only actress of whom I have bought an entire photo wall calendar, an artistic homage I usually reserve for artists such as Alphonse Mucha. I think the first movie of hers I ever saw was her first big hit, Roman Holiday. But the movie I – like so many others – will enduringly associate her with is Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

We can leave aside the fact that Truman Capote (who wrote the story on which the movie was based) thought she was badly miscast and wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role. Let us also for the moment leave aside the terrible casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi (his scenes should be re-shot with George Takei presenting an entirely different and better version of the character, in my opinion). The rest of the movie is lovely, even though some people might think it a bit tawdry and no one could call Holly Golightly a saint. But I want to talk about Tiffany’s.

Or, more particularly, Tiffany. Such a gem of a name, soft, sighing in the wind, the ff waving like a field of heather or timothy. Yes, Tiffany is a more heather-like name than Heather, I think. But it’s also more delectable, like a perfect little tiffin or tea. Now, yes, it can have a girlish faddishness or faddish girlishness, I suppose, and it does call forth a certain preciousness. There was a girl in my high school named Tiffany, and actually she didn’t seem precious and expensive at all, but then she wasn’t in my grade so maybe I was wrong. I actually used to think Epiphany would be a good name for a girl, though I’ve never seen it; it has a similar sound but perhaps more of a coruscating phonetic epiphenomenon. No?

The famous Tiffany, though, and the Tiffany of the movie, is the family name of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who founded a jewelry store that is now one of the anchors of 5th Avenue in Manhattan. It is a place you can go to look and dream, though not really to have breakfast. It is where you see the bright shiny priceless things.

But there is another Tiffany, one more in line with Alphonse Mucha: both had connections to Art Nouveau, an artistic movement I shamelessly adore. (I once bought an entire book of Art Nouveau wrapping paper.) Such beautiful botanical curves, softly illuminating their surroundings. The Paris Metro seems a wonderful thing just because at some stations you pass through Art Nouveau entrances. It is a perfect fairyland home for the gamines and assorted theophanies of the world. And the most luminous artist of them all was Louis Comfort Tiffany, maker of stained glass – lamps, windows, what have you. Was he related to Charles Lewis Tiffany? He was Charles’s son. (Comfort was a personal name held by several men in the Tiffany clan.)

There are also musical connections to Tiffany – an American singer who had a hit with “I Think We’re Alone Now”; a K-pop singer, member of Girls’ Generation; and the song “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something, which I heard a gazillion times on the radio 20 years ago, which was 17 years before I ever saw the movie.

Oh, yes, the movie: I first watched it on an Air New Zealand flight from LA to Auckland – a flight where the flight attendant spontaneously offered us sparkling wine with breakfast, quite the contrast to the horrible United Airlines flight from Sydney to San Fran on the way back, where our direct request for sparkling wine at breakfast elicited a look of disgust and a flat refusal. Well, never mind, that UA flight was from hell for several reasons, but sparkling wine on Air NZ on the way to NZ was at least as heavenly as a Danish in front of a jewelry window.

So. Sparkling wines. Art Nouveau glass. Jewels. Audrey Hepburn. Such divine manifestations indeed. And fair enough. Tiffany is a name given in honour of the epiphany – the divine manifestation, the revealing of Jesus to the magi. Epiphany is a Greek word, but the Greek word for ‘divine manifestation’ is theophany.

Which is the etymon of Tiffany.

That’s right. Just as Dionysos became Dennis, Theophany became Tiffany. What the heck… St. Audrey became tawdry, you know. But not in Breakfast at Tiffany’s she didn’t. Or maybe she did, just a little bit, to dip into the weary tarnished but hopeful joy of humanity and raise it back to the divine. You know, Louis Comfort Tiffany sought out the glass with impurities, because it made a more beautiful glow…

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obnoxion, obnoxity, obnoxiety, obnoxicity, obnoxy, obnoxiosity, obnoxiousness

Posted on May 3, 2015 | 3 comments

Ah, the constant lexical capriciousness of the English language. It’s like a combination of Christmas and Hallowe’en: when you unbox a word, you don’t know if it will be trick or treat. It’s like trying to learn to eat with a full formal flatware setting: the multifarious forks, knives, and spoons, there for you to choose from wrongly and make yourself look like a bumpkin. Our derived word forms in particular display a pointed obnoxion.

What do you mean obnoxion isn’t a word? Religious – religion; contagious – contagion… What is it, obnoxity? You know, loquacious – loquacity; mendacious – medacity… Well, then, how about obnoxiety? Like anxious – anxiety? Let’s see… calamitous – calamity could give us obnoxy… It’s not obnoxicity, anyway, right, because that really is just an –ity with an –ic before it… Maybe obnoxiosity on the model of monstrous – monstrosity? No?

Well, we’re getting through all the Latin endings here. I mean, the word obnoxious comes from Latin obnoxius, which is from ob ‘towards, in the way of’ and noxa ‘hurt, injury’; it meant ‘exposed to harm, answerable, subject to punishment’. So clearly we should use a Latin-derived suffix to make the noun. It would be silly to stick on an old Germanic suffix, right? Something like –ness?

Oh, come on, you have got to be kidding. Obnoxiousness? That’s the correct form? Well, it sure is an obnoxiously long word, so maybe it’s fitting. Anyway, there are other –ous words that get a –ness as well; the Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of them, from abstemiousness through anxiousness and atrociousness and barbarousness and boisterousness and capaciousness and consciousness and contagiousness and… um, yes, we do have anxiety and atrocity and barbarity and capacity and contagion…

And, according to Oxford, we also have obnoxity and obnoxiety. Could it be that obnoxiousness is a measurable quality and one or both of the others is an instance of someone or something being obnoxious? Well, yes, an obnoxity is “An obnoxious, objectionable, or offensive person or thing; an object of aversion.” As to obnoxiety, it’s listed as “Originally: †the state of being liable to something; liability (obs.). Now: offensiveness, objectionableness, odiousness.”

Remember: the original definition of obnoxious in English as of the 1500s, and the usual sense before the 1800s, was (per Oxford) “Liable, subject, exposed, or open to a thing (esp. something actually or possibly harmful).” You would be obnoxious to punishment or obnoxious to accidents or or or… But the ‘hurtful, injurious’ sense (proper to Latin obnoxiosus) appeared in the 1600s and prevailed by the 1800s.

Mind you, these days obnoxious means not so much ‘hurtful’ as (to quote Merriam-Webster) “unpleasant in a way that makes people feel offended, annoyed, or disgusted.” We see it in phrases like obnoxious little brat, loud and obnoxious, rude and obnoxious, and obnoxious behaviour. It’s a very hard-to-ignore quality.

Which leaves us with the obnoxion of English derivational morphology. There are plenty of people who would like obnoxion to be a word in regular use; just Google it and you’ll see. But there are also people who are rather obnoxious about its being “not a word.” (“You dreadful little man, you are using the wrong fork with your squab.”) You get generally similar results for obnoxity, obnoxiety, obnoxicity, obnoxiosity (and obnoxiousity), even obnoxy.

I think it just leaves plenty of opening for being obnoxious. Which, in the bratty sense, can even include a little puckishness and rambunction. Rambunctiousness. Rambunxity?

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lithobraking

Posted on April 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

Today, the MESSENGER orbiter, which had been circling Mercury since 2011, executed a lithobraking manoeuvre.

What is lithobraking? It’s one of the ways of reducing the velocity of a spacecraft. Yes, it’s braking as in braking, that thing you do to slow down a car or a bike. The verb brake in this sense comes from the noun brake, ‘device for slowing or stopping a wheel’, which comes from one or both (by mutual influence) of the Dutch verb breken ‘break’ (in reference to crushing flax in this case, apparently) and the Old French brac ‘arm’ (in reference to a lever, which is used for applying the brake), which comes from Latin bracchium.

Spacecraft are gliding through space, so you can’t just slow down a wheel that’s in contact with a surface; you have to use some external force. One way of doing this is by aerobraking. A spacecraft that has come a long distance at high speeds needs to slow down enough to get into the right orbit around a planet, and if you dip into the atmosphere and back out, you can use the friction of the atmosphere to slow it down rather than needing to burn a lot of fuel firing rockets to the same effect. So: aero, from Latin for ‘air’. And braking.

The MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe didn’t use aerobraking at any point; Mercury doesn’t have enough atmosphere for that to work. When it arrived at Mercury in 2011, it had to use a complex and large set of manoeuvres to take it to the right speed and into orbit. But it settled into its orbit and commenced mapping Mercury. It was set for a one-year mission. But at the end of the year, it still had lots of juice, so they decided to keep it going as long as possible. And they started live-tweeting it: a person on Earth tweeting as the first-person voice of MESSENGER.

Orbit is not a pure and simple thing. Your straight-line speed has to be just right to pull you away from what you’re orbiting with the same energy as what you’re orbiting is exerting through gravity to pull you towards it. Orbits can decay: the speeds aren’t quite matched. MESSENGER needed to fire some rockets occasionally to fix decay of its orbit. And finally it no longer had the fuel to do so. Its orbit would inevitably give way to the pull of gravity. It was determined that the resolution of this would be lithobraking.

Do you recognize lith? It’s a Greek-derived root meaning ‘stone’; you see it in lithograph (a printmaking technique using etched stone) and monolith (speaking of things in space, cue 2001: A Space Odyssey). Lithobraking is using rock to reduce the speed of a spacecraft. It has been used with the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover, for instance.

Where do you get rock in space? You don’t. You get it at the surface of the planet.

The Mars landers inflated big balloons and bounced along the surface of the planet until friction with the stone finally stopped them.

MESSENGER did not have big balloons. It was not designed to be a lander.

Lithobraking is a technical term for a precise manoeuvre calculatedly using the rock of a planet’s surface to stop a lander. It is also a more sarcastically euphemistic term for crashing.

The MESSENGER ground crew on Earth knew that this was the inevitable ending. The orbit was decaying and gravity would win. They let this be known on April 16. @MESSENGER2011 tweeted:

Oh No!! I’m going to be creating a new crater on Mercury? Hum.. This should be interesting.

They made a manoeuvre on April 24 to set the trajectory. The probe would come into the planet at 3.9 km per second and would contact the planet’s surface at about 54˚ north on April 30, at 2:36:06 EST, Earth time. The probe tweeted more information, including this:

I’m only ~ 3m across, but I will create a crater about 16 meters across.

Yesterday (April 29), it tweeted:

Well my lithobraking will occur tomorrow @ 3:26pm EDT. More info here: bit.ly/1DLhHVg

A Twitter user commented this morning on the use of lithobraking. @MESSENGER2011 responded:

It’s called I don’t want to think about crashing. Lithobraking sounds a lot better.

And at just the predicted time, in just the predicted way, MESSENGER lithobraked from 3.9 km/s  to 0 km/s instantaneously – on the other side of Mercury from the Earth, so there are no pictures of it as it happened. But there’s a new crater on Mercury now. You can find out more at @MESSENGER2011 and messenger.jhuapl.edu.

And now so many more of us know this word lithobraking. The first half is smooth and classical, the liquid /l/ and soft /θ/, like flying through space though it refers to stone. The second half is hard, abrupt, an odd and uncertain form from Germanic and/or Latin. Collided together, they make quite the contrast. Of course, contrast is what lets you see craters…

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pinxit

Posted on April 28, 2015 | Leave a comment

You may have seen this word somewhere. Perhaps in a corner of some depiction pinned on Pinterest? Can you multiply a pin by it (pin x it)? Or is it a mix between a pixie and a minx, perhaps making its grand exit, observable only when you’re in the middle of pint number eleven? It sounds like some shear cut in the fabric, leaving a sawtooth edge: “she pinks it.”

This is seen in conjunction with a craft, to be sure, but not one of the cloth, unless that cloth be stretched canvas. Or we could think of the fabric of reality, lying smooth in most places but, like the fabric of space-time in the presence of massive gravity, bulging here and there under the influence of some sheer genius or more workmanlike efforts. Art erupts, you know; it is not created so much as heaved up from the frost that underlies our lives. A little bit of melting or overexpansion and then pingo: a bump, a high point, a disruption. But pingo is not just a mound swelling up from the permafrost. It is also Latin for ‘I paint’.

I paint, yes… I paint the head of a pin, or a canvas, or a plate; I depict a pixie, or a naiad, or some other thing more or less expected. And then, having limned it, I wish to to claim the art, to let it be known who did it. I could simply leave my name, sign it somewhere and let it be understood that I am the artist. But I could also be classic and classical and self-declare in Latin. I paint, I painted? Pingo, pinxit. On a painting I have done, I could put “James Harbeck pinxit.” And – pace thorn, the letter that looks like b plus p but sounds like “th” – I wouldn’t mean “James Harbeck þinxit is very good.” No, just “James Harbeck painted.” Should it be “painted it”? No one does that: pinxit it, no; the “it” is implied. The same goes with scripsit (“wrote it”), dixit (“said it”), and fecit (“made it”). Most painters don’t use pinxit, but some did, especially during the Italian Middle Ages, when signing one’s work was a newer thing to do.

So. The painter paints, pingo, and, having painted, pinxit, signs, and then leaves: exit. But the picture (from pictus, ‘painted’) still exists.

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gurnetty

Posted on April 27, 2015 | 1 comment

Sometimes, following caprice, I just swim through the sediment of the Oxford English Dictionary feeling for strange words that I would have no reason to encounter in my daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly life. Extend a tentative tendril here, a probing appendage there; see what words emerge when you stir up the lexical mud of centuries. Will you get some garnet from the gentry? Or just turn up grunge? What do you get as a lexical bottom-feeder?

Gurnetty.

You get gurnettier and gurnettier sometimes, but you don’t get gurnettier; you just get gurnetty, which implies the comparative. It implies it because it’s an adjective form. As the OED explains, gurnetty means “Resembling a gurnard.”

So now we have two questions: What is a gurnard, and Why is this word not gurnardy?

First: a gurnard is a bottom-feeding fish. Oh, come on, like you didn’t see that coming with all the hints dropping around you like… um, like fish poop falling to the ocean floor, I guess. A gurnard has big fins, a big head, big eyes, and three appendages hanging down below its – not neck, but where that would be – that feel for foodstuffs in the muck. It probably comes from French grognard ‘grumbler, grunter’.

It also has some alternate forms in English; the one that is still current is gurnet. That undoubtedly came through predictable English sound changes and reductions – take some illiterate British fishermen and give them gurnard and you might yet net gurnet. Not exactly a gem, but not exactly the gentry, and not really urgent, either.

And if you do net a gurnet? Apparently they’re often tossed away as a bycatch, but increasingly they are being kept, as they have (per the BBC) “firm white flesh that holds together well in cooking.” They don’t have a lot of flavour, though. So they’re best in stews and such like.

So there it is. You come for lexical enlightenment, you get a tasteless (but resilient) bottom-feeder. ’Twas ever thus.

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brackish

Posted on April 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

Laurie took a sip from his glass. “Brack!”

“Old brack water?” I said.

He shook his head and spluttered. “Brock! York! Guelph!” Or maybe he was just yucking and yexing.

I decided to test the hypothesis that his distaste for the water was equal to his distaste for certain Ontario universities. “What was it, loo water? Would you like some rye instead?” (Waterloo and Ryerson, like the other three, are also not the University of Toronto or McMaster, Laurie’s almae matres.)

Laurie wiped his mouth. “Brackish. Send it back.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Is that onomatopoeia? Brackish? Doesn’t sound like water to me.”

“I wonder,” I said. “More likely we’re going at it brackwards: gross salty water may seem flat and cracked like ‘brack’ because of the sound of brackish.” I saddled up a computer and did some looking up. “Seems to come from Middle Dutch brak, ‘salty’ or ‘worthless’. The trail is kind of lost after that.”

I kept looking while Laurie sought out something better to drink. “Maybe some backwater with bark and a crab in it?” he said over his shoulder. “Or Aristophanes’ frogs, brakakakax koax koax?”

“Well, that was ‘brekekekex,’ but…” I said, snorkelling the internet. Actually, snorkelling is perhaps not a good word for it, as brackish water nauseates me, too, and I have a consequently bad record when snorkelling. But anyway. “There was a brack that was a loud noise or outcry, but that’s obsolete,” I said. “It could also mean a break or rupture. Oh, and there’s an Irish seed cake. And there’s bracken, which is a kind of fern.” I looked up. “Of course there’s brachy, a Greek prefix for ‘wide’, as in brachydactyly. The wide brackish Sargasso Sea? And there’s Georges Braque, a cubist painter, many of whose works were shades of brown and black. And of course the rather distasteful mania for collegiate basketball playoff brackets that comes around every March.”

“Give it a break,” Laurie said, handing me a glass of beer, another for himself in the other hand. “At least these won’t be brackish.”

“Until we belch: ‘brack!’” I said. Laurie pulled a face. I sipped. I paused. I pulled a face too. “Um, what kind of beer is this?”

“Let me see… something like Busch. Or Pabst. Or Schlitz.”

“Aw, man,” I said. “Rule number one: Don’t drink beer that sounds like a beer can opening!”

Thanks to Laurie Miller for suggesting today’s word. I hope he doesn’t mind my putting rather more words into his mouth than he used in suggesting it – but he did supply the university yexing.

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conniption

Posted on April 23, 2015 | 7 comments

There was a time in American English when words were like contraptions you could jerry-rig: a bit from here, a bit from there, all bolted together to make a pseudo-classical bit of hickery. Absquatulate and copacetic are two classics – though copacetic is the newer by nearly a century, showing up circa 1910. Absquatulate hit the scene around 1830. So did contraption – a pseudo-classical construction with a trap stuck in it. And so did conniption.

You know what a conniption is, right? It’s a fit: a fainting fit or a hissy fit or some other pique or fright. We often see the redundant (but assonant) phrase conniption fit – in fact, that’s how it shows up in the earliest attested uses.

I think conniption has a good sound; that nip in the middle is fittingly indignant but short; the gathering con could call on confound and condemn and consarn (a fake-swear probably based on concern and usable where one might use goshdarn), and the ption ending brings out not only contraption but corruption, consumption, and conscription – and eruption and exception, among others. And just maybe, the word as a whole has an air of a sneezing fit.

So where did conniption come from? Um, the US… around 1830… and no one’s really sure of anything more than that. There’s speculation, of course, but not even a whole lot of that. It was confected; it fit well; it stuck. If you look at Google ngrams, you’ll see ebbs and flows over the decades.

Mind you, you’ll also see results from the earliest 1800s. Have a look and you’ll find hits like these:

“there are a thousand occasions in which it breaks through its original conniption” —1803

“The economy of injustice is, to furnish resources for the fund of conniption” —1807

“who would be the avengers, not the abettors of conniption” —1811

“the moral conniption of our first parent has been entailed on his whole posterity” —1811

This is rather entertaining. But if you click through and look at the actual photo facsimile, you will find what you may have already guessed: it’s due to bad optical character recognition. This conniption is in every case a corruption… of corruption.

Tsk. It’s enough to give one a conniption.

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