This week we look at a couple of comments on television that
are ripe for use in this space.
While watching the successful new Sherlock Holmes show entitled
Elementary Holmes uses and Watson repeats the word haptic. In the
blog that is hyperlinked to haptic I mention that haptic is similar to tactile
and tangible but not the same. Ironically, it’s time to follow up on that
coincidence because I have gathered a cache of words with some cachet.
Tactile and tangible are similar to each other; one could
say they are haptic, in that they touch each other. Tactile means pertaining to
or endowed with a sense of touch. The emphasis is on the quality of the
touching entity, to the sense itself. Tangible means capable of being touched,
therefore real or actual as opposed to imaginary. But it can also mean definite
as opposed to vague. The emphasis is on the object of the touching, not the
sense itself. If neither touching entity is acting on the other (or both are),
use haptic.
Tangible came to English first, in the 1580s, from the
Middle French word with the same spelling. The Middle French got tangible from the Late Latin word tangibilis. Tangibilis means “that which may be touched.” It didn’t develop any
non-physical meaning until 1709.
Tactile came to English in 1610, from the French word tactile, which the French got from the Latin
word tactilis. Tactilis also means “that
which may be touched.” (Why Latin had two words for the same thing I couldn’t discover.)
For the first 40 years after its arrival in English the word had the same
meaning as tangible. Then in 1650 it developed the meaning we have now.
Another recent television show, Castle, had Richard Castle, and author,
compliment Kate Beckett, the police detective, on her discriminating use of
coincidence instead of irony (or vice versa). These two, even before the Alanis
Morissette song became popular. (One site has even gone so far as to parse the lyrics and score the irony: Attempts at
describing irony: 11, Successful attempts: 2.5, Confusion of irony with
"poor sense of timing": 6, and Completely
missing the term: 3.)
Coincidence is related to the word coincide, which
means occur at the same time or occupy the same space. (I wonder if occur and
occupy have similar etymology or is it just coincidence that they both begin
with occ-?) It came to English about 1600 from the French word coincidence. Within a century of its
entrance into English it developed a sense of happenstance, of the occurrence
being by chance or unplanned. What’s interesting but not coincident is that the
word coincide didn’t come to English until 1715, again from the French (coincider), which they got from a
Medieval Latin word, coincidere. Coincidere was an astrological term that
mean “to fall upon together”.
Irony has a meaning that isn’t difficult to
understand. If the use of the words conveys the opposite meaning of what the words
mean, or if the outcome of event is opposite of what was expected, that is
irony. The drippingly ironic and rhetorical question “Well, isn’t that just wonderful?”
when I give my wife some bad news is one example. So is the joke about the
priest and the nun that ends with the punch line (many punch lines are ironic,
hence the humor) “get up and get it yourself” is ironic because it is the
opposite of the event that is expected. If you want the joke, you’ll have to
ask me for it.
I still have the cache of words for next week: cache,
cachet, occur and occupy. Stay tuned.
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