Time for more Follow Up on the Pedantic Night Before Christmas.
Welter is our first word of the day. It’s a very useful
word, both a noun and a verb. There are seven definitions given for welter,
four for the verb and three for the noun. Three of them include a rolling,
tossing, or tumbling. Two of them involve a state of commotion or turmoil, and
the others are: a confused jumble (noun) and a verb form - drenching in
something fluid (especially blood). The verb welter came to English in about
1300, from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German word welteren, which meant to roll. The noun is a recent arrival, having
first been used to describe a confused mass in 1851.
While it may seem that the
common designation in boxing of welterweight might have come from welter, it
more likely came from welt, which was
a verb used in about 1400 to mean “beat severely.” In 1832 welterweight was
used to describe a heavyweight horseman, and in 1896 used for a specific weight
grouping in boxing. It avoided the confusion created by an earlier (1804) use
of welter to also describe the horseman or boxer. Welt came to English in the
early 1400s as a shoemaker’s term, and may have been related to the Middle
English word welten, which mean to
roll or turn over. Welten is a
distant cousin (an Old Norse cousin) of welteren.
We now use welt to describe a raised ridge on the skin caused by a wound, but
that usage didn’t appear for 400 years.
Our next word is inspissate, which as a verb may have been
misused in PDBC, since it refers to thickening by evaporation. I do not imagine
St. Nick was thickening by evaporation; by consumption of cookies and milk,
yes. By evaporation, no. One of my dictionaries lists this word as an archaic
one, but another doesn’t. Since I ran across it in my reading, it is rare but
still being used. Even rarer is a related word, spissitude, which means
thickness or density. Spissitude actually arrived in English about 1400, far
before inspissate, which didn’t land on English shores until the decade the
pilgrims landed in Plymouth, the 1620s. They both come from Latin, spissitudo become spissitude and inspissatus becoming inspissate; the
meanings did not change from Latin to English.
Fey is a short word with much to convey. It has several
definitions, depending on where you live. In much of the English-speaking world
it refers to something that is supernatural, like Santa or elves or fairies. But
in Scotland (chiefly) it means appearing to be put under a spell. And at other
places in the United Kingdom (chiefly Britain) it means doomed or fated to die.
Quite a range of definitions and geographic variety. As an adjective its
supernatural meaning can not only refer to someone who believes in the supernatural,
but someone who is visionary or clairvoyant. And to bring it back to the Scottish
meaning, it can also refer to “being in unnaturally high spirits, as were formerly
thought to precede death” (Dictionary.com).
Its etymology is difficult to discern. It could be related
to the Old English word fæge, which meant “doomed to die”,
and it seems certain the British usage comes from that word. But in Old Norse
there is a word feigr that has many
cognates in other languages and also means doomed. How it developed any sense
of supernatural is not indicated.
Perhaps one of the fey readers of this blog
can discern its origin.
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