Work Your Abs Part Two

I said last year “I’ll work on the difference between abscond and absquatulate. Then I’ll be abstemious, and maybe all this is facetious.” Today’s Latin joke is “how do you get away from those abs?”

So let’s look at absquatulate versus abscond. They’re not so different. Absquatulate is defined (by dictionary.com) as “to flee; abscond.” So they’re synonymous, right? To which I would answer “never!” If this blog has done nothing else, it should have illustrated how difficult it is to find two words that are truly synonyms. They may be similar (simonyms?) but are not identical in meaning as much as people may think.

Absquatulate was a “facetious U.S. coinage [Weekley]” according to etymonline.com, and they speculate that it was rooted in the “mock-Latin negation of squat ‘to settle.’” They also attribute its first usage to a U.S. Western character named Nimrod Wildfire in a play re-written by British author William B. Bernard and staged in London in 1833. I encountered the word in the book A Nation of Counterfeiters (page 194) where the word was quoted from an 1838 publication.  It is a colorful Americanism that refers to someone leaving a place they once lived.

Absconding, on the other hand, refers to a sudden and secret departure, especially to avoid capture and prosecution.  It’s been around much longer, having arrived in English in the 1560s. It came from the Middle French word absconder which came pretty directly from the Latin word abscondere. The Latin word is formed by adding the prefix ab-, which this week means “away” (see today’s Latin joke above) added to condere, which means to put together. In other words, “away put together.” Huh? Those crazy Latins. Somehow the combination came to mean to hide or conceal or to put out of sight – to put away together, as we might put it. If we putted.

So absconding is a much more insidious meaning, while absquatulating is at least colorful if not comic in intent.

That brings us to abstemious, and facetious, both of which were referenced but not explained in an earlier post.

Abstemious refers to abstinence or moderation in eating and drinking. It comes to English about 1600 from the Latin word abstemius. Again the prefix ab-, this time meaning “from” (see Latin joke above) is affixed to the Latin word temetum, their word for strong drink. Abstemius was extended in Latin beyond the reference to liquor to a lifestyle of temperance, a meaning retained in our word.

Abstinence, on the other hand, has been used in English since the mid-14^th century, when it arrived from the Old French word abstinence, which they got from the Latin word abstinentia. It originally referred specifically to sexual appetites, then was expanded to include “food, fighting, luxury” and has recently received considerable use in the sexual arena again. Its meaning is not temperate use, but complete forbearance or non-indulgence of appetite. That makes the differentiation between abstemious and abstinence more useful; they are “simonyms”, not synonyms.

To complete this study we need to consider facetious.  Facetious is an adjective used to refer to anything not meant to be taken seriously or literally. It is not intended to be misleading, merely amusing or a joke. Facetious came to English in the 1590s from the French word facétieux, which the French got from the Latin word facetia, which means a jest or witticism. So my Latin jokes may have been more facetious than humorous. You decide.