Inark and inarch and inarm and inclip and enclip

One of the most popular bumper stickers of the late 1980s was "Arms are for Hugging." I always saw it on the backs of "Volvo-type" cars, which meant it was the liberal way of expressing dismay at the US military buildup in the 1980s even as the car-owners seemingly were recipients of that same society's largess. Aging hippies, with graduate degrees and 1.8 children in tow, were still focusing on the "peace agenda," but from a much more comfortable perch. Actually, when the sticker hit the culture, I was already aware of an earlier iteration of that strip.

In very early 1981 I was in CA. My father had just died, and I was helping my mother readjust to her new life. The (very liberal) church I attended at the time in Palo Alto had an elderly English couple in it, who brought to church one Sunday a copy of a bumper sticker they had just designed. In their very proper British way they begged pardon to introduce their creation. It said, "Arms are for Embracing." I am sure that the American marketplace couldn't endure a three-syllable word, and that someone who saw an early version of this sticker got his cronies to say "hugging" instead of "embracing," and an idea was born. Rather than feeling that their copyright was infringed, I am sure that my elderly friends felt vindicated.

An Overview of Four Words

Two of the four words for today emphasize a "hugging" or "embracing" reality: inarm and inclip. But, before getting to them, let's attend to the other two, which are not frequently used but shouldn't so quickly fall to the side. One of the meanings of inarch is "to arch in, encompass like an arch." From 1882: "When all the embracing earth, the inarching blue,/ Seemed the soul's cage no wings might battle through.." The sky's surround is not exacly like an embrace, is it? It is more like an arch, a vault which stretch up THIS high and then seemingly meets the earth at a point just beyond our vision line. Then, a line from theology in 1893: "The Divine Presence whom Christ calls His Father, who inarched the Spirit of Jesus and infolded Him."

There is, to be sure, a word picture behind "arch." The OED tells us that it is derived from two Latin words, arca, meaning a chest or coffer, and arcus, meaning a bow. However, when arca disappeared into Old French, the first child nourished by the Latin, it became the OF arc, which also translated arcus. Finally, when English got around to forming in the 14th century, the arcus root became more prominent. Hence, "arch" is always associated in English with something bowed or curved.

[The word arch in English also can be formed off the Greek "arche," which means first or original or chief or pre-eminent. When the Gospel of John says, "In the beginning was the Word" (1:1), the Greek behind it is "in arche en ho logos." Thus, an "arch-conservative" is one who is the primus inter pares of conservatives or, since Saddam Hussein talked about the "mother of all battles" he would inflict on America if we invaded him in 1990-91, the "mother of all conservatives." In Richard III Shakespeare could speak of, "The most arch deed of a piteous massacre." If we stretched the word "arch" a little from this, it can mean clever, cunning, witty, crafty or waggish. Thus, we have an "arch expression" or "arch response." The adverb archly, then, has nothing to do with something that is curved. "She responded archly to his clumsy attempt at romance," would mean that she greeted his attempt with pert or good-humored slyness. I used to get a mental picture, when I heard the word "archly," of someone standing on their tip-toes in responding, so that the "arch" of the foot was somehow implicated. I think I believed that if you said something "archly" you said it with raised eyebrows, hence forming an "arch." I persisted in this pleasant fantasy until very recently.]

I think our two examples illustrate its potential for current use. The inarching blue; the Spirit which inarches. We might use the term as a substitute for the overused word "aura." Rather than saying that someone "had an aura," why not talk about a spirit inarching them? I once had a friend take a picture of me under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. If that were done today, the caption would be: "Bill inarched."

Finishing with Inark

And, it seems to me, you don't have to be named Noah to be able to use the word inark. Defined as "to put or enclose in an ark," the two ancient (16th and 17th) attestations (h)ark back to its biblical origin. From 1595: "Greater, and better then inarked he,/ Which in the worlds huge deluge did survive." And, from 1646: "Get your souls in-arked in all these promises." Perhaps it is the latter usage that encourages our figurative flight of fancy with inark. Something within (Noah's) ark was protected and safely preserved through the storms that covered the earth. The only other English word that seems to capture this sense of protecting embrace is ensconce. But a sconce was a small fortification or earthwork, and the original meaning of ensconse was either "to fortify" or "furnish with earthworks" or to "shelter behind a fortification." Thus, ensconse comes from a military context, while inark emerges from the imaginative picture of Noah's boatbuiding and the subsequent trip through high waters. "Inarked we were throughout the tempest in the cramped confines of the two-person tent." A figurative use of this term could stress the confining, as well as protecting embrace of something. "She really hadn't explored some of the fine offerings of the city, inarked as she was in her hapless marriage."

Now let's move to the other two words: inarm and inclip.

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