26. Pages 193-205
Bill Long 5/9/05
From the Ca's to the Ch's
Where do I start with these words? So many of them have such suggestive meanings that it is all I can do just to list a bunch of them that I am supposed to know. Let me do this. First I will "finish up" from the preceding page, and then I will go into the words of these pages, even though I might not make much "progress."
Beginning with Caseous/Caseation
The Collegiate simply defines caseation as "necrosis with conversion of damaged tissue into a soft cheesy substance." The word that stands behind it is the Latin caseus. Caseus means cheese, to be sure, but also has an interesting attestation as a term of endearment. From Plautus, we have the following:
"meum mel, meum cor, mea colustra, meu'molliculus caseus," which can be translated, "My honey, my heart, my beestings [another term of endearment!], my sweet little cheese."
The definition of caseation as "the coagulation of milk, conversion into cheese" (OED) is not attested in the quotations given, but it seems that from the middle of the 19th century the medical field took over the term. And so, by the early 20th century it could be defined as a necrosis characteristic of tuberculosis, in which the infected tissue becomes a firm, amorphous, yellowish-white material resembling cheese. It is interesting that the OED talks about the tissue hardening to become like cheese (its yellow-white color also reminds one of cheese) but the Collegiate talks about its becoming soft like cheese. Jeez, which is it? Well, on to other words.
I also just want to mention canorous, meaning melodious, because of a pleasant Lowell quotation using the term. "The Latin has given us most of our canorous words, only they must not be confounded with merely sonorous ones, still less with phrases that, instead of supplementing the sense, encumber it." So, seek canorous words in speech and writing, rather than simply sonorous ones. Maybe that is the ultimate goal of good writing--to seek the song-like words that touch the phenomena rather than simply any old word that might fit.
A Festival of Words
Almost every one of the following terms would repay individual study and more extended treatment. Catachresis is the wrong use of words (lit. "against" the "standard use"). Didn't President George Bush say something about "subliminable" images, or is that only a subliminal message that the D's are trying to give to America? That would be an example of catachresis. Be sure to distinguish this from catechesis, which is derived from "kata" and "eichein" and means to instruct orally (originally meant to "resound"). There are a whole slew of words formed off catechesis, such as catechumen and catechize and catechistic and catechism, but I have taught enough on this word for now.
Distinguish also between catalectic (the noun form is catalexis) and cataleptic, the former of which has to do with classical poetry lacking a syllable at the end of a line, while the latter is concerned with a trancelike state. I wrote an essay on acatalectic and acataleptic, with the latter term meaning something quite different from the negative of cataleptic [acataleptic comes from ancient philosophy], which you can access here.
Then we have catadromous which is a familiar term to those of us who have weathered the fish battles in the Pacific NW, and it refers to something living in fresh water. Something cataphoric "carries" meaning to the following word, such as the word her in the sentence, given in the Collegiate, "before her Jane saw nothing but desert." Something that looks "back" for its meaning is anaphoric, while something forward-looking is cataphoric. Cataphoric also has a meaning relating to electric currents, on which the Collegiate is mum.
Oh, let me take a brief detour to another word in the OED, but not in the Collegiate. It caught my eye as I was writing on cataphoric. It is cataphatic, and is a term made up in response to the classical term apophatic, which means "negative" or, in theological terms, "the way of negation in describing God." An apophatic or negative theology describes God by the way of negation or ignorance, while cataphatic theology is the standard Western theology of affirmation. When I was in graduate school at Brown University in the late 1970s, one of my closest colleagues was interested in recapturing the apophatic tradition of Christian theology. You only want to get to that if the field is already occupied by the cataphatics.
Finishing Up
It looks like I am not making much progress in moving through the dictionary. Well, instead of closing this essay with a flourish of 15 words, I think I will finish with one: catastrophism. Most educated people, I would presume, know that the term comes from geology and is a theory, opposed by the uniformitarians, that teaches that changes in the earth's crust have come about suddenly by massive physical changes. I really have lots and lots to say about this because it implicates not only our theory of the earth's formation but the way that Darwininan evolution displaced catastrophism and tended to try to show that it was simply the mouthpiece of Christian fundamentalists, who are interested, because of their biblical literalism, in arguing for a catastrophist theory. But catastrophism has a lot to be said for it, in my judgment, irrespective of its connection with conservative theology. But nothing will be said for it now, because I am out of time.....
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