Interesting Nouns--Adjectives

Memory is a multi-faceted and ambiguous gift. On the one hand, without memory we lose identity. One of the heart-breaking realities of Alzheimer's disease is that it ravishes the person's mind--elminating their store of memories and ability to recognize people even in the present. On the other hand if memory is too good, we also suffer great pain. When you combine vivid memory, for example, with great pain in one's past, you have all the ingredients for mental distress in the present. But memory still allures. As I examine my own, I think I have a particularly vivid "numerical memory." That is, if I am given a particular date on the calendar, I can then "plug it in" to my mental computer and often recall not simply the context where I was in any particular year, but also can conjure up feelings from that time, memories of people, and even, on occasion, odors. It is this skill that informs my ability to question people closely about their pasts. I ask them, for example, how they "divide" or "segment" their past; how they would divide the "chapters" of their life if they were to write an autobiography and, then, when this is done, how they understand particulars of some of the chapters. Through this process, if the person permits me to go very far with them, I enable people to "rediscover" things about themselves or others which they have long forgotten. And, I never charge them for my services...

All this was triggered in my mind by the rare word automnesia, which appears only a few times in a Google search and is invariably defined, following after the OED, as "spontaneous revival of memories of an earlier condition in life." This definition is derived from a 1901 textbook entitled Human Personality, but actually the word first appeared in a French book in 1896 (trs. into English in 1897): Ribot's work on the Psychology of the Emotions. I quote Ribot here not because I am interested in whatever theory he puts forth on the emotions, but because his description of visual, auditory and emotional memory rekindled my thoughts on how my memory worked. He quotes from one of his correspondences as follows:

"Littre relates that, at the age of ten, he lost a young sister under very painful circumstances. He felt acute grief at the time; 'but a boy's sorrow doesn't last long.' At an advanced age this grief suddenly returned, without apparent cause. 'Suddenly, without wish or effort on my part, by some phenomenon of affective automnesia, this same event reproduced itself with feelings no less painful, certainly, than those I had experienced at the moment of its occurrence," p. 153.

He went on to say that the emotion was repeated several times in the next few days, and then it ceased and gave place to "habitual recollection," i.e., to the purely intellectual form of memory.

Thus, we see the word automnesia as suggesting a self-generated memory from the deep past, and it is associated with a sort of intense memory of that past, even if we don't know exactly why or how this memory was triggered. Do we want to open up or close off possibilities of discovering or re-dicovering past memories? I have a friend who had a painful childhood, and even the attempt to think throught the years she lived at various addresses evokes such discomfort in her that she doesn't want to "go there." But shouldn't one of our tasks be to try to provoke and evoke the deep memory of emotion, rather than to "protect" the person by leaving that part of their past submerged? Is it really "submerged," if they know it will bring them great pain even to think about it? I suppose we must all seek our own truths, and my truth, I fear, is to try to probe people, and myself, with the specifics of visual, auditory, osmatic and emotional memory.

Epirot

I keep wanting to spell this word with an "e" on the end, and indeed epirote has almost twice as many attestations as epirot, but the latter the preferred spelling in the OED. It is derived from the land of Epirus, an inland area of NW Greece. Its original meaning in English is "one who dwells inland," even though there is only one attestation for this, from Jeremy Taylor ("The Greek and the barbarian, the epirot and the maritime"). Another early attestation of the term led me someplace else: "You must go amongst the Mountaines and places of fastnesse, as the Epirotiques in Greece..." We don't much use the word fastness anymore, but one of its definitions is a place of security or strength, which is more likely to be in a mountainous or inland area.

Isangelous

Even though the OED denotes this word as obsolete and rare, a double whammy from which most words can never recover, I think it has a great utility today, and I plan to introduce it in my speech and writing. Its meaning is taken from a literal reading of its parts: "equal" to the "angels." From the 18th century: "Let us look back upon ourselves, who we expect shall one day be made isangelous..." I could paraphrase Psalm 8 and say, "What is man that thou regardest him? Thou hast made him little less than God, perhaps even isangelous..." The problem with lovers sometimes is that they tend to see the beloved as isangelous, rather than as a struggling, confused and imperfect partner.

Dulosis/Svengali

I actually wrote about the word "dulosis," the process of ants making other ants their slaves, here. If you have a "rule by slaves," you have a dulocracy. So, I will conclude this essay simply by talking about svengali. Svengali, as the OED informs us, was a musician and hypnotist, a character in George Du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, and the word is used to mean a person who, like Svengali of old, exercises a controlling or mesmeric influence on another, frequently for some sinister purpose. Kipling was the first to make reference to Svengali a few decades after he appeared in the novel: "I'm glad Zvengali's back where he belongs [referring to a dog with a mesmeric stare]." The word was still rather unfamiliar, however, in 1942, when the periodical American Speech had this: "The word 'Svengali' shows the player's ability to keep his opponent so 'hypnotized' that he will not be aware of his trickery." WH Auden wrote in 1963, about Christ: "It is impossible to represent Christ on the stage. If he is made dramatically interesting, he ceases to be Christ and turns into a Hercules or a Svengali." The only ways I have seen the word used successfully these days is in the phrase "Svengali-like" or "Svengali enthusiasm..." One might also refer to "Svengali power" or "Svengali deception," I suppose.

With these words now defined, let's continue to comb the dictionary, realizing that we are closer to fuller knowledge than when we first began...

3508