Recent reading has provided
several words (or reminders of words) that relate to previous posts, so let’s
catch up with some more good words.
I encountered a word in recent
reading that I’d never seen before and needed to look up to discover its
meaning: exenterate. I knew it might be a good word for a bad thing, but could
not tell from the context its meaning. Its context led me to think of my post
on words like castigate, excoriate and defenestrate.
Exenterate is a verb that means
to disembowel or remove the contents of. It is similar to eviscerate, and came
to English in the first decade of the 1600s from the Latin root word enter with the suffix - atus and the prefix ex-. The Latin word stem enter came over from the Greek word entera, from which we get another of our
word for bowels: entrails. (The suffix is used in Latin to make an adjective of
a verb while the prefix means “from.”) In addition to describing literal disemboweling
it is used figuratively to describe the act of removing the contents of
something. It has a less emotional use than eviscerate.
Eviscerate also means to remove
the entrails from a person or animal. It came to English about the same time as
exenterate (the early 1600s must have seen a flurry of disemboweling taking
place), although it initially was used figuratively and didn’t develop its
literal use of disemboweling for about 20 years. It came from the Latin word
for internal organs, viscera, with
the Latin prefix e-, the short form
of ex-. When used figuratively it means to remove the vital or essential parts
of something, to leave the resulting entity powerless. In its figurative use it
is very strong.
We get the English word visceral
from the same Latin root word, a developed meaning of the adjective form of
viscera, which is used to describe the organs of the abdominal cavity. Because
of the physical reaction in our abdomen occurs when a strong instinctive
response takes place we call that feeling visceral, and have since the 1570s,
when we adopted the word from the Middle French word visceral. It was after the word eviscerate came into use that the
word developed its literal meaning, in about 1640. Again, the figurative use is
of an emotional reaction, not as powerful a feeling as eviscerate, but more
instinctive in nature. Because of the word viscera, viscerate means the same as eviscerate, while there is no English word "enterate."
Mordancy is another word I
encountered in my recent reading. It would have fit nicely in my posts on the
words calumny or sarcastic. Mordancy is the quality of being mordant, which
means biting, sharply caustic or sarcastic. (If sarcastic is not strong enough,
use mordant. If calumny is too strong, use mordant.) Mordant came into use in
English in the late 1400s, having come from the Middle French word mordant, which they got from the Latin
word for bite: mordere. Those of you
engaged in dyeing fabrics may have encountered the word in its use of making
colors fixed or fast, a sense that did not develop until 1791, prior to which dyes
apparently ran a lot. Musicians will know a mordant as a “turn”, in which the
tone and the tones above and below are used in quick succession as an
embellishment.
Our final word today is related
to my post on words like dissimulate and obfuscate. Our word for today is
tergiversation. Coming to English in the mid-1500s, it is the noun form of the
lesser-used and back-formed verb tergiversate.
Its etymology is interesting, in that it is formed from a Latin word that
combines two Latin words: tergum and versare. Tergum means the back (the
opposite of your face or your front) and versare
means to spin or turn. So tergiversationem
meant a shifting away or turning one’s back on something.
Tergiversation in English means
to repeatedly change one’s opinion or attitude; one can easily imagine the
person’s attitude spinning. While its meaning relates to a weakness, a regular
changing of one’s mind, it also has a negative meaning of intentional changing,
or turning renegade. In that sense the question is whether the original opinion
was honest or not, hence its association with dissimulation and obfuscation.
So, more good words to use in our
quest for accuracy in English usage.
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