Vocabulary Flotsam and Jetsam by Nancy L. Eady

I like to play online word games. I’m good at them. It is a point of pride that I usually accumulate thousands of “coins” – the currency these games use for hints – without having to buy them. In doing so, I come across words and variations I find curious. For example, in searching for a suitable name for this post, I considered “dips and dabs,” which I thought meant “odds and ends”, originating with the little pieces of dough that fall onto a cookie sheet when baking. However, according to various online slang dictionaries, “dab” can mean to “inhale the vapors of (a heated concentrate of cannabis)” or even less savory things. So, I moved to plan B for a title. 

Fortunately, the colloquial meanings of “flotsam and jetsam” are more innocuous, and in this case, I am using the phrase in the sense of “jumbled sundry items.” The true meaning of “flotsam” and “jetsam” comes from maritime law – “flotsam” is “wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk” and “jetsam” means “goods thrown overboard from a ship in danger of sinking to give it more buoyancy.” 

Two words I came across that interested me are the words “hurdle” and “hurtle.” Silly me; I assumed one was the English spelling and one the American spelling of the same word. Not so; they have distinctive meanings. 

“Hurdle” is both a noun and a verb. The most modern definitions as a noun are “an artificial barrier over which racers must leap,” and “barrier; obstacle.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hurdle. As a verb, “hurdle” can mean either “to leap over especially while running (as in a sporting competition)” and “overcome, surmount.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hurdle. By contrast, “hurtle” is solely a verb. As an intransitive verb, it means “to move rapidly or forcefully.” As a transitive verb, it means “hurl, fling.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hurtle. I’ll save the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs for another post, which is another way of saying I can’t (yet) explain the difference between the two. 

The two words don’t even have the same derivation. “Hurdle” comes from the Middle English “hurdel” from the Old English “hyrdel”, which referred to a frame or netting of intertwined twigs. In fact, one of the modern definitions of “hurdle” is “a portable panel usually of wattled withes and stakes used especially for enclosing land or livestock.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hurdle.  The fence in the picture below is an example of “hurdle” fencing. 

Photo by Lucekbb, 5/1/2008.  Wikipedia Commons.

“Hurtle,” however, is derived from the Middle English “hurtlen,” which meant to collide. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hurtle.

Is it any wonder people say English is a confusing language?

The Cemetery of Lost Words by Connie Berry

                                                      Tom Gauld. Used with permission.
 

My favorite line in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan describes Captain Hook: “The man is not wholly evil—he has a thesaurus in his cabin.” 

I love that. Words are important. They convey meaning and create an intellectual and emotional response. Since we know words can hurt or heal, we should be certain ours are understood.

 

Some words are imprecise, flabby, and liable to misinterpretation. Other words nail the intended thought with such clarity and precision that the mind of the hearer or reader is enlightened and enlarged. I admire people—even Captain Hooks—who know interesting and beautiful words and use them with skill and artistry. That’s the job of the writer, after all.

The English language has no shortage of words. One million is the current estimate, with more added each year. In 2019, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary added almost 700 new words, phrases, and definitions, including buzzy (speculative or excited talk or attention); snowflake (someone who is overly sensitive); and unplug (temporarily refrain from using electronic devices).

 

 My interest isn’t so much in the new words being created as in the old words being lost through neglect—or downgraded in meaning. I agree with those who say, “Don’t use a fancy word when a plain one will do.” The problem is sometimes a plain word just won’t do.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of eight delightful forgotten or endangered words I think we should use more often so as to preserve them for future generations.

1. Eventide: the onset of dusk or twilight; a lovely word to use when all is right with the world, and it’s time to sit on the porch with your sweetie and a glass of wine.

 

2. After-wise: the feeling of knowing exactly what you should have said or done when the opportunity to say it or do it has passed you by. Yup.

 

3. Susurration: the whispering, murmuring, or rustling of wind or water; a perfect example of onomatopoeia (another endangered word).

 

4. Bunbury: to get out of a commitment by inventing an imaginary person you must visit; from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, where Algernon invents a sick friend named Bunbury as an excuse to avoid his relatives. Secondary meaning: to galavant around (another word in danger of being forgotten) under a false identity. The first bunburying often leads to the second.

 

5. Slugabed: a person who stays in bed long after the usual or proper time to get up; helpful when raising teenagers.

 

6. Énoument: the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future and seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

 

7. Ephemeral: lasting for a very short time; fleeting; transitory. A word used primarily by those over fifty.

 

8. Chimerical: hoped-for but illusory and impossible to achieve; or something that exists only as the product of unchecked imagination, like Big Foot or world peace.

 

 I read a fascinating article recently on the subject of lost words by Wilfrid M. McKay in The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2019). McKay said, “Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued, and is grateful when a writer restores to currency a semantic possibility that had fallen into desuetude. It is as if a lovely antique table has been rediscovered after many years of gathering dust up in the attic, and when brought downstairs and cleaned up and polished, imparts a splendor and unbought grace to the room that no shiny new object could possibly match.”

 

Do you have some favorite old words? How about a favorite author who makes you get out your dictionary and thesaurus? What words do you hope we save for future generations?

Dumbing Down

I recently sent my current WIP Ant Farm to beta readers. I wanted to know if they had any problems with the manuscript. I received a number of insightful comments and suggestions.

Fortunately none of them caused a major rewrite, but two of my readers commented unfavorably about my word choices. A reader of my earlier books had also noted that she needed to use the dictionary more on my mysteries than any of the literature she normally read.

They were telling me that my vocabulary was too complex.

My reading friends are of above average intelligence and understood many of the words they questioned. Their point was that to appeal to a large audience, I should keep my books at the seventh grade reading level.

I do not have a particularly large vocabulary as such things go. In high school my class schedule for all four years had me taking English in first period. That meant I memorized the vocabulary words during homeroom, aced the tests, which were the first activity of the class, and then promptly forgot the definitions. The result of that short-term solution to learning vocabulary was evident in my preliminary SAT exam English score, which was not up to my standards. I spent the next year actually learning a bit of vocabulary and raised my verbal SAT from the 75th percentile to the 95th. I have since forgotten most of those words.

Apparently a few stuck, including these highfalutin word choices from the beta version of Ant Farm:

Cacophony, affect, prevaricate, gawp, suss out, Circean, macadam, tympani, arpeggio, conflated, cockup (English slang), penurious, Mesozoic, epigram, dendrite, diurnal, malapropism, victuals, incipient, peregrine, coterie, and puerile.

Most of these words have close enough synonyms that I could make easy substitutions. To remove others required me to do a bit of sentence reworking. A few words I left in. For example, I have a character whose essential being is to use phrases like “penurious skeezicks.” I now have another character define the term.

This paucity of vocabulary by ordinary readers was not always so. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. Here are a few words he used in his works (taken from http://poestories.com/wordlist.php ):

Abase, abstruse, AEgipans, aigrette, apothegm, appetency, asphaltum, asseveration, athwart, avoirdupois, axiom

Those are just the “A” words.

Latin was required at my grandfather’s high school. He proclaimed those classes were the most useful ones he took. Knowing Latin roots and a spattering of Greek ones, he could figure out the meaning of most words. He did not graduate from college, but he would routinely correctly answer at least 90% of the monthly Reader’s Digest “Word Power” quiz.

Now, even though most of my readers are college graduates, I must temper my vocabulary. Steven King in his On Writing suggests that vocabulary is the top shelf of a writer’s toolbox. He stuck grammar on the same shelf, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.

King says “the first rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.

Therein lies my problem: each of my highfalutin words was my first choice. I didn’t use “lie” in draft one and gussy it up to “prevaricate” in draft two. Nope, prevaricate is what I wrote from the get-go and that’s no lie.

As I was thinking about my problems with obscure vocabulary, I had a brief moment of relief (I wrote “respite,” but changed it to “moment of relief,” because of, you know, what I’m hearing about my word choices). Most e-readers have built in dictionaries that allow you to hold your finger over a word to automatically generate a pop-up with the definition.

My relief was short lived. I am the kind of guy who schleps to his Funk and Wagnalls’ 1600+-page dictionary to learn the meaning of an unfamiliar word and check its etymology, but we live in a world where instant gratification is the norm. Most of my readers do not have the same interest as I do in words and do not want to stop reading to learn something.

All of which explains why “cacophony” became “noisy” and I replaced “speaking with a flat affect” with some other set of words that indicate a lack of tonal expression. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote; I’ve blocked it out.

On this issue of vocabulary, I’ve sold out, I have. I’m okay with that. I’ll still get to use my twenty-five cent words in my first drafts, but from now on, I’ll start modifying them in the second draft.

~ Jim

Most Hated Words in the English Language

Several weeks ago on NPR I heard someone talking about a list of the most hated words. I’m not sure which list they were talking about because when I went to Google to check it out, there were an incredible amount of lists of most hated words. The Vocabulary Review has a blog where you can list the Worst Words in your opinion. You can also sign up for the free Daily Vocabula by sending your email address to: TheDailyVocabula@vocabula.com.

Then Madeleine Crum on the Huff Post listed “9 Words You Probably Hate (And Why You Hate Them). They described our feelings about certain words as a love/hate relationship. The words we hate make us cringe, and there’s actually a word aversion that makes us physically sick, if you can believe that. They listed words like “yolk” and “slurp” because they produce a visceral reaction. I guess that’s why one shouldn’t talk about road kill at the dinner table. Following are a list of the nine words they list as ones you probably hate. I’ve shortened much of the reasoning for why it’s a hated word and for some have added my own thoughts. 

 

Literally:  Linguistic prescriptivists beware: This may give you a literal headache. A non-literal definition of “literally” has been deemed acceptable by Google. It can now be used as an emphasizer, as in, “Miley’s VMA performance literally shocked me.”

Moist:  This word ranks among hoist and cloister as one of the most phonetically displeasing components of the English language. Plus, according to Slate, “It’s squishy-seeming, and, to some, specifically evocative to certain body parts and undergarments.

Panties: Much the same reasoning as the above words although others think it’s an okay word.

Foodie:  Defined as “a person with a particular interest in food.” According to Huff Post, “most people have a particular interest in food.” Duh! So most of us are foodies whether we know that or not.

Alright:  This should absolutely not be a word, but it is. It’s a weird alignment of all right. A phrase that actually makes sense, but Huff Post or Madeleine doesn’t like it because it lacks imagination and looks like a typo.

Curate:  People hate this word because it’s everywhere and not just about museums. Today people curate Twitter feeds, Etsy shops and second-hand clothing stores.

Zeitgeist:  It’s a German word meaning “spirit of the time,” and Huff Post thinks it’s overused and almost always disrupts the flow of a sentence or conversation.

Impactful:  It’s not a word in the dictionary yet, but Huff Post finds it irritating business jargon. Plus it can describe everything from a politician’s haircut to a startup’s fourth quarter earnings.

Paradigm:  It’s become a canned way of saying “You’ve gotta change your perspective, man.”

Stephen Adkins, University Harold Reporter lists the Top 13 Hated Words in English Language (2013). They are: Selfie, Twerk/twerking, Hashtag, Twittersphere, Mister Mom, T-Bone, On Steroids, ageddon, apocalypse, intellectually/morally bankrupt, Obamacare, adversity and fan base.

In addition to words there are phrases that are annoying, too. Three of mine are: In my honest opinion. Why would you give me your dishonest opinion? To make a long story short almost always follows an already long story. In other words. If what had been said previously was said concisely and in simple English, the message wouldn’t have to be repeated, would it? As far as words I hate, it's any denigrating or derogatory words that demean others.

What are words or phrases you hate?