Toccata and Back Again

This upcoming month is a unique one on my schedule. While my wife is usually nidiculous, this next month will be one of those times when I will spend a week at home, then a week away, then a week at home. I don’t know the last time that happened. In addition, the two of us will be nidifugous while I have two appointments in southern California.

Nidify and its forms are one of the few words to not have etymology in the vast resource that is etymonline.com. But it is found in several dictionaries. Nidify is the verb form, and nidificate is another form of the verb. (Any time I see the –icate suffix I presume it to be a back-formation and prefer the simpler word, in this case nidify, but it could be a cognate.) Nidify is formed from the Latin word nidificare, which means to build a nest. Nidificare  is formed from the words nidus, nest, and facere, to make. Isn’t Latin grand? Nidify came to English from the Latin in the 1650s, and it apparently took until the 1810s for nidificate to arrive. (According to dictionary.com it was formed from the past participle of nidificare, which of course is nidificatus.)

It wasn’t until the 1900s that the adjective nidiculous was used. It means staying in the nest, because the Latin suffix –colere, the root of –culous, means “to inhabit.” The Latin suffix –fugere is the source of the word that means “leave the nest” (nidifugous), and –fugere has a meaning of “take flight”.

Fugere is also the root word for the musical term fugue, which makes fugue a cognate of nidify. Fugue is spelled the way it is because it came to English from “the French version of the Italian word,” according to etymonline.com. It arrived in the 1590s, when fugues were all the rage, showing up prominently on the Billboard charts of the day. Fugue refers to a composition where a melody is introduced in one part, then another part takes up the melody (often a 4^th or 5^th away from the initial statement) and sometimes continuing with multiple statements of the melodic theme in other parts. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a most interesting form of which you can see and hear for yourself if the tune doesn’t come readily to mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te4SqP-X8GA

Unfortunately, the most common and useful form of nidify would be one to describe the empty nest and I wasn’t able to find that word (anyone want to find it?)

I’ve used a word a couple times today that bears defining: cognate. Cognate also comes directly from Latin, from the word for “of common descent”: cognatus. Cognatus is formed by combining the prefix com-, meaning “together”, and gnasci, meaning “to be born”, from which we get the word genus. In other words, a cognate of genus is cognate. (So is nascent, by the way.) As etymonline.com so nicely puts it “cognates are cousins, not siblings”.

For those of you who misread the opening line and thought I called my wife ridiculous, get your eyes checked.