Hoydens Give me Neurasthenia

As I promised last week, I’m trying to catch up on words I said I’d get to later.

From October 6, 2010 I have two words relating to lassitude and ennui that I didn’t get to include in my two-week exposition on vacation: neurasthenia and acedia.

Neurasthenia is a psychiatric term for what we would call nervous exhaustion. According to etymonline.com it was coined as a “medical Latin” word in 1854 by combining the Greek words for the nerves (neuro-) and feeling (asthenia).

Acedia, on the other hand, has nothing to do with psychiatry. It means sloth or laziness, particularly relative to religious matters. Or so says dictionary.com. It came to English in the early 1600s, from the Late Latin word acedia, which came to Latin from the Greek word akeda that was derived from the Greek word for care or anxiety, kedos. The prefix a- negates the word that follows, the Greek equivalent of our non-.

From my blog of December 1, 2010 comes the word ambit. Not a word I’ve seen or heard used, it is nonetheless a good word to describe the circumference or boundary or limit of something, whether physical or conceptual. Originally referring to the space surrounding a building or town in the late 1400s, by the 1590s it came to refer to a circuit. It came to English from the Latin word ambitus, which is the past participle of ambire that means to go round or about. It is the Latin word from which we also get the word ambient, meaning surrounding and usually referring to an environment. Ambient came to English at the time ambit came to mean a circuit.

Lastly, from my blog of January 23, 2011 is the hyphenated word hoity-toity. Although etymonline.com suggests it can also be used without the hyphen, my dictionary has neither hoity nor toity as a word, so I’m sticking with the hyphen. Hoity-toity is a disparaging word that means pretentious or haughty. (You can’t sing “never is heard a disparaging word” when singing about my blog.) The word hoity-toity came to English in the 1660s and originally meant “riotous behavior.” There was an earlier phrase, highty tighty (not to be confused with the screwy mnemonic “righty-tighty, lefty loosy”) that meant “frolicsome or flighty”. Etymonline.com suggests that hoity-toity might have been related to the dialectic word hoyting, which in the 1590s referred to “acting the hoyden, romping.” Hoity-toity didn’t get its sense of haughtiness until the late 1800s, and etymonline.com conjectures it was probably due to the homonymic qualities of haughty and hoity.

Hoyden, a word from etymonline.com I used in the last paragraph, is a good word to use when describing a boisterous, bold, and carefree girl, or a tomboy. It came to English in the 1590s, but it’s not clear from where. Most likely it came from the Dutch word heiden, which was used of rustic or uncivilized men. Hoyden originally meant a rude or boorish man, but since the 1670s it started being used in reference to females, and now has come to refer almost exclusively to girls.