New Free Rice Words XX
Bill Long 5/27/08
Many of the new and difficult words on freerice.com are names of rather obscure (for me, at least!) birds, marsupials and trees from all over the world. It shows me that in order to know our world, I really need to pay close attention to the Linnaean classification system as well as the popular names of things. In this essay we won't get to that (I am still mulling the value of essays on those more arcane words); I will focus here and the next essay on the following: detort, escalade, syntropy, sweeney, fleche, flechette, lentous, retrude, treenware, synonymicon, dunnage, stotious, shadoof, serein, supremum/infinum, claver, rheology, incondite and stound.
1. To understand detort we must first begin with tort, which has nothing to do with German pastries. It is derived, rather, from the Latin detortus, past participle of detorquere, which means to turn aside or twist out of shape. In law a tort is a wrong, injustice, a "twisted" situation. We also get torque from the word. Detort means the same as distort. It is a twisting, wresting or perverting something. Actually, the word emerged in theological contexts in the 16th century, as people accused each other of "twisting" Scripture. From ca.1555: "How miserably doth Tertullian [early 3rd cent. Church Father] wrest and wring the Levitt: to detort it to the confirmation of his heresy." Or, from Dryden (1682): "The Fanatics...have detorted those texts of Scripture."
2. Let's skip around a bit. Lentous, derived from lentus, meaning "slow" or "pliant," means "clammy, viscid." Viscid means "sticky" or "adhesive." "In this [a frog's] spawn of a lentous and transparent body are to be discerned many specks." The noun form of the word is lentor/lentour. I like the quotation from Francis Bacon: "Some bodies have a kind of lentour, and are of a more deptertible nature than others." Depertible? The Latin depertire is the same as dispertire, which means to "divide" or "distribute". Thus, something depertible is capable of being divided into parts; divisible. What does Bacon really mean, then?
3.-4. Moving more quickly, a fleche, derived from the French word for "arrow," has significance in fortifications, architecture and decorative art. As this article says, too, fleche is a term from fencing. In architecture it is a spire, such as the fleche atop the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A fletcher is "one who fletches arrows, an arrow maker."
Oh-oh.. I ran into another word in the Century while I was minding my own business on fletcher, and I had to turn aside to look at it closely. It is flexanimous. The word is taken from flex (past participle of flectere), which means "bend" (you "flex" or "bend" your muscles) and animum, meaning "mind." Someone who is flexanimous has the "power to bend or influence the mind; moving, affecting." From 1633: "He is that flexanimous Preacher whose pulpit is in heaven." Or, from the life of Arminius (1672): "There was in Beza beyond other mortals a flexanimous and perswasive eloquence."
Back to flechette. Yes, I was going to move more quickly... A flechette is a missile resembling a dart, dropped from an aircraft. The word seemed to rise and fall, like the flechette itself, in 1915. Yet, even though the word has been out of use since almost the day it was invented, it is "fair game" on freerice.com....
5. Escalade is either a noun or a verb. It is built off the French word for scaling a wall. I like a theological use of the word: "Sin enters, not by escalade, but by cunning or treachery." Or, "instead of entering the stadium by paying like everyone else, he entered by escalade."
6. I like retrude because of the root--"trude." The Latin trude means to "thrust," and we have English words such as detrude, extrude, intrude, obtrude, and protrude built off of it. Re, of course, means "back," and thus to retrude means to thrust back. "He retruded the head of his partner away from danger."
7.-8. Let's get to a few practical words, lest we think we are in Aristophanes' Cloudcookooland. Dunnage was originally (16th cent.) light material, such as brushwood, mats, and the like, stored beneath the cargo of a vessel to keep it from injury by chafing or wet. Now it can be used to describe padding in a shipping container. Thus, by extention, those styrofoam kidneys in your packages could be called dunnage. Then, we have treenware. If you know that the word treen means "made of tree" or "wooden," you know that treenware is kitchen or other small handcrafted items made of wood. Here is a web site about treenware.
9. Let's conclude this essay with a word on syntropy. There are three definitions for this word, derived from the Greek for "turning in the same direction:" (1) the tendency of two diseases occasionally to coalesce into one; (2) the state of harmonious association with others; or (3) in anatomy, a number of similar structures inclined in the same direction, such as the ribs or a series of vertebrae. Freerice.com used the word in the second sense.
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