pons asinorum and psychobabble

While continuing to prepare my list of words for the January celebrity spelling bee in Portland, OR, I decided to pause on some "p's" and introduce you to them. Some of them are words we don't use anymore but have an interesting history, short or long, and others have long fallen out of use but should be resurrected. Then there are some, like psychobabble, which, like Jesus said about the poor, will always be with us. A quick list of the words I want to introduce are premonish, prill, psyops, prothalamion, punditocracy, ptyalism, puerilism and psephology. Tons of others could also be introduced, like pons asinorum (the asses' bridge--to denote a difficult point in an argument or task taken on by an inexperienced person. This was historically taken to refer humorously to the fifth proposition of Euclid's first book (relating to the angles enclosed by the sides of an isosceles triangle), but I can't go any further along this road at this point). Again, I am ignoring such terms as primal scream therapy, which is listed this way in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate but is absent in the OED. Yet, as the Wikipedia article tells us, primal therapy is the more accurate term. It was coined about 1970 by a psychologist (I will give you one guess about which part of which state he developed the theory--you got it, Southern California) named Arthur Janov, who believed that therapeutic progress can only be made through direct emotional experience, which allows access to the source of psychological pain. Well, if it became known as primal scream therapy, Janov is probably to blame, because it is his 1970 book entitled The Primal Scream that launched the movement.

Beginning with Psychobabble

The proliferation of psychological approaches to self-improvement began late in the 1960s/early 1970s in California. I was there at the time, and I recall leading discussion groups on books such as I'm Ok, You're Ok or The Revolution of Hope or other books that tried to provide a vocabulary that would explore inner states of mind. I even recall leading a discussion of "psycho-cybernetics" an approach to healing our "inner scars" by a cosmetic facial surgeon, Matthew Maltz, who for years had a flourishing practice of reconstructive surgery in New York. One could have expected that cynics or critics of this epidemic of pop-psy literature would have invented pejorative words to describe the phenomenon. Indeed, psychobabble was first used by R.D. Rosen in 1975, even though the OED lists 1976 as the intial reference to the term: "For the consumer who doesn't understand psycho-babble, trying to sort out the various specialties can be downright mind-boggling: Gestalt, TA, bio-energetics, sex therapy, behavior modification, etc." It is a great term, even more immediately appealing than feminazi or cybersex, and has been used either to describe the imprecise use of psychological terminology by laypeople or to refer to the fact that psychological jargon is, by its nature, unclear and therefore partakes of the nature of babble.

Moving to a Word We Should Rediscover

A word we should (re)discover is premonish. Though everyone knows the word admonish, which means to warn or reprove, few know that we have both monish and premonish in our vocabulary, even though they have largely dropped out of our usage. Let me begin with a word on monish. Derived from the Latin moneo, meaning advise or warn, monish means to exhort or warn a person, while a monition is a formal ecclesiastical document or instruction to a person to obey. From 1872: "Monition" An order monishing the party complained against to obey." But the verb fell out of use in the 19th century, and the word monition, though attested by the OED within the last 50 years, seems also to have falled into desuetude.

Premonish, which the OED says is "now rare" means, as can easily be inferred from the prefix, "to forewarn; to advise, caution, notify or admonish beforehand." I suppose when we want to express the thought today we use "forewarn," and one meaning of forewarn in the OED is "To warn, caution, or admonish beforehand." Hm.. why did forewarn survive and premonish fade? Was there a linguistic survival of the fittest after a struggle to live, with the latter dying and the former flourishing? Well, some heavy hitters are quoted using forewarn. From Shakespeare: "We were fore-warned of your coming." Or, from Milton, "The..Arch-angel had forewarn'd Adam..to beware." Premonish, in contrast, doesn't have such illustrious parentage. But I am all for bringing it back, resurrecting it. If we can have two concepts/works for resurrection, why not two for warning beforehand?

Concluding

Let's conclude this essay with prothalamion, a very rare word, almost useless in our current context, but still attested in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate. Well, we being with the observation that the word was invented by Spenser in 1597 after epithalamion, which he coined in 1595. You would think that the "pro," as its name suggests, would come first, but that isn't the case. Well, an epithalamium is a wedding song, praising the bride and bridegroom and praying for their prosperity. Spenser invented it without Latinizing it; hence it was at first epithalamion. We can see how ephithalamium is a very useful term, for every wedding I have ever attended has songs during it, but the prothalamion, which never became Latinized in form (possibly because very few people ever used the term), is a "preliminary nuptial song." What would that mean? One example suggests it might mean "a song of greeting to happy lovers before the actual wedding-day had arrived." But when might that have been? You can see why it might not have been found useful even though, for some reason, the Collegiate still has it. Maybe they want to stage a revival of the term. Well, its inclusion is probably for reasons much more mundane--that a previous edition had the term.

This is enough for now. Let's do one more essay on our "P's."

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