Continuing with the Pleasure of Words--11th Essay

There are tons of words in English that look like other words we know but if we try to extrapolate from the words we know to these words, we fall flat. Some examples are adventitial, saury, amphibole, pituita. I have written about pituita here, amphibole here and adventitial here. So, let's begin with saury.

The first problem we encounter with saury is the derivation of the word. My inclination, supported by the OED, is to see it derived from saurus, the Latin word for "lizard." We have tons of words in English with this prefix: saurophagous means eating lizards (I think I saw people doing this in Beijing..); the Saurodontidae is an extinct family of "lizard-tooth" fishes, etc. Something saurous resembles a lizard. The Century uses the neatly-sounding, but difficult to say, saururous to denote something that is "lizard-tailed." So, a saury, which actually is a fish, might look like a lizard (that is the best I can do with the OED etymology). Think so? Here is a diagram from an Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife web page to give you a "close up" of the rather rare Pacific saury (Cololabis saira). Here is an image of a pile of dead Pacific saury--just what you wanted to start your day, I am sure... The Century, on the other hand, has saury derived from the French saur, or sorrel/saurel. There are other kinds of saury: the skipper or bill-fish or any species of this genus. You could spend your whole life on just a few fish; maybe you are called to a life of piscatorial pleasures. But if you just thought that saury was some kind of "lizard," you would have gone down the wrong path.

Cataplasm

One other word that looks like "someone you know" but isn't is cataplasm. I so wanted to see it as having something to do with Greek tragedy (sort of alike a catastrophe--a turning down, that is, the "final turning" of a play). But it doesn't. Then, I was hoping it might be related to the rare word catasterism (a placing among the "stars"; Greek word for star is aster) which was the name of a treatise attributed to Eratosthenes in the 3rd cent. BCE, giving the legends of the different constellations. Again, no connection. But as you see, I was wallowing around in classical antiquity, and that didn't help. So, I looked at the word again. From plasm we get the words plaster and plastic. The Greek word plassein means to "form" or "shape." The verb kataplassein means to spread over something. Then, bingo, the realization dawned that a cataplasm is "something spread over something else," or, in this case, a poultice or soft substance to be spread over the body. Thus, it is an ointment, a poultice, a soothing spread.

The word also has been used figuratively over the years. From 1622 we have: "the cataplasm of a well-cozened Lawyer" (i.e., a lawyer who cheats and deceives). Or, Burke used the word in 1796: "The emollient cataplasms of robbery and confiscation." Anything that tends to comfort, mollify, soothe can be called a cataplasm. "When he felt lonely, he always went for pizza, a sort of oral cataplasm for a wounded psyche." A synonymn for cataplasm is a fomentation or fomentum. Indeed, in this essay I trace a little of the history of the word foment, which began as a pleasant thing that keeps warm and gives physical comfort and became, in the 1620s, a term to describe somethign unpleasant that is "stirred up." "What we need in our day is a cataplasm for the soul, a fomentation that soothes, an emollient that tenderly treats us as we need to be treated. Then can we rise with wings like eagles, and run the race before us."

More Practical/Visible Now

I wanted to pick up a word from a previous essay. When I spoke of the Indian silken fabric kincob a few days ago, I neglected to quote one of the first attestations of it in English. From 1786: "She would ransack the zenanah..for Kincobs, muslins, cloths." I hadn't run into zenanah, and so I learned that a zenana (current spelling; derived from the Hindu, then from Persian, word meaning "woman") is that part of a dwelling-house in India and Persia in which the women of the family are secluded. The word for these quarters in Arabic is haramlik. The word zenana had come into English in 1761: "I asked him where the Nabob was? Who replied, he was asleep in his Zenana." What is a man doing in the zenana? Arrest him!

Conclusion

Let's finish with a random words for which there is such a clear online picture as to make you remember it forever. A burladero (not in most English dictionaries) is one of four wooden shields positioned just in front of four openings in the perimeter wall of a bull-fighting ring, where the bullfighter can slide behind and take refuge but the bull can't get to him [by the way, the barrera is the 5' high wooden wall encircling the ring]. Here is a picture of a matador seeking protection behind a burladero. Maybe you could be the first to develop a figurative meaning of the word. Just as the ancient Israelities had their cities of refuge, maybe we need an occasional burladero from the crushing, and goring (?), cares and carks of life.

Let's continue with more of this now.

3721