Today, let’s continue our journey through interesting words, taking as our guide my new toy, an online subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary. I intended to make a list of interesting (to me) words and see how they originated, but I found a major detour with the first word, and now am just going to fly by the seat of my pants (something I rarely do for these posts), and see where we end up.
The first word I thought of for my list was the word “discombobulated.” I use it when I feel a little scatter-brained, unoriented, and jolted out of my routine. It’s always nice when the official meaning of a word matches how I use it. (Have you heard the joke about the mom who was texting people about the death of someone and ended those texts with “LOL” because she thought it meant “lots of love” rather than “laughing out loud”? That’s a spot I’d rather not be in.) The OED says “discombobulate” means “to disturb, upset, disconcert, confuse.”
My guess was that an interesting word must have an interesting origin, so I checked out the etymology page next. I was wrong; the entry simply suggested that the word was perhaps a humorous alteration of “discompose,” “discomfit,” or “discomfort.” However, the entry then continued, “compare the slightly later humorous formation absquatulate v. and the possible models cited at that entry.”
The needle on the record came to a screeching halt. What? How did I ever miss encountering such a glorious-sounding word as “absquatulate”? I clicked on the link to find out about that word. It turns out absquatulate is also a humorous form of a word, probably intended to take the word “abscond” and make it sound Latin. It means “to abscond, make off.” No less than Kurt Vonnegut used the word in his book Hocus Pocus, in the sentence “some overthrown … dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation's treasury.”
Another word I looked up was “gesticulate.” When I was a young(er) lawyer, I was taking a deposition. When you take a deposition, the attorney for the person you are deposing is supposed to let his/her client do the talking without coaching while the session is being transcribed. The attorney for the other side at this deposition was gesturing and whispering to his client for most of the first part of the deposition. I got enough of it and objected on the record to his “whispering and gesticulating to his clients.” The man stopped the deposition and asked me what gesticulating meant. (to “gesticulate” is to “make lively or energetic motions with the limbs or body; esp. as an accompaniment or in lieu of speech.” For such a full-sounding word, its etymology is, alas, not exciting either—it is a word borrowed from Latin.
“Serendipity” is a fun word. It means “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of making such a discovery.” One well-known instance of a serendipitous discovery is the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928, when, coming back from vacation, he noticed that a stray penicillium mold had contaminated a petri dish in which he was growing Staphylococcus bacteria. What intrigued him was the fact that the mold spore appeared to be excreting a substance that was destroying the bacteria that surrounded it. The origin of “serendipity” is much more interesting than the other words in this column. It was coined by Horace Walpole, in a letter to a friend, based upon a fairy-tale called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Serendip is one former name for what is now Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole was a British politician and writer, the son of Robert Walpole, who was First Lord of the Treasury under King George I and King George II.
What words do you find interesting either for their sound, meaning, or derivation?
