Monthly Archives: November 2009

Like last year, I went AWOL this month so I could do NaNoWriMo, which challenges you to write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. I hit 50,010 about fifteen minutes ago. Also like last year, what I wrote isn’t very good, though I think slightly improved on last year.

All that is fine, since the point of NaNoWriMo is to just sit down and write, and to not worry about it it’s any good. And who knows, maybe there is something salvageable here on a rewrite. Even if there isn’t, it was a hell of a lot of fun, and it was great practice.

Unlike last year, my story didn’t finished around the 50,000 mark. I probably have another 10,000 to go before it wraps up, which I plan on doing at a more leisurely pace. And expect live posting here to resume on Wednesday.

A final post from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. About a hundred pages in, the title character has been traveling across a desert and has just met a boy who has given him food and water:

He ate and drank until he felt logy, and then settled back.

I wasn’t sure what this meant, though from the context I would have guessed it meant satisfied.

Nope. I looked it up, and it means “sluggish” or “groggy.” Remember that when everyone is slumped on the couch tomorrow night.

American Heritage and Merriam-Webster Online give slightly different etymologies:

• AHD: Perhaps from the Dutch log, meaning heavy or a variant of the English loggy, meaning heavy, sluggish, from log, from the Middle English logge.
• M-W: Perhaps from Dutch log; akin to the Middle Low German luggich, meaning lazy.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! (And happy Nov. 26 to my British, Aussie, Canadian and other readers abroad!) See you all next week.

Another one from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. The gunslinger and the boy have encountered a group of horrifying Slow Mutants:

The gunslinger felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates.

Atavism is the “resemblance to grandparents or more remote ancestors rather than to parents; tendency to reproduce the ancestral type in animals or plants,” according to the OED. This is a great turn of phrase by King, invoking an ancient fear like that of a Stone Age man when something howled in the night.

The American Heritage Dictionary etymology: From the French atavisme, from the Latin atavus, meaning ancestor: from atta, father + avus, grandfather.” The OED says atavus literally meant “a great-grandfather’s grandfather.”

I’m going to have a few posts this month from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, which I was reading in October.

In a scene where the title character, as a young boy, has just defeated his master in combat, marking his coming of age. He has done so at an age younger than anyone ever has, his friends are watching the aftermath in shock:

They still watched him, caught in a bated moment that none of them could immediately break. They still looked for a corona of fire, or a magical change of features.

The OED defines bated as “Lowered or lessened in position, amount, force, estimation, etc.; especially in bated breath: breathing subdued or restrained under the influence of awe, terror, or other emotion.” It comes from the verb bate, which has a slew of definitions in the OED. The fifth definition on the second entry for bate is the one relevant here:

• 5a. transitive. To lessen in force or intensity; to mitigate, moderate, assuage, diminish. Now chiefly in the phrase “to bate one’s breath”: to restrain one’s breathing, and make it soft and gentle.
• 5b. intransitive. To fall off in force or intensity.

That meaning of  bate goes back as far as 1300, according to the OED. However, Shakespeare has the OED’ s first quotation for bated as an adjective, from the Merchant of Venice in 1596: “With bated breath, and whispring humblenesse.”

The OED says bate is an “aphetic form of abate.” Aphetic is the adjective form of aphesis, which means  “the loss of an initial, usually unstressed vowel,” according to American Heritage.

I was talking about Halloween costumes last month with a reporter friend who had recently left a job where she wasn’t very happy for one that has been a lot better. She asked for suggestions, so I said: “How about a disgruntled journalist?”

“But that’s my everyday costume!” she said.

“But aren’t you gruntled now?” I said.

I then looked up gruntled, suspecting  that disgruntled was one of those words that existed independent of the root word. I was partially right, as the OED explains that gruntled is a “back-formation from disgruntled” that means “pleased, satisfied, contented.” It’s not a particularly recent back-formation though, as the OED’s first quotation with gruntled is from 1938.

But digging into the OED, I found that disgruntle goes back much farther, with a quotation from 1682. It’s a combination of dis- and gruntle.

But wait, isn’t gruntled a back-formation? Not when you go back this far, where the meaning of gruntle is “to grumble, murmur, complain”; the first quotation in that sense goes to 1589.  And the dis- prefix here isn’t used in the most common sense of “In twain, in different directions, apart, asunder, hence abroad, away” as in disconnect or dismiss. The OED’s fifth definition for dis- is how it is used in disgruntle:

• “With verbs having already a sense of division, solution, separation, or undoing, the addition of dis- was naturally intensive, ‘away, out and out, utterly, exceedingly’, as in disperere to perish utterly, dispudire to be utterly ashamed, distædere to be utterly wearied or disgusted; hence it became an intensive in some other verbs, as dilaudere to praise exceedingly, discupere to desire vehemently, dissuaviri to kiss ardently. In the same way, English has several verbs in which dis- adds intensity to words having already a sense of undoing, as in disalter, disaltern, disannul.”

And disgruntle, which the OED defines as: “To put into sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humour; to chagrin, disgust.”

So there is the modern gruntled, which means content, and the old gruntle, which means to grumble. English follows weird paths.

The original gruntle comes from the word grunt, unsurprisingly. Grunt’s OED etymology: from the “Old English grunnettan (= Old High German, modern German grunzen), frequently of grunian (compare to Middle High German grunnen), meaning to grunt, an echoic formation parallel with Latin grunnire.

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.