Wordcatcher (43 page)

To vibrate, to excite; originally, to pierce, to make a hole.
One of the most penetrating words in the language,
thrill
has its roots in the sound and
fury
that a tool makes when it creates a hole, or an arrow when it hits its target. It comes from the Middle English
thrillen
, from
thryel
, hot, and
thurh
, through, meaning “to pierce.” By 1592, it had evolved to mean “a shivering, exciting feeling,” as when someone is “pierced by an emotion,” a distant echo of the heart-puncturing arrows of Eros. Metaphorically,
thrill
has developed into the sense of being filled with a quivering pleasure, as when listening to B. B. King’s “The
Thrill
is Gone,” or reading an Agatha Christie
thriller
. Cole Porter captures both senses when he writes: “I get no kick from
champagne / Mere alcohol doesn’t
thrill
me at all. / So tell my why should it be true / That I get a kick out of you?” And on a poignant note, when Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, died, he was buried, as the newspapers said, “with some things of a personal nature,” including five of his own handmade arrows. To me, a
thrilling
detail.

Upside down,
crazy
-making.
The word is a brilliant example of a common but intimate daily practice metamorphosing into a colorful
metaphor
. The reeling expression comes from the old-fashioned hearths of rural Ireland where peat or turf was burned by the local
bogtrotters
, and refers to the way that it was stacked to dry. As Joseph Taylor defined it, in his 1819
dictionary
Antiquitates Curiosae
, the common practice was to stack turf “the top-side-turf-way,” which meant the wrong side upward. As W.B. Yeats might have said, “It’s all in a
darg
,” meaning “a day’s work,” Old Irish for completing the task of peat-cutting and carrying it back home in a wheelbarrow, as immortalized by Halliwell in his 1811
dictionary
. Philosopher William James, ever wrestling with the unpredictability of the human mind, wrote, “Men’s activities are occupied into ways—in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own
topsy
-
turvy
mind.”

Carrying meaning from one language to another.
A relic of a word. The derivation is from the Latin
translatus
and
transferre
, carry across, from
trans
, across, and
latus
, carry, borne, which easily slid into the English
transfer
, capturing the sense of movement of words across the borders of incomprehension and misunderstanding. But its earliest meaning is cultural and spiritual, anchored in the “transfer of relics” from one cathedral to another during medieval times. There is a curious connection between the
translation
of a relic, say the femur bone of St. Francis, and the
translation
of Chekhov from Russian into English, and here it is. For a site to qualify as a cathedral, a genuine relic was needed as proof of the holiness of the site. Inevitably, a brisk business arose in the transfer, or
translating
, of relics from one church to another, like soccer players switching clubs. Thus, to
translate
is to carry the meaning of one language across the great divide between cultures to a second language on the other side. Tragically, Henry VIII chose to publically burn thousands of those
translated
relics—the bones of saints—whose ashes eventually gave us the word
bonfire
, from “bone-fire.” In the
Sunday Telegraph
in August 2009, Alain de Botton reviewed the new
translation
of Marcel Proust: “The greatest praise one could pay this new edition of
In Search of Lost Time
is therefore to say that it allows us to forget both that we are reading the work of many different
translators
and, for long sections, that we are even reading anything that began in a foreign language at all. Like the best
translations
, it lets the author speak.” Amen.

To take a journey; a trip.
A universal practice with universal features—departure, encountering obstacles, returning home—all of which are reflected in the story of the word. Our English word dates back to 1375: “to journey,” from Early French
travailen
, to toil, labor, work hard. The earliest references to the word don’t have our—(sigh)—romantic associations; they refer to “pains; labor, toil, suffering, childbirth pains,” as James Murray defined it for the OED. The French verb gave us travail, hard work, but also a farrier’s (blacksmith’s) frame for unruly horses, and the earlier
tripalium
, a medieval three-paled (-spiked) instrument of torture. Tied together, the notion here is of embarking on a difficult journey, which will either torture you or
stretch
you. Historian Daniel Boorstin writes that the
travel
-travail connection evolved during the Middle Ages owing to the fact that “traveling entailed hard work such as learning the local language, studying its history, risking different cuisine, in contrast to tourism, where the guide does all the work for you.
Travels
as “an account of journeys” is recorded from 1591.
Traveled
as in “experienced in
travel
” is from 1413.
Traveling salesman
is attested to in 1885.
Travelers’ tales
are stories brought home by survivors, pilgrims, adventurers, and poets. Companion words include the lapidary
trip
, which can refer to a short journey, a clumsy fall, a slip of the tongue, and a bastard. Grosse pounds out a triple
pun
: “She has made a trip; she had a bastard.” And why, other than for diversion, do we hit
the road? Hear out Mark Twain: “
Travel
is the death of prejudice.”

Useless but fascinating facts
. Trivia is the kind of thing you pick up or learn at a crossroads, and the derivation is exactly that, from the Latin for
crossroads
, from
tri
, three, and
via
, way or road. This allusion is potent, because in ancient times a traveler arriving at an intersection of three streets in Rome or elsewhere in Italy would have encountered a type of kiosk where a wide range of information was listed. If you were a novice, all of it would be valuable; if you were a veteran traveler, it would seem old hat, twice-told tales—ultimately,
trivial talk
, mere gossip, at the crossroads. At universities during the Middle Ages, educators taught the Seven Liberal Arts, known as the
trivium
, the three ways or three roads of learning believed to form the foundation of learning,
grammar
, logic, and rhetoric, followed by the
quatrivium
, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Companion words include the board game phenomenon Trivial Pursuit, which transforms the idea of
trivia
into must-know facts about pop culture.

A monument to victory
. In ancient Greece a triumph in war was marked by hanging the spoils or prizes of war—weapons, shields, even body parts—in a tree near the battle site. These monuments were called, in Greek,
tropaion
, defeat, from
trope
, a rout, in the sense of turning back the enemy. By the early 15th century, the
trophy
had been awarded to the Romans, where it became the Latin
trophæum
, a signal of victory, a monument; it was then given to the French, among whom it become
trophée
by the 16th century. Figuratively,
trophy
first was recorded 1569 in English to mean any token or memorial of victory, a physical manifestation. By 1984, the phrase
trophy wife
was popular, according to my
Dictionary of American Slang.
Companion words include
trope
, a figure of speech. Thus, a
trophy
symbolizes the vanquishing of the enemy and a celebration of victory, but is also something to hang above the mantel, as our ancestors hung theirs from a tree. Soccer star David Beckham once said, “With United, we’d all grown up together, we all wanted to win the biggest
trophy
in football. We did it together.” Regarding the difference between art and reality, singer Rufus Wainwright remarked, “Life is a game, and love is the
trophy
.”