Alyssum and Athetize

Since the goal now is to have fun with difficult words from my list (with selected others), let's do it. Words that interest me here are alyssum, athetize, graphorrhea, lipogram, ananym and terpsimbrotos. I probably won't get to all, but at least we can make a start.

Alyssum

Alyssum is a genus of more than 100 species of flowering plants in the family Brassicaceae. The most famous is what we know as "Sweet Alyssum," lobularia maritima. Pictures of it abound on the Net. What interested me about it, however, is its name. It is derived from two Greek words, "a" which means "not," and "lyssa," which is rage or anger. Lyssa occurs frequently in Homer to describe the martial fury which warriors possess. So, when you put the words together you have "not rage" or "not anger." Well, we have to know a little more about lyssa in English in order to understand what we are learning. Lyssa was first attested in English 300 years ago and meant "madness, properly of a dog." A raging dog is a rabid dog, and so lyssa is rabies. Another name for rabies was hydrophobia, so named because of the fear or difficulty swallowing which afflicted people with rabies. By the way, the word lyssophobia was coined in the late 1880s to describe the "nervous state produced by morbid dread of having contracted rabies." That fear, as well as the word, has sort of faded from our vocabulary, just like the fear known as phthisiophobia, fear of "getting the tisic."

Well, to conclude this story very briefly, alyssum was supposed to have the power of curing rabies. I don't know how it was supposed to do that or who started the story (though this sounds like a Pliny-type story), but there you have it.

Athetize(d)

For some reason this word brought up thoughts of my youth. I think I know what it is. When I was a child at school, my teachers used overhead projectors to teach. The sheets they put on the overhead with the math problems or sentences were called "acetates," as I recall. So a teacher would tell a student, "go get the acetates," and presto, the student would know what she meant. Well, it was popular for the boys, who had little else to do with their lives, to hold their tongues when saying the word, and so it would come out like "athetate." I don't know why we did it; the lore of youth is rarely the subject of scholarly reflection. In any case, "athetate" came to mind when I ran across this good word, athetize.

It is a verb that comes from the Greek verb atheteo, which means "to set aside." More specifically it came into English in a classical journal (Journal of Hellenic Studies) in 1886, and so you know that the scholar would give a "classical twist" to it. Indeed, he did. His line was: "The solution is to athetize B (i.e., Book II) [of the Iliad]. When a classical scholar or other philologist (by the way, the 23,000 word list has the word philologaster-- "an inferior or bungling philologist"--formed on the model of other "aster" words--such as "poetaster") used the word, you know that it means to set aside a passage in Homer as spurious.

The whole notion of setting aside passages as spurious calls to mind the question, "Well, how do you do that?" The answer: well, you have to mark the affected lines with some kind of sign to indicate that you think it is spurious. The history of these critical markings, which differs from diacritical marks, is an interesting one indeed, and most would suggest that the critical markings came in with critical reading of Homer in the Hellensitic era. Two people most influential in establishing ancient Homeric scholarship were Zenodotus, the 3rd century BCE librarian at Alexandria, and his 2nd century BCE successor Aristarchus of Samothrace. A word on the latter first. Aristarchus was reputed to be the most significant of all critics of Homer, and either he or Zenodotus was credited with dividing the epics into 24 books each. Aristarchus excised so many lines of Homer as not genuine that the word "aristarch," still a useful word in English, means a "severe critic."

But I am more interested in Zenodotus. To him belongs the invention of the obelus, or the "division" sign, to indicate an athetized passage. Sometime later, and I don't know when, someone also introduced the keraunion (a Greek word which has never made it into English), the dagger or "thunder bolt," also as a critic's mark. These preceded the 'modern' invention of the footnote, where numbers were introduced because there was no uniformity on symbols for first, second, third, etc. footnotes.

So, you got more than you bargained for on athetize, but now you will never forget that word.

Graphorrhea

For some reason the OED doesn't have this word, though it is in the Unabridged and in my list. We see the notion of "flow" in the "rhea," and "writing" or "words" in the first syllable. Often the "r" is doubled in "flow" words ("hemorrhage" or "logorrhea"--a common "Bee" word, for example) but this isn't always the case. Well, the Unabridged defines it as "a symptom of motor excitement consisting in continual and incoherent writing." It doesn't say who invented the term or when, and since it doesn't appear in the OED, there is no easy answer to this lying around. I bet it was invented by a psychologist in the 1960s, just when the "mania" craze was exploding. Indeed, in one online article we have references not only to logorrhea or graphorrhea, but also to hypermnesia (coined in 1882), which is the ability to recall things with precision, hypersyntony, an immediate and increased receptivity to stimuli from the outside word, and tachypsychia, "rushing thoughts" or an acceleration of the thought process. The last two terms haven't really caught on.

What I question, however, is why graphorrhea has to be seen as a negative term or a mania? Why isn't the urge to write (and why does it have to refer to incoherent ramblings?) and keep on writing a blessing of the gods rather than a curse of a mania? Indeed, it seems like the person who thought that these manifestations were "morbid" (the old term) or manic was probably someone who felt that all life should be lived with the kind of Aristotelian "balance" that would have made the person sueed on the playgrounds of Eton and Oxford. Thus, I would like to argue for a more positive sense of graphorrhea than the Unabridged gives us. Someone who has graphorrhea just has to write. I think I understand the "problem." As poet Robert Bly says, he never really trusted someone without at least one obsession. So may it be.

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