Solving the Mystery

I recently came across three (out of a set of 10) small books with the ambitious title “The World’s Best 100 Detective Stories.” Published in 1929, it came before Dashiell Hammitt and one year after Ellery Queen’s creation. Nonetheless the stories I’ve read so far (two of the three volumes) provide a couple of interesting word mysteries.

The first mystery is: what is the difference between incredible and incredulous? In a story by Karl W. Detzer entitled “The Music of Robert the Devil” the author introduces the title character and states:

“’Robert the Devil?’ Amazed townsfolk stared him down. It was incredulous!”

I would have used the word incredible, having understood that incredible is used of something beyond belief and incredulous is a response of disbelief (whether justified or not). A thing is incredible, whether a fact or a statement, and a person is incredulous (sometimes in response to an incredible statement). At least that’s the way I’ve ordered them in my mind. Let’s see what Mr. Webster says.

The adjectives are defined as: incredible – not credible, unbelievable, and incredulous – unwilling or unable to believe, doubting, skeptical. So my supposition was correct; incredible describes the act, statement, or fact, and incredulous describes the reaction to the act, statement or fact.

According to Webster’s, they come from two different Latin words. Incredible comes from incredibilis, and incredulous comes from incredulus. (I wonder why we added the “o”?) The word incredible came first into English in the early 15th century. It wasn’t until the end of the 16th century (1570 to be exact) that incredulous came aboard, although incredulity arrived at about the same time as incredible.

Incredulity, the unwillingness or inability to believe, came from the French word incrédulité, which came from the Latin incredulitatem, the qualitative noun form of incredulous.

So you may be incredible, but you’re more likely to be incredulous. And something someone else says may be incredible, but it can’t be incredulous. It can be said with incredulity, or incredulously, but only a person can be incredulous.

Another word used in the book was the word is sang-froid. Sang-froid is a good word, and comes from two French words (yes, sang and froid). First used in English in 1712, it refers to a calm presence of mind, or composure, often described as coolness under pressure. In French sang means blood (we have the word sanguinary which comes from the same root) and froid means cold. So the literal translation would be cold-blooded, a phrase mostly used of killers. Sang-froid is often used in a positive sense; I’ve not heard cold-blooded used in anything but a negative sense (except in referring to animals).

The word sang-froid reminded me of another word relating to emotions: angst. Much more popular now than even two decades ago, angst refers to a “gloomy, often neurotic feeling of generalized anxiety and depression.” Used in its original German (Angst) in 1849 by George Eliot, it became more popular as Freud’s works were translated into English. It was considered a foreign word until the 1940s, and my dictionary lists it as a proper noun, while acknowledging that it is often spelled with a lower case “a”.

I suppose the existence of a cold-blooded killer would cause angst until a sang-froid hero catches the killer in an incredible fashion. Although you might be incredulous.