Toccata and Back Again

This upcoming month is a unique one on my schedule. While my wife is usually nidiculous, this next month will be one of those times when I will spend a week at home, then a week away, then a week at home. I don’t know the last time that happened. In addition, the two of us will be nidifugous while I have two appointments in southern California.

Nidify and its forms are one of the few words to not have etymology in the vast resource that is etymonline.com. But it is found in several dictionaries. Nidify is the verb form, and nidificate is another form of the verb. (Any time I see the –icate suffix I presume it to be a back-formation and prefer the simpler word, in this case nidify, but it could be a cognate.) Nidify is formed from the Latin word nidificare, which means to build a nest. Nidificare  is formed from the words nidus, nest, and facere, to make. Isn’t Latin grand? Nidify came to English from the Latin in the 1650s, and it apparently took until the 1810s for nidificate to arrive. (According to dictionary.com it was formed from the past participle of nidificare, which of course is nidificatus.)

It wasn’t until the 1900s that the adjective nidiculous was used. It means staying in the nest, because the Latin suffix –colere, the root of –culous, means “to inhabit.” The Latin suffix –fugere is the source of the word that means “leave the nest” (nidifugous), and –fugere has a meaning of “take flight”.

Fugere is also the root word for the musical term fugue, which makes fugue a cognate of nidify. Fugue is spelled the way it is because it came to English from “the French version of the Italian word,” according to etymonline.com. It arrived in the 1590s, when fugues were all the rage, showing up prominently on the Billboard charts of the day. Fugue refers to a composition where a melody is introduced in one part, then another part takes up the melody (often a 4^th or 5^th away from the initial statement) and sometimes continuing with multiple statements of the melodic theme in other parts. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a most interesting form of which you can see and hear for yourself if the tune doesn’t come readily to mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te4SqP-X8GA

Unfortunately, the most common and useful form of nidify would be one to describe the empty nest and I wasn’t able to find that word (anyone want to find it?)

I’ve used a word a couple times today that bears defining: cognate. Cognate also comes directly from Latin, from the word for “of common descent”: cognatus. Cognatus is formed by combining the prefix com-, meaning “together”, and gnasci, meaning “to be born”, from which we get the word genus. In other words, a cognate of genus is cognate. (So is nascent, by the way.) As etymonline.com so nicely puts it “cognates are cousins, not siblings”.

For those of you who misread the opening line and thought I called my wife ridiculous, get your eyes checked.

Literati Glitterati - Part 2

[Continued from Sunday]

While erstwhile has an archaic usage as an adverb it is now used as an adjective meaning former, or of an earlier time. What is interesting is that the word erst, while its definitions as either adverb or adjective are deemed either obsolete or archaic in usage, means formerly, too. We’ve lost the simple word and added a while. Erstwhile is a synonym of quondam (see 7/11/10 blog).


Etymonline.com says that it is a cognate with Old Swedish, Old High German (erist) and German (erst). A cognate, it also says, is “a cousin, not a sibling”; it refers to something with a common descent. The word cognate came to English from the Latin word cognatus in the 1640s. Cognatus, it says, is formed from a combining of the prefix com- which means together, and gnatus, which is the past participle of gnasci, which is an older form of the word nasci, which means “to be born” and from which we get the word nascent (see 2/15/10 blog). I find that to be an interesting etymology (or is it a geneology?)

As to my being a picaresque propaedeutic, I will spend some time this week learning as much as possible  from my predecessor in my new position. That is what makes me propaedeutic.

Propaedeutic means “having the nature of elementary or introductory instruction.” It comes from Greek, the “pro-“ being a prefix we use in English that means before (in this case) and paideuein, which means “to teach” (a cognate from which we get the word pedagogy). It is a relatively recent addition to English, having arrived first as a noun in 1798 and then becoming an adjective in 1849. The current noun form has added the suffix –al.

Picaresque is a picturesque word. It is an adjective “designating or of sharp-witted vagabonds and their roguish adventures.” It is the latest of today’s words to arrive in English, having come from Spanish in 1810. The Spanish word was picaresco, which means “roguish”, and was formed from picaro (rogue) or possibly from picar (to pierce). It was originally used in the phrase “roman picaresque”, or rogue novel. “The classic example of a roman picaresque is Gil Blas” says etymonline.com.

The full title of the novel is “The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane”. Gil Blas was written by Alain René le Sage and published in 1730. According to Wikipedia “it is considered to be the last masterpiece of the picaresque genre.”

Will I be picaresque in my new position? Perhaps not as a vagabond, and depending on your definition of rogue, perhaps not as that either; but I hope to be somewhat witty, and will definitely be roaming and will likely recount some of my adventures in this space, since I was given a journal as a gift on my departure from the AFP chapter in Modesto. But I’ll never be a literati glitterati.