Some of Scot's Words

Friend and fellow spelling competitor Scott Firebaugh has been gracing a number of us with special word lists which he has come up with to help him and us prepare for the National Spelling Bee. Thrice monthly he faithfully sends along about a dozen difficult words, arranged according to some principle that makes sense, and saves a lot of us from potential errors. I haven't had a lot of time to study Scott's lists so far, but this essay will deal with words from one of them--on homonyms. Scott is correct, as usual, in listing the word as it appears in the Merriam Webster 11th Edition (our official dictionary, for now), but his listing sometimes invites me to dig a little deeper into the history of the word, especially if it seems as if something is not quite "right" here. This essay is devoted to a few of those complex words, especially aphaeresis and apheresis and aphesis, on the one hand, and apophthegm/apothegm and apothem, on the other. In subsequent essays I will actually get to some of Scott's wonderfully helpful words; here I only want to vent, I fear...

On Aphaeresis, Apheresis and Aphesis

I have long felt that our beloved dictionary, the Webster's Collegiate (11th ed.) messed up, or at least didn't give us the full story, on aphaeresis/apheresis/aphesis, and in this brief note I would like to argue that point. I suppose it won't make much difference, since these words are all "fair game" in a bee.

The classical word, in Greek grammars and in English grammars, for the loss of an initial sound in a word is aphaeresis. The word goes back to 1611 in English with this usage. Often, as we know, words that once had an "ae" together soon lose the "a" and become simply words with an "e" in its place. The most famous example is mediaeval which now is almost universally spelled medieval. So, by 1864 aphaeresis was considered the same word as apheresis by Webster's. But aphaeresis never really lost its prominence in grammatical terminology (perhaps because of the innately conservative nature of grammar), and apheresis to designate the loss of a first syllable never caught on.

Aphaeresis also had a medical meaning going back to 1753: "Aphæresis in medicine denotes a necessary taking away or removal of something that is noxious. In surgery, an operation whereby something superfluous is taken away." This is from Chambers' Cyclopedia Supplement. Thus, we see the "taking away" notion as the common thread between the words. The OED has no attestations for the medical aphaeresis becoming apheresis. Yet somehow, and I don't know exactly when this happened (see below), the elision of the "a" in the second syllable happened (if it happened in the first, we might say that there was an aphaeresis of aphaeresis, right?) and now apheresis indicates this medical reality. But the OED is sticking to its guns on that one by not reconizing apheresis at all.

Finally, aphesis only owes its origin to 1880, but scholars immediately became perplexed as to the difference between grammatical aphaeresis and aphesis, since both had to do with the rubbing out of an initial vowel or unstressed syllable. As one grammarian complained in 1930: "I do not quite see the difference between aphesis and aphæresis, but use the former term as the shorter and therefore more convenient of the two." Thus, the decision for use became convenience. The fact that no one really knows the difference between these terms is evident in the Wikipedia article, where the words are used synonymously. And, to top it off, I think it is ironic that the example that Scott gave for grammatical aphaeresis ("coon" for "racoon"; copied from our dictionary, no doubt) is the same example used on several web pages for aphesis. Here is one example: "Aphesis' is the omission of unaccented initial syllables, especially noticeable in the South when Southerners say things like, 'coon,.." Sing a hymn to confusion, then....

Thus, in the beginning we not only had the heavens and the earth, but we only had aphaeresis. Aphaeresis had two meanings: a grammatical one (elision of first syllable) and a medical one (withdrawal of blood from a donor's body). The first aphaeresis was hijacked by aphesis in 1880 to everyone's confusion, but then took up residence as a separate dictionary entry, just because some people like a sense of "completeness" or "convenience." But the terms are used pretty interchangeably today. As for the medical aphaeresis, it changed its spelling to apheresis, but no one decided to tell the OED, the "arbiter" of good English. I think the change only happened in the 1970s in America--another good reason for the OED editors to look down their long noses and reject the change.

So if we are to be Merriam Webster 11th Edition Spellers, we need to think of these as three separate words, but if we see the way that language has evolved, we just throw back our heads and laugh...

A Confusion Going the Other Way

Then there is some confusion surrounding how many terms we have with apophthegm, apothegm, and apothem. In fact, the first two are related, and are derived from the Greek verb that means to "speak" or "answer," while the latter is taken from the Greek verb meaning "to set off." But, the development of apothegm and apophthegm is just the opposite of aphaeresis and aphesis. In the latter it was from longer to shorter, from more complex to simpler. Isn't that the way that language is 'spozed' to develop? Not in apophthegm/apothegm. The OED tells us that apothegm, meaning a "terse pointed saying, embodying an important truth in few words," first appeared--of all places in Foxe's Book of Martyrs (16th century): "Another Apothegma of D. Taylor." But then, it says, Samuel Johnson, the dictionary-maker in the mid-18th century, decided that it was more accurate to spell the word apophthegm, because the Greek verb standing behind it actually has the coming together of a phi and a theta in the middle, and these are represented as "ph th", like we have in phthisis. Now, the OED tells us, apophthegm is the more common spelling in England, but those of us involved in spelling bees in the US must learn it as apothegm, because that is the way it appears in Merriam Webster's 11th edition Or, more precisely, it only appears as apothegm under that word. It appears as apophthegm as a "British variant." But, according to the rules of the bee, I don't know if it can be used... Too many headaches, I will just learn the history of the words...

Oh, almost as an afterthought, apothem (also spelled apotheme, but this isn't very well attested), only emerged in the 1820s in English, according to this fine website on historical mathematical terms. It means "the distance from the center of a regular polygon to the sides." The Greek term lying behind it is "to set off" or "to set apart," and has nothing to do with "speaking," as does apophthegm/apothegm. So, thanks, Scott, for giving me a headache on these words. I needed to try to explain them once and for all to myself at least. I doubt if many others will care about my making things "clear."

Conclusion

I think I will close this essay by making reference to a near neighbor word--apophlegmatic. It has nothing to do with saying wise sayings (apophthegms). It has to do with getting rid of phlegm. An "apophlegmatic" is an expectorant--which I am in great need of just about now...

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