Monthly Archives: October 2009
A rich vocabulary
Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day recently had an interesting entry on near-synonyms for nouveau riche:
The gallicisms “parvenu” (/PAHR-vuh-noo/) and “arriviste” (/ah-ree-VEEST/) are synonymous, meaning “a person who is newly rich; an upstart.” “Arriviste” can also refer to one who has recently acquired power or success that isn’t necessarily monetary.
Garner also warns:
But “parvenu” and “arriviste” are uncommon enough that they smack of sesquipedality.
You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day here.
A book that elided my boredom
I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods last month, and besides providing yesterday’s Words of Others, it had a slew of interesting words in it. Gaiman is a fantastic writer, and he uses words like a jeweler, choosing and setting each one precisely where it will sparkle for maximum effect.
(Warning: Spoiler to follow, but the book is eight years old. Still, if you plan to read it and really don’t want to know anything, you should skip this.)
The novel explores the gods that people brought with them to America, and then forgot. In the scene where I found this word, the main character, Shadow, has been brought back from death after having been hung on a tree. As he died he dreamed and had visions, and Shadow is now rediscovering the world of the living:
Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that , soon enough, the million-yard stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
OED gives these definitions:
- 1a. To destroy, annihilate (the force of evidence). Obsolete.
- 1b. Law, especially Scottish. To annul, do away with, quash, rebut.
- 2. To strike out, suppress, pass over in silence.
- 3. Grammar. To omit (a vowel, or syllable) in pronunciation.
The closest sense to what Gaiman meant here seems to be the first, obsolete definition, though the second works as well. But I like the idea that Shadow’s dreams, which were probably real, will fade under the force of evidence of the “real” world.
The word comes from the Latin ēlīdere, meaning to strike out : ē-, ex-, ex- out + laedere, to strike., according to the American Heritage Dictionary. AHD also gives a slightly different set of definitions:
- 1a. To omit or slur over (a syllable, for example) in pronunciation.
- 1b. To strike out (something written).
- 2a. To eliminate or leave out of consideration.
- 2b. To cut short; abridge.
Words of Others | On Our Islands
From Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a novel that explores the gods that people brought with them to America, and then forgot. The following quote comes in a discussion of how stories can allow us to safely experience the problems of others (bonus, quote includes a bit of etymology):
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who loved, and then, by some means of another, died. There. You may fill in the blanks from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes — forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” …
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without any real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
But then I read an article in this month’s Wired about how our friends and family’s behavior greatly influence things like our weight and our ability to quit smoking:
An obese sibling hundreds of miles away can cause us to eat more. The individual is a romantic myth; indeed, no man is an island.
I think both ideas are right. People shut out the pain of the greater world, because it is too much to bear. But they also allow the pain (and the joy) of their family and friends onto their islands, because that is what friends and family do for each other. Maybe each man is an island, but an island in an archipelago of our loved ones.
And here’s a fuller etymology for insulate, from the OED: “from Latin insula, meaning island, + -ATE, or from insulatus. The verb insulare is not recorded in late or medieval Latin, but may have existed in the latter or in Renascence Latin; the corresponding Italian isolare ‘to reduce into an island’ is known in 16th century.”
Un-hiatus
OK, I am back. A few things:
- Sorry I crapped out for a month.
- September went by fast, didn’t it?
- I spent the weekend redesigning the site a bit. The theme is one of the ones WordPress offers freeloading users like me. It’s called Vigilance. The header and button designs are my own. Let me know what you think.
- Along with the redesign of the site, I hope to be refocusing it a little bit and writing about a bit more than just interesting words. I’ve got some books I’ve been sent to review that I hope to actually get to. And I would like to write a bit more about what I am reading on my own time too. And maybe other things too. We’ll see.
- That is all.
