Great Grandparents or Great-grandparents.

This past week my father died. He, and my grandfather and my great-grandfather all lived to be in their 90s. So it bodes well for this blog to go on for another few decades. I was wondering why we call our parent's parents "grand" and their parents "great." So let's find out and see where it goes.

The use of grand- in talking of your parents' parents came originally from Latin and Greek. Grandis in Latin means big or great, or full or abundant. (Perhaps the abundant meaning is the reason behind the appellation. Many grandparents delight in the abundance of the number of grandchildren they have. I know my dad did.)

The use came into English in 1200 or earlier. It came from Anglo-French, where the words were graunde dame. 

But where did "great" come from? It was apparently first used to describe a relationship once-removed, and the earliest attested use if of a great uncle. In Old English you would have referred to your great-grandfather as your þridda fæder, which literally translated is "third father." By Middle English the term was furþur ealdefade. (Any Middle English people out there know what furþur ealdefade is, literally translated? My guess is "further old father.)

Great-grandfather was first used in the 1510s, and it took a decade for great-grandmothers to be included.

I used removed earlier to mean "distant in relationship by a degree," in this case once-removed. I thought that while we're in the 1500s we might as well cover its meaning, since it came into use in the 1540s.

Removed in a genealogical sense refers to a generation. So your great uncle is your uncle once removed, or your father's uncle. So your grandparent's relatives are twice removed, and your great-grandparents relatives are three times removed. I just filed a photo of my grandmother and her brother Milt: my uncle twice removed.

Does the hyphen need to be in great-grandparent? Yes. For instance, my grandson Noah no longer has any great-grandparents, But he has some great grandparents, if I do say so myself. Our family is blessed with great ancestor, even though one more was "removed" this week.

The Long and (Mostly) the Short of it

This week’s readings (a book and a magazine) were replete with words appropriate for blogging: aperçu, divertissement, embonpoint, mordant, and rigmarole. Two of them have been posted on previously (the ones in purple, which will take you to their post when clicked on), so that leaves three for today’s post. Let’s take them in reverse alphabetical order just because I can be contumacious sometimes.

Rigmarole is a word I remember hearing my mother say, although she pronounced it as if it were spelled rigamarole. It is apparently an accepted variant spelling of rigmarole, because the Collins English Dictionary says so. But the preferred spelling is rigmarole; the word is a noun for any long or complicated procedure, or for a set of pointless statements or just garbled nonsense. Rigamarole is more fun for an utterance; it has a cadence to it and works well in dactylic tetrameter poetry, as the first part of this sentence might illustrate. (You provide the aperçu.)

Its etymology is almost as much fun as its utterance. While it came to English in 1736 to describe “a long, rambling discourse,” according to etymonline.com, it seems to have come from a colloquial Kentish use from the 1520s, a form of “ragman roll,” which coincidentally will be the name of my next album. “In Middle English a long roll of verses descriptive of personal characters, used in the medieval game of chance called Rageman” was the reference. But the name of the game (rhyme of the ancient blogman) may be from “Anglo-French Ragemon le bon ‘Ragemon the good,’ which was the heading on one set of the verses, referring to a character by that name.” For two hundred years it referred to a long, rambling discourse until 1939 when the idea of a foolish activity or commotion was added. The etymological explanation in itself may qualify as a rigmarole.

Our next word today is divertissement. It is NOT synonymous with diversion, because a diversion can be anything that entertains or distracts, while a divertissement is defined as anything that serves as an interlude in a performance. It is short, while a diversion is of indeterminate length. It is also related to performances: if you’re not watching a performance of a play, opera, or concert, that which provides entertainment between pieces is a diversion. For those who have never been to a play, opera, or concert, consider the Super Bowl commercials or halftime show as divertissement and you have the idea. Short entertainment between the main entertainment.

Divertissement came to English directly from the French in about 1720. The French word means amusement or diversion, but its English meaning is influenced by the Italian word divertimento, used in music for a piece of music either providing light amusement or using a small group of performers.

Finally, let’s get an aperçu at aperçu. Aperçu (pronounced to rhyme with “at her sea” if you’re still on that poetry kick) is a quick glance, or a glimpse of something. It can also mean a quick estimate or insight, or just an outline or summary. Whatever your use, it should be short and quick, not a rigmarole.

Aperçu, it won’t likely surprise you given the cedilla, is from the French word of the same spelling (although cedillas are also used in Portuguese, Catalan, Old Spanish, and Visigoth, which is probably where you encountered it.) It came to English in the 1820s. The French got it from Latin, from ad percipere, to perceive. Get it? Or was that too much of an aperçu?

Anyway, that’s the long and the short of it. Mostly the short.

Garbanzos and Gileadites

I used the word ersatz in a recent email, and checked to see if I'd covered it in this blog. I hadn't, so let's make up for that oversight and see where the word takes us.

I wondered if it was a Yiddish word that I'd missed in my posts on that subject, but etymonline.com says that it is a German word meaning literally compensation, replacement, or substitute. It was used in 1875 as an adjective to refer to military units held in reserve. It is now used as an adjective to describe anything artificial or substitute. It was then used as a noun starting in 1892, to mean any artificial substance or article used to replace something genuine. Like those pink, blue or yellow packets that are ersatz sugar.

As referenced in the opening paragraph, when researching a word it is interesting to see what other words have a connection to the word being researched, or how it compares with similar words. Ersatz provided neither. So let's go with another word and see where it takes us.

In a goodreads book review I used the word shibboleth, and again double checked against this blog. It turned out to be another word I had yet to expound upon with a very interesting and expansive etymology.

As I wrote the review I wanted shibboleth to mean the equivalent of "sacred cow" but found that it means far more. The third listed meaning is, indeed, close 'to sacred cow: a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth. In fact, "sacred cow" might itself be a shibboleth.

The second meaning of shibboleth is "a slogan or catchword." I can't recall having seen shibboleth used with this meaning. And the primary definition is "a peculiarity of pronunciation,behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons. So a shibboleth would be the Texas Rangers' (the lawmen, not the baseball team) cowboy hats, or the uniform of people in the Salvation Army.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word, and it arrived in English in the late 1300s directly from the Hebrew, undoubtedly from its use in Judges 12:4-6. In Hebrew it means both "flood or stream" and "ear of corn." (Don't ask me why those two! Maybe a Hebrew scholar can post a comment to explain.)

Here's the Judges story: the Gileadites were fighting the Ephraimites, and in order to protect themselves from Ephraimites posing as Gileadites they decided to use the password "shibboleth" because Ephraimites could not produce the "sh-" sound. This led in English to the word shibboleth meaning "watchword" or "password" as it has since the 1630s. It wasn't until 1862 it developed the meaning of an outmoded slogan or common saying with little current meaning.

This isn't the only instance of a word being used to distinguish one nationality from another. In 1282, during a massacre called the Sicilian Vespers (now THERE's a title for a movie about the mafia) the Italians used the shibboleth cicera to identify those who were French, because they could not pronounce the word that means "chick peas." Apparently they could pronounce garbanzo, though.

...If I Do Say So Myself

This week’s readings included the word rodomontade. It’s a good word that can be used with impunity in describing the boasting or bragging nature that you find displeasing. (Some of you may actually find boasting or bragging pleasing. You can stop reading now.)

Rodomontade has an interesting etymology. It came to English in the 1610s, although it had an earlier more Italian version in English spelled rodomontado, in the 1590s. It comes from the name of a character in Ludivico Ariosto’s epic 16^th century poem Orlando Furioso, which can be translated as “The Frenzy of Orlando” or more literally “Raging Roland.” The latter translation is important because the poem shares some features with the (to me, at least) more famous and older (11^th century) French epic poem Chanson de Roland (source of the word termagent). Orlando Furioso has inspired creative works by many artists, including Vivaldi, Shakespeare, and Delacroix.

Rodomont (as he’s called in the Gutenberg Project’s translation by William Steward Rose) is one of the main characters, a fierce Muslim warrior and King of Algiers who is quoted as saying

I am that Rodomont, whose martial worth

Scatters its splendor through this ample earth.

Rodomont Is known for his boasting, his gasconade, his bombast. And so that boasting, bragging, bombastic nature is now known as rodomontade.

Which brings us to the word bombast. What is bombast, or being bombastic? Is it related to bombs? 

Bombastic is defined as high-flown or high-sounding (like a bomb?), inflated, or pretentious. Bombast is defined as speech that is too pompous or pretentious. (I’m never guilty of bombast.) It used to be the word for cotton or other batting used for stuffing clothing. In fact, that was its original definition when it came to English in the 1560s. The word is a corruption of the Old French word bombace that means cotton or cotton wadding. The Old French got it from Latin, where it was bombacem, the accusative (why would you accuse cotton?) of bombax, which itself was a corruption and transferred use of the Latin word bombyx that means silk and comes from the Greek word for silk or silkworm: bombyx. You can't get much further from bombs than silkworms. By the 1580s bombast came to mean any inflated, padded, or pompous speech. 

Bombastic, the adjective form, took over 200 years (it arrived in 1704) to come to English use, and originally just meant inflated. But by 1727 it was being used to describe language that is “inflated” as well.

Bombast is related to bluster in meaning. While the word bluster originally came to English in the late 1300s as a verb for violent blowing of wind, it eventually became a noun (in the 1580s) that not only meant a strong wind or boisterous noise but also inflated talk. The word bluster came from a Low German source: Middle Low German has the word blüstren as does East Frisian. (No, I don’t know what West Frisian has instead.)

Rodomontade is boasting or bragging, while bombast is described well as inflated talk. Bombast is expansive and pedantic, but not necessarily about oneself. Bluster has a sense of deception that bombast does not have. Three good words, if I do say so myself, and that might make me guilty of  rodomontade.

Unpaired Words

Jonah Goldberg is one of my favorite writers. Mr. Goldberg is author of The Goldberg File on nationalreview.com and the book "The Tyranny of Cliches" (buy it and the next one, too). Today's post is mostly from his Friday post, with all but the first hyperlink (part of his original post) relating to the words already covered in this blog. The Charles to which he refers is Charles Krauthammer. And now, here's Jonah: 

Anyway, Charles is a big fan of “unpaired words.” I don’t mean words with the Bluetooth turned off. I mean . . . hmmm . . . how do I explain?

Well, many times, during the commercial break on Special Report, we’ve gone back and forth -- brandy snifters in hand -- talking about how we need a president with more feck running an ept and gormful foreign policy. These conversations usually take place after the make-up lady comes into the studio to make sure that we look kempt and shevelled. Well, last Wednesday, the topic came up again, and we kept bandying them about. Which made me think, “This is pretty cool.” It also made me think, “This would be a good riff for the G-File.”Still, I’m hoping that he isn’t gruntled by this somewhat nocuous and entirely effable effort to rip off one of his favorite parlor games. Indeed, I could have dropped this choate schtick without name-dropping Charles, which might have made it seem less petuous, but why leave my motivation unbeknownst when it can be beknownst? Better to go communicado and cognito, I say. Particularly when I’m still throat clearing as I try to scrounge up a real topic to discuss. 

Still, I fear I seem quite chalant as I search for sipid things to say. If I don’t work harder, this “news”letter will never be combobulated. (“I don’t want to disrupt your flow here, so I’ll rupt it. But you should know this all comes across as soucient and below even your pareil writing style. I would have thrown this whole thing out the window, but you opted to fenestrate it.” -- The Couch)

Right off the bat Jonah used the unpaired form of two words I was surprised I didn't find in my list of blogged words: feckless and gormful. They've been on my "to do" list for a long time, so let's get to them. 

Feckless means ineffective, incompetent, or futile; it can also mean irresponsible, lazy, or indifferent. While feckless is funct (to unpair a word), the word from the 1400s from which it is formed, feck, is defunct. It is a word the Scottish shortened from the word "effect", and meant not only effect but value or vigor. The writer Carlyle (according to etymonline.com) popularized the word. Apparently at one time there the word feckful was extant.

Gormless is an adjective that came into English in about 1746 (according to etymonline.com; it is their unspecific specific date) as a "British dialectical word." Not to be confused with a British delectable word, one of the few times you'll see delectable and British in the same sentence. Gormless is defined as stupid or somehow lacking in intelligence. 

I did not realize when I began this blog (ept was in my first post) that I would be in such esteemed company. I trust I viscerated Jonah's column appropriately; I wouldn't want to sult him.

GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out

My wife and I have been struck this week by the magnificent challenge of instilling character in our offspring, imbuing them with good values, and infusing them with the qualities they need to make the best choices in life. It is not an easy task, and I am not even sure whether we can instill, imbue or infuse. Hence today’s post.

Instill is the most commonly used of today’s words. It means, dictionary.com tells us, “to infuse slowly or gradually into the mind or feelings.” So to understand instill we have to know the meaning of the word infuse, eh? The definition gives as synonyms the words insinuate (in my opinion using a secondary definition of that word) and inject. Not my favorite definition.

The etymology (according to etymonline.come) dates back to the early 1400s, as does the word infuse. Instill comes from the Latin word instillare that means to put in drop by drop, stilla being the Latin word for drop. Which is why the verb instill is related to the word distilling or the device used in distilling, the still.

Infuse, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word infusus (from infundere) and means to pour in, a lot at once, not drop by drop. It was not recorded as having been used figuratively (as I did in the introductory paragraph) until 1520. It still means to introduce by pouring, but again Dictionary.com gives a second definition of “to imbue or inspire.” Does that help?

Imbue also arrived in English in the early 1400s, from the Latin imbuere that means “to moisten.” The definition given is “to impregnate or inspire, as with feelings, opinions, etc.” with a second definition of saturating with moisture or color. The first definition is the sense I used initially, to saturate with feelings or opinions in the hope that those feelings or emotions will remain. This word has the least indication of volume and most indication of the recipient’s role in retention of what is being used imbued.

This brings us to the word inspire, which has seven definitions to choose from. The breadth of meaning ranges from “to fill with quickening influence” to “to guide or control, by divine influence.” 

The word came to English in the mid-1300s as the word enspiren that meant to fill (like the mind or heart with something like grace) or to prompt to action. The Old French had a word, enspiren, from which it may have come. Or it could have come directly from the Latin word inspirare that meant to inflame or blow into. Etymonline.com says that the Latin word is “a loan-translation of Greek pnein in the Bible.” The idea comes from Genesis 2:7, when the creation account tells how “…the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

What is the role parents play in developing their children? We try, through imbuing them with the dew of our knowledge, instilling drop by drop our ideas on character, and sometimes infusing them with opinions. And when we are successful, we inspire them with our lives and beliefs. My parents did for me. I hope my children can say the same. 

Momentarily Miffed

I feel it necessary to mourn the passing of a good distinction in words. Momentarily, meaning “for a moment,” is being transmogrified into meaning “in a moment.” Like when I hear the scraping of fingernails on a chalkboard, I cringe whenever a United Airlines crew member (it must be in their “script”) says “we will be arriving momentarily” when our arrival will take place soon and last for more than just a moment, unless you define "a moment" as 45 minutes to an hour. Or they say “we’ll be waiting momentarily for takeoff,” and that moment can be anywhere from five minutes to hours.

Now, for those nitpickers who want to point out to me that momentarily has a secondary meaning of “in a moment” I would posit that the word was perfectly good at describing a short-term situation and words like soon, anon, apace, forthwith, and (in the U.K.) straightaway work very well at expressing something liminal. Momentarily was first used to mean “for a moment” in 1650. For over two centuries that is what it meant. Then in 1928 someone (probably drunk with illicit hootch during the days of prohibition) misused the word to mean “in a moment” and since then the bothersome practice has increased.

If you wanted to say something would happen soon you would use the word soon. If you wanted to add speed to its occurrence you would use the word apace. If you wanted to be a little less distinct than soon you would use anon, and if you wanted to say something closer to “in a moment,” meaning quicker than soon, you would use forthwith.

The distinction between “for a moment” and “in a moment” may be small to many people, but to me it makes a difference whether I have to get all my belongings and get off the plane quickly because it will only be at the gate for a short time or if I only have to wait a short time to get to the gate.

One more thing: what other word do we have in English to mean “for a moment”? Briefly comes close, but is less distinct. Temporarily has a slightly different meaning, as if the action taking place is on its way to another permanent situation. (“We’re in this area temporarily until our gate opens up.”) We have plenty of words – shorter words – for “in a moment.” Use them, and leave momentarily to express a short duration!

Okay, now for some etymology (from etymonline.com). Momentarily was formed from the word momentary which came to English in the 1400s from the Latin word momentarius that means “of brief duration.” Apace has been used in English even longer, from the mid-1300s, and means “at a quick pace,” pace meaning step and coming to English in the 1200s from both Old French (pas) and Latin (passum). Forthwith means “at once” or “immediately” and is the modern equivalent of the Old English forð mid. So it comes to English from English, as does soon (it was sona in Old English). Anon is also Old English, though it developed a sense of procrastination as early as the 1520s.  

I’ll get to the words briefly and temporarily anon. But it won’t be momentarily. It will be another long post.