Who doesn’t like lavish things? Lavish parties, lavish gifts, lavish spending, lavish praise, a lavish lifestyle – to run through the most common words that come after lavish? Or a lavish spread, a lavish banquet, lavish accommodations, lavish dinners, lavish vacations, even a lavish home? Such ravishing luxury, such a lively lifestyle, so much more than, say, a slavish attention to the bottom line, or a meal made of a single piece of lavash. One simply can’t have too much lavishness, can one?
Can one? Is there a point when such a flood of luxury leaves one just… washed out?
Well. If you ask Lao Tzu – in the translation of the Tao Te Ching by Wing-Tsit Chan – “There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.”
Yes, OK, but what if the lavish is not desired but just given – perhaps by nature itself? To quote Vachel Lindsay,
I would be one with the lavish earth,
Eating the bee-stung apples red:
Walking where lambs walk on the hills;
By oak-grove paths to the pools be led.
Louis Untermeyer saw lavishness in flowers:
Such golden fires, such yellow—lo, how good
This spendthrift world, and what a lavish God!
This fringe of wood,
Blazing with buttercup and goldenrod.
And Michael Field (the pen name of Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) voiced a paean to the
Lavish, large, soothing, refluent summer wind.
So how could lavishness itself be wrong? Who would reject a lavish?
Perhaps the people who would not reject “a lavish.” Because, ah, yes, lavish was a noun before it was an adjective (or, after that, a verb) – and while this noun fell out of usage around the time of Shakespeare, while it was at large it meant, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “profusion, excessive abundance, extravagant outpouring or expenditure.” And they say that like it’s a bad thing! A synonym would be prodigality, which, again, we know is supposed to be bad, but it is nice from time to time to be on the receiving end… when some storied host “makes it rain,” as the saying goes, and you are indeed awash in good things.
A wash? A downpour, perhaps? Consider this definition of a word (which I will name shortly) from Littré: “Pluie subite et impétueuse” (Sudden and impetuous rain). That sense of the word is “peu usité” (little used), but there is a second sense: “Vin, bouillon, sauce, tisane où l’on a mis trop d’eau” (Wine, bouillon, sauce, herbal tea where one has put in too much water). The example sentence for that uses the word defined: “Cette soupe ne vaut rien du tout, ce n’est qu’une lavasse” (That soup is worth nothing at all, it’s just a lavasse).
Yes, lavasse – which is the word that lavish traces back to. And lavasse traces, as Littré puts it, to “laver, avec la finale péjorative asse”: the verb laver – meaning ‘wash’ – with the pejorative suffix asse. We don’t quite have an analogous suffix in English – it’s tempting to say “that wash-ass stuff,” though the asse is not related to ass or arse – but we could say “just a washout” or something like that.
Which, ironically perhaps, something is now if it is not lavish enough. Like the infamous Fyre Festival. Which certainly involved lavish desires, and certainly was a great calamity, a total washout – but precisely because it was lavish in desire but not in fulfillment. It was – and its participants were – dishevelled, and dislavished.
Sesquiotica 