A Ghost or a Knight?

If you have read the last two posts you may think I have run the gamut of words about the numerous words about numbers. Unless you noticed that last line on last week’s blog, when I previewed this week’s content. Panoply, range, and spectrum, are not in the same numerical category as some of the other words. There is an element of sight in these words, and while they relate in their descriptiveness of a large amount of something, they also differ.

Panoply is an interesting word. Most people, I dare say, are unaware of its history (unless you’re a hard-core fan of Renaissance Faires).  Panoply’s is primarily used to describe “a wide-ranging and impressive array or display.” But it retains the secondary definition of “a complete suit of armor,” which is how it came to English during the Renaissance, in the 1570s, from the Greek word panoplia, and originally was figurative, due to its derivation from the Greek of Ephesians 6:11, which says “put on the whole armor of God.” (For those of you dressing as knights for Halloween, you’re not in panoply if you’re missing any piece of your armor.) Panoply in Greek is formed by combining pan-, meaning “all”, with hopla, meaning “arms” and the plural of hoplon, the Greek word for tool, weapon or implement. For those of  you who are scholars of ancient Greek military terms, you may be familiar with the word hoplite, which refers to the “heavy-armed foot soldier of ancient Greece” and has been used in English since 1727.

Panoply didn’t develop its current wide-ranging meaning until 1829. My guess is that its first use of this meaning was in a poem by John Neal, called Ode to Peace, in which he wrote:

...Child of the North - New England - Up and heave

Thy sumptuous drapery to the wind! Thy brow

Begirt with adamant, lay bare; and leave

The lurid panoply of death; and go

Forth like the mightiest and the best of them

Who, if they move to grapple with a foe,

Put on a snowy robe - a diadem

Of triple stars. Up with thee, in thy grave

And awful beauty! Let the nations hear

The language of endurance from the brave;

The song of peace from such as know not fear.

So if panoply is wide-ranging and refers to completeness, what does a range refer to? It has more of a reference to limits, whether the “extent to which…variation is possible” or the “scope of an operation or action.” It also refers to distance, usually of a projectile or to a cooking appliance. It came to English in about 1200 from the Old French word of the same spelling, and originally carried the same meaning, that of a row or line of persons. We get the word rank, as in “rank and file”, from the same source.

What’s interesting about the word range is not only its range of meanings, but its historical development.  While it started out referring to a line of people, its first divergent meaning is to the cooking appliance, a meaning which developed in the 15^th century. Why that meaning came to be is unknown, a historical and etymological mystery. By the 1590s the meaning of range as “the distance a gun can send a bullet” came into use, although the reference to the place where you can practice shooting did not develop until 1862. (Perhaps ammunition was too valuable to waste practicing shooting until then.) Since much shooting was at animals in the 1600s, it’s not surprising that the meaning of “area over which animals seek food” developed in the 1620s. Shortly after, in the 1660s, we (not me, but those alive at the time) adopted the meaning in greatest use today, of “scope or extent.” In case you’re wondering, the use of the word to describe a series of mountains was not developed until 1705.

It’s time to shed some light on spectrum. My Webster’s dictionary defines spectrum as “the series of colored bands diffracted and arranged in the order of their respective wave-lengths by the passage of white light through a prism or other diffracting medium and shading continuously from red (produced by the longest wave visible) to violet (produced by the shortest). Phew! It is not until the fourth definition we get the synonym for panoply or range: “a continuous range or entire extent.” It also ascribes its coinage as a physics term to Sir Isaac Newton in 1671. While etymonline.com mentions its first usage of the initial definition to the 1670s, it gives an older usage of the word.

In the 1610s it was used as a form of the word specter to refer to an apparition or ghost. Taken directly from the Latin word spectrum, our word originally retained the Latin meaning of a ghostly image or apparition, or specter. Specter is and was a word adopted from the Latin through French (where it is spelled spectre). 

Numerous Words for Multiplicity, Part II

To follow up on last week, and make things more confusing, the word multiple didn’t come into English until the 1640s, and came from the 14^th century French word multiple, which the French got from those Late Latins who used the word multiplus. Multiple means having several parts.  Multiplus means manifold, and came from combining the prefix multi- with –plus, which means, and I quote, “-fold”. In case you’re wondering, and at this point why would you, -fold is a multiplicative (just what we need, another “multi-“ word) suffix. While its use has been “crowded out by the Latinate double, triple, etc.” it is still used in words like hundredfold.  The use of crowd indicates a multitude of uses of double and triple rather than –fold.

Multiplex means having several parts. Sounds like multiple, doesn’t it? But it also means having several aspects, which expands its meaning slightly beyond multiple. It came to English through mathematics over a century before multiple, in the 1550s as an adjective and within ten years became also a noun. It came directly (I said it, etymonline didn’t) from the Latin word multiplex, which means “having many folds; many times as great in number; of many parts.” Many folds sounds like manifold.

Manifold has a different etymological path, which is why it uses “mani-“ rather than “multi-“. It means “of many kinds; numerous and varied.” Its etymology is from Old English, the Anglian version of which is monigfald and the West Saxon version of which is manigfeald. It meant “various, varied in appearance, complicated; numerous, abundant.” And for those who like a challenge, etymonline adds:

A common Germanic compound (cf. Old Frisian Manichfald, Middle Dutch Menichvout, German mannigfalt, Swedish mångfalt, Gothic managfalþs), perhaps a loan-translation of [the] Latin multiplex (see multiply). Retains the original pronunciation of many, Old English also had a verb form, manigfealdian, “to multiply, abound, increase, extend.”

For those of you who care (both of you), Old Frisian was a language "akin to English spoken on the North Sea coast of modern Netherlands and Germany before 1500," according to etymonline.com.

So, manifold has a sense of variety to its multiplicity, multiplicity can be synonymous with manifold or with multiplex, which is about complexity where multiple is about similarity, and multitude can be synonymous with multiple but is the only one to use when speaking of a crowd of people. Or a number of people, or numerous people. 

Or, to make it simpler (I hope), use numerous when just referring a great number of anything, multitude when referring to people or a very large number of objects, manifold when referring to a variety of objects, multiple when referring to a number of similar things, multiplex when referring to one thing with several parts to it, and multiplicity if you can’t remember which of the other five to use. Phew!

Next week: plethora, range, and spectrum. Because there are never enough words for numerous .

Multiplicity of Words for Numerous, Part I

There are a number of words for numerous. In my blog post “Hands and Legs” we looked at gamut, and multifarious was covered in “Nothing Nefarious about Multifarious”. But what’s the difference between multitude and multiplicity, between range and spectrum, between panoply and plethora? And where’d we get such an unusually spelled word as “number” and why is the word numerous rather than numberous? So many questions, so little space, so this will take several weeks to get through.

Let’s begin by getting the number vs. numerous mystery out of the way. Number was the first of the two words to come to English, and it came about 1300 from the Anglo-French word noumbre. The Anglo-French got noumbre from the Old French word nombre, which the Old French got from the Latin word numerus. Why they added a b is unexplained. A form of the Latin word numerus, numerosus, is the source of the English word numerous, which began to be used the 1400s. So you can blame the Old French (if you can find them) for the presence of a b in our word number. Number has at least five definitions, one of which is “the sum, total, count, or aggregate of a collection of units, or the like,” which is similar to our other words today and next week. But when used in this sense, it is usually in the phrase “a number of”. Numerous means “very many; being or existing in great quantity.”

Multitude and multiplicity, I must admit, are two words that seem to me to be so similar that research can only help me differentiate. Multitude came to English in the 14^th century, from a 12^th century Old French word (are you ready for this?) multitude. The Old French (you know who you are) took it “directly from” (that’s what etymonline says, and it rarely uses the word “directly”) the Latin word multitudinem. Multitudinem means “a great number, a crowd; the crowd, the common people.” Multi- means many, and -tude is the suffix Latins used to turn an adjective into a noun. So multitudinem was a noun meaning a great number, and had a sense of a lot of people. It still means a great number, and still has a sense of reference to a great number of people, a crowd.

Multiplicity came to English a century later than multitude, in the mid-15^th century. It came from the Middle French word multiplicité, which the Middle French got from the Late Latin word multiplicitas. Multiplicitas means (wait for it…) multiplicity. That clears it up, doesn’t it? By the way, the Late Latins (you know who you are, and next time be on time, please) got multiplicitas from the Latin prefix multiplic- from which we get our word multiple.

So what does multiplicity mean? It means either a large number or a large variety or both. It can mean “the state of being multiplex or manifold.” Here we go again.  But not until next week.

Annoying stubborn bullies?

Sometimes there are words you think you’ve used, only to find out that after tens of thousands of words, you’ve never written about one of the old ones. When our children were young (elementary school age) I encountered and began using the word contumacious, which refers to someone who is stubbornly perverse or rebellious or willfully or obstinately disobedient. It’s truly a good word to use with children. It not only describes their behavior, but it sometimes even makes them look up the meaning of a word.

I’ve used it for about 20 years, and although there are 135 other posts in this blog, none of them looked at contumacious. Contumacious is the adjective form of contumacy, and came to English about 1600 directly from the Latin word contumaci-, which is the stem of contumax that means “haughty, insolent, obstinate. The noun contumacy came to English in the late 14^th century, from the Latin word contumacia, which means haughty. I don’t know why contumacious came from the stem of contumax rather than from the word contumacia, but that’s what etymonline says. It also says it is the “noun quality of contumax (see contumely).” So let’s see contumely.

Contumely is a noun, even though it looks like an adverb, and also imported to English in the late 14^th century, but from an Old French word contumelie. The Old French got their word from the Latin word contumelia, which means insult and according to etymonline.com “is probably related to contumax.”

Contumelia also spawned the word contumelious, which took 100 years or so to be formed from the Old French word contumelieus. You can be contumelious by using the word contumacious. But avoid being a termagant.

A termagant is a boisterous shrew of a woman, a violent, turbulent or brawling woman. Not the kind you see on “professional” wrestling, but more likely the kind you see in your local purveyor of alcoholic beverages – after midnight. Termagant has a most interesting etymology, having come to English in about 1500 from the Old French name Tervagant, which was used in the Chanson de Roland. The Chanson de Roland (French for Song of Roland) is, according ty Encyclopædia Britannica online, “probably the earliest (c. 1100) chanson de geste and is considered the masterpiece of the genre.” In the interest of clarity, a chanson de geste is “any of the Old French epic poems forming the core of the Charlemagne legends.” Tervagant, though, may also have developed into the name Teruagant or Teruagaunt, which was the name of a Muslim deity that appeared in medieval morality plays.

Now, a termagant is not a nag. A nag, according to the World English Dictionary, is ”a person, especially a woman, who nags.” That helps. What is nagging? Pestering, or hectoring, or constantly annoying or scolding. It arrived in English only in 1828, and was originally “a dialectic word meaning ‘to gnaw’ (1825).” While it can’t be certain, it likely came from Scandinavia, where the Old Norse word for complain is gnaga and the dialectic Swedish and Norwegian for gnaw is nagga.

While we know what pestering is, hectoring is not a word I often hear. While in the late 14^th century it referred to a brave warrior, by the 1650s it referred to, according to Johnson, “a blustering, turbulent, pervicacious, noisy fellow,” it is in reference to the Trojan hero Hector from Homer’s Iliad. It still today refers to a “blustering, domineering person,” a bully.

Johnson’s word pervicacious was new to me. It arrived in English about 1630, from the Latin stem of pervicax, which means stubborn or willful. Interestingly, it is formed from the prefix per-, which indicates “by means of” combined with a form of the word vincere, which means to conquer.  When I looked up its definition I found it means “extremely willful; obstinate; stubborn.” Like contumacious. And the circle of words continues.