Catch up (or is it ketchup?)

This makes four months’ worth of blog entries, and it’s time to catch up on some follow up words that were missed or left off for lack of space in previous blogs.

On March 7 I, as a soidisant blogger, blogged about the different words for different names for people. I missed two that I’ve since encountered in my reading. Soidisant comes directly from French, where it is literally translated self-saying. It means “so-called by oneself, self-styled.”

The second word I missed was bespoke, which doesn’t sound at all like what it means. You instantly recognize it as the past participle of bespeak, of course, which means “to speak about or arrange beforehand,” something it has meant since the 1580s. It has come to also mean to be indicative of or anticipatory of, the usage with which I am most familiar. It is, according to etymonline.com, “now usually of tailored suits”. While I have absolutely no experience with tailored suits (as you can probably discern if you’ve ever seen me in a suit) I take the source at its word and presume that as the reason for the development of the past participle of it to mean “custom-made” or “made-to-order”. So bespeak means to be indicative or portending of something, and bespoke (its past participle) means custom-made. English – what a language!

Rostrum (see April 11th’s blog) is the word for the stage on which the dais or podium might be placed, and on which the pulpit or lectern would be placed. It originally referred to the prow of Roman ships, which looked like a bird’s beak (Latin – rosus). In the Forum in Rome, the place where speakers stood was decorated with the prows of ships taken in the first naval victory of the Roman Empire, over Antium in 338 bc. Taking the description of the prows and applying it to the place of speaking, the area became known as the rostrum and came to English in 1542, the 50th anniversary of Columbus sailing the ocean blue.

Way back on February 3 in talking about various words to describe punishing language there was one missed: obloquy. It refers to verbal abuse of a person, or the ill repute that comes from it. It also comes from Latin (late or low Latin, in the mid 15th century), from the words meaning against (ob) and speak (loqui). The word is pronounced obb-la-kwee, which reminds me of the Beatles’ hit “Oh- bla-dee oh-bla-dah, life goes on”.

After writing (on April 12) about homonyms/synonyms (words that sound alike and mean similar things) I encountered a nice quotation that used feint and faint together, illustrating the same h/s idea. Unfortunately both my time and space today are already gone, so it will have to wait for another “follow up” blog. That will give me time to find the quote and use it impressively.