Superior Words VI...Final Essay

This essay concludes my treatment of some of the words in Peter Bowler's The Superior Person's Book of Words. Not many of these will become part of your daily speech, but it is well to be armed with them. You never know when a word will come in handy.

Let me illustrate this briefly through a story. Yesterday I was walking through my home town (Salem, OR) looking at and identifying trees. At one home a woman came to the door while I was checking out her street trees and told me she had a certain kind of redwood but she wasn't quite sure which it was. On the way to showing me the redwood, we came across an Empress tree. She said, "I think it is called a paulowa or something like that." Well, I commend her for trying, but if you know your trees you know that it is a Paulownia tomentosa. The Paulownia part of it derived from the name of Anna Pavlovna (1795-1865), a daughter of a Russian Czar who ended up marrying a Dutch prince. I don't know the story precisely of how that tree became associated with her, but some German botanists, who called her Anna Paulowna, named it. Hence the name "paulownia." "Tomentosa," by the way, means "hairy" or "thick stuffing." Now, I have only given you one more little fact about the tree. If you were curious, then, or had the time, you could explore why it was so named, other similar trees, the familiy of which it is a part, etc.

The journey is almost endless, but it begins with a precise statement of identification. Unless you have precision at the beginning of the chain of knowledge, you will become fuzzy along the way and then give up in discouragement. Thus, begin with precision, and even learn things that you don't think you "need" to know, and you will find that the quest for precision comes naturally to you. You will begin to notice how skillful you are at sorting out arguments, finding lacunae in books and articles which tell about phenomena and, eventually, in being able to put together your own material which is helpful for others. With this encouragement, let's list the words I wish comment on briefly in this essay.

They are: procacity, recrement, sapid, suggillation (spelled a number of ways), temulency, and venery.

Beginning with Venery

Venery is an interesting word because it has two meanings completely unrelated to each other--the practice of hunting, and the practice or pursuit of sexual pleasure. Well, your first reaction might be...hm, sounds like the same thing to me! But, in fact, they are derived from different Latin words. The venery having to do with hunting comes from the deponent verb venor. But the greater number of words built off this word in English have a sexual connotation. Why? Because of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, who stands behind it. Thus, a "venereal" disease has something to do with sex or lust (even though the first usages of "venereal" had little connection with "disease"; it could be used in the phrase "lust venereal"). But then we have words such as venereology (the science of venereal disease), venereous (addicted to sexual enjoyment; libidinous).

There are also a lot of words in English formed off the vend root (having to do with selling) or the Latin word venerare (having to do with worship).

The Rest of the List

Let's do the others rapidly. Something that is sapid is flavorful or savory. It is derived from the Latin verb sapio, which means "to have a taste" or "to smack (of a quality)." But the English word sapient, wise, is derived from this same Latin root, too. How? Well, the Oxford Latin Dictionary tells us that further definitions of sapio include to "smell of" or to "have taste or discernment." That is, the notion of something's taste or smell transmuted into people who themselves have "taste" or judgment. A wise person has these qualities. Food can be said to have sapidity or sapidness, but only humans have sapience or can give sapiential advice. Actually, one of the names for the Wisdom literature in the Bible is the "sapiential literature." I like the word sapid also because it is the opposite of vapid. Vapid was originally related to the Latin word vappa, which was a wine that had gone flat. So, sapid means tasty; vapid means flat.

Someone who is in a temulent is drunken or intoxicated. The word temetum in Latin is any intoxicating liquor or drink. Thus, temulentia was drunkenness and temulenter was "in the manner of a drunken person." We also have the words temulence/cy in English, but there are so many other good words, mostly slang, for being drunk, that we probably won't need to resurrect temulent.

Suggillation has to do with bruising and discoloration of the skin. The OLD doesn't know how it was derived from a possible progenitor sugo ("to suck"), and the word hasn't had a very promising life in English, either. Originally related to a "beating blacke and blew" (1623), this term was taken over by the medical establishment to describe those "livid spots of various size noticed on dead bodies" (1859). By the way lividus (livid) in Latin first mean "of a dull or greyish-blue color,...slate-colored." Thus a person who is "livid" with anger is "pale" with rage, rather than "red" with rage. Do people get pale when they are enraged? I generally try to avoid such people, but maybe I ought to look more closely next time.

Finishing up on suggillation-- A 1903 medical authority, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, Insanity and Toxicology introduces suggillation in connection with death. "In connection with the signs of death, the conditions known as cadaveric lividity, or suggillation, may appropriately be mentioned" (p. 27). You have been warned by your mother to avoid all kinds of harmful things in life--I especially want you to take heed of cadaveric lividity.

Conclusion

Let's close with a word on procacity. Derived from the Latin procax, the word suggests extravagance in demanding what one wants or undisciplined and pushy. Cicero has a sentence which read: "non solum meretrix sed etiam proterua meretrix procaxque." A person is "not only a whore but also a violent and demanding whore." Thus, don't confuse procacity with perspicacity. Procacity means to be insolent, arrogant, cheeky or forward.

Finally, recrement is related to excrement; only you sometimes retain the recrement while you expel the excrement. Though the verb cernare, which stands behind the word, means "to separate," recrement was originally the "superfluous or useless portion of any substance; refuse, dross, scum, off-scouring," but was later a "fluid which is separated from the blook and again absorbed into it, as the saliva or bile." Thus, recrement can seem to include dross or shucked off things as well as reabsorbed things. Recrementitious, something superfluous, has been used recently in the Kids National Spelling Bee.

Enough for now. Enjoy your words and your day.

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