Free Rice Words IV--Beginning with Discerption

There is such a great emphasis on "unity" and "making or becoming one" in our religious traditions because our experience in the world is often to the contrary. Loved ones are torn from us and experiences that should bring harmony often lead to the opposite. Sometimes nothing seems to go as planned. Thus, I don't think it is unusual that we have more words to express disunity or the act of pulling something to pieces than we do of putting things together or creating harmony. Yesterday I spent a lot of time talking about diremption and the confusions it has gone through in philosophical debate. It basically means separation or division. Then, direption (dropping the "m") suggests not only the sacking of a town but the "action of snatching away or dragging apart violently." Caxton, a 15th century printer and writer, first used the latter word: "For we have not obeyed thy comandementis, therfore we ben betaken in to dyrepcion, captyuyte (i.e., captivity), deth." Then, we have the word discerption. Though called "rare" in the OED, it is taken from the Latin dis (apart) and carpere (to pluck, pick). Actually, we have the common word excerpt in our vocabulary--to cull out passages, to quote, to extract. So, the root is familiar, even if the prefix is different.

Back, then, to discerption. It basically means to pull to pieces or to divide forcibly into fragments. The OED also uses another good word to describe it: dilaceration. Thus, diremption, direption, discerption, dilaceration. Each has its own little world, but together they destroy the unity for which we so fervently yearn. A few examples of the use of discerption will fix it in our minds. First, from 1647: "Hence are churches, congregations, families, persons, torn asunder...so as the whole earth is strewed over with the woful monuments of our discerptions." Then, two centuries later, from Gladstone: "Heracles suffers a strange discerption of individuality; for his eidolon or shade moves and speaks here, while he himself is at the banquet of the immortals."

An eidolon, by the way, is "an unsubstantial image, spectre, phantom." The Greek word morphed into idolum in Latin, whose original meaning as "idol" in English was an "image" or "similitude" of a deity, but the original Greek, when brought into English as eidolon, kept its "phantom" meaning. Carlyle first used eidolon in 1828; a few years later Scott said, "Calling up his eidolon in the hall of his former greatness." Does the eidolon have recognizable properties (i.e., can you tell whose phantom it is?)? Don't fully know, but I think so... Let this be our consideration of the four "division" words, ending here with discerption.

More Quickly Now--Fuller and Hele

A fuller is a blacksmith's hammer or, more particularly, according to this picture (a fuller is on the far left as well as the far right), a hammer which mounts in the anvil's "hardie hole," and is used for creating annular grooves in the barstock. I think I would need to have a pretty complete course on blacksmithing to know everything that is said here, but this gets us started.

On hele, however, much more can be said. We don't know if the proper pronunciation of it was like the back of the ankle or of a greeting, but its general meaning was to hide or conceal. The word has a curious history in Freemasonry; the article on "Hele" by Brother Yoshio Washizu is a most remarkable exposition of its use in the history of English. I will only quote one paragraph from this remarkable article:

"The word in question is often spelled "hele." It originates from an old English root "helan." Somner’s Saxon-Latin-English Dictionary (1659) has "helan=celare, tegere-to hide, to cover, to heale, and hence in many places a coverlet is called 'a hylling.'" Lye’s Saxon Dictionary (1772) defines "helan" as "to hele, hyll, celare, unde nostra hylling." Given as the principal meaning of "helan" in Lye’s dictionary, "hele" must have been in use in the latter half of the 18th century."

Have you ever heard of a coverlet called a "hylling?" Nor have I, but I suppose this is something that is just too good to miss. What I also didn't know about this word is that it is closely related to word connected to roofing--tegere is related to "tect," which means "to cover." So, as the article goes on to say, the word still survived into the 20th century in some parts of Great Britain.

"At one point there were some 25 guilds in Dublin, Ireland. One of them was made of of carpenters, millers, masons and heliers. 'Helier' derives from 'hele.' Today heliers or tylers are represented by slaters..."

Conclusion

When you are having this much fun, you are almost afraid to stop, but I will conclude here with a few words suggested to me by my "wanderings" from hele in the Century. The first set of words revolves around the Greek word helkos, which means "a wound, an ulcer" (ulcus is the Latin word for "ulcer"). Something helcoid is "resembling an ulcer," while helcology is that branch of pathology which is concerned with the study of ulcers. A helcoplasty is an operation of grafting on an ulcer a piece of skin from another part of the patient or another person, in order to hasten the healing process. Finally, the word hekistotherm draws on another solid Greek word, which has only bequeathed to us one or two words. The Greek word--hekistos, a diminutive, meaning "smallest." Since "therm" is derived from the Greek word for "heat," an hekistothermic is something that can grow in "very little heat" or, in fact, in cold environments, such as the arctic and antarctic lichens and mosses.

Hekistotherm first appeared in 1875 and then became part of regular, though fairly rare, scientific terminology. Here ends our trip for today. Thank you for joining me.

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