FUTPNBCI (Follow Up - The Pedantic Night Before Christmas, Part I)

I went back to the post from a month ago and looked up the words I used, most of which haven’t been explicated in this blog heretofore. It will take a few posts, so might as well get started now and finish by next Christmas.

The second word in TPNBC is crepuscular. Taken directly from the Latin word for twilight or dusk, crepusulum, it was first used figuratively in English in the 1660s. It didn’t obtain the literal meaning until 1755. I encountered it twice in my reading,  in the biography of Moe Berg entitled The Catcher Was A Spy, and in the autobiography of the last child to be raised in Macbeth’s Castle, A Charmed Life.

Crepuscular is a word that reminds me (I’m sure it does you, too) of the word matutinal. As crepuscular describes the evening, matutinal is an adjective for that which pertains to the morning. It also comes from the Latin word for that which pertains to the morning, matutinalis, which comes from the Roman goddess of the morning, Matuta (not to be confused with Lacuna Matata, another blog post with reference to The Catcher Was A Spy).

The next word in TPNBC is quiescent, and can be found in the second line. It’s a great word that describes the condition of being at rest, still, or quiet. Its breadth of meaning is greater than quiet or resting or still, since it can mean all of those. Around 1600 it came to English from the Latin word quiescens. By the 1630s the noun form, quiescence, had come into use, and the verb form, quiesce, took another two centuries to be back-formed.  

Our third word from TPNBC is immure, in the first line of the second stanza. I first found the word in the P.D. James mystery The Private Patient. Immure means to shut in or imprison, and came to English in the 1580s from the Middle French word emmurer and directly from the Medeival Latin word immurare, which literally means “shut up within walls.” The Latin word for wall, murus, which is one of the root words for immure, is also the source of our word mural, which describes art on a wall.

Immure should not be confused (why would it except it sounds similar) for inure. Inure describes the process getting used to hardship or pain or discomfort. It came to English in the early 1400s from the combining of two words, in ure. Ure is a now obsolete English word that meant work or practice. Ure probably came from the French word oeuvre, which is now used in English to describe a body of work. Oeuvre came from the Latin word opera, which means work.

We get the word opus from the Latin word opera. (Did you know the plural of the word opus is opera?) It wasn’t used in English until 1809. Opera, according to etymonline.com, is the secondary (abstract) noung that comes from operari, which means ‘to work,’ and comes from opus (genitive operis). I’m sure that clears it up for you.

The Latin word opera easily became the Italian word opera, meaning a work or composition, and in the 1640s was used to describe a drama that is sung. We still use it that way.

And that’s just the first two stanzas of TPNBC.  More to come.