The dictionary is not just a reference book, it is also a place to uncover words you didn’t know existed, or find out things about words you never thought about, or discover forms of words and think “why didn’t I realize this should be a word?”, or remember seeing before but forgot. Those are today’s words – all discovered when looking through the dictionary for other words. This blog wouldn’t exist if I had not used a printed dictionary (had used an online version instead) because it is in the looking alphabetically that I found this information, not in looking at the search results for only the word I was researching. So, here are the nuggets uncovered in panning for other gold.
When looking up the word onomatopoeia for use in the June 20 blog (one of these days I’ll get around to that good word) I found the word omphaloskepsis. It is a noun formed from the combination of two Greek words: omphalo, which is a combining word used in any reference to the navel or the umbilicus (if it’s used before a vowel drop the o), and skepsis, which means a viewing. If you’ve never heard of the phrase “navel gazing” (my wife hadn’t, but then she was never accused of it, unlike her husband) this is the pedantic word for it. Navel gazing is used to describe any inactivity that is completely unproductive. The word came to English in 1925, and with a word developed as late as that one always wonders whether it was coined in response to the development of the phrase rather than to fulfill a language gap. It was preceded by other attempts to describe the same inactivity, those words being omphalopsychite (in 1882) and omphalopsychic (in 1892). Neither other word is found in my dictionary.
Celery was a word I found looking for celerity. I have known the word (and have stalked) celery, so it wasn’t a new discovery. But I wondered if it had a similar etymology (something to do with crispness). While both words came to English from French, that is where their ancestries diverge. The French word céleri came from the Italian word seleri, which was a holdover from the Latin selinon that was just transliterated from the Greek word that was also used for parsley. (Although the etymology of parley says that it originally was called petroselinon in Greek, which comes from the combining of petros, meaning stone, and selinon, meaning celery. Perhaps it’s just a Greek mystery.) It came to English usage in the 1660s (I wonder what it was called in England in the 1650s?) from its use in French, where it was originally called sceleri d’Italie. My dictionary defines celery as a biennial plant of the parsley family. I didn’t know there were biennial plants or that celery was one of them, so even in researching something as mundane as celery I learned something. Goes to show you never know.
Audient is the word that I should have realized must exist but didn’t. In fact, in etymonline.com it doesn’t have a listing. But if you have an audience you have some audient people. (Audient being an adjective that means listening or paying attention.) Dictionary.com even quotes a use by Mrs. Browning (is that Elizabeth Barrett?) where she uses the phrase “audient souls” but I was unable to find the full reference. According to thefreedictionary.com it was especially used for a catechumen in the early church.
Sans-culotte is obviously a French phrase, but its meaning in English needs explanation. Literally translated, the word means “without breeches”. But its definition in English is "revolutionary". My dictionary goes on to say it began use as a “term of contempt, applied by the aristocrats to the republicans of the poorly clad French Revolutionary army, who substituted pantaloons (which we’ve shortened to the word pants) for knee breeches (which are no longer worn except by some purists on the golf course)". It has a secondary meaning of any radical or revolutionary.
Discovery is a wonderful thing.
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