Monthly Archives: March 2024

scrutatious

Posted on March 28, 2024 | Leave a comment

Are you scrutatious?

You know what scrutatious means, of course. I just used it in my tasting of harrumphery and I heard no squawks. To define: ‘characterized by or disposed to scrutation; inclined to intense study or thorough inspection’. (Scrutation, of course, is the act of giving scrutiny – the OED defines it as “minute search or examination.”) 

That monocle-with-eyebrow-raised emoji, 🧐, is iconically scrutatious. Which means pick, pick, pick, always picking at things. Why must you pick so much? Why are you so scrutatious?

Huh, when you put it that way, it almost sounds trashy.

Well, hey, there’s nitpicking and then there’s trashpicking. Nitpicking may have a negative tone, but in the real world, removing nits is a very good and caring and helpful thing to do, because they hatch into lice if you don’t. Trashpicking, on the other hand… say, did you know that there was a self-described, self-appointed “Dylanologist” who regularly picked through Bob Dylan’s trash when Dylan lived in New York City? Dylan moved out of town in no small part just to get away from the guy. This kind of obsessive “fandom,” where you go through the flotsam and jetsam of a life just for the sake of your own mastery of it, is certainly the apex of scrutatiousness. Or, rather, the nadir.

And there are other areas of life that are similarly subject to the gimlet eye of the scrutatious. Language is one such. Grammatical pedants and etymological trashpickers make life needlessly unpleasant without any true benefit for others. But it’s not that being scrutatious is inevitably bad; a person who has the inclination but is well balanced about it might become a good safety inspector or editor (sometimes the same thing).

And a good etymologist or linguistic historian is also scrutatious in a good way: looking at the origins of words to know, for instance, that the scrut- root in all these words (and others) comes from Vulgar Latin scrutor, which appears to come from Late Latin scruta ‘rubbish, broken trash’ – which would mean that scrutiny etc. refer in their origins to picking through trash. (There are competing theories, though, that might yet trash that one.) A bad etymologist will insist that scrutatious must therefore refer to literal trashpicking, but that’s a load of rubbish. 

OK, so how scrutatious are you are about language? Well, tell me this: how common a word is scrutatious? How many dictionaries is it in?

The answer is that it is in zero (0) dictionaries. And if you Google it, you get three results, and one of them is my word tasting note on harrumphery, and another is (or will be) this very thing you’re reading right now. The third is the comments section of a post from 2006.

Some lexical trashpickers might conclude on that basis that it’s not a word. But obviously they’re wrong. I used it and you (probably) understood it, and you (probably) didn’t even question it. It is a word that always existed in potential and was just waiting for people to notice it and use it. That’s not so inscrutable, is it?

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harrumphery

Posted on March 26, 2024 | 3 comments

Another week, another eructation of harrumphery about the parlous state of today’s youth published on one opinion page or another to be passed around as the latest hate-read. The jeremiad fulminates against the current decadent generation of whippersnappers, so horribly coddled and disrespectful and feckless, simultaneously inert and destructive, passive and insolent. The criticisms are all familiar, having been harrumphed by various curmudgeonly harruncles for as long as there have been people willing to publish them. It is the regular round of exgramination (get-off-my-lawn-ery) as grunted and burbled in the huffing tones of the most walrus-like of people.

Indeed, the particular characteristic of harrumphery is that its rumbled disgruntlement insistently affects a kind of gravitas that devolves into gravy-toss. When you harrumph, you take the posture of one whose social status is assured, one whose presence is the opposite of callow, one who – after abundant clearing of the throat – insists on elevated elocutions and would never be so undignified as to utter a vulgarism. So what if the harrumphing is incoherent, inconsistent, just a rehashing of unoriginal psychosocial dyspepsia assembled harum-scarum (or rather harumph-scarumph)? Harrumphery claims the earned right to supersede scrutiny. It is the harrumpher who is scrutatious!

Oh, speaking of scrutiny, and of things done harum-scarum: there is the question of how many r’s there are in this word. In point of fact, while neither spelling – harrumphery or harumphery – is to be found in dictionaries, both are to be found in use, the former somewhat more than the latter. I favour the double r, but not just on the basis of frequency. For one thing, if you search harrumphery on Google, Google wants to assume you meant harrumphed, whereas if you search harumphery, Google wants to assume you meant Humphrey. What a boggart! But more to the point, the doublet rr better conveys the phlegmatic onomatopoeia, and it adds just that much extra weight to the word. But of course the single-r version is no less legitimate, just as the single-r versions of the others – harumph, for example – are established alternatives to the double-r ones.

But, yes, this is a word that may become its own target: language grouches might insist it’s not a word at all. It’s not in their ledgers of lexical legislation! That means nothing, though. The word is, as noted, in use; and when I first used it above, I feel sure you knew on the instant what it meant. If you know harrumph – as you do, I am sure – and if you know the suffix -ery, as in cookery, mockery, and so on, then this confection is clear enough. So let it be used. We shall surely have repeated use for it, every time another geyser-like eruption issues forth from the harrumpherate (it would accord them too much style to call them the harrumpherati).

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sequacious

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

Lead is the most sequacious metal. 

I’ll prove it. What metal is quite ductile, and yet not too costly? Easily lead. What metal can be melted readily and formed into whatever model is required? Easily lead. What metal will behave as you want without oxidizing excessively or otherwise reacting and altering? Easily lead. And what is a good definition of sequacious? ‘Easily led’. 

You see how neatly it follows? As well it should. An argument that is sequacious follows neatly, with tidy reasoning tending in a single direction like a smooth sales pitch. Music that is sequacious has notes that follow neatly in entirely regular order. A person who is sequacious is one who follows neatly – one who is credulous and will adhere without second thought to the dictates of their leader. And a thing or object that is sequacious is ductile, yielding, and easy to shape. …Well, sequacious is not commonly used in that last sense anymore, but, then, it’s not very commonly used at all – though there are many occasions where we could use it.

I won’t say that sequacious is itself a sequacious word in form – it does have all the vowels, but not in exact order, and the u repeats; it also ends as it starts, with s. But its etymology follows neatly enough. It starts with Latin sequor ‘I follow’, which gains -ax ‘inclined to’ to make sequax ‘follower’ (sounds like ducks in a row, doesn’t it?); that has a combining form sequac-, which mixes with -ious and there you have it, a nice tidy sequence.

Tidiness is appealing, and can be a good thing. However, a certain amount of resistance, complication, and thought can also be valuable. Being easily led is great for myrmidons and myrmecoids, and perhaps for dogs and ducks and ductile metals, and it’s true that being excessively reactive or unstable is often undesirable – though there will always be elements that are, such as potassium and cesium – but persons of a sequacious mettle will never be able to get the lead out, steel their resolve, and brass their way through to iron out difficulties. And while lead’s sequacious properties may seem a useful model, when looking at the public sphere, we should extend the analogy even farther: What metal is known to be damaging to the healthy functioning of the brain? Easily lead. And what metal is famously of low value? Easily lead.

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flibbertigibbet

Posted on March 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Daddy told me to tell you that I don’t know what he hired you for and not to tell me. That I’m totally untrustworthy. I’m a flibbertigibbet. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

That scene from Joe Versus the Volcano is what always comes to my mind when I think of flibbertigibbet. Others think first of The Sound of Music:

“How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet? A will-o’-the-wisp? A clown?”

I have to wonder where else in popular entertainment flibbertigibbet has been used. It’s such a lovely, lively word – like a flapper fluttering in furs and taffeta, or a flivver’s flat tire flip-flopping on the tarmac. (Or, I suppose, like a gibbeted robber babbling deliriously for a final filbert, though that’s rather unpleasant.) It’s a word that expresses in sound the idea “Why say one thing when you can say two? Why say two when you can say three?”

It expresses it in its history, too. In its earliest forms, flibbertigibbet seems to have been just flibbergib, a kind onomatopoeia of bafflegab, folderol, rigmarole, and ad libitum hocus pocus – the daily verbal traffic of the average gossiping tattletale: a merge of flibber and gib, two and one to make three to make one. But why have one syllable of gib when you can have two of gibbet (with that little diminutive – a creditable derivative, though indubitably punitive, with its adventitious baleful overtone), and why have two of flibber when you can have three of flibberti (we could as readily spell it flibber-de-gibbet, which would make it rather oojah-cum-spiff)?

And that is the basic origin of the flibbertigibbet: someone for whom words multiply, a person who simply can’t not say – originally a flattering sycophant or a gossip, but now evolved to mean a flighty person, one who may well babble endlessly but who in any event is as firm and easy to follow as a butterfly. And, of course, social stereotypes being what they are, a flibbertigibbet has generally been thought of as a woman.

There were, to be sure, attempts to turn flibbertigibbet another way. Shakespeare and Walter Scott both gave it as a name to a demon or imp – in Scott’s Kenilworth, what the OED calls “an impish-looking, mischievous, and flighty urchin.” Meaning, perhaps, a sort of devilish ragamuffin. But it didn’t stick. Now it’s not the Artful Dodger or Puck, or a little Beelzebub; it’s Meg Ryan or Julie Andrews. Well, I’d rather adorable than abominable.

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hobbledehoy

Posted on March 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

What does a ragamuffin become when he hits that awkward age? A hobbledehoy.

Strictly speaking, hobbledehoy just means any awkward youth, in those gawky years between childhood and adulthood – though it typically implies is a boy. A girl, if she was not sufficiently “ladylike,” might in times past have been called a hoyden or a tomboy (hobbledehoy, hoyden, and tomboy? oy, oy, oy). I would like to suggest that an awkward but boisterous adolescent girl might be called a hobbledehoyden… but the words are not related, as far as we know.

Mind you, we are hobbled by incomplete etymological information. There are various guesses as to the origins of both words, but, as the words were confected not in the hallowed halls of academe or at the cramped carrels of the law-clerks but in the wide wild world, where writers simply put down what they heard and later readers tried to fit it with what they recognized, what we get is an awkward trail that has little more direction, reason, or consistency than a foolish fourteen-year-old.

In particular, we may note that most of the older appearances of hobbledehoy – in the 1500s and 1600s – are more like hobber-de-hoy or hobby de hoy or even hobbadehoy. They all have the hoy and they all have the hob and they even all have the de, but that first off-beat syllable is variable. It’s unlikely that the word has any original relation to hobble, but it’s clear to see that hobble drew the word to it. After all, hobbling is awkward, and hobbledehoys are awkward, and it just made sense, right? 

Not that the word always implied that the person was awkward. It may have come from an old French word for a country squire (perhaps also applied to apprentices) plus another old French word for ‘today’, but that’s based on sound resemblance and has no real trail of evidence. Some suggest that it originally meant ‘today’s young upstart’, but all the recorded uses seem simply to signify a teenage boy, with all that is normally expected from one. The hobble just happened to be around, and the word’s development of form and sense has been hobbled by it.

What if it had been drawn into the gravity of some other word? One could imagine a historical circumstance in which the word instead shifted to hoppity-hoy, which would have been more lively. Well, when words are in that awkward period, you don’t always know just what they’re going to end up as. Just like awkward youths. For all you know, your hobbledehoy might end up happily matched to a flibbertigibbet.

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ragamuffin

Posted on March 8, 2024 | 2 comments

Oh, that Oliver Twist! What a perfect ragamuffin. Making mistakes like any little boy, but so colourful, always improvising, and always worth a song, too – but always in want of a little bread, and all in tatters… the little devil!

You see what a perfect ragamuffin he is? We have all the parts, and then some. Make mistakes: muff. Little boy: ragazzo. Colourful, improvising, song: raga. A little bread: muffin. Tatters: rag. Little devil: also muffin.

Of course not all of those actually relate directly to ragamuffin. But if I can sniff and taste a wine and get things that definitely are not actually in the wine (leather, chocolate, tobacco, and pencil shavings, or petrol, or gooseberries), I can taste a word and find things that fill it out in my mind, and you can’t stop me. It’s a process not of deduction or induction but of abduction. And, look, we know words by association anyway.

So let’s look closer at all these abducted bits. First: muff, as in make a mistake. It seems to come from muff meaning ‘clumsy or incompetent person’, which may come from muff meaning ‘handwarmer’, coming from a sense meaning ‘mitten’, which is likely related to muffle and muffler. No indication that it has any etymological relation to ragamuffin.

Next: ragazzo. That’s just Italian for ‘little boy’. When you think about it for a moment, though, it’s kind of an odd word; I mean, Italian comes from Latin, but Latin for ‘little boy’ is puer. It seems that the Italian word comes either from an Arabic word for ‘courier’ or ‘delivery boy’ or, perhaps, from Greek ῥάκος rhákos ‘rag, tatter’ – as Wiktionary says, “suggesting the clothing.” Weirdly, the Greek ῥάκος doesn’t appear to be related to English rag (what? I know, right?), and the Italian ragazzo has no known relation to ragamuffin. I mean, for heaven’s sake, but you can’t just say that it has to be so. As linguists love to say, etymology by sound is not sound etymology. You need a chain of evidence, and ideally a plausible morphophonetic route. Words may run loose in the world like little Dickensian orphans, but if you want to give a word an inheritance, you need a birth certificate.

OK, how about raga? Strictly it’s rāga, even more strictly राग. It means, literally, ‘colour’, but in music it refers to a particular musical form. It’s hard to explain raga to people used to European forms of music, because it is less fixed than a symphony or other scored composition and both more and less fixed than a jazz jam session. A raga will have a specific scale associated with it, or sometimes two, because the descending scale can be different from the ascending scale; it has a prescribed structure of parts, and within each part it has specific time signatures (which are more complex than European ones, and I’m not going to start on them here) and certain associated motifs. Within that framework, each performance is like an ex tempore musical essay, improvised within a framework. It can be sung or played by an instrument such as a sitar. For a good example, try Roopa Panesar’s performance of Raga Bhairavi (with Dalbir Singh Rattan on table) at Stornoway, Scotland. Needless to say, there’s no etymological connection between raga and ragamuffin. But you can eat a muffin while listening to a raga, and so – in a twist – can Oliver.

Speaking of which, there’s muffin, the little bread we all know and love, though somehow the English muffin is nothing like the American muffin. Either way, it probably comes from a Low German word muffe ‘little cake’, the source of which is not forthcoming. Is it related to ragamuffin? It is not, but you can have some more if you say “Please, sir.”

OK, well, how about rag, as in tattered clothes? That comes up from old Germanic roots referring to fur and frayed fabric. And it is assumed to be the source of the rag in ragamuffin – it’s rag-a-muffin, with an added syllable for connection (as in thingamajig, or as some people do with rigamarole).

And, finally, the muffin, the one that in some historical uses has meant ‘little devil’ or ‘mean creature’ or similar. It may come from Middle French malfé or maufé ‘demon, evildoer’ or Anglo-Norman malfelon, maufelon ‘devil, scoundrel’ (per the OED). It doesn’t seem to be related to the pastry. It may or may not be the source of the muffin in ragamuffin, but if it’s not, we’re all out of leads. Will the poor little ragamuffin come into its etymological inheritance? Dickens only knows. But at least it’s picked the pockets of a few other languages along the way.

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bathos

Posted on March 4, 2024 | Leave a comment

Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
And drench with tears of broken love
This sad grey world, once bright, now lorn,
Its golden edge dull, brassed, and worn:

A world that lately housed a spark
Of joy and fun, now snuffed and dark;
For there shall be no glee here for us
Who have lost my hamster, Doris.

O Doris! Furry ball of glee!
What evil hand stole you from me!
Was it bad grain or rancid nuts
That spurred the torsion of your guts?

Nothing is right, nothing is real
Within the stillness of your wheel…
I water your wee casket’s plot
With my abundant tears and snot.

Wow… that’s deep, eh? Deep like the ocean. Or a lake. Or anyway your bath. Well, it is bathos…

You know bathos, right? It’s like pathos, but bad. But we don’t get bathos from bad plus pathos, though that would work too. We get it from an official writing of the Pope.

Well, OK, we get it from an essay by Alexander Pope. In 1727 he wrote “Peri Bathous,” which, let me say right away, was not about a bathhouse frequented by Persian pixies. No, it was a satirical essay looking at – to quote its subtitle – “The Art of Sinking in Poetry.” Note the spelling carefully: Sinking, not Stinking. Poetic bathos is like the Vasa, which was a grand Swedish ship that was launched to much fanfare and, after cruising less than a mile, sank – a battleship become a bathyscaphe.

And yes, the bath in bathyscaphe is the same as in bathos: it’s from Greek βάθος bathos, which is of course our word du jour. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, officially in English the a is “long,” as in Baywatch, though in Greek it certainly is not.) This word, in Greek, means ‘depth’. It is not related to πάθος pathos, although of course the resemblance is striking and was used to good effect by Pope – and has since reinforced the sense of bathos as meaning specifically ‘bad pathos’ as opposed to the flight path of Icarus, reaching for the heavens but sinking disastrously.

It is also – you may be surprised to learn – not related to bath. Bath comes by way of Germanic from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘warm’ (which means I categorically deny the existence of cold baths, and if you try to get me into one I will categorically deny you too). But bathos is related to benthic, which refers to the greatest depths of the ocean. And perhaps the bottom of your tub, if it – unlike mine – is deep enough.

The most important trait of bathos is that the person creating it must be oblivious; it must be done in all sincerity. There shall be no taking the piss. Which means that deliberate camp doesn’t really count – and neither does my poem above, because I wrote it quite consciously to sink from the sublime (or an aspiration to sublimity) to the ridiculous. But if you think I was going to do a deep dive on the poetry of my angsty adolescence to find a genuine example… well, no.

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