ferruginous and ferruminate and feeze and foment

I decided yesterday that I needed to devote an entire mini-essay to words relating to felicity, despite the fact that I can spell all of them correctly! But I decided to clean up a few other words of the "fe's," and then I became distracted again. Here is the result of that distraction (the OED has one attestation of distracture, a word whose sound I like, to mean the same thing as distraction, but none of distractment, which I think should mean the same as distraction).

Beginning with "Ferr"

Two words, ferruginous and ferruminate, occupied my mind. The first is in the Collegiate and is defined as "relating to or containing iron" or "resembling iron rust in color." These definitions are seemingly taken right from the OED, but the OED also has ferrugineous, which is attested as early as ferruginous, and means "ferruginous in all its senses." I like the sentence from 1671: "[Loadstone] is a hard Stone, ferrugineous, or irony." At first when I read the last word of the sentence, irony, I was wondering how a stone could have an ironic effect, but then it dawned on me that "irony" means "made of iron." Ironic. When the Wizard of Oz berates the Tin Man, he calls him "a clinking, clanking clattering collection of caliginous junk." But the word caliginous doesn't seem to work well here. Caliginous means "misty, dim, murky; dark" as in the sentence, "That caliginous atmosphere which fills London towards the 10th of November.." Why would the Wizard be using that term? I think he really meant to say ferruginous, so that the derogation or disparagement of the Tin Man would be the greater--he would be stressing the rusted nature of the man without a heart.

Be that as it may, I was also taken up briefly with the word ferruminate. Derived from the Latin word for iron, ferruminate means "to cement, solder, unite." Ferrumination is the process or action of cementing together. Certain medications or diets might help the ferrumination of broken bones. But it was a quotation under the verb that piqued my attention. A 1641 author talked about a "course directly tending to break asunder that which he intended to ferruminate and to foment." Foment? It seems like foment is used here synonymously with "unite" or "cement." Normally when I use the term 'foment' I mean to instigate or stimulate something. It is a negative term. You foment trouble or a revolution. So, I had to look up the history of foment to see what was up.

On to Foment

You must start with the OLD. Behind foment is fomentum, which is a contraction of the verb foveo and mentum. A fomentum is a soothing application, compress or poultice. Figuratively speaking, it is a remedy or a solace. Thus it is something that heals or warms. The verb foveo has eight meanings in the OLD, but most of them refer to something that keeps warm or snug, that gives physical comfort to, or that favors or supports. English picks up these meanings of the Latin with "to bathe with warm or medicated lotions, "to lubricate" or "to promote the growth of." Either the second or the third usage is the behind the use of foment in the 1641 quotation above.

But, unlike the Latin, at the same time that this positive meaning of foment was growing up a more negative one arose. Foment early came to mean not only the cultivation, stimulation or encouragement of something/someone but it picked up what the OED calls a "bad sense." The first usage of the "bad sense" was by Francis Bacon, who himself was facing some pretty rough days in the 1620s, when he used the term. He talked about a rumor (a "bruite" in his words) as follows: "which bruite was cunningly fomented by such as desired innovation." Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, picks up the "bad sense" meaning of foment, when he says, "These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarch of Blefuscu." The "good sense" of foment gradually dropped out of the language and the rest, as they say, is history. Why not foment a movement to return to the more original meaning of foment?

Finishing Up with Feeze

One more term caught my attention as I was studying the Collegiate, and that is feeze. I have never used the term, at least in a waking state, but the Collegiate defines it as "a state of alarm or excitement." The OED lists a complicated etymology before arriving at its oldest definition, as a verb. Feeze means "to drive; to put to flight; to drive away." The American Puritan preacher Cotton Mather used the term in this sense, "A Devil..would make her laugh to see how he feaz'd 'em about." It also meant "to frighten." The OED tells us that there was a 17th century threat, "I'll feeze you," which probably meant to "settle the business of" (does that mean, in contemporary American English, 'take care of you'?) such as in Shakespeare's sentence in Taming of the Shrew, "Ile pheeze you infaith." The OED says that the noun form means two things. Its more common American usage, if you really can say that it is common, is as a rush, violent impact, rub, or state of perturbation. Lowell said in 1865, "Even the locust's cry is no longer a mere impertinent feeze of sound." An Atlantic article said, "I am in a feeze half the time."

But I will close this essay with the other use of feeze as a noun. Though it is said to be obsolete, the phrase "to take one's full feeze" or "to fetch one's feeze" meant to take a short run before leaping. "If a man do but goe back a little to take his feeze, he may easily jump over it." Wouldn't American track & field reporting, which already is at a pretty high level, be enhanced by the reintroduction of feeze into their vocabulary? They could speak of Tommy Skipper taking his full feeze before attempting to pole vault over 18'6''; they could recreate Bob Beamon's incredible 29'2 1/2'' long jump in Mexico City in 1968 by talking about how he fetched his feeze. I think all kinds of possibilities abound.

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