I learned something not too many people know last night.
My wife and I went just a short block up the street at the end of which we live, to the theatre, to a splendid production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, put on by Canadian Stage, directed by Brendan Healy, and starring Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Hailey Gillis, and – as a late replacement (due to an unspecified health event) – Rylan Wilkie. We were seated in the front row, which is my favourite place in any live theatre. This play is not about Virginia Woolf; it joins The Iceman Cometh in founding its title on a joke that is at once louche and recherché. It is a classic of the twentieth-century American theatre, and I’m not going to tell you all about the plot, but it takes place between about 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning in a living room in a small New England college town and goes through much liquor, many words, and quite a lot of often (but not always) hilarious cruelty. In my last year of getting my BFA in drama I did a short piece of the play with another student in acting class (the George-and-Martha two-person stretch in the middle of act 2). I recall actually learning something about acting when I did that scene.
When we saw the play last night, I learned something about language.
Specifically the pronunciation of one word.
Allow me to reproduce, first, a snippet of dialogue from act 1, which I have ready to hand not because I have the script of the play (I’m not sure I do; I thought I did but I can’t find it on my shelf) but because it’s the epigraph for Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer, of which I do have a copy:
MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less . . . abstruse.
GEORGE. Abstract.
MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words.
(WordPress is preventing me from applying proper small caps; please imagine them in place of the full caps you see in the quote above.)
So which word surprised me? You may guess, but allow me to adduce J. Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791, as quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary:
Dr. Johnson, Dr. Ash, Dr. Kenrick, Mr. Nares, Mr. Scott, Mr. Fry, and Entick, accent this word on the second syllable; Mr. Sheridan and Bailey on the last. Notwithstanding these authorities, I am mistaken if the best speakers do not pronounce this word with the accent on the first syllable, and if it is not agreeable to analogy to do so. A few words of three syllables from the Latin, when anglicised, without altering the number of syllables, have the accent on the same syllable as in the Latin, as Opponent, Deponent, &c.; but the general inclination of our language is to place the accent on the first syllable, as in Manducate, Indagate, &c.
I have always been in the camp of Drs. Johnson, Ash, and Kenrick, and Messrs. Nares, Scott, Fry, and Entick, saying “re-con-dite,” and until I heard Martha Burns pronounce the word live on stage, I had not realized that stressing the first syllable – like “reckon-dite” – was even an option. But as it turns out, Mr. Walker’s taste has prevailed: it’s the first listed option in Merriam-Webster as well as in Oxford.
Well, what. I may have an enormous vocabulary (in fact, I do; it’s been demonstrated on tests as well as through normal people not understanding words I tell them from time to time), but I acquired many of these words through reading, as one does. And recondite is a word that surely describes itself: ‘little-known, little-understood, abstruse’.
Recondite in the sense of abstruse? Sure: the words can serve to define each other. The OED defines abstruse as “difficult to understand; obscure, recondite” and recondite as (among other things) “little known or understood; abstruse, obscure; profound.” It seems apposite, doesn’t it? The arcade of the arcane, a circuit of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, looking up things from one foxed and vermiculated volume to another and so, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to the first.
What is the substrate of abstruse? Its source is Latin abstrusus, past tense of abstrudere ‘conceal, hide, thrust away’ from ab- ‘away’ and trudere ‘thrust’. If you are thumbing the ancient pages of secret knowledge and someone comes around the corner, you may thrust the volume deep into the nearest shelf. Or, if you are an ordinary person who dwells in the plain and has no taste for twenty-dollar words, you may just thrust it all away from you like a surprise ortolan canapé.
And how may we recognize or reconnoitre recondite? It comes from Latin reconditus, from re- ‘back’ plus condere, from con- ‘with, together’ and dare ‘put’, which, all put back together, means ‘hidden, concealed, put away’. The parts are all well known and well used, but the recipe is singular; it’s like the difference between C2H50H and CH30H – just a tweak of proportions changes ethanol, fuel of many a play, to methanol (imagine a recipe for cake such that if you halved the number of eggs it could make you blind).
But enough biology. (By the way, what, in the quote from the play, is biology better than? Math, as it happens. But the two can work together: with C2H50H, the effect of biology is to make you number.) For whatever reason (its faint hint of Chartreuse? the strangling strength of str?), abstruse seems to be the more common word. The OED declares that abstruse occurs about once every two million words in modern written English, whereas recondite occurs about once every three million words, making it indeed a bit more recondite. But recondite has a faintly more highbrow air to recommend inditing it, at least to me.
Either word, mind you, is suited best for a person with their head buried in a stack of books like the legendary ostrich with its head in the earth. Which is apposite when you learn – as I did, late last evening – that, at least once in the 1580s, abstruse was used for ostrich (“many Abstruses in the Plaines,” the OED quotes). Such are the things you can learn if, when faced with recondite knowledge, you do what the plain-dwelling abstruses ought: look up.
Sesquiotica 