Monday, June 18: The Scribbler
WAYWARD WORDS
by James Lincoln Warren
I love words in general, and have a crank fondness for unusual ones. Many’s the time I have snarled, “Let them read dictionaries!” with an air of overbearing superiority when a reader has wondered what this or that term meant in one of my stories. One editor I know tells me that every one of my pieces contains at least one word she has to look up. But in what may be a delusional rationalization on my part, every time I use an unusual word, I justify doing so for reasons of verisimilitude — “this is the word this character would have used in 1768” — and try to make its meaning as obvious as I can through its context. I never, ever use a word just to show off, or at least I hope I don’t.
A few weeks ago I sent Our Leigh the collected Treviscoe Opera. (All right, I’m being deliberately cute by using the word opera as the plural of opus — see what I mean about showing off? Irritating, ain’t it?) He told me that the first page had sent him to the dictionary, quite an accomplishment, since he possesses one vasty deep of a vocabulary. I had titled the collection Treviscoe of Lloyd’s or The Indagator of Crimes. The word he got stuck on was indagator, an archaic synonym for investigator. I had chosen to call Treviscoe an “indagator of crimes” rather than a “private detective”, “inquiry agent”, or “private investigator”, because those terms all date from the mid-19th century, and I scrupulously (although not always successfully) try to avoid anachronisms. I thought that indagator had a nice historical ring to it and that its meaning was easily deduced from context. I thought, and still think, that it fits.
I read lots of things that introduce me to new words, and I usually welcome the opportunity to add to my knowledge. Patrick O’Brian, one of my gods, is full of heretofore (to me) unmined riches in this regard, and I don’t mind it one bit –I feel like O’Brian’s character Stephen Maturin on discovering a new species of shrub, filled with delight. But last night I read a short story by a major writer (not in the crime fiction genre) that drove me crazy. Almost every paragraph had a word I had never before encountered, and this was aggravated by the fact that there seemed nary a noun bereft of antecedent adjectives.
Here are some of the words that left bruise marks on my brain:
nescience: a synonym for ignorance. I was certainly ignorant of it.
farouche: sullen, sly, repellent. Context: “farouche beauty”. Should have been used thus: “farouche prose”.
moil: related to turmoil, this shorter version is usually used in the sense of hard labor (“moil and toil”); the author intended the word in its infrequent application as a synonym for confusion. Well, it confused me.
fainéant: indolent, idle. The opposite of the person who scrambles to the dictionary to find out what it means.
pylorus: the opening of the stomach to the duodenum, also an insect’s asshole. Context: “a pylorus of endless hunger.” This one is too easy, so I’m going to be nice and say nothing at all.
The thing that irritated me most is that the story is actually very good, or would be, if it weren’t so disrespectful to the reader by pummeling him over the head with its ab fab vocab.
I’m reminded of Auric Goldfinger’s famous comment to 007: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
More than three times is out and out felonious assault.
Nay, aureation is no sin!
To wish one’s foe adnichilate
Doth not obstupefact his fate:
Temulent… adepted by gin.
Nothing is more irritating than a show offy writer. I want to enjoy what I read. If I have to puzzle over something let it be plot or motivation or what is going to happen next. Please don’t make me puzzle over the meaning of rarely used words when there are so many overly used ones.
Whew! Glad I got that off my chest.
Also wanted to say that I doscovered this blog a few months ago and am a faithful follower altho’ I don’t comment often. Kudos on a great blog. Terrie
I too agree with Terrie – I don’t want to be taken out of a story to look up endless words and not be able to get their meaning from what I am readig. I was reading a book over the Christmas holidays or at some time while visiting my parents and had to ask my father what a certain word meant. Even though he didn’t know the exact meaning, he came to the conclusion by the context (the reason I was asking is because I like to sound out the words in my mind when I’m reading and I wasn’t sure how to really pronounce the word because it seemed it could go several ways and it wasn’t making sense, any way I tried to read the word). I think knowing the context in which the word is used helps our minds “pronounce” the word and makes the reading smoother.
I knew the last word on the list – pylorus – but that is because I work in the medical field and when my doctors are doig endoscopes of the upper GI tract (as opposed to lower GI tract – the intestines and the rectum) they always refer to the pylorus of the stomach – so I wouldn’t have stumbled over that one except that the author misused the word more than anything – and I woud have thrown the book at him (or short story, whatever) out of offense. If one is to use unusual words, don’t offend the readers and misuse the words.
Great posting, by the way – it really made me think about what I read and how many unusual words are used in the writings (not many thank goodness) – E 🙂
All right, Tom. My first guess was Ezra Pound — but the farouche wit (if you’ll pardon the expression) seems more like Joyce: using “obstupefact” and “adept” as verbs, forsooth!
Who wrote it, and what is it from?
JLW – Not long ago, I finished a “Teaching Company” course on the history of the English Language, taught (on DVD) by Professor Seth Lerer of Stanford University. According to Prof. Lerer: (1)”aureation” or “aureate diction,” in poetry, “uses a Latinate and Romance vocabulary modeled on Chaucer’s poetry and that of his heirs.” (2) The following “inkhorn terms,” now obsolete, “were coined from Latin or Greek for educated effect and sonic power” during the 16th and 17th centuries: “adepted[attained], adnichilate[reduced to nothing], obstupefact[to make unclear], temulent[drunk].” I put the dog in the doggerel. When you meet Pound and Joyce in the Afterlife, you’re going to have some explaining to do!
I salute you, sir!
Pound and Joyce should be flattered that I compared them to you, not the other way around.
According to the OED,
“Aureation” is the “condition of being aureate in style”, where aureate means “brilliant or splendid as gold, esp. in literary or rhetorical skill; spec. designating or characteristic of a highly ornamental literary style or diction.” The root is the Latin aureatus, i.e., decorated with gold.
“Adepted” means “gained; acquired” and was adopted from the common adjective “adept” meaning well-skilled, but it is only listed as a participial adjective, not as a verb.
“Adnichilate” is simply an archaic form of “Annihilate”.
“Obstupefact” is synonym for “stupid” as both an adjective and a noun. (“It’s the economy, obstupefact.”)
I am temulent with words.
I confess I don’t mind looking up words (occasionally!) and I turn down a page corner to look up a word or reference at a later time.
Ideally, words should be necessary and appropriate in context, and a writer should help the reader with technical terms, expanding acronyms in a subsequent paragraph or perhaps having a character explain.
I’ve read a few of the Treviscoe series. Having to look up words notwithstanding and James’ commitment to the idiom of the 1700s, by the end of the third page I’d found the ‘rhythm’ of the writing. I hope, one day, James publishes the collection.
Compare with, say, the Lovejoy series. There’s no jargon, no abstruse polysyllabic words, no foreign phrases, but I found the books unusually difficult to parse. I believe I was nearly a third of the way though the first one before I caught the rhythm and and least 10% through subsequent books in the series before I settled in.
I think of the latter’s treatment of language as Gash ‘n’ burn.
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