More Inigo Montoya Words

Time for another installment of Inigo Montoya words. Today we look at restive and factitious.

Restive sounds like it should describe a state of rest. But it actually describes something that is impatient regarding control or restraint or delay. It can also describe something that is stubborn or refusing to go forward, or balking at something. It’s been around since the early 1400s, when it arrived in English from the French word restuffe, which meant “not moving forward.” Restuffe came from an earlier (Middle French) word restif, that meant brought to a standstill, like traffic in Los Angeles. There is a Modern French word, rétif, that has the same root. Originally restricted in meaning to just “not moving forward,” the word apparently grew restive and in the 1680s developed the additional meaning of “unmanageable”, according to etymonline.com, having “evolved via [the] notion of a horse refusing to go forward.” So restive is anything but restful.

Our other word today is factitious. Factitious sounds like it should mean full of facts. It also is an adjective, used to describe something that is created rather than natural, planned rather than spontaneous, artificial rather than real.  It’s been around in English since the 1640s, having arrived straight from the Latin word factitius, which means artificial and comes from factus, which is the past participle of facere, from which we get multifarious, surfeit, and nidify. Facere means “do” or “make”, and it is in the sense of “make” that it is used here.

We get a lot of words from facere, including misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance. While these three words might be familiar, the word feasance, from which they are formed, may not be. Since it has the root word facere, arriving in English through the French word faire, both of which mean "to do," it has the legal sense of doing something as a condition or a duty. But what’s the difference between misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance?

According to etymonline.com, misfeasance is “the wrongful exercise of lawful authority or improper performance of a lawful act,” and arrived in English in the 1590s from the Middle French word mesfaisance, which comes from the combining of the Old French mes-, meaning “wrongly” and the aforementioned “faire,” that means “to do.” My dictionary has an additional definition of “a wrong consisting of affirmative action.”

Malfeasance, on the other hand, is defined by my dictionary as “the performance by a public official of a…wrongdoing.” According to etymonline.com it arrived in English a century after misfeasance, in the 1690s. It also came through French, from malfaisance, formed from the French prefix for “badly”, mal-, and faisant, the present participle of faire. So in French the difference is between doing something badly and doing something wrongly.

Misfeasance is doing a legal act improperly but not illegally yet its effect may have legal repercussions. Malfeasance is doing something that is illegal. It is often used of those in public office in particular, but applies to anyone. Nonfeasance is the illegal non-performance of an act one is obligated to perform.

If you’re restive, don’t give in to a desire to be factitious and be guilty of malfeasance. 

It's Enough to Drive You Mad, Especially If You're Crossing a Rubicon

As I threatened last week, today we follow up on Alyssum and Rubicon. Both are proper nouns, hence the capitalization.

Alyssum, not to be confused with my lissome niece Elissa, is also part of a family – the mustard family (not the Colonel Mustard family, for you Clue players.) There is an entire genus named Alyssum, and Alyssum is characterized by clusters of small white or yellow flowers. The name arrived in English in the 1550s, having come through Latin from Greek. The Greek word, alysson is, according to etymonline.com, “perhaps the neuter of adjective alyssos ‘curing madness,’ from privative prefix a + lyssa ‘madness, rage, fury.’” My dictionary inserts “canine” between curing and madness. In case you’re wondering whether flowers are a key component in the rabies vaccine, they’re not.

Rubicon is the other proper noun carried over from last week. With the same root as ruby or rubicund (the Latin word rubicundus), it is similar in appellation to the eight Red Rivers in the U.S. or the five in Canada or similar ones around the world. When the banks of a river have surrounding soil that is red it is often used to describe the river itself.

But the Rubicon is familiar to many in the phrase “Crossing the Rubicon.” While there are two Swedish bands (Armageddon and The Sounds) who use that title for one of their albums, and a couple of other bands (The Human Extract and Revolution Renaissance) have used the phrase as a title of a song, it is more commonly known as a metaphor for reaching the point of no return.

Students of history know this refers back to Julius Caesar, and his decision on January 10, 49 BC, after having conquered what is now France and southern England as Governor of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul, to “invade” Italy, the border of which was the Rubicon River. While one report has Caesar saying Alea iacta est, which of course means “The die is cast,” the one thing that is certain is that this began his march on Rome, which resulted in his becoming the dictator before the year was out.

I used the word appellation above. Appellation means name or title, but also is used of the act of naming. It came to English in the mid-1400s, from the Middle French word apeler. But another form of the word came to English in the late 1400s from the old French word apelacion, which the French got from the Latin word appellationem, which was an addressing or accosting, but also an appeal, or a name or title. It actually was a noun of action (like the act of naming), and was derived from the past participle of appelare, from which we get the verb appeal. So the act of appealing to a higher authority is a newer sense (by about ½ century) than the more common meaning of name or naming.

It’s enough to drive you mad, especially if you’re crossing a Rubicon.

Ravenous But Not Rapacious Reading Results in Being Lissome

I ran across three words this week in my readings, two of which are follow up to recent posts.

While last week’s post covered some "–some" words, it could not cover them all. One that I encountered this week was lissome. It is a variant spelling for lithesome, which is more difficult to pronounce, and developed around 1800. Lithesome had arrived in use in 1768, but because it is a voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative followed by a voiceless coronal sibilant (th sound followed by s) it is not easy to pronounce, hence along came lissome. It is pronounced with a short i sound rather than a long i sound since it is followed by a double s. It sounds like the flower Alyssum, a word we’ll have to defer (defer until later is unnecessary repetition).

Lithe, the base word for lissome that means flexible or limber, is an adjective (as are lithesome and lissome). It is a very old word in English, having survived from an Old English word that meant soft, gentle or meek. By Middle English it was used of the weather, and developed its current meaning around 1300.

Our second word today follows up on the blog post on voracious, inveterate reading. Had there been space I could have added the word ravenous to that post. Ravenous, which means extremely hungry or rapacious (we’ll get to that in a minute), does not come from the bird named the Raven but from an Old French word, ravinos, which the Old French developed from their word that meant “to seize”, raviner, which came from the word for a violent rush or a robbery, ravine.  Yes, that’s where we get one of our words for a narrow, steep-sided valley through which water often rushes violently, a ravine. When the word we started with, ravenous, came to use in English in the late 1300s it meant obsessed with plundering or excessively greedy. Within a century its meaning expanded to any excessive appetite, like reading or food.

The word rapacious mentioned above is the adjective that currently has a meaning related to plundering and greediness. It came to English in the 1650s from the Latin word rapaci-, a  “stem of rapax, ‘grasping,’ itself from stem of rapere ‘to seize,’” according to etymonline.com. The stem word rapere, if you remember, is the word from which we get our word rapine. 

Today’s final word from this week’s reading is rubicund. It is related to both the name of the red gem ruby and the river Rubicon which is another word we’ll have to defer. Rubicund is more closely related in use to our word sanguinary than ruby or Rubicon, although sanguinary is more related to blood than just color. Rubicund, by the way, is a good adjective for something that is red or reddish or ruddy (having a fresh, healthy red color). It came to English about 1500 from the French word rubicund, or perhaps directly from the Latin word rubicundus (it gets my etymological vote), a form of the word rubere that means “to be red.” One could say that rubicund is the pedantic word for ruddy, but why would you?

So you’ve now read about red, and perhaps are no longer ravenous or rapacious to find out about lissome. But we still have Alyssum and Rubicon to look forward to. We’ll cross those next week.

Some Abraham Lincoln, Some- Robert Browning, and –some Inigo Montoya

I had dinner this week with someone I once described as winsome, and in my reading came across the word fulsome. While it seems obvious that the word irksome means that the situation being described is one that is full of annoyance or being irked, or even tiresome (which describes something that causes one to tire), that does not mean that a toothsome grin means that the grin is full of teeth. The suffix –some can sometimes be troublesome (which does mean full of trouble or difficulty.) Whereas the prefix some- usually means “at an unspecified increment” the suffix doesn’t always appear to be a suffix of causation.

Even the word some sometimes means different things. While its central meaning is “being an undetermined or unspecified one” as used in “somebody stole my cookie”, it can also be used to describe the opposite when used of plural nouns “some days I just don’t want a cookie.” There are a number of other uses, too. The word some has some (meaning “remarkable”) kind of variety, and has been used in that sense since 1808, mostly as an American colloquial.

The prefix some- (as in someone, somebody, sometime, someday, someone) indicates uncertainty or describes something that is undetermined. You can find the same words in Middle English, but they were written as two words until the 17^th to 19^th centuries. Even the word somewhen, a rare word (I do not remember having heard or read it), has been used since the 19^th century in combination with more common compounds, as Robert Browning did in line 505 of “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’”:

Out of the drift of facts, whereby you learn

What some was, somewhere, somewhen, somewhy?

Wikipedia cites several recent uses, so maybe it is once again becoming a useful word.

But then there are the troublesome and irksome suffixes. The easy one to understand is the meaning of “causing”, which is the sense used in troublesome and irksome. But there is also a collective use of the suffix, as in twosome or threesome, which means “group of”.

And then there are the words that don’t follow either convention, like winsome, toothsome, and fulsome. Or, as Inigo Montoya said in the movie The Princess Bride, “I do not think it means what you think it means.” While they technically mean "full of", such a definition requires more explanation and research.

Winsome is an old word, used in English since before the year 900. It is a good word, meaning sweetly or innocently charming, and similar in meaning to the word engaging. That’s a much nicer meaning than “some win.”  In Old English it was spelled wynsum, and combined the Old English word for joy (wyn) with the Old English word sum, which somewhere and somewhen became spelled some, probably so it would not be confused with the word that indicates the total of a series of numbers or quantities, or aggregate. So technically winsome means full of wyn. 

Toothsome, which I always thought meant showing some teeth (as in toothsome grin), actually is defined as pleasing or desirable, and is often used of that which passes through the teeth (food). It came to English in the 1560s, but it was used ten years earlier in the figurative sense of “attractive.” It has also been used to describe someone who is voluptuous or sexually alluring. I think I will begin using this word more; it will likely be misunderstood by others, and I always enjoy driving people to the dictionary. 

Fulsome is the word that got me started on this quest. It means offensive to good taste, especially in being excessive or overdone. In that respect it almost means the opposite of what it sounds like it means (the kind of word I like – you can use it correctly but sound like you’re giving a compliment: “That was a fulsome dinner!”) In Middle English the word was simply a compound of the words full and some. In the 1200s it mean abundant or full (full of full?), but by the mid-1300s developed a meaning of plump or well-fed, then by the 1640s meant overgrown or overfed. It was not far or long (the 1660s) until it widened its meaning to anything offensive to good taste or good manners. One source suggested it might have developed the negative meaning from its similarity of "ful-" to the word foul, an interesting speculation that makes it easier to remember its primary meaning. 

Finally, there is also the use of the word “some” in the phrase “get some”, meaning “have sexual intercourse.” The use in this sense can be found as far back as 1899 in a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln from circa 1840. Or is it somewhen 1840?