Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 January 2006 20:58:18
Thank you, and thank God, for the great wisdom in your comments on my previous post. By God's grace these passions will be overcome.
The comments on continence had me laughing out loud: it is very odd how words can change their meaning, or else take on a new meaning. I, as someone who has some interested in the history of language, find it very interesting: language continues to evolve to suit the needs of the people.
The wonderful e-mail list A.Word.A.Day is this week focussing on words better known in their negative form: have you ever described someone's meal as sipid (having a pleasant taste/flavour), or described someone flexible in ideas as pervious (open to suggestions, arguments, reason, change, etc.)? Bill Bryson's entertaining and informing Mother Tongue gives some negative words for which no positive seems to exist (else it has been lost): inept, inert, dishevelled... As he wrote, "English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, 'She's so shevelled'..." (p. 61).
His book also provides some words that have gone out of usage, and, as he thinks, I think it'd be great to try and bring them back: slubberdegullion (17th C): worthless or slovenly fellow; ugsome: (late mediæval) loathsome or disgusting; velleity: a mild desire or urge, too slight for action.
There is the well-known story, possibly apocryphal, that when Queen Anne saw the recently restored St Paul's Cathedral, she described it as "awful, artificial and amusing". Wren dropped to his knees: and kissed the monarch's hand. Awful meant awe-inspiring; artificial -- the product of great artifice: well-designed and showing great skill; and amusing -- a great delight to the senses. I doubt an architect would be impressed if those words were used to describe a building of theirs in the 21st century!
And then there are words which, when discovered, fill me with delight and I need to try and use them. Mother Tongue provides: muliebrity: the state of being a woman; arachibutyrophobia: the morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof ouf your mouth; properispomenon: a word that has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable (granted, how often could one use it?: but it'd be fun to throw it into an e-mail: "Is fenetre a properispomenon?" and see the response you get!) A source for more strange and unusual words is The Phrontistery: well worth a look.
World Wide Words is another great site: plenty of information on words (normal and weird) and also on the history of certain phrases.
I love words.