Final and Soporific FUTPNBC

When I first moved to Chicago last millennium I was stuck in traffic on the Eisenhower freeway in the heat of August hoping my car would not overheat when the announcer on the radio shared that the news that the last of the snow that in the previous winter had been dumped in a quarry had finally melted. I was not heartened by the news. That may be how you feel about this post, another in the lengthy FUTPNBC string.

Let’s begin with aquiline. You may think aquiline is a cooling reference to water, but it actually refers to the shape of an eagle’s beak, and is used to describe a curved or a hooked nose. Aguila is the Latin word for eagle, and aquilinus describing anything eagle-like, so somewhere in the 1640s the word was adopted as aquiline in English. No relief from the heat there.

How about with the word Gadarene? Maybe, but not sure you want to go there. Gadarene is a reference to the story in Matthew 8 where a legion of demons were cast into a drift (or litter) of pigs, or a sounder of swine. When something or someone runs into water, they can be described by the adjective Gadarene.

In researching Gadarene I ran across the explanation in etymonline.com that the words porker and grunter were developed as synonyms for pig because of “…sailor’s and fishermen’s euphemistic avoidance of the word pig while at sea, a superstition perhaps based on the fate of the Gadarene swine, who drowned.”

Somewhat the opposite of Gadarene is hegira, which is a noun for a journey to a better place. Hegira comes from the story of Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 662. That is the date on which the Islamic calendar begins. The Islamic word for Muhammad’s journey is Hijra, and where we would use AD for our calendar, the Islamic calendar uses AH, Anno Hegirae, which means in the year of the Hijra. Muslims call their calendar the Hijri calendar. The English word hegira has been in use since the 1580s.

Chiasma is actually a scientific word, used to describe something that crosses, like in anatomy when the optic nerves cross at the base of the brain, or in cellular biology (dictionary.com tells us) the “point of overlap of paired chromatids at which fusion and exchange of genetic material take place during prophase of meiosis.” I thought that would clear it up for you. Actually, the Greek etymology is more help: khiasma means “two things placed crosswise.” The word chiasma actually came through medical Latin (hence its different spelling) into English in 1832.

I missed one word I should have covered in the first follow up post, but it fits better here. These may have been soporific posts to you, but it kept me off the streets. I remember my first encounter with the word soporific, if I remember correctly, was Roddy McDowall in The Subterraneans, a beatnik movie. He is complaining that life is “Soporific, soporific, it’s all so soporific.” Soporific used as a noun is something that causes sleep; as an adjective it means sleepy or drowsy, or causing sleep. It came to English in the 1680s from the French word soporifique, which the French got from the Latin word for a deep sleep, sopor.

Now it’s time for a hegira or Gadarene trip to the pool, where I may find things soporific.