Choice Vocabulary: September 2003 Archives

One of the hazards of using impressive words is accidentally reaching for the wrong one in the heat of disputation. It can be difficult to maintain the proper command of meanings when several little-used and unusual terms sound sufficiently similar to each other. More to the point, misuse of a big, fancy word will disastrously undermine the aura of learned intelligence that you are attempting to put over on your interlocutors.

I would thus be remiss in recommending last week's word, lugubrious, if I did not note a few other terms that are easily confused with it, such as lucubration and lubricous. It is essential to guard against confusion at all times, since using a word such as lubricous to describe a friend's mournful aspect will strain even a fast friendship.

lucubration refers to a solitary activity known only too well to every editor of The Glob. It derives, like so many of the snootier words in English, from the Latin. To lucubrate is to work by candlelight, and connotes the labors attendent on study or scribbling far into the night. The initial luc- is from lux, light, an element familiar from charming baby names such as Lucille and Lucifer. This happy association captures some of the essential pleasures of lucubration, which can be used to refer both to the act of burning the midnight oil itself or to the literary works produced by such toil.

Mrs. Bizzy: What do you think of our new vicar, then?
Mrs. Boddy: Hm.
Mrs. Bizzy: Isn't he wonderful? So young, and such the intellectual!
Mrs. Boddy: He's something shocking all right.
Mrs. Bizzy: I beg your pardon? Did you know he's writing a book on the divine body of the scriptures?
Mrs. Boddy: That does not surprise me in the slightest: he's carnally inclined.
Mrs. Bizzy: He's what?
Mrs. Boddy: He propositioned me.
Mrs. Bizzy: What? Vicar Glandstone?
Mrs. Boddy: After the Bible study group last week, I asked him for recommendations of further readings on the incorruptibility of saints both pre- and post-mortem. He pretended to have written something apropos the subject, and then he baldly asked me to call at the vicarage later so he could show me his lucubrations.
Mrs. Bizzy: Oh my goodness! What did you do?
Mrs. Boddy: I was utterly astonished at being addressed in such a fashion, so I bid him a hasty good day after kicking him in the shins.
Mrs. Bizzy: My, my, another lost soul, seething with cruel lusts. He seemed like such a nice, quiet man.
Mrs. Boddy: My dear, those are exactly the sort of people you need to watch.

In contrast to the upright, though perhaps pedantic, associations of lucubrations, the word lubricous is more suspect. A lubricous entity is characterized by lubricity, a smoothness or slipperiness that may be caused or enhanced by lubrication. A state of lubricity is therefore tricky and potentially treacherous. As an extended meaning, this term connotes lewdness, lechery and related entertaining vices. There is therefore a nice distinction between a lubricous glance and a lugubrious look that must be understood before employing either term in anger.

The Geek Chorus: Alright, dood, enough. I surrender.
Myself: I beg your pardon?
The Geek Chorus: You're the alpha male, OK? Chief BigWord.
Myself: Are you finding this presentation tedious?
The Geek Chorus: Well, your dictionary kinda stops on the first syllable, if you know what I mean.
Myself: . . .
The Geek Chorus: No offense, but there are limits. Some of us have stuff to do.
Myself: Ah, yes. I see.
The Geek Chorus: Seriously, man. I have work to do tonight.
Myself: And are your parents aware that your nocturnal, lucubratory activities are largely lubricous in nature?
The Geek Chorus: What?
Myself: You know what I mean. You're busy playing on the Shame Grid. What's your handle? The invincible Pr0n, who surfs for the Lusers?
The Geek Chorus: Man, I'm outta here.
Myself: Goodbye.

One of the appealing characteristics of the English language is its fearlessness in appropriating vocabulary from any source. You can easily find Latin, Greek, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Irish, Dutch, and Spanish words canonized within the vocabulary of English, though somewhat changed by the process.

These words are frequently borrowed as opaque wholes, without related words to set up helpful associations in the mind of a speaker. So, for example, the word lugubrious is unique in English, standing underived from any other word. You either know what it means, or you don't, and there's no way to figure it out unless you have been subjected to the tribulations of a classical education.

If you have had the pleasure of reading Catullus in Latin (and it is worth the while), you would have run across the verb lugeo in Carm. 39 referring to mourning, allowing you to infer that a person with a lugubrious physiognomy is a pretty gloomy-looking customer, even if it is a put-on.

The Lady: Is it Halloween already?
The Genilman: Naw, baby. 's my new look. I am the king of the night.
The Lady: King of the night?
The Genilman: You ever think about how beautiful the moon is, when it's all big and clouds blow over it? Over at the club we talk a lot about the moon, and the night. Space, death, y'know, the heavy stuff.
The Lady: Uh-huh.
The Genilman: So, you gotta put on your heavy-thinking clothes to deal with that. It's like a crime-scene cleaner-- can't wear no Hawaiian shirt to a crime scene. You gotta dress serious for serious business.
The Lady: Uh-huh. You look like Ronald McDracula.
The Genilman: Aw, don't be that way. Besides, that name was already taken. When I'm at the club, I am the dread Baron Courvoisier. I make a face like this: behold my fearful visage!
The Lady: . . . You are one lugubrious looooser.

Learning long Latinate words like lugubrious is worth the effort both for their descriptive power and for their usefulness in restaurants. If you find yourself slightly short of funds for an adequate gratuity, you can proffer genuine 50-cent words of this kind to make up the balance, scribbing them on the check. I recently presented the following word list to a waiter, after an indescribable meal:

1 Caesar salad . . . saponaceous
1 Soup of the day . . . multifarious
1 Special roast . . . precambrian
1 Creme brulee . . . auto-da-fe
1 Espresso . . . rheological

This gift of knowledge will happily fulfill your moral obligations to your server, but it is advisable to resort to your vocabulary in this way only if you happen to be wearing shoes that you can run in. Do not linger over the coffee: you should allow your waiter the pleasure of a private moment upon discovering your matchless gratuity.

In recent divagations through the wilds of English vocabulary, I encountered the curious specimen wittol. It turns out that this rara avis is a descendent of a once-vigorous family of terms inspired by the cuckoo and its curious means of raising young. For this week, will will abandon our studies in useful terms that sound much ruder than they actually are, and focus on these linguistic fossils, both living and extinct.

The actual cuckoo and its song was known to both classical and medieval authors for appearing in spring and heralding summer . One of the earliest pieces of written English music, the thirteenth-century pop hit 'Sumer is icumen in,' depicts the cuckoo as singing in the season:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu …

The cuckoo's singing is also memorable for its Reichian fascination with its own rhythm, repeated seemingly forever at a stretch. I suspect that this tendency to mindless, maddening repetition gave the cuckoo something of an association with simplemindedness and the compulsions of lunacy, leading to the modern he's going cuckoo, he's completely cuckoo, and all kings are cuckoos.

However, it is not the song of the cuckoo that recommends itself to our attention, but rather its fascinating means of reproduction. The cuckoo does not raise its own young. Rather, the female cuckoo lays lays her eggs in the nest of another bird, sometimes making room by eliminating any eggs that happen to be there already. The nest's owner, being generally bird-brained, raises the young cuckoos as its own, thus saving the cuckoo the trouble of care and feeding. Thus the cuckoo's nest always happens to be some other bird's nest, which has led to a an interesting set of associations with infidelity among human couples.

Although it is the male cuckoo that sings, and the female that invades the nests of other birds, when this pattern of homewrecking is applied to humans, we find that it is the male that takes on the role of invader. A man who seduces a married woman cuckolds her husband, who is considered a horned cuckold forevermore. This identification of the male adulturer with the female cuckoo is an interesting reversal of sex, but the implications for the human woman are unfortunate: she is reduced to a passive role as the site of the invasion.

There is in fact a strain of Scottish bawdry that makes very clear exactly what the cuckoo's nest is and where it can be found, which is perhaps a little too raw to explore fully in a feature of wide circulation. This is regrettable, because the various versions of the air 'The Cuckoo's Nest' are extremely pleasant to sing on a summer's night:

There's a thorn bush in the garden where the lads and lassies meet
For it wouldna do to do the do they're doin in the street
And the first time I went down there, I was very much impressed
By the rufflin up the feathers of the cuckoo's nest!

I am happy to report that these songs hold the cuckoos themselves up to some rather pointed criticism, but I digress.

The curious word wittol that started this train of thought refers to a witting cuckold. A wittol is a man whose wife cheats on him, who knows that she cheats on him, and who doesn't happen to mind. It may be that he is a cuckoo himself in his spare time, as well as a cuckold, but at any rate his marriage would appear to be happy enough.

A woman whose husband cheats can be referred to as a cuckquean, though it seems something of a stretch. So strong is the association of the wandering (female) cuckoo with the wandering human male, that in order to reverse the roles cuckoo is explicitly feminized with quean, a woman. This term appears to be completely extinct, whereas cuckold can still be encountered in the wild from time to time, although it is most likely to be seen by moderns in Shakespeare.

Taken on the whole, I cannot approve of the behavior of either cuckoo birds or cuckolding apes. Life is difficult enough without these domestic betrayals. Cuculus non facit magnam felicitatem, sed adulteram. Cave, lector!

I am pleased to learn that our recent experiments in promoting vocabulary are starting to yield results. One of our loyal readers reports that no less a writer than Samuel Beckett, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has availed himself of one of our recommended words in his radio play All That Fall. To quote from the work:

MRS ROONEY: Come down here, Miss Fitt, and give me your arm, before I scream down the parish!
MISS FITT: Well, I suppose it is the Protestant thing to do.
MRS ROONEY: Pismires do it for one another. I have seen slugs do it…

That a writer of such stature had the insight to sieze upon the word pismire in 1956, when he yet walked the earth, is a testament to the prodigious ability of our RetroSocket (tm) publication strategy to shine a light of knowledge into the past as forcefully as we shadow forth the future. I have petitioned my virtual correspondent 4rch33 to contact Mr. Beckett's shade for comment, which I hope to report in due time.

The word for this week is the subtle adjective glaucous. The word names the color of the sea: a bluish, grayish green. It has also taken on a technical sense in botany, referring to the state of being covered with a pale waxy bloom. What brings it to our attention is its sound, reminiscent of raucous and mucous. To pronounce it distinctly is to first scrape invisible peanut butter off of the roof of your mouth, then gargle invisible water, choke slightly, and finish with a hiss.

I admit to a fondness for the sea, and I find its subtle colors appealing. I am therefore somewhat disappointed that these qualities are labeled with word sounding like glaucous. If pronounced with appropriate force, it would make a passable term for some theoretically edible Klingon delicacy:

Captain KorD'ump: More glauQuss?
Ambassador Buffer: No, thank you, captain.
Captain KorD'ump: Bah! The old proverb is true: food is wasted on the weak, human!

However, this line of speculation is taking us from the matter at hand. The word glaucous can be effectively employed as a conversation-stopper, even when the meaning of the utterance is completely innocent.

The Genilman: I wanna get you a present. What's your favorite color, baby?
The Lady: Glaucous.

Likewise, simply describing something as glaucous, however accurately, will tend to call the whole context of discourse into question. Suppose that you are dining out, and due to poor planning you are dining alone. The waitstaff of the fine restaurant you selected is ruthlessly efficient and opinionated, and so you have been forced to accept the recommendations of your waiter in all things in order to avoid argument. You can serve as you are served by lodging complaints like the following:

Waiter: For the final course, the cheese and fruit selection de luxe.
Diner: These fruits are unacceptable.
Waiter: In what manner do they fail to please, sir?
Diner: Isn't it apparent? The grapes are patently glaucous!
Waiter: …I see. I do apologize.

It is vitally important to utilize this technique only under extreme provocation, and well after having eaten your fill. Waitstaff can be perilously vindictive.

Finally, when wishing to discuss a bluish-green color, the word glaucous simply has a greater expressivity than bluish-green. It evokes the great melancholy that afflicts all sea-going peoples from time to time when facing the vast, unsympathetic depths of the oceans.

Mrs. Bizzy: Oh, you should have seen the bridesmaids! The little dears, all in pink ruffles.
Mrs. Boddy: Pink dresses? I hope the girls were pretty.
Mrs. Bizzy: Oh, such bright faces, and all blondes, the dears.
Mrs. Boddy: Nothing sadder than a plain bridesmaid in pink. Unfair, especially with ruffles.
Mrs. Bizzy: They were just darling! I took so many pictures.
Mrs. Boddy: Like a great big gold ring set with an agate. A common stone.
Mrs. Bizzy: Oh, to be a young girl and a bridesmaid again!
Mrs. Boddy: They'll never get me to do that again, oh no! (Pause.) What about the bride?
Mrs. Bizzy: The bride?
Mrs. Boddy: Yes, there was one, wasn't there?
Mrs. Bizzy: Oh, the bride! It was so sad!
Mrs. Boddy: She died?
Mrs. Bizzy: No! The bridesmaids were such darlings, and then the bride enters in a full gown, with a bouquet of pink roses. The gown must have cost a fortune- silk, antique lace… oh, what a tragedy!
Mrs. Boddy: Yes? Go on.
Mrs. Bizzy: It… the gown, was… glaucous.
Mrs. Boddy: Glaucous! And pink bridesmaids!
Mrs. Bizzy: It was horrible, hor-rible!
Mrs. Boddy: There, there, take my handkerchief, love.