euphuism and euphuistic and exsiccate and extrorse and exude and exudation and sweat and ooze

Let's just begin by running through several words without comment. An eyas, pronounced I as, is a nesting hawk. Something that is extrorse is somethat that faces outward. The only OED attestations are "anther/pistil"-type of quotations, but I long for a way to use the term humanistically. How could we do it? It almost sounds as if, when you pronounce the word, you are craning the neck with some pain, to view things in a different way. "After three years of inner contemplation following his divorce, he decided to turn extrorse." Why not? It could emphasize not only the different focus of his gaze but also the wrenching difficulty of this new "turn."

Moving on. Remember the "a" in expendable. Things are taxable or expendable, and you hope people are dependable, but something that you include in income is includible. Well includable is also acceptable. When in doubt, lean towards an "a." An expellee, double "l" and double "e," is one expelled and exostosis is a growth on a bone. To evert is to overthrow or upset, and something eutectic has the lowest melting point possible. Indeed, eutectic is a much more complex word than that, but not for me, at least not now for me.

Stopping to Look at Some Beautiful or Suggestive Words

I am so glad I stopped to look at exude. We also have exudation and exudatory and all the usual suspects that are formed off such a verb, but it didn't dawn on me until now that exude is really derived from ex(s)udo. I guess I never thought about it until now, but the addition of the "s" tells us that it means "To get rid of by sweating," since sudo is the Latin verb for "sweat" or "perspire." Thus the definition in the OED follows closely the Latin root, "To ooze out like sweat; to pass of in bead-like drops through the pores." To exude means to ooze. I like both of those words. The word exudation has had an application in metallurgy, where there is an "exudation test" to determine the extent of lead segregation in a sample of leaded steel. Lead will exude on the surface in the form of globules. Much more interesting to me, as you know, is the use of the term in everyday speech. Someone who exudes confidence is a person who has "globules" of confidence coming out of the "pores," so to speak. We usually say that confidence exudes but blood oozes, though both stress the seeping quality of things.

Opposite to exudatation in meaning is exsiccation. It refers to the action of drying what is moist, but it can also mean a thoroughly dried condition or absolute dryness. The underlying Latin words siccitas, siccesco, siccus all connote the idea of being free from or deficient in moisture. While most of the attestations in the OED refer to fields or lakes drying up, this one from the 17th century caught my attention: "Let wine be moderately used, that neither ..exiccation, or drunkenness follow." Don't want people to dry up, you know. There must be a way to bring this word into humanistic usage. "His seventh grade teacher reminded him of an exsiccated prune." Or, "often the spiritual life is lived in the refreshing and bracing waters of the divine presence, but other times one descends to the blistering heat and exsiccated deserts of the wilderness." Or "Job's physical thirst was made more acute by his spiritual exsiccation." I think it has a future.

Euphuism

This word has nothing to do with euphony or euphemism. The Collegiate definition is admirably brief and descriptive. Euphuism comes from the name Euphues, a character in prose romances by the late 16th century English author John Lyly. Euphuism is an elegant late Elizabethan prose style characterized by "excessive use of balance, antithesis, and alliteration and by frequent use of similes drawn from mythology and nature." What this definition does not mention, however, is how Lyly's work and literary descriptions contributed to the development of the English language. The article in the Cambridge History is more helpful. What is significant about Lyly is not simply the elegance of the style, which was not obfuscatory fustian but rather seemed to clarify things, but also the way his style encouraged the development of the English language.

In the late 16th century England was just coming out of its own Middle Ages. During and shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I England became a world power, and began to extend a tentacular grip not only in Europe, through the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 but also to the far reaches of the world, through the founding of the East India Company and English settlement in North America. An expansion in empire necessitated an expansion of language--language which would not only be richly descriptive of the new goods and peoples "discovered," but would suffice to mirror the aspirations and ambitions of the inhabitants of the "sceptered isle." In the words of one writer, the English desired "to heare finer speach then the language would allow." Lyly's work, his euphuism, was one of the instruments through which English descried a vernacular richness that it hitherto had not possessed. Of special interest to me was the way that Lyly used (Latin) classical allusions and literature in his project. Rather than simply relying on the standard works of the historians or orators, he found his inspiration in Pliny's Natural History and Plutarch's works.

Conclusion--On Language

Once you arrive in the 17th century in England and, to be more precise, in the third or fourth decades of that century, it seems to me you are dropped into a completely different linguistic world that people inhabited only fifty years previously. I think that one of the ways that this linguistic richness probably developed was through Puritan preaching--where the preachers combed the dictionary, and made up loads of new words, to try to describe the liberating, empowering and "all-things-new-making" power of the Gospel. It was preaching designed for a sturdy people who saw themselves growing ever more confident as the years wore on. And they left behind their words for us to see if they "fit" us 400 years later. I, for one, am reluctant to discard old garments, even if they aren't really "in style." Does American writing in the 21st century need a sort of euphuistic infusion? I don't know, but it there seems to be no good reason that we, who are rich indeed, should not mine the riches of many terms which are not current in our usage.

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