Lacuna Matata

Just finished reading the book The Catcher Was A Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff, and collected a number of words both from previous posts and for future posts. The book was a very interesting biography of Moe Berg, and would be of interest to aficionados of baseball, spy craft or psychology (Moe is part of a diagnosable family). I also collected (from page 248) a nice quote, mostly attributed to Moe: “poverty annihilates the future.”

So, on to the words: the one word collected that has already had a post was recondite. I had a couple of words I’d already collected but hadn’t yet posted on – lacuna and caesura, and 13 words I thought should be added to my pending posts list.

Let’s begin with the two that I had already collected. Those words were caesura and lacuna, and are similar in meaning.  

Caesura is not an unfamiliar term for recovering musicians like me. In musical notation it is the double mark indicating “stop the music – don’t keep beating time” (or at least that’s my interpretation.) It is also a phrase used in writing verse, but it also means simply a break or pause in time. (Appropriate for this post, my first in several months.) It was adopted in English in the 1550s directly from the Latin, although the Latin probably had it as the ae “grapheme… a ligature representing the Latin diphthong” (Wikipedia) whatever that means. The Latin word caesura refers to a pause, and is literally translated as “a cutting”.

The second word is lacuna, and actually refers more to a missing portion of a written work. It also had the Latin grapheme in its plural form, but at the end. It came to English in the 1660s, and the Latin word refers to a hole or a pit (obviously into which letters, words, or sections of manuscripts can disappear.)

In my "waiting words" list for future posts I have another word associated with lacuna, and it is listed in the dictionary as a synonym for caesura. Hiatus is the word, and it also means a break or gap, but it can be in time or space. The definition of hiatus uses the word lacuna, so you see how nicely the three fit together. Also directly from the Latin, hiatus means an "opening, aperture, rupture, gap" and arrived in English in the 1560s. It took only 50 years for it to be applied to "an interruptions in events" (etymonline.com).

Stay tuned for more words from my The Catcher Was A Spy. Some (like maudlin, turpitude, and tatterdemalion) may be familiar, but others were completely new to me (scrofula and crepuscular).

By the way, in case you’re missing the reference, the title to this blog post is a reference to a song from the movie The Lion King entitled Hakuna Matata, which is a Swahili phrase meaning “no problem”. Its literal translation is “there are no worries.”