16. Beginning with the "V's"
Bill Long 6/12/05
Pages 1381-1410
Even though I have done nothing approximating justice with the "u's" and "un's," these are the pages I studied today, and I want to capture some thoughts before I lose them. I will go word by word here, stopping to observe interesting sights along the way.
1. Vagotomy. A surgical division of the vagus nerve. I only had a vague understanding of this nerve before I ran into the word vagotomy. Every time you meet a "tomy," you cut something. It is from the Greek word "tmesis," and you can cut words, nerves, heads or other things in nature. Here you are cutting the nerve that originates in the brain and spreads downward to the digestive tract.
2. Vair. I had not run into this word previously, which means the blue-grey fur of a squirrel prized in medieval times. When you do an "image" search in Google, you realize that vair was taken over into heraldy to represent the blue interlocking "bells" on a shield. Technically it is called "argent" (background white) and "azure" (the blue interlocking "bells").
3. Valance. This is a short drapery concealing the top of curtains. Often it appears in a box-form. You can find all kinds of Internet dealers in "valances." It makes you wonder. Just think. While I was pursuing a Ph. D., and traveling the world, and being married and raising kids and writing and doing all kinds of things in life, some poor souls were spending their lives making and selling valances.
4. Vallate. Something vallate has raised edges surrounding a depression. The OED tells us that the word was obsolete...until, the 1993 Supplement showed how it has entered into scientific vocabulary in the phrase vallate papillae, meaning the raised area in the back third of the tongue. Someday I will master Gray's Anatomy, but not this week.
5. Vaward. Something vaward is in the forefront or vanguard. The term goes back to the 14th century and is mostly used in a military context. "His vawarde so sore oppressyd them, with shott of arrows, that they gave them right-a-sharpe shwre." Aren't you glad you live in the 21st century? But, Shakespeare saved the word for us by using it in a figurative sense. In a rollicking early scene in 2 H 4, he says, "We that are in the vaward of our youth." Subsequent authors using the word all are seemingly indebted to The Bard. I also like the way he coined another, but opposite, phrase. In the Tempest he talks about the "dark backward and abysme of time." So, we have taken both the vaward and backward from their original contexts and used them figuratively. Why can't we learn from Shakespeare that THIS, indeed, is the way to use language?
6. Vadalia, vegete, velleity, veloute. A vadalia is an Australian lady bug, unattested in the OED, but listed in the Collegiate. Vegete (ve JEET) means lively or healthy or active. Actually, the word is said to be archaic, but I love the way that it is used in some OED sentences. "His face was always tinted with a fresh color, and his looks vegete and sanguine." Or, with respect to the mind, "If you would possess such a mind, you must keep it fresh and vegete and lifesome by secret prayer." I like the word lifesome (lively), too, though I am not so sure whether the mind is kept vegete by secret prayer. I would like to maintain, however, that the mind is kept vegete by learning new words and by spelling. I think that we will gradually wake up to that as a culture in about a decade, when the baby boomers are facing serious mental deficiencies and they want to correct them instantly. Veloute is a soup or sauce containing chicken and other meats.
I guess I need to devote an entire paragraph to velleity (ve LEE i tee). It is defined as the "lowest degree of inclination" by the Collegiate, but even that definition showed it to be a philosophical term and I knew the Century tries to be as precise as possible in defining (often indefinable--such as ubiety/ubeity) philosophical terms. So, I looked there. Sure enough, we not only had the definition as "indolent or inactive wish or inclination toward a thing, which leads to no energetic effort to obtain it" (chiefly a scholastic term), but there were also two pleasant 17th century quotations, one from the Puritan preacher Jeremy Taylor and one from the great empiricist philosopher John Locke. Listen to Locke, from his Essay on Human Understanding: "Velleity: the term used to signify the lowest degree of desire, and that which is next to none at all, where there is so little uneasiness in the absence of any thing that it carries a man no farther than some faint wishes for it."
Because velleity suggests a wan or weak will, an inclination but no effort, it was a very attractive term to preachers because it could be a nice adjunct to the doctrine of original sin. The reason the "natural man" doesn't show much inclination toward divine things, the explanation for his spiritual torpor, is that he at most has velleity in him but, because of the power of regnant sin within, is unable to live righteously. Excuse all the theological verbiage, but that is a way that the term velleity might have had a long life in preaching. It has disappeared now, probably for good reason, though as a parent who has raised two kids through the teenage years, I can think of a way the term might still have utility.
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