There's More Than One Way...

My older brother went to a college prep high school, and they had cheers like "progress, progress, undulate over the turf". I was reminded of that when thinking of the word excoriate, as in "you have more than one option when excoriating a feline."

Excoriate has two simple definitions. The first comes from the word's origin, which is Latin. Although it was used in Middle English, the original source is the word excoriare. The ex means to come out of or off of, and the corium is the skin (a word apparently used more of the skin of insects than of humans). So excoriate means to take the skin off of something, whether intentionally or not. It is a synonym of abrade or flay or chafe. Its second definition is the figurative sense of the action: to denounce harshly, my dictionary says. If you are so harsh in your denunciation of someone that they feel like they've had their skin ripped off, that's excoriating. Sounds like a medieval torture.

The second word is another one which in my mind comes from the middle ages. Defenestrate comes from fenestra, which is the Latin word for window. To defenestrate something is to throw it out the window. I probably associate this with the middle ages because the first remembrance I have of the word is in describing how people would use the streets as their sewers, throwing everything they wished to discard out of the windows. It made it dangerous, or at least unsavory, to walk down the streets. (Since we've stopped doing that people don't wear hats as much.) When you think in terms of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" it seems harsh. But in some ways the idea is more comical than punitive. Office and hotel windows don't open enough to throw someone out of any more, so it's mostly a figurative expression.

Castigate is another middle ages term, and also comes from a Latin root: castigare means to purify, but we also get the word chastise from castigare, so there is an element of purifying through criticism. Castigate also has a more public element to it, as if someone were placed in the stocks in the public square. It means to punish or severely rebuke, especially publicly.

The final word today is the most recent to come to my awareness. In my dictionary it is two words below one of yesterday's words, fustian, but both were found in my reading rather than in perusing the dictionary. Fustigate comes from the same original word as fustian, the Latin word fustis, which is a wooden stick. But this word's meaning retains the involvement of the stick, whereas fustian has lost it. To fustigate someone is to beat them with a stick (or cudgel, another odd word).

So, today's words, all from Latin roots, are all ways to punish, berate, or get rid of someone. Just to show there's more than one way...