Talk Wordy to Me

On Wednesday I wrote about susurrus, a word from Latin that means “a hum, whisper,” according to Merriam-Webster Online.

M-W’s entry on susurrus also suggested looking at its entry on swarm.  Between that and the American Heritage Dictionary entry, I found that swarm is thought to be a Middle English word from Old English swearm, meaning a group of bees; it is akin to Old High German swaram and probably to Latin susurrus. The OED concurs and adds that “The root is usually identified with that of the Sanskrit svárati, meaning sounds, resounds, and svará, svára meaning sound, voice.”

However, the OED also says that swarm’s etymology might be entirely different, related to the movement of the swarm, not the humming sound it makes:

“But the etymological meaning may be that of agitated, confused, or deflected movement, in which case swarm and swerve might arise from parallel formations on the same base.” The OED cites “the parallelism of swarm and swarve (both can mean ‘To climb up a pole, tree, or the like, by clasping it with the arms and legs alternately’); the Norwegian dialect svarma, meaning to be giddy, stagger, dream, and svarva, meaning to turn, go in a circle, stagger, be agitated; …. also the meanings of the German schwärmen, meaning to swarm, rove, riot, fall into reverie, rave.”

The OED’s climbing meaning for swarm (and the synonymous obsolete word swarve) is “of unascertained origin. Perhaps originally a sailor’s word borrowed from the Continent, but no trace of the meaning has been discovered for phonetically corresponding words.”

Here’s another good word that I came across in  Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:

There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear.

I love this word. You hardly need the context to get it — susurrus sounds like what it is:

• OED: A low soft sound as of whispering or muttering; a whisper; a rustling.
• AHD: The act of whispering; a whisper; a murmur.
• M-W online: A whispering or rustling sound.

Susurrus comes straight from the Latin, meaning “hum, whisper,” according to M-W Online.

More Friday on an interesting aside I found while reading about susurrus.

I’ve got a project that will be taking up most of my free time this month, so I’ve scheduled a few posts a week through the end of November. I’ll still be around to moderate comments, and I’ll still be active on Twitter.

This week’s Words of Others was from George R.R. Martin’s The Hedge Knight. Today’s post comes from the sequel to that story, The Sworn Sword, and is a good one to lead into Halloween weekend.

Dunk is now in the service of a very minor lord and is visiting another castle at the lord’s behest. The lady of Coldmoat castle is a 25-year-old with three dead husbands and is called the Red Widow. Dunk is discussing her with Coldmoat’s priest, who says:

Coldmoat crawls with revenants, it must be said. The husbands die yet their kin remain, to drink my lady’s wines and eat her sweetmeats, like a plague of pink locusts done up in silk and velvet.

Revenant has two meanings, according to the OED:

• 1. One who returns from the dead; a ghost.
• 2. One who returns to a place.

The ghostly variety of revenant is the older meaning, with a quotation from 1827 in the OED. The second meaning dates to at least 1886.

The word comes from the French, where it is the present participle of revenir, meaning to return. The American Heritage Dictionary points out that the word revenue has a similar origin, and gives further etymology in revenue’s entry: “Middle English, from Old French, from feminine past participle of revenir, from Latin revenīre : re- + venīre, to come.”

I spotted what I thought was an odd usage of the word moot in an article in last week’s New York Times about a Senate bill that would “end what has become known as the “widow penalty” — the government’s practice of annulling foreigners’ applications for permanent residency when their American spouses die before the marriage is two years old.”

Some of the spouses affected by the widow penalty had sued over it, but:

The bill approved Tuesday would appear to moot Ms. Robinson’s case, along with about a dozen similar court cases around the country that are challenging the widow penalty.

I’d never seen moot used that way as a verb. The American Heritage Dictionary has these definitions for it as a transitive verb:

• 1a. To bring up as a subject for discussion or debate.
• 1b. To discuss or debate.
• 2. Law. To plead or argue (a case) in a moot court.

But nothing in the sense of making the case unnecessary. That sense compares to the AHD’s second definition of moot as an adjective, as in a moot point:

• 1. Subject to debate; arguable: a moot question.
• 2a. Law. Without legal significance, through having been previously decided or settled.
• 2b. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.

I scanned through the much larger set of definitions for moot in the OED and couldn’t find any for moot as a verb meaning to make irrelevant or unnecessary.

So I then checked my Garner’s Modern American Usage. Although the book is for a general audience, Garner’s background is in law and the book has a lot of good entries on law-related words that dictionaries do not explore as fully. On moot as a verb, Garner says:

Historically, the verb “moot” meant “to raise or bring forward (a point, question, candidate, etc.) for discussion.” That sense was formerly used in American English, but today it is current only in British English.

In American legal usage, a new sense of “moot” has taken hold: “to render (a question) moot or of no practical significance” (Black’s Law Dictionary [9th ed. 2009]). E.g.: “A challenge to an abortion statute will be mooted after nine months by the birth of the child.” William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, “The Economics of Anticipatory Adjudication,” J. Legal Studies 683, 717 (1994).

So the NYT article’s usage was not incorrect, just unfamiliar to me. (That could be another subtitle for this blog. Good thing I like learning this stuff.)

All of these usages derive from moot as a noun, defined by the AHD as:

• 1. Law. A hypothetical case argued by law students as an exercise.
• 2. An ancient English meeting, especially a representative meeting of the freemen of a shire.

The second definition is the original meaning of moot, from which all the rest evolved. OED says the use of moot for the English meetings goes back to the 12th century.

This week’s On Language column in the New York Times Magazine was about the stop-and-start genesis of the title Ms. It was first proposed in an article in The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., in 1901,which said:

Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts.

But it wasn’t until long after 1901 that it caught on, as feminists promoted it as a title that did not tie them to marital status. But that wasn’t the aim of the 1901 article, On Language thinks:

Though (philologist Mario) identified the early proponents of Ms. as feminists, the Republican writer (most likely a man) presented the argument for the title as one of simple etiquette and expediency.

Here’s the lead of a story in Wednesday’s New York Times:

BEIJING — In what has become a familiar vocal pas de deux, Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader, stepped off a plane in Tokyo on Tuesday and immediately began accusing the Chinese government of secretly executing members of the Uighur minority and illegally detaining hundreds of others.

The OED defines pas de deux as “a dance for two people. In extended use: a partnership or liaison between two people, countries, etc., especially one which is difficult to initiate or requires careful handling.”

I’ve said before that I can be a fan of sending people to the dictionary, but I usually like that to be accompanied by a hint of context or to greatly add something to the story.

In this case, I don’t think that exists. Even if you know what a pas de deux is, it’s not clear here what the two-sided relationship is. Is it that of Kadeer and whatever country she has visited? That doesn’t seem likely, since it’s a “vocal pas de deux,” and the host country isn’t doing any talking. The same goes for a pas de deux between her stepping off the plane and starting to attack China, since the plane obviously isn’t talking. So is it between her two accusations, that of executions and detentions? That seems to be the most likely explanation.

But saying pas de deux in that case doesn’t add anything to a person’s understanding. It smacks of either showing off or of trying to spice up a lead that doesn’t have a lot of action. If the goal was the latter, I think this fails because it just clouds the introduction to what was a pretty interesting story about Kadeer. There would have been nothing wrong with something like “BEIJING — In what has become a familiar greeting … ” And China’s detentions and executions don’t so much have a relationship as they are part of the same policy of human-rights violations.

The New York Times is a more challenging paper when it comes to the language it uses, and that’s great. But this goes a bit above and beyond, especially in a news story.

Here are two quotations from the OED where pas de deux is used to better effect. You still might have to look it up, but the definition is immediately applicable to what you just read:

• 1973 Times Literary Supplement 26 Oct. 1324/1 Between them they perform a ritual examination of conscience, a pas de deux in which they are painfully at cross-purposes.
• 2001 Science 10 Aug. 1034/2 Researchers have identified several critical steps in the delicate pas de deux between HIV and the cells it infects.

Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary etymology: “French : pas, step + de, of, for + deux, two.”

Here’s an interesting bit from today’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Noisome is often misconstrued as meaning “noisy; loud; clamorous.” In fact, it means “noxious; malodorous.” The word is related etymologically to “annoy.”

Here’s the etymology for noisome from the American Heritage Dictionary: “From the Middle English noiesom : noie, meaning harm (short for anoi, meaning annoyance, from Old French, from anoier, meaning to annoy)” + “the Middle English -som, from the Old English -sum, meaning -like.”

And the AHD etymology for annoy: “From the Middle English anoien, from the Old French anoier, ennuyer, from the Vulgar Latin inodiāre, meaning to make odious.”

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