Sunday, March 9, 2014

Mordant Exenteration of Tergiversation

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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