16. Pages 114-125
Bill Long 5/1/05
From Bengaline to Birkie
I would like to do three things in this essay: (1) give a few "Bible-related" words or stories; (2) provide more "be" adjectives or verbs; and (3) add to the list of words I need to know.
A Word on the Bible
Very few words on the Bible. I would love to write for hours on this, but I only want to illustrate a few things I didn't know. A Bible published in 1631 was referred to as the "Wicked Bible" because it left out the "not" in the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." Maybe that was where Abbie Hoffman got the inspiration for his 1971 book entitled "Steal This Book." The "Treacle Bible" of the late 16th century was so called because, instead of reading "Is there no balm in Gilead?" (Jer 8:22), the verse read, "Is there no treacle in Gilead?" Finally, the "Printers' Bible" is so-called because Ps. 119:161 reads, "Printers have persecuted me without cause," instead of "princes..." Well, might the type of this last one have been set by someone who was feeling overworked?
Then, a few "biblio" words. Everyone knows that a bibliophile loves books, but a bibliophage (bibliophagous is the adjective) is one who devours books. Bibliomancy is "magic" by randomly selecting Bible verses. Finally, the OED has the entry Bible-backed, to describe a person who is hump-backed or has rounded shoulders. Perhaps such a person's shoulders looked rounded like a well-worn Bible.
More "Be" Verbs and Adjectives
A veritable flood of terms meets us here. Someone whose clothes are dirty might be bedaubed, bedabbled, besmeared, bespattered or beslubbered. I suppose that splashing through mud was such a preoccupation in medieval and early-modern England that they needed loads of words to describe one who hadn't negotiated the roads cleanly. However, beslobber means to praise fulsomely or, more usually, "to kiss like a drivelling child." An 1828 quotation from Macaulay is to the point, "The salaried Viceroy of France...beslobbering his brother and courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection." To beseem means to befit or suit--"it ill beseems you to complain."
Clothes that have been patched many times are bepatched; a log cabin is betimbered; an addled or confused person is betwattled and a person who bespouts is one who recites things in a pompous manner. Something reduced to nothing is benothinged. "His aim was to benothing the competition." Finally, my favorite is benighted, whose older and rarer meaning is simply to be overtaken by darkness of night [John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress says, "I am like to be benighted, for the day is almost spent"] while the more usual meaning is to "involve in intellectual or moral darkness, in the 'night' of error or superstition." As England flexed its muscles in the 18th and 19th centuries, it found this word eminently useful to describe those who fell under its imperial sway. So, Bishop Reginald Heber of Calcutta could pen what became the most famous missionary hymn of the 19th century, in which the congregation gently upbraids itself with these words:
"Shall we, whose way is lighted, with wisdom from on high/ Shall we to men benighted the lamp of life deny?"
Those who use the word benighted always think it refers to someone ELSE.
Running Through The List
So, let's list about 15 or so terms quickly that I need to master from these pages. There is bengaline, relating to a fabric, and berceuse, a lullaby. The Italian loan word(s) ben trovato means "appropriate even if not true," a word that I would have used a few weeks ago had I known it when I mentioned to my students an apocryphal story that was, nevertheless, too good to lose. I could have said, "an apocryphal story, yet ben trovato," though I am sure I would still have had to explain myself. A berdache is a Native American transvestite, no doubt a useful thing to know about. A bergamot is a tree or pear-shaped orange from a tree, while a bergere (pronounced ber ZHER) is an 18th century armchair. A besom is a broom, but the OED defines it also as "a contemptuous or jocular designation for a woman," a definition which our ultra politically-correct Collegiate doesn't recognize.
To bestead means to avail or help, while a betel is a pepper tree of SE Asia. A betise (ba TEZ) is an act of foolishness, while a bezant is a Byzantine gold coin. In bezique, a card game, the jack of diamonds and queen of spades together make a bezique, but I don't have a beclue of what that means. The Collegiate has five terms that follow that are not in the OED which itself is pretty amazing, but may testify also to the rapid evolution of our language. A bialy is a flat breakfast roll (Polish word), while a bidi is a cigarette, a bidonville is a settlement on the outskirts of town ("the bidonville around Khartoum was the place where much of the alleged murder and pillage took place"), bigarade is a brown sauce and bhangra is a dance. Wow. You just have to take the time to learn these things.
Let's finish with a few "bi's" that I need to learn. A bikie is a biker, though I don't think I would call him that to his face. Bilharzia is a genus of parasitic worm named after the German physician, Theodor Bilharz, who discovered it in 1852. Thus, the bilharzia is of interest to helminthologists. Where you have these little critters infecting your bladder, you have bilharziasis or schistosomiasis. The worm was named after this "indefatigable discoverer," as a scientific journal has it, in 1859, three years before his death at the early age of 37. I suppose he wasn't so indefatigable after all.
Finally, we have biliverdin, a green pigment, billon, a silver alloy, biltong, a kind of beef jerky, binaural, heard with both ears, and a bine (plant). A Scottish word for lad is birkie, while the refraction index of minerals is called their birefringence. A veritable feast of words tonight.
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