Category Archives: new old words

aptuse

Posted on July 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

This is a word that means so much it means nothing at all. It’s so shallow it’s profound. It’s like that old (probably misattributed) Yogi-Berra-ism: “Nobody ever goes there anymore – it’s too crowded.”

It’s not just like that, though. It describes that. It’s a word for things that make perfect sense even though they’re prima facie senseless. They’re so obtuse they’re apt.

But it’s also a word for things that are so apt they’re obtuse – things that sound very clever and mind-expanding but are the toilet paper of wit, dissolving if you so much as wipe a tear or blow a nose with it. So aptuse also describes George Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The first kind of aptuseness uses loutish-seeming language to license sensible behaviour; the second-kind uses sensible-seeming language to license loutish behaviour.

Does it seem an inapt use of language to have a word that means two contrary things, senses that cleave apart even as they cleave together? Well, this word does not. It has two times two contrary senses, because each of its two contrary senses conveys a contradiction in sense between form and substance.

The etymology of this word is no puzzle, yet it is still an entertainment. Apt is from Latin aptus, ‘suitable, fitting’, from the past participle of an earlier conjectured verb apere, ‘attach, fasten’. The use is used from not use, of course, but obtuse, ‘blunt, of an angle greater than 90˚’, which comes from Latin obtusus, past participle of obtundere, ‘deaden, dull, beat against’. So the two words are attached while their senses beat against each other. They’re mashed in a portmanteau, overstuffed like a Vonnegut blivet.

You may not have seen it too often, but this is a word for our times, don’t you think? So many clever unclever and unclever clever things being said. It’s a good thing it spilled out of my Scrabble tiles tonight so I could confect it for you. It’s a new old word. Use it aptly.

wect

Posted on July 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

…Then we were wect,
Riding on the moment-stream
As twoseafarers moonlight-wrecked
And gazing after fading steam,
Naked on an unknown shore
And walking in a waking dream
Unmoored from after and before…

I almost want to stop there, with those lines from Emily Saint Christopher’s “Late Diversion,” but a characteristic of being wect is that you keep on going, drawn forward as by an invisible thread or wafting on a thin streamer of smoke.

Wect is a word that appeared in English almost as if from a dream made real: it’s not quite clear where it came from, but it may be related to wake – if by ‘wake’ we mean the feeling you have after parting the curtains of a deep afternoon slumber and wandering sleep-stoned in the waning daylight. But really it is, as Emily Saint Christopher wrote, “Walking in a waking dream Unmoored from after and before”: a timeless state of mind, narcotized by the infinite moment. Awake but as if dreaming.

It is a word for the most magical summer evenings, when every passing light is a fairy and every nearby voice is trapped in an amber of warm sorcery: an hour lying on the grass in the slowly swirling dark, exploring the contours of the ground and grass and of the person twined with you; a walk along the beach in viscous air through passing strands of talk and music, the only shocks of light coming from sporadic fireworks or distant electric storms; a stroll through James Joyce’s Circean Nighttown, the dimmer corners in orbit of Harvard Square under the dog star, a swim through the night crowd on Church Street in Pride, or the tail end of an evening at EPCOT; a dip in a warm pool lit by stars and underwater glow; a walk alone or in a pair on the high empty deck of a Caribbean cruise ship at midnight and a half, staring at the rushing white creases trailing away in the borderless bottomless rippling blackness. You are holding a little detached swatch of reality, and you will pocket it in your memory to take out later and rub gently in your hand and dab at the corners of your eyes.

It’s a crisp-ending word for such a smooth thing, but such is language. Not everything is as you expect it; take what comes to you. This word came to me tonight, drawn from random letters; the poem and poet are my invention. It is a new old word. Cherish it and walk with it.

giparon

Posted on June 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Toujours je fais le giparon.

As Rimbaud said. Or was it Baudelaire?

Every party, we all know, slides into the kitchen eventually. The dull polite people may stay in the living room; the hungry ones looking for crispier conversation find themselves leaning against the kitchen counters, opening the refrigerators of their personal discontents and desires and serving them like raided snack food to the surprisingly kindred spirits sharing the formica.

But every party also has its satellites. Give a balcony or a darker corner of the gardens or even an open window with a view and there will be one, then two or three, stepping away from the noise to watch it at a distance and reflect its light dimly, coolly, in the damp and petrichorean air seasoned with their night-blossoming thoughts. Those are the moments when you find yourself facing another and knowing you will kiss them or knowing you will never kiss them, retasting the cold leftovers of your shared histories or quickly flicking new ones on the flame.

And, always, there is a person or maybe two wandering ghost-like from room to room, sitting and facing, glimpsing sidelong and listening to three conversations at once. Perhaps they will end up in the kitchen, perhaps they will orbit on the balcony, or perhaps they will sit on a settee and soak in the local emotions, the music of voices. You may see them staring at the bookshelves, assessing the reading habits of the hosts. And at the end of the party, look for them to be there like starfish at low tide, but ready now to talk and to tie the knot and bow on the evening.

Some are satellites in space and some in time, but always there will be those who cannot blend in the thick heat of the social moment but have active valence in the more rarefied spaces. The giparons.

This word giparon has nothing to do with gipsy, be assured of that; nor are its designates peregrines per se, though they may wander as planets do. No, it is their spectatorial nature that seems to have given them the name. The word is a little peculiar; it fits the French form with the –on as in fanfaron, but it matches a Spanish conjugated verb, giparon, ‘they glimpse, they glance, they look at’. These are those who behold, those who like to watch, those whose eyes move in their orbits. But if at last they touch earth, they have had a view as from the moon.

And I, I am always a giparon. In fact, I am the first – the first to be called such. You see, this is a new old word. It came into being by random letter drawing just this evening. Please keep it.

scotagon

Posted on June 18, 2018 | 1 comment

I am searching for a scotagon. I pull a book off my shelf. It’s in good condition for one dated 1907. The cover has gilt and relief: PEER GYNT and HENRIK IBSEN. I flip a bit, looking for something. Finally I find it, starting page 79:

(Peer Gynt höres at hugge og slå omkring sig med en stor gren).

Peer Gynt: Giv svar! Hvem er du?

En stemme i mörket: Mig selv.

Peer Gynt: Af vejen!

Stemmen: Gå udenom, Peer!

Is it not clear what that says? It may not be; when we struggle to understand a language we don’t know – which we all do at least once, as children, and many of us do again and again later in life – we are doing as Peer is doing, thrashing in the dark, wrestling to determine its shape. Hit something and see where the corners are, the angles we can grab onto. Peer is swinging and slashing with the branch of a tree. I’ll circumvent the learning process and give you a translation: Continue reading →

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Tagged Bøyg, Jacob, new old words, Peer Gynt, scotagon

soray

Posted on June 13, 2018 | 1 comment

She pulled her lips at last back from mine, her hand resting on my chest, and looked at me from a few inches away. “I’m going to miss you… when I go.”

Her parents’ family room was in gathered darkness behind her, old couches and upholstered chairs, coffee table, probably a television somewhere in it all. After a very long evening of chatting and playing games and other things I recall mostly by conjecture and probability, we’d run out of excuses for me not to leave, so at last I’d put my arm on her shoulder and leaned in to make the bold and long-expected move. Our first kiss was five or ten seconds that filled more hours in my mind than the whole evening before. It was then or never: she was leaving to take an opportunity to study overseas. A lucky break. Literally: she had given up ballet because of a stress fracture. I didn’t know then how successful she would be in her new career – the answer, as the intervening thirty years have played out, is “very” – but I wished the best for her as she left me behind.

I don’t remember exactly what I said. I’m sure it was commonplace words said with portentous feeling. I know didn’t say “Soray.” But I could have.

Soray. A word you can say in valediction when a parting makes you ache with sadness at the loss of the person and with joy at what they are going to. And a noun to name for the occasion. A soray may be when you release a captive animal into freedom, hopeful that it won’t meet one of the abrupt disasters that await the unprepared. So a soray happens myriad times every September as parents see their almost-adult children off to university for their first year, even though soray is not now a word most of them would say. A believer in heaven could say it to a dying beloved, but no one does.

What is this word, anyway? Conjecturally it looks like a blend of sorry and hooray but it is not; that’s just a backformation, and a clumsy one at that. It rhymes with foray but that just makes it suitable for poetry. It is tempting to trace soray to the same source as sorry and sorrow – Old English sarig and sorgian – but this is a sweet sorrow of parting, sweet not in hope for rejoining but just in rejoicing for hope.

But Scots Gaelic gives a more tempting clue: soraidh, meaning ‘farewell’ – the parting wish, but seen in soray with the sure belief that the person will fare well. “Ae fond kiss and then we sever,” Burns wrote, but his “warring sighs and groans” are replaced in a soray by tears of your own loss but also of your joy at the other’s gain: the most noble tears ever shed.

The truth of soray’s origin is known, though, and it’s none of the above, though they all have come to bear on it in its history. Take out a bag of Scrabble tiles; pull out five face down, and turn them over one by one: S, O, R, A, Y. That’s what I did an hour or so ago, and then I hit my reference shelf to see what history I could give it, what manufactured or borrowed memories I could endow this newborn lexeme with.

Sorry. Until just now, it was never a word. But now it is, and a word for something that deserves one. And now it is out of my hands, out into the world, sent hopefully. Soray!

This is but the first of a series of new old words: lexical replicants with invented or borrowed histories. I’ll still also be tasting words that have existed before. Personal anecdotes and other stories illustrating the new old words may or may not be true, and I won’t tell you whether they are.

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Tagged new old words, soray