From Latin lutarius, from lutum, ‘mud’. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, lutarious means “inhabiting mud.” Wiktionary (like others) expands the definition a bit: “of, pertaining to, or like, mud; living in mud.” But both agree the word is obsolete.
As though living in mud, being like mud, sheer muddiness of nature and dwelling, mind and body, were obsolete. As though the world were not a big ball of wet dirt.
Here’s a poem.
lutarious
I am lutarious, I like fresh wet soil under my fingernails, between my toes, squishing in and out of my pores.
You like it clean and dry, the dust, the rocks, blue sky, hard, and whispering of death, no muck, no suck, no breath.
You scorn my wormsome ways, streambeds, puddles, bays, ooze, nematodes, cnidaria, as though you contained no bacteria.
But in a millennium or two, when they find mummified you, your face like a parchment scroll unchanged and unread in your hole,
I’ll be dissolved, remixed, reborn, remade, unfixed, untraceable, fungible, teeming with living and loving and dreaming.
Which would suggest that eucratic means ‘pleasant power’ or something like that. And, well, it sort of does. Canadians tend to be familiar with the phrase good government, as in “peace, order, and good government,” which is generally taken as the Canadian answer to the American “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” though of course each is intended to imply the other: Canadians believe that with peace, order, and good government, you can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whereas Americans are more likely to believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the appropriate basis for acceptable peace, order, and good government. But the point here today is that both countries (among many others) can have good government, which is more on the line of what eucratic implies (allowing that it’s an adjective, not a noun).
But what is that, really? Let me quote from the single English source for this word, the translation (unsigned) of Fragments of Politics and History, vol. 1, by Louis-Sébastien Mercier:
Is this word Greek to you? That’s OK; it’s Greek to everyone. If it looks a bit Socratic, it is: Socrates’s name, Σωκράτης, means ‘safe power’, and the cratic in eucratic is the same cratic as in Socratic and democratic and all the other cratic words, from κράτος, meaning ‘power’. But the eu is from εὐ- meaning ‘good’ or ‘pleasant’, as in euphoria(‘pleasant bearing’), eulogy (‘pleasant words’), euthanasia (‘pleasant death’), and even euphemism (‘pleasant talk’).
It is a maxim among physicians, “that no body is perfectly sound.” The same may be said of every government: the least imperfect live in a middle existence, in a state truly eucratic, that is, where good and ill are intermingled, but where the good preponderates.
Les médecins disent, nemo perfectè sanus, personne n’est parfaitement sain. On en peut dire autant de tout gouvernement : les moins imparfaits vivent dans un moyen être, dans un état véritablement eucratique, c’est-à-dire, mêlé de bien et de mal, et où le bien l’emporte sur le mal.
So you can see that English gets the word from French. However, in French as in English, the word (at least in this sense) is traceable to a single source: the one you’ve just read. Which, of course, assembled it from the Greek kit.
But still. It’s a good word, as good as one could ask for, for good government, a good state of a state – as good as one could ask for.
Let not the clipsome go unclasped, Nor yet the handsome go ungrasped; Chase me, embrace me, squeeze me well, And let us snug and hug a spell.
What is clipsome? It’s something that many a person feels after a long time of lockdown. No, not needing a haircut – I mean, that too, but that’s not what clipsome means. It means embraceable, huggable, claspable. Like Judy Garland and all these lads in Girl Crazy:
Why is that clipsome? Well, consider the clip – I mean the kind you use to hold things together, not to cut them off. This word clip comes from an old Germanic root meaning ‘clasp, embrace, kiss’; that was its first sense in English, too. From that came a sense ‘grip tightly’, and from that came a word for devices that grip tightly. Sort of like clamps, but, at least these days, a little smaller and lighter – clamps can hold lamps, but clips are sized for lips (well, ouch, but I couldn’t not use that). And as late as the 1800s, the ‘embrace’ sense was common enough that clipsome was a sensible word meaning ‘fit to be embraced’.
In case you’re wondering about that other clip, by the way, the one you do to hair, it comes from a different root, one that comes from the sound – just like clap, click, clank, et cetera. Scissors make a “clip, clip” sound (or at least they can; the ones I use tend to sound more like “snip, snip”).
And so it just happens that we have a phonaesthemic doublet. Some words that start with cl- have to do with abrupt onset of sound or action: clack, clang, clank, clap, and the rest of the largely onomatopoeic (if regularized) bunch, plus perhaps cliff. Other words that start with cl- have to do with things being or coming together: clam, clamp, clan, clasp, cleave, clench, cling, clot, clump, cluster, clutch… There are, of course, other cl- words that have nothing to do with either (clerk, clever, clinic, clover…), but cl- tends to show up a bit more often than chance would have it with one of these two general senses.
Which shouldn’t be so surprising: most of us don’t bear etymology in mind when speaking; we just think of words in terms of resemblance – the more words have a certain feature to them, the more we are likely to associate that feature with that sound. The bigger the cluster, the more clipsome it is.
Here’s another word we all need, especially right now. Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) asked Twitter,
What is the German word for “feeling physically nauseous from anxiety at the news but also morbidly unable to look away and stop scrolling”
She got a number of responses, of course. I’ve decided, however, that the mot juiced is Geierfaszination – “vulture fascination,” i.e., inability to look away when you see a vulture eating something (e.g., your cat).
Don’t bother looking it up; it’s not in any dictionary. I’m not even going to call it a “new old word”—I’m owning this puppy up front. (And any German speakers out there who find it ill formed are welcome to issue a correction.) If you want to say it out loud, it’s said like “guy-er-fass-i-na-tsyon” or however close to that you’re up to.
The word is made of two plain parts. Geier means ‘vulture’ (it traces back through German roots relating to ‘greed’ and ‘desire’ to a root that mainly gave rise to words meaning ‘gladly, willingly, eagerly’ in various Germanic languages, such as German gern and Swedish gärna). Faszination is plainly the German cognate of English fascination, from Latin fascinare ‘bewitch’, which traces to fascinum, which meant ‘evil spell, witchcraft’ but also meant ‘penis’ and, binding the two senses together (and – according to some people – the origin of both), ‘a phallus-shaped amulet worn around the neck as a preventive against witchcraft’ (to quote Wiktionary).
Which means that the roots of this word for ‘vulture-fascination’ could also have developed to mean ‘eagerly wear a magic dildo around my neck’. And, frankly, if you saw someone walking down the street proudly wearing a magic dildo around their neck, you might well feel queasy and worried but have a hard time looking away.
Sesquiotica 