Peevish, senseless, malignant, mischievous, harmful

The definition of peevish as petulant, and petulant as peevish, brought to mind a story from my youth. The big news as my 4th grade class began was that Dag Hammarskjold, the beloved Secretary General of the United Nations, had just died in a plane crash while he was trying to broker peace negotiations in the Congo. I grew up in a town tucked inside the Connecticut border about 40 minutes from the United Nations headquarters, and we were all "pro-UN" in those days. The teacher somberly told us that she "lamented" his death. I, not really knowing what that term meant, decided to take the Thorndike Barnhart dictionary from the shelf while we were supposed to be doing something else, and I looked up "lament." It said, "to mourn." Not fully sure of the scope of that concept, I looked up "mourn," which was defined as "grieve." Again, I looked up "grieve," which said that it meant "lament." Round and round I went, lost in the dictionary. Luckily for me, I grew into the concept of lamenting, and eventually wouldn't have to wrack my brains to understand these terms. Unfortunately, the same hasn't happened regarding peevishness.

Returning to Petulant, et al.

So, recall what we did: we decided to follow one definition of peevish, which was petulant, and then we looked up what petulant meant. We first started with petulance, and learned that it could include or somehow relate to the concepts of sauciness, wantonness and rudeness. But then I turned to petulant. It is defined as follows: "manifesting peevish impatience, irritation, or caprice; peevishly pert or saucy; peevish; capricious." I always thought of capricious as being something whimsical, rather than something saucy or pert, but I was taken that the definition included three references to peevish. It almost seemed as if the words were joined at the hip, but no one knew who was Chang or Eng.

Then, I felt like Keats on looking into Chapman's Homer when a new star had come into his ken. The Century had a little article limning the difference among several related words. Here is what it says: "Petulant, Peevish, Fretful, Pettish, Cross, irritable, irascible, ill-humored, snappish, crusty, choleric. The first five words apply to an ill-governed temper or its manifestation." Now I felt I was actually getting somewhere. The Century went on to distinguish petulant and peevish. The former it defined as "a quick impatience, often of a temporary or capricious sort (oops, there goes the caprice definition for peevishness, I suppose), with bursts of feeling." Thus, one could have a "petulant teen or a "petulant answer." But how is peevish defined? "That which is more permanent in character, more frequent in manifestation, more sour, and more an evidence of weakness." So, the Century is trying to take us down a road, influenced by Aristotelian psychology, which looks at peevish as a set condition of impatience, almost a habit, and petulance as something passing or ephemeral. It sounds as if your petulance could mature into peevishness if you just gave it the chance. I wonder, however, if in the process of getting over your peevishness, which you might be able to do after spending thousands with counselors, you have to go through petulance to get to being a nice person or you can take the bypass around it, and get right to normalcy? I really don't want to get into fretful, pettish and cross here, or I could go on for quite some time.

Returning to Peevish

So our trip to petulant/petulance has resulted in a rather narrow and precise meaning for peevish. It is a kind of impatience that is long-lasting, deep-seated and more "sour" than mere petulance. It sounds like something you grow into. "What began as petulant objections to the arrangement of the tablecloths soon settled into a peevish attitude towards the whole wedding." Well, let's see how that stacks up as we return to peevish. After all, we just went down one definitional road.

So, the second definition of peevish in the Century takes us slightly away from the petulant road. "Perverse; self-willed; froward; testy." Usually when I think of someone who is froward and testy, I think of an immediate action, rather than a deep-seated attitude (if that distinction really makes any sense). Maybe, however, we just have linguistic imprecision or inadequation here, for the quotation from Shakespeare that follows doesn't help us. From Two Gentlemen of Verona: "She is peevish, sullen, froward,/ Proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty." The most that can be said from this description is that peevish means something that is ill-tempered. Maybe, going back to our football illustration of the previous essay, we must penalize peevish 15 yards for "piling on" (itself an obsolete football penalty); it simply can't seem to confine itself very narrowly.

The "Obsolete" Definition

Then there is the final definition, meaning "childish, silly, foolish, trifling." The dictionary says it is obsolete. Phew. But here are a few quotations. "I see and sigh (bycause it makes me sadde)/ that pevishe pryde doth al the world possesse." Or, "There never was any so peevish to imagine the moone either capable of affection or shape of a mistris."

Conclusion

So, what did I do in my growing desperation? I turned to the OED, the dictionary that settles all the squabbles, the authoritative source to resolve my discontents. After reading through the seven definitions suggested*, I decided to do some

[*1. silly, senseless foolish (obsolete), with a sub-meaning of out of one's senses;
2. spiteful, malignant, mischievous, harmful. 3. An epithet of dislike, hostility, disparagement, contempt (obsolete). 4. Perverse, refractory, froward, headstrong; obstinante; self-willed, skittish, capricious, coy (also said to be obsolete). 5. Morose, querulous, irritable, ill-tempered, childlishly fretful (this seems to be the big one, which the Century picked up); the other definitions are not well-attested or in an adverbial construction--peevishly.]

brief work on the etymology, and I ran across this note in the OED: "Derivation unknown. The exact sense of the adj. in many of the early quots. is difficult to fix, and the following treatment is in many respects only provisional." Hm. I guess that was exactly what I was feeling...though I sure got a wonderful tour through the dictionary in order to learn this.

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