Eleemosynary Mercenaries

For those of you who don’t know, I am finishing up my time with Sierra Vista Child & Family Services and at the first of the year will take a position with the Association of Fundraising Professionals.


At a goodbye luncheon I shared with fellow fundraising professionals (who asked for a word of the day) the word eleemosynary, and said that we might be guilty of being eleemercenaries (a word that I am hereby coining – look for it at a charity near you).

Eleemosynary is an interesting word; I am unaware of another word in English that has a double e where each e is its own syllable. (While the primary pronunciation has the double ee pronounced as a short i as in is, the secondary pronunciation – and the one I prefer for some unknown reason – is with the double e pronounced as a long e and the second one as the a in ago.) Eleemosynary is an adjective that means of or for charity or alms. A synonym would be charitable. It also refers to those supported by charity or that which is given as charity.

Eleemosynary came to English in the 1610s from the Middle Latin word eleemosynarius, which meant pertaining to alms. The word came to Middle Latin from the Late Latin eleemosyna, which got it from the Greek word for pity: eleemosyne. I have no idea where I happened upon the word, but have used it in Rotary to refer to my category of membership (…Larry Hostetler, classification Eleemosynary…). It sounds like a word W.C. Fields would have used.

A word I remember hearing W.C. Fields use is emolument. Emolument is a noun for gain from employment or position, payment received for work, salary, wages, fees, etc. It is older in English than eleemosynary, having entered the language in the mid-15th century. We get the spelling from the Middle French émolument, which they took directly from the Latin word emolumentum, meaning profit or gain. It may have originally meant payment for a miller of grain, because the Latin word emolere means to grind out, having been formed from ex-, which means out, and molere, which means to grind. Molere is the word from which we get our word mallet, I’m told. But that’s a story for another day.

While my new position doesn’t qualify as a sinecure (see 1/3/10), I must admit I feel a little like a parvenu. Parvenu is a noun that refers to a person who has suddenly acquired wealth or power, especially one who is not fully accepted socially by the class into which he has risen (I'm confident I will be accepted); a person considered an upstart. It came to English directly from the French in 1802, which got it from the Latin word pervenire, per- meaning through and venire meaning “to come” (and from which we get the word venue, again through French.)

The new position is a wonderful opportunity and I’ve received numerous congratulations and great support, so I look forward to a new chapter in a new year with a new organization. And no longer will I be an eleemercenary.