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.