colza and rapeseed and rape and commination and climacteric and clerihew

I took a several-day break from writing this column because of my trip to Southern CA, but I have to return to reality now. I will ease my way back into the dictionaries, however, by focusing on a few delicious words from the "C's."

Clerihew

What, indeed, is clerihew? When I saw it the first time I knew it couldn't be from the Greek or Latin or any language with which I was familiar and, sure enough, it was one of those words like paulownia that, because it is derived from a person's name, has to be learned and simply can't be "sounded out." So, I learned that it comes from Edward Clerihew Bentley, died 1956, and means "a light verse quatrain rhyming aabb and usually dealing with a person named in the initial rhyme." The lines given in the OED are:

"Sir Christopher Wren was going to dine with some men. (He said:)

"If anybody calls, Say I'm designing Saint Paul's."

See that? Yep aabb. Light verse. Very light. As Bentley himself said in 1940 about a clerihew, "This formless form of verse was so called because my book, "Biography for Beginners,' in which it originated, was published under the name of E. Clerihew...This was in 1906." The first attestation of clerihew as a type of verse was not until 1928, however, according to the OED. Now, if there is anything more useless to learn about the English language, please let me know.

Climacteric

Now that I have fully returned to inutility, I can move on with confidence and grace. Climacteric means critical or crucial, when used as an adjective, and as a noun sugests a major turning point or critical stage. It may also mean "menopause," or the marked and sudden rise in the respiratory rate of fruit just prior to full ripening. Hm. Maybe the last two are not fully unrelated!? Thus, we can have the "climacteric" year of a king's reign or a "climacteric" age. An 1881 social scientific lexicon could say that the five epochs of life contemplated by the Greeks were "termed climacterics or climacteric periods."

But there is more. The OED says that its medical meaning applies to that period of life (usually between the ages of 45 and 60) at which the vital forces begin to decline (in women coinciding with the period of 'change of life.'). Isn't the OED so wonderfully prudish and SO out of date? Note that the definition in the above paragraph, from the Collegiate (published in 2003) talks about "ripeness" of fruit right after "menopause" as a definition, leading me to conclude that the "philosophy" of the definition in the Collegiate is that women, at menopause, "ripen," or reach their most delightful and delicious stage. The OED, however, in addition to having 45-60 being the time of decline in life, also talks about the female 'change in life' as a sign of that decline. Let's yell real loud and maybe they will hear us in Oxford: "MENOPAUSE!!" But, in any case, doesn't the OED witness to its own obsolescence even as we study it? I love it when THE authority is patently out of date. It shows that the OED is merely the first draft, and sometimes a very dated first draft, of the English language.

But there is even more. The OED goes on to define climacteric not only as a crucial state in human life, but it suggests that a climacteric can happen every seven years, or possibly the odd multiples of seven (7, 21, 35, etc). Some writers speak of 63 (9X7) as the grand or great climacteric and some, also, see 81 as the grand clmacteric. A 1634 quotation says, "This false Prophet (sore against his will) died in his sixtie third yeare (his great Clymactericke)." I suppose that as people lived longer the great climacteric also stretched out longer and longer. With longevity as it is now, we see 63 still as late middle age. I think that climacteric needs to be distinguished from an annus mirabilis--the latter can be any year at any time of one's life, but it needs to have a "miraculous" character, while the former suggests something that is more connected to the septennial rhythms of life. I wrote my first autobiography at age 39 and the second at 52. I think that if I am granted life, I would write the third at 65 and the fourth at 78. I already have the titles for them, so I will be disappointed if I don't make it to 65 and 78! Yet, I would say that they are my climacteric works, my own "change of life" books.

Commination

The worst thing you can do is to think that commination means commendation. Actually, they couldn't be further from each other in meaning. Commination, derived from the Latin meaning "to threaten" or "to anathematize," is a "denunciation of punishment or vengeance," especially Divine punishment or vengeance. Thomas More in 1533 could speak of the "terrible comminacion and threate...in the Apocalyps unto the byshoppe of Ephesy." [Now I know why the Spelling Bee was not a product of the 16th century.] The great Puritan divine Richard Baxter, in 1651, spoke of "The terrible Commination of our Saviour against Scandalizers." Actually, commination can be a pretty useful word--perhaps as an alternative to fulmination or denunciation, and need not be used in a religious context. "The comminations against President Bush for his desire to appoint conservative jurists whipped through the Senate like a scirroco off the Sahara."

Finally, commination has a liturgical meaning--a "recital of Divine threatenings against sinners...appointed to be read after the Litany on Ash-Wednesday and at other times." Since we all admit to being sinners on Ash Wednesday, the Anglican liturgists, at least a few hundred years ago, thought it useful to make sure that we hear all kinds of divine threats as the ashes are smeared on the foreheads. How dumb is that? Well, let's not answer that question. Suffice it to say that already by 1710 in his Introduction to his treatise on the Book of Common Prayer, Charles Wheatley could say, "In the last review of our Liturgy, a clause was added for the sake of explaining the word commination...So that the whole title...now runs thus: "A commination...or denouncing of God's anger and judgements against sinners." That is, by 1710 the "person in the pew" didn't know what a commination was, and the revisers/updaters of the liturgy were kind enough to tell people that God was denouncing them. Wouldn't it have been better just to let them be denounced without knowing it? I sure would have preferred it.

Conclusion

As you can see, it is beyond the time for me to quit this essay. So, let's end with colza, a word defined as "rape" or "rapeseed." I only knew about rape in its "popular" meaning. But then, all along, there existed this plant called the "rape plant," which is like a turnip. How do you think it felt, having its meaning stolen from it all these years?

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