Wordcatcher (42 page)

To sew; a seam, a thread.
This venerable word refers to the ties that bind us, whether it’s in the
sutras
, the sacred Hindu writings, or the surgical stitches after an operation. If you follow the
thread
of the word from its origins in the Proto-Indo-European
syu
- or
su
-, to bind or sew, you will come to the Latin
sutura
, a sewing together, and eventually to the English
seam
and
seamstress
. Similarly, a
stitch
is “a passing through stuff of a needle and thread.” Centuries of drawing out these threads gave us the Old English
spinnan
, to
spin,
as in the spinning of
yarns
by sailors while mending their nets, and the expressions “three sheets to the wind” and “know the ropes.”
Gray’s Anatomy
, first published in 1858, defines
sutures
: “The bones of the cranium and face are connected to each other by means of
Sutures.
… The
sutures
remain separate for a considerable period after the complete formation of the skull. It is probable that they serve the purpose of permitting the growth of the bones at their margins, while their peculiar formation, together with the interposition of the
sutural
ligament between the bones forming them, prevents the dispersion of blows or jars received upon the skull.” In the fall of 2009, at a dinner in San Francisco, Deepak Chopra told me that ancient Hindu sages taught that “the
sutras
stitch together consciousness, and every sutra is a reflection of all the threads of the universe.” Metaphorically,
sutures
not only tie things together, they also expand to allow growth, to connect us to ourselves and to each other.

To come one over the other
, like waves upon the shore, like waves of sleepiness upon a man who has been up for three days, like waves of nausea upon someone on a ship in heavy seas. “Drenched with their
swaffing
waves,” in the wondrous phrasing of
Taylor’s Works,
1630.
Swaff
is also a noun in English dialect for the amount of grass a scythe cuts with one bold stroke. A plangent word worth reviving, a word that sighs and soughs. Companion words include the Scottish
dwam
, the trancelike feeling that washes over a person, rendering them unaware of what’s occurring around them. Similarly, a
fugue
is a flight of consciousness, from the Italian
fuga
, for flight, a wavy, dreamlike state of altered awareness that may stretch for hours or days with little memory of what happened.

Forbidden, prohibited, out of bounds.
A complex series of prohibitions related to things holy or unclean; an ancient Polynesian practice to protect and ensure the sacred. Captain Cook wrote in a journal entry from 1777 that the word “has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden…. When any thing is forbidden to be eat, or made use of, they say, that it is taboo.” In the spring of 2009 I caught sight of the word while walking along a beach in Samoa. Written in bright white paint on a towering palm tree was the word TABOO. Beneath the warning was a strip of yellow police tape that stretched to the next tree about ten yards away and to the tree beyond it. Then I saw the reason for the warning. Within the semicircle of towering palms was a small flotilla of outrigger canoes. Clearly, intruders, strangers, nonsailors, were meant to keep away. This bold
word has meant exactly that for millennia throughout Polynesia, to prevent the desecration of sacred objects such as sailing vessels, or virtually anything that the tribal kings had touched. “Furthermore,” wrote Margaret Mead of her time in Samoa, “among true
taboo
prohibitions, those whose breach is followed by automatic punishment, there are in Polynesia two main classes:
taboos
associated with the inherent sanctity of the gods, chiefs, and priests, and
taboos
associated with the inherent uncleanness of certain occurrences, such as menstruation, [childbirth], blood-shed, and death.”

A
quiz
, an exam, a questioning.
In Roman times a man would swear to the truth by tugging his beard, crossing his heart, or making a vow on the lives of his family or
fortune
. Or—he would grasp his own
testes
, testicles. (Some say it was those of the man to whom the oath was made.) The word picture gets curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll said, in the Latin word for “witness,” which is
testis
, and for “testifying,” which is
testificari
, to bear witness. These words led to
testament
, from
testis
, witness, and
facere
, to make—meaning both the written record of a statement and “an open profession of one’s faith and devotion,” in 1526, or “publication of a will,” from
testamentum
. In its annual contest for the most humorous malapropisms, the
Washington Post
reported that one contestant defined
testicle
as “a humorous question on an exam.” Companion words are legion:
testimony,
evidence;
testudo,
tortoise;
textile
, from
textere
, to weave; and
test tube
, a vessel for conducting simple chemical tests.
Test-tube baby
is recorded from 1935;
test drive
is first recorded in 1954. Thus, a
testament
reveals your deepest truth, what you would swear to. To which the soul man, Motown singer Marvin Gaye, sang, “Can I get a witness?”

A treasure trove of synonyms.
An upside-down
dictionary
; whereas a
dictionary
provides meanings for words, a
thesaurus
provides words for meanings. While ruin-hunting in Olympia, Greece, after the 2004 Olympics, I was startled to see the original use of the word
thesauros
on my map of the ancient grounds. There in black and white was the Greek word for the six buildings that lined the path leading to the famous stadium (from
stadia
, a 200-meter running track). For centuries, visitors and dignitaries attending the Olympics would contribute spectacular gifts—
treasures
—from their cities or homelands, which were housed in a newly constructed
thesauros
, from the root of
tithenai
, which later gave us both
treasure
and
tithe
. The term
Thesaurarie
was used by compilers of
dictionary
as early as 1592, for a collection of rich information about words. In 1823,
thesaurus
made its first appearance as an English word, around the time an eccentric British physician, inventor, and lexicographer,
Peter Mark Roget, known for his discovery of the “persistence of vision,” began a lifelong project of collecting his “treasure house of words.” First published in 1852, Roget’s
Thesaurus
was originally titled
Collection of English Synonyms Classified and Arranged
, and proved to be so popular it was reprinted twenty-eight times during his life, expanded by his son John in 1879 and again in 1911, and reprinted and expanded more than a hundred times since then, in many languages. Curiously, his
Thesaurus
was long considered a “difficult book”—at least until the crossword puzzle fad transformed the book into an indispensable prompt. And the 1550 term
treasure trove
, from the Anglo-French
tresor trové,
via the Latin
thesaurus inventus
, found treasure, which refers to the old custom of rendering to the lord of the land or the king any
treasure
that is found on his land.

To suffer, abide
,
to tolerate without complaint
. “Endure,” according to Coleridge’s
A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language
. As they say in the Highlands, ‘Ye’ll just have to
thole
it.” A “lost beauty,” a missing link, or a word we miss and don’t even know it.
Thole
is of Anglo-Saxon heritage, immortalized in the 10th-century epic
Beowulf
. Obscure but still used in pockets of Gaeltacht country, as in “To
thole
the
dool
(doldrums),” which means to bear the evil consequences of something. When Seamus Heaney was translating
Beowulf
, he turned to his
own family in Northern Ireland, who still used the word. His aunt used to say of those who were grieving, “They’ll just have to learn to
thole
.” In his classic
Lost Beauties of the English Language
, Charles Mackay regrets the way that the deeply mournful Old English and Scottish
thole
, with its long
o
, “was wrongly thrust out of the English to make room for modern substitutes from the French,” such as the weaker expression “to bear.” Companion words include the Old English
tholemod
, long-suffering;
untholandlik
, unendurable;
untholeable
, intolerable, not to be tholed or endured. Finally, a Scottish proverb that rolls around the heather of the heart: “He who
tholes
, endures.”