Monthly Archives: May 2010
Words of Others | “Grim Harbingers”
Great, funny writing by A.O. Scott in his New York Times review of Sex and the City 2:
Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) have made honest men of each other, giving the four main female characters, their male companions and the director, Michael Patrick King, a chance to wink, nod and drag out Liza Minnelli to perform “All the Single Ladies.” Her version is in no way superior to the one in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” and it is somehow both the high point of “Sex and the City 2” and a grim harbinger of what is to come. The number starts out campy, affectionate and self-aware, but at some point turns desperate, grating and a little sad.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t define it
I recently subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the day RSS feed. It paid off with an interesting entry pretty quickly: remiss. The word has a long and versatile history, with a host of definitions, mostly obsolete, and a lengthy, interesting etymology. The third and fourth definitions cover the modern meanings.
The definitions:
- 1a. Chiefly medical. Of a physical property or quality: reduced in intensity. Also of urine: dilute, watery. Obsolete.
- 1b. Dissolved; liquid. Obsolete.
- 1c. Originally: (of a sound) weak, soft, low. In later use: (of a syllable) unstressed.
- 1d. Of a condition, disease, etc.: not intense or strong; moderate, mild. Obsolete.
- 1e. Of degree: moderate, low, slight; lesser. Obsolete.
- 1f. Of taste or flavour: faint, slight. Obsolete. Rare.
- 2. Reduced in tension; slack, loose; relaxed. Obsolete.
- 3a. Of a person, an organization, etc.: neglectful in the discharge of a task or duty; careless, negligent.
- 3b. Of conduct, an action, etc.: characterized by carelessness, negligence, or lack of attention.
- 4a. Characterized by a lack of strictness or proper restraint; lax, undisciplined. In later use merging with sense 3.
- 4b. Not strict or severe in punishing; lenient. In later use merging with sense 3a.
- 5. Delayed, postponed. Obsolete.
- 6a. Free from vehemence or violence; gentle; (also) lacking in energy or effort. Obsolete.
- 6b. Free from work or labour. Obsolete. Rare.
And the etymology:
- Anglo-Norman and Middle French remis, remisse, meaning melted (of wax, etc.) (first half of the 13th cent. in Anglo-Norman), diminished, weakened, exhausted (c1240), weak, negligent, lazy (c1310), delayed, postponed (a1405), calm, serene (1496), (of a vowel) weak, soft, low (1521) and its etymon classical Latin remissus, meaning not drawn tight, slack, drooping, sagging, loosely arranged, (of activity or sound) free from passion or vehemence, gentle, relaxed, mild, (of people) free from constraint or solemnity, light-hearted, easy-going, slack, casual, lenient, forbearing, (of conditions) moderate, (of remedies) not potent, (of a patient) free from fever, in post-classical Latin also meaning dissolved, liquid (5th cent. in Palladius), weak or weakened in consistency or colour (1363 in Chauliac).
Random word nerdiness
The OED online has a “Lost for words?” button that gives you a random entry. I spent some time clicking through it over the weekend. Here are three interesting things it came up with:
- The etymology of cereal: from the Latin Cerealis, meaning pertaining to Ceres, the goddess of agriculture.
- The definition of orography: The study or description of mountains; the branch of physical geography concerned with the formation and features of mountains.
- The definition of palmiped: n. A web-footed bird. adj. Web-footed. Palmiped is classical Latin for web-footed.
Words of Others | Perfect Advice
I picked up Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life last week because I have been in a bit of an introspective mood lately and I’d read that this was a good book for that sort of thing. There’s a lot of good stuff in it so far, including this on perfectionism:
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Well, that’s pretty blunt, but it’s also probably true.
A paragraph later, she adds this:
Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground — you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe to move.
As someone who is perpetually facing moderate to heave mess and clutter of my own making, I fully endorse this view.
Go west, young man
My wife and I are visiting San Francisco and Yosemite National Park this week. I have a few things scheduled to post. (Funny that I will have more up this week, when I am 2,500 miles from home, than last. Sorry. It was a busy week.)
I probably won’t be active much here or on Twitter this week. I still haven’t decided whether or not to bring the laptop on the trip. Another reason I need a smartphone.
If you haven’t checked out the blogs I’ve linked to in the right column, why not take a look now instead of pining away for me.
See you all next week.
Inquiring spam wants to know
There were a series of strange spam comments on the blog recently, each in the form of a question. Here are some of them, with my answers:
Do you think about dying? Are you scared?
I don’t think about it any more than is usual, I think. I don’t want to die, but I also don’t think it makes much sense worrying about it. If you live your life in fear of death, then the life you live will be poorer for it.
I also thought this could be a not-so-subtle mob threat. If that’s the case, Jimmy, I swear I’ll have the money for you by next Thursday.
How has being a parent changed you?
Uh oh. I wasn’t aware that I was a parent. Does this have anything to do with the research study I participated in last year? The one that collected my genetic material? I never read the fine print on that. I did think it was weird that the lab was in a decrepit castle in the middle of the woods.
If you were a time traveler and could only go back in time or forward in time, which would you choose?
Forward. I love history, but I want to see where we are going. Also, jet packs and laser guns.
Most exciting experience thus far in your life?
Probably going to Rome last year with my wife. We saw a lot of amazing history, architecture, and culture; ate amazing food that was cheaper than what Olive Garden charges; and drank lots of fantastic wine that went for $4 a half liter
Second-most exciting was being kidnapped by a tribe of gorillas at the Philadelphia Zoo. But I don’t like to talk about that.
Getting to the roots of sectarian and secular
I was reading a New York Times article this morning about Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the botched Times Square bombing. At one point, I misread the word sectarian as secular:
At the same time, hard-line mosques were given money and land, elevating a narrow, often sectarian world view that cast a pall over young Pakistanis.
Stick secular in there, and the sentence makes no sense. My mistake.
But that had me wondering if the two words have a common root. They don’t.
First, the definitions. Sectarian, according to the American Heritage Dictionary:
- 1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a sect.
- 2. Adhering or confined to the dogmatic limits of a sect or denomination; partisan.
- 3. Narrow-minded; parochial.
Sect:
- 1. A group of people forming a distinct unit within a larger group by virtue of certain refinements or distinctions of belief or practice.
- 2. A religious body, especially one that has separated from a larger denomination.
- 3. A faction united by common interests or beliefs.
- 1. Worldly rather than spiritual.
- 2. Not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body: secular music.
- 3. Relating to or advocating secularism.
- 4. Not bound by monastic restrictions, especially not belonging to a religious order. Used of the clergy.
- 5. Occurring or observed once in an age or century.
- 6. Lasting from century to century.
Despite the common thread of religion and spirituality in the definitions, the words have distinct origins.
The AHD etymology for sect is that it comes from the “Middle English secte, from the Old French, from the Latin secta, meaning course or school of thought, from the feminine past participle of sequī, meaning to follow.”
Secular comes from the “Middle English, from the Old French seculer, from the Late Latin saeculāris, from the Latin, meaning of an age, from saeculum, meaning generation, age.” Webster’s New World adds that saeculāris meant worldly, profane, heathen in ecclesiastical (church) Late Latin.
The OED further explains that the first four definitions of secular above follow that etymology, while the fifth and sixth, those dealing with time, come directly from saeculāris and saeculum. The OED also says that in Christian Latin, saeculum came to mean “the world,” especially as opposed to the church, which explains how the ecclesiastical Late Latin saeculāris took on a meaning of profane and heathen.
Flabbergasted by a gasconade
At some point at work last week, I said I was flabbergasted by something. I can’t remember what — I think it was some odd piece of news. Someone said, “flabbergasted?” He knew what it meant; he was just surprised to hear it used. But it fit my feeling at the moment. From the OED:
- To put (a person) in such confusion that he does not for the moment know what to do or say; to astonish utterly, to confound.
Yeah, that was about where I was. But being questioned about it put me into Talk Wordy mode, so I wanted to know where it came from. Turns out that no one really knows. The OED gives the most information:
- First mentioned in 1772 as a new piece of fashionable slang; possibly of dialectal origin; Moor 1823 records it as a Suffolk word, and Jamieson, Suppl. 1825, has flabrigast, meaning to gasconade, and flabrigastit, meaning worn out with exertion, as used in Perthshire. The formation is unknown; it is plausibly conjectured that the word is an arbitrary invention suggested by flabby or flap and aghast.
Gasconade? Glad you asked. From the OED:
- n. Extravagant boasting; vain-glorious fiction.
- v. To indulge in gasconades; to boast extravagantly.
Apparently, gasconade is a slur. It comes from Gascon:
- 1. A native of Gascony, a former province in south-western France.
- 2. One who resembles a Gascon in character; a braggart, boaster (the natives of Gascony being notorious as such).
Words of Others | Jet Lag
I’m on a William Gibson kick lately. He’s a great writer, and he always has interesting ways of looking at ordinary things. I started Pattern Recognition last night, and right on the first page, as we are being introduced to the protagonist, Cayce Pollard, we get this:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
There’s a bit about the book and the whole first chapter here on Gibson’s website.
