Ease on Down the Road

I was composing an email and thought about using the word attenuate, but wanted to make sure it was the appropriate word to use. It turned out it wasn’t, and I learned another good word.

Attenuate means to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value. It comes from the Latin word attenuatus, that means enfeebled or weak. Attenuatus is past participle of attenuare (a combination of att- and tenuare, meaning make thin”) that means to lessen or diminish. The word came to English in the 1520s.

In my email I used the more accurate word alleviate, that means to make easier to endure, or to lessen or mitigate. Alleviate came to English a little before attenuate, from Latin through Middle French. The Latin word was alleviare, meaning to lighten (in Latin levis does not mean jeans, it means “light in weight.” Levis is the word from which we get lever, something that makes a heavy load easier to lift.) So alleviate has a sense of easing or taking pressure off, while attenuate is has a sense of weakening. Attenuating is often negative, while alleviating is always positive.

Of course, now that we have the definition of alleviate we have to look at mitigate. The difference between mitigate and alleviate is that mitigate has a connection to pain. It means to lessen pain or grief or wrath, or make a punishment less severe. That is because it comes from the Latin word mitigatus, which is the past participle of mitigare, that means to soften or make tender. Mitis means gentle or soft. A gentle touch is wonderful when you’re in pain or facing severe punishment.

As I was capturing this line of words, I wondered if attenuate and extenuate are related. They are, though the meaning is somewhat connected more closely to mitigate. Extenuate, like attenuate, came to English in the 1520s, and also is originally from the word tenuare, this time with the prefix ex- that indicates “out”. It means to represent something as less serious. It is most often used in the phrase “extenuating circumstances,” which indicates there is a reason why the offense should be considered less serious that it would appear to be.  So it is different from the other words in that it is an explanation as to why an offense or fault that has already taken place should have lesser impact.

Attenuate is weakening (and not necessarily good), alleviate is easing (and good), mitigate is lessening pain (and very good), and extenuate is lessening punishment (and neither good nor bad).

May your week be filled by one or more of these. Mine will, as I am now officially on vacation for the week. 

A Visit to Anhedonia for the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows

I once used the word dolor in a reference letter, and the person for whom I was doing the reference later shared with me that her interviewer said that my use of that word was influential in her getting the job.

Dolor (spelled dolour in the U.K.) means sorrow or grief. It is different from anhedonia, which is the lack of ability to experience pleasure, although it can also refer to the lack of pleasure. It is a psychological term. Cafard is a feeling of severe depression, but is not a psychological term.

Dolor came to English from the Latin word for pain, dolor, in about 1300, through Middle English (where it was spelled dolour). It is the source of a more common word, dolorous. It is probably most familiar as part of the phrase via dolorosa, which is translated as “way of sorrow” and refers to the path Jesus took through Jerusalem to the site of the crucifixion. Dolorous (the adjective form of the noun dolor) has been in use since about 1400, and came through Old French, where the word was doloros.  

In case your name is Dolores, don’t be sad. The name comes from the Spanish Maria de los Dolores, literally “Mary of the Sorrows.” Prior to Vatican II the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows was celebrated on September 15 (I guess I’m a month late with this post.) An interesting devotion is to follow the seven sorrows in the life of the Virgin Mary.

The other two words in today’s short post are from reading the letters of humorist S. J. Perelman.

Anhedonia was a word coined in 1897 by French Psychologist Theodule Ribot. He was looking for a word to express the opposite of analgesia, and adapted the French word anhédonie for this purpose. The French word comes from Greek, from an-, which expresses negation, and hedone, the Greek word for pleasure. Hedone is also the source word for hedonist. 

Cafard is a very obscure word. Dictionary.com has only one reference dictionary that provides a definition. Cafard comes from the French word kafar. According to Collins English Dictionary, kafar can mean either cockroach or hypocrite.

Anhedonia may lead to dolor, which may devolve to cafard.

Words from One Book Review

I was reading a review of Daniel Hannan's Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World and within two paragraphs came across the word tendentious and the phrase "English is the world's lingua franca." (The review was by Jay Weiser in The Weekly Standard.)

My first thought about tendentious was how similar it is in sound to contentious but how very different in meaning. 

Tendentious is an adjective meaning having or showing a purpose or bias or tendency, the word to which it is related. Contentious is an adjective related to contend, and defines anything that causes contention or strife or arguing.

Tendentious was, according to etymonline.com, not formed from contend or contention, but from the German word tendentiös, which the Germans got from the Medieval Latin word tendentia. It probably will not surprise you to read that tendency also comes from the Medieval Latin word tendentia. Tendency has been use in English since the 1620s, while tendentious first appeared in 1871. The use of tendentious is a relatively "new tendency," which in Portuguese is "bossa nova."

Contend and contentious came to English much closer in time. Contend arrived in the mid-1400s, while contentious came about 1500. Contend came from the Old French word contendre, which the French got from the Latin word contendere that meant to strive after. Contentious came from the Middle French word contentieux, which the Middle French got from the Latin word contentiosus, meaning quarrelsome.  

The phrase "English is the world's lingua franca" got my attention because lingua franca was not italicized as a foreign word or phrase usually would be. Is it now common enough, I wondered, that italicization is unnecessary? I guess so, since it has been in use since the 1620s. It is from Italian, and means “Frankish tongue.” The phrase, if capitalized, refers to the Italian-Provençal jargon, an admixture of Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. The jargon was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean, especially in ports. According to etymonline.com it was originally used in the Levant, and “is probably from the Arabic custom (that dates back to the crusades) of calling all Europeans Franks.”

Lingua franca now refers to any language that is widely used as a means of communication among speakers of another language. For instance, in the court of Europe French was the lingua franca. In the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church Latin was the lingua franca. In Britain lingua franca can also refer to any language that contains elements of several other languages.

Later on in the review Weiser used the word admixture (as I did above), again sending me to my dictionary. What's the difference between admixture and mixture? Admixture is the noun for the act of mixing or the state of being mixed. Mixture is the result of the act of mixing. Admixture arrived in English in about 1600, comes from an earlier word admix, which was a back-formation of admixt that came from the Latin word admixtus that means “mixed with.” Mixture had arrived about 100 years earlier from the Old French word misture, and also directly from the Latin word mixtura.

Today’s admixture is probably not a contentious post, though I can be a tendentious poster. 

Slang, Idiom, Jargon, Euphemism or Argot?

In a recent post I was looking for the word that means a phrase used to avoid impolite words (euphemism) and ran across words like slang, idiom, and jargon.

That is a long list of words for words that are outside of formal expression. What is the difference?

Let's start with euphemism. A euphemism is the substitution of a more acceptable expression (usually a phrase) for one that might be viewed as offensive or harsh. George Carlin used the proliferation of euphemisms for several comedy routines. Dictionary.com uses the example "to pass away" for "to die." The substitutions dates from ancient Greece (from whence came the word), when words were avoided out of superstition. You probably remember Eumenides' substitution of "the Gracious Ones" for "the Furies."

When the word euphemism came into use in English in the 1650s it was rhetorical, indicating the use of a favorable term in place of an inauspicious one. It came from the Greek word eupemizein that means "speak with fair words, use words of good omen," according to etymonline.com. It was not until 1793 that the word began to be used for the replacement for an impolite word or phrase.

Slang, idiom jargon, and argot are different from euphemisms in that they are not intended to avoid embarrassment.

Slang words are those that are more playful or vivid and less acceptable in polite language. It also has a definition of "the jargon of a particular class, profession, etc." I would use jargon for the language peculiar to a specific profession. Slang came into use in English in 1756 to define the "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves." It may have come from the Norwegian word slengenamn, which meant nickname, but the Oxford English Dictionary says that based on "date and early associations" such etymology is unlikely.

Jargon is defined as "the language...peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group." It is also used that is unintelligible, not understandable, or pedantic. Jargon is an old word, coming to English in the mid-1300s from an Old French world of the same spelling. The Old French used it for the chattering of birds, lending the sense of unintelligibility to the English word.

Argot is at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. While it can be (and is) used as a synonym for jargon, as language particular to a group and sometimes a profession or trade (more often of the genre of detectives noir), its strongest use is for language used particularly by gangsters and the underworld. Words like moll, gat, and gam are argot. Argot, like jargon, comes from French without change in spelling (or substantially in pronounciation). In French it referred to the language peculiar to the Parisian underworld. It arrived in English in 1860.

Idiom is language that (like euphemisms) has a meaning different from its components; dictionary.com uses the illustration of "kick the bucket" for the aforementioned euphemism "pass away." But it is also used (and in my experience more commonly) for language that is characteristic of the sentence construction of another language. Yiddish very often uses idiomatic expressions. My ancestry, Amish, is renowned for idiomatic expressions like "throw papa down the stairs his hat" or "throw the cow over the fence some hay." Idiom is also used of styles in music and literature. Idiom also comes to English from French, from the Middle French word idiome, which came from the Late Latin word idioma, that means "peculiar language." Latin got idoma from Greek, where it was also  idioma.