On Contriving the Shooting of Relatives

I just finished reading some essays of Michel de Montaigne (and a book by Janet Evanovich, lest you think me pedantic). The translation had a few words: arquebus, parricide, and fructify.

The first word, arquebus, is also spelled harquebus, and was gun invented in the 15^th century in Spain and was the first gun to be fired from the shoulder. The barrel was long, so there was a hook in the middle of it which fit into a supporting stick, a precursor to the fork used with other long barrel guns.

It was named by either the Germans or the Dutch, because the words for “hook” and “gun”, at least in Middle Dutch, are hake and busse. That’s also the source of the more commonly known word for a gun, blunderbuss, which comes from donderbus, the Dutch word for “thunder gun.” It was named in the 1650s. You’ll think differently of the name now when Santa calls to his reindeer “…on, Donder and Blitzen.”

The blunderbuss was a shorter gun with a muzzle that flared slightly so as to scatter the shot over a wider area. It was one of the guns carried by the Lewis and Clark expedition as they sought a northwest passage to the Pacific.

Our second word today, parricide, means the act of killing one’s father, mother, or other close relative. (You need not use an arquebus or blunderbuss to be guilty of parricide.) It came to English in the 1550s to name the person who did the killing, but by the 1560s defined the act of killing, the meaning it retains today. It initially had two meanings because the Middle French word from which it came, parricide, had since the 13^th century meant  the killer of a close relative but in the early 15^th century added the meaning of the killing itself. Both meanings came to English. The Middle French got the word from the Latin words for relative (parus) and killing (cidium).

More specific and more common words in English are the killing of one’s father and mother (patricide and matricide, from the Latin words for father, pater, and for mother, mater.) They similarly had the transition from defining the killer, in the 1590s, to defining the killing by the 1620s or 1630s.

The final word is fructify. While this word made my “to write about list” initially after reading The Anthologist, I was reminded of it by its use in the Essays. Fructify is a good word to use in place of the phrase “bear fruit.” The Latin word for fruit is fructus, and is the source of our word fructify. The Old French adapted it first in the 1100s, as fructifier, and we adapted it into English in the early 1300s.

The root word from which fructus comes is facere, from which we get factitious. The meaning of factitious is not far from fictitious. Both represent something created or contrived. Fictitious has a sense of either deception or story, while factitious is about an act meant to look normal when in reality is artificial, like factitious laughter or enthusiasm. Fictitious has been used in English since the 1610s, when it arrived from the Middle Latin word fictitus from the Latin word ficticius, which means artificial or contrived, from the Latin word for false, fictus.

In this blog the use of an arquebus for parricide is only fictitious. My family need not worry.

Take a Day Off - Be Lazy

Last week I used the word torpor. Turns out there are a lot of words for various kinds of inactivity: laziness, stupor, lethargy, or torpor.

Torpor means sluggish inactivity or lethargic indifference. It is different from lethargy in that torpor has a sense of self-imposition where lethargy may not be by choice. Torpor is different from ennui, for instance, in that ennui is dissatisfaction with inactivity whereas torpor can be the inactivity itself. It is different from stupor in that stupor is usually used in describing the results of the consumption of alcohol or drugs.

Torpor and stupor have unusual word spelling, which made me wonder about their etymology. Do they have the same source language?

Torpor came to English about 1600 from the Latin word torpere, which means to be inactive, dull, or numb. Stupor came from Latin, too, from the word stupor which means dullness, numbness, or insensible. The Latin word stupere means “be stunned.” The word arrived in English in the late 1300s.

So why do they both have an –or ending, when the Latin doesn’t? Dictionary.com says that the suffix –or occurs in words loaned from Latin and they are “usually denoting a condition or property of things or persons, sometimes corresponding to qualitative adjectives.” That qualitative aspect explains words like ardor, honor, horror, pallor, squalor and tremor. It also says “…a few other words that originally ended in different suffixes have been assimilated into this group (behavior; demeanor; glamour).”

From the same source word as torpor came the adjective torpid, in the 1610s, and it was not long before the adjective was formed into the noun torpidity. Use torpor, not torpidity, unless you want to be pedantic.

So where did lethargy come from? It has a much more diverse etymology. It came to English in the late 1300s from Old French (where it was spelled lethargie) unless it came directly from the Medeival Latin litargia, which developed from the Late Latin word lethargia, which came from the Greek word lethargia, which means “forgetfulness.” Lethargia was formed from the Greek words for forgetfulness (lethe) and idle (argos). Originally lethargos meant inactive through forgetfulness. I’m not sure what that means, and I am too lazy to figure it out.

Lazy, which means disinclined to activity or indolent, something I apparently feel every year at this time, since almost exactly a year ago is when I posted on indolent. Lazy has an interesting etymology because its origin is a matter of debate. In the 19^th century it was thought to have come from the verb lay, as tipsy comes from tip. But there is strong sentiment for it coming from German, French, Old Norse, or even Icelandic. So much activity for a word describing inactivity.

It’s enough to make one tired.  I think I will take tomorrow off. 

Devil-May-Care Pope?

Today I would like to pontificate on insouciant, and we’ll see where that takes us. I have been reading the monumental (in two senses of the word) third installment in the biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, and this past week the word insouciant has cropped up several times. Not knowing what exactly it meant, I turned to my dictionary for elucidation.

Insouciant is an adjective that means free from concern or worry. Synonyms suggested are carefree and nonchalant. Insouciant is a good word for the phrase “devil-may-care.” In 1799 it arrived in English from the French noun insouciant, which means carelessness, thoughtlessness, or heedlessness. It has a more negative connotation in French than in English. The English noun has become insouciance, while the adjective has kept the French spelling even though its first use was not until 1829.

The French got the word from the Latin word for agitate, sollicitare (to which they added the French prefix in- which means opposite). How they got from “to agitate” to “to care” is not shown, although insouciant certainly can describe someone who does not care or get agitated about things.

There is no word “souciant” in English, because in the 1560s English had previously adopted a Latin form of sollicitare (sollicitus) as the source for the word solicitous, which means restless, uneasy, not carefree.

The Latin word sollicitare is also the source of our word solicit. Sometime in the 1300s the Middle French took the Latin word and used it as the French word soliciter. It meant to disturb or rouse, trouble or harass, but also to stimulate or provoke. Anything that brought one out of their torpor was soliciter. It retained that meaning until the 1520s when the meaning of petition or ask came from the Middle French sense of managing affairs, according to etymonline.com. Eventually as a person “begged the favor” of a woman (a sense that solicit achieved by the 1590s) and it came by 1710 to refer to the “business agreement” reached with a prostitute. Leave it to the libertine French… (libertine means morally or sexually unrestrained).

Libertine originally was used (in the late 1300s) as the word for an emancipated slave. It came from the Latin word libertinus, which designated (etymonline says) a “member of a class of freedmen.” The Latin word liber means “free,” and is also the source of our word liberal, because in the 1560s those who we now call liberals were “freethinking.” Libertin was a word used in France in the 1540s to certain Protestant (freethinking) sects. Within 50 years the word came to describe someone unrestrained in their consumptions (wine, women, song, etc.) There is speculation that the changed meaning comes from the misunderstanding of the use of the Latin word libertinus in Acts 6:9, where it is translated in the King James Version as Libertines and in the New International Version as Freedmen.

Speaking of religious matters, I used the word pontificate in my opening line. When used as a noun it refers to the office of the Pope (hence the title of this post), but when used as a verb can mean to speak in a pompous or dogmatic manner.  It comes from the Latin word for the office of the Pope (pontificatus), and the verb pontificate was first used in 1818 to mean “act as a pontiff.” By 1825 the meaning  “to assume pompous and dignified airs, issue dogmatic decrees” (don’t blame me – that quote is from etymonline.com) came into use. Perhaps that is because Pope Leo XII’s reign was very unpopular due to his (according to Wikipedia) inability to “understand and cope with the social, cultural, and philosophical changes that slowly rose throughout Europe during his reign.”

Pope Leo XII would never be described as insouciant.

How Do You Connect Falcons to Punxsutawney Phil? Pilgrims, That's How.

In my first post of the year I quoted a sentence that ended “…in the same way that peregrine becomes pilgrim.” Since today is Groundhog Day (and the Super Bowl), there are a lot of peregrine pilgrims in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and the Meadowlands, New Jersey, so it's a good day to revisit those words.

Since the quote intimates that peregrine came first (that's debatable), we’ll deal with that word first. 

Peregrine is an adjective that is used primarily in two ways: to describe something that is not from the area or is from abroad (peregrine tourists), or something that wanders or migrates, which is how the Peregrine Falcon got its name. The word in this use is a noun, a proper noun, but with lower case letters it could be an adjective describing any number of falcons,  including the one made by Ford in the 1960s.

The word peregrine came to English in the 1300s ultimately from the Latin word for coming from abroad, peregrinus. It actually entered Middle English in its noun form, peregrination. Peregrination came through Old French (peregrination) where it meant pilgrimage or long absence. It came to French from the Latin in the 1100s. According to etymonline.com the French word at one time referred to anything coming from outside Roman territory.

So where did pilgrim come from? (I know, the Pilgrims came from Plymouth, England.* I used the lower case, not the upper case P.) In about the year 1200 English started using the word pilegrim, which they got from the Old French word pelerine (doesn’t look alike to me, either) which the French also got from peregrinus. Peregrin could refer to not only to someone on a pilgrimage but also to any stranger, foreigner or crusader. In Italian the word is pelligrino, and in case you enjoy the Italian mineral water San Pelligrino, its name comes from the town where it’s located (San Pellegrino Terme). How they got the name, I don’t know, but it seems people have been coming there for a long time to avail themselves of the curative powers of the water. Leonardo DaVinci is rumored to have done so, but “that may just be a case of attaching a famous name to a quote.” (Abraham Lincoln, or perhaps me...) In case you’re thinking of going, it’s in Lombardy, not too far from Zogno or Castignola.

I can’t let the reference to Punxsutawney pass without recalling our idyllic time living there. The word Punxsutawney comes from the Delaware Indians, and means town of the sandflies, although it may mean town of the mosquitoes. I don’t remember being bothered much by either when we lived there, so I can’t come down on either side of the raging debate. The Delaware people, according to delawarenation.com, are descendants of the Lenape people who inhabited New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Punxsutawney Phil , according to groundhog.com, was named after King Phillip. It doesn’t indicate as much, but I like to think the King Phillip after which he was named was the son of Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoaug Tribe that helped the Pilgrims through the winter of 1620, because with that reference I am able to bring this post full circle. See how it all works? 

*Plymouth not the city from which they sailed - it was named for the stock company that had the contract to settle the area. While there is a Plymouth, England, the Pilgrims actually sailed to America from Southampton, in Hampshire, England, 150 miles east of Plymouth.