Stop Ahead - FUTPNBCV (Follow Up - The Pedantic Night Before Christmas, Part V)

Will Christmas never end? I don’t think I’ve ever written that before, but being the last week of the month this is yet another few words from my post of last Christmas. 

Today: body parts. Or words that were used to describe them.

First is coruscate, to describe Santa’s eyes. Coruscate is a verb, so the full sentence (I used my poetic license) would have read “his eyes were coruscating.” Coruscating means to emit flashes of light, or to gleam or sparkle. It came to English in 1705 from the Latin word coruscatus, which is the past participle of coruscare, which means to vibrate or glitter. English doesn’t retain the vibrate part of the Latin meaning.

Hoary is the next word, and is a good word for Santa’s beard. Hoary means grey or white with age, although it has come to mean anything old or ancient, and sometimes even something so old as to be stale and overly familiar, like that joke I make about the sign that says “Stop Ahead” where I hold the head of the person nearest to me. Anyway, hoary came to English in the 1510s and was a development of an older adjective, hoar, which came from an Old English word har. The Proto-Germanic root haira came from an older Proto-Indo-European root kei-, from which we also get our word hue (a word generally used to refer to a shade of a color) and the Germans get their word Herr, which is equivalent to our English Mister.

The word gyre is one of the group of words that we have that come originally from the Greek word for circle, gyros (yes, that’s where the name of my wife’s favorite Greek dish came from – the circle of lamb on a spit from which meat is carved to put in a pita) and sometimes from its Latin descendant gyrus. For instance, gyration (which is a noun for anything turning in circles – NOT for something vibrating, a common misuse) came from the Latin word in the 1610s, and the gyroscope (which is an apparatus that allows something like a compass to turn freely and remain relatively steady no matter the gyrations of the apparatus) was invented and named by Foucault (of pendulum fame - look it up) in 1852, and was first used in English in 1856. Gyre predates both of those, having arrived in English in the 1560s from the Latin root. It is a noun for a ring or circle or a motion that constitutes a ring or a circle. So you could confuse most people by suggesting “let’s form a gyre” (when pronounced correctly the g sounds like a j).

Our next word today, tumescent, has one of those definitions that drive me crazy: “slightly tumid.” Tumid means swollen, but is even less used than tumescent. So tumescent is an adjective that is used to describe anything that is swollen, either physically or emotionally. It can also be used to describe a posture of swollenness (like someone who is pretentious or pompous). Tumescent arrived in English in 1806 from the Latin word tumescentem, the present participle of tumescere, which is the inceptive (yes, that’s what it says  - don’t ask me) of tumere, which means to swell. And, by the way, tumere is the root word from which we developed the English word that refers to the thick or most swelled part of the leg, the thigh.

But that’s below the belt. Today we’re all about the head.