Wordcatcher (45 page)

Word killing; language torture
. Victims include the pronunciation “nuke-you-lar” for
nuclear
and the stupefying belief that people in Latin America speak Latin. Derived from
verbum
, an action word, and
cide
, killing, from Latin
caedere
, to cut, hack, strike. Thus,
verbicide
can be used to describe both the deliberate misuse of a word and the obtuse, unintentional murder of its meaning. The consequences are not academic; they effect how—or even whether—we communicate. David W. Orr writes, in
The Nature of Design
, “We are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and
verbicide
—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden.” Companions in word crime include the recently conjured
memoricide
, an officially recognized crime perpetrated through the intentional destruction of art or artifacts, which amounts to the murder of cultural memory, as in the destruction of the Sarajevo Library or the National Museum in Baghdad.
Tomecide
is “book killing,” used to describe the crimes of book censors and book burners. Another powerful term is
logomachy
, fighting over words, from
logos
, word, and
machia
, fight or struggle.

The aesthetic flaw in art that reveals the soul of the work; the patina that only age can bring to it.
Though usually regarded as separate words, as early as the 1940s D. T. Suzuki had linked them as
wabi-sabi
, defining the compound word as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” According to Leonard Koren, roughly speaking, the nearest word in English is probably
rustic
, suggesting something earthy, primitive, unpretentious, unvarnished. Separately,
wabi
suggests a tough, humble spiritual attitude toward life and art, while
sabi
refers to the solitudinous, often
melancholy
quality in objects. The overlap between these often-hinged words is an affection and appreciation for imperfection. The old barn that was a little wobbly to begin with and has aged well with twenty coats of flaking red paint would be an example of
wabi-sabi
. If the barn was finally recognized as beautiful, perhaps after years of neglect and being taken
for granted, then it could be said to illustrate
shibui
, “the beauty that ages beautifully.”

Wabi-Sabi

An empty word, but a full story.
This phrase is inspired by the folk memory of watching weasels pierce a small hole in an egg and suck all the life out of it, while leaving it apparently untouched and whole. Thus, weasel words give
the appearance of fact but are empty of any real meaning since they don’t include any proof or attribution. Examples include “It’s commonly known…” “Everybody knows…” “They claim that…” “Contrary to popular belief…” and “Scientists say…” In February 2009, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann interviewed political analyst Richard Wolffe, who said, “Look, the truth is that when you see these kinds of
weasel words
coming from the office of an elected official, you know they’ve got something to hide.”

Strange, curious, ominous. Weird
’s own peculiar roots reach back to the Old English
wyrd
, fate or destiny, literally “that which comes,” and the Proto-Indo-European
wert
-, to turn, wind, bend. Together they suggest something eerie in the human condition, the sense that our fate is already known and that it is unwinding at every moment. The
numinous
power of
wyrd
has seen a revival in the recent spate of
Beowulf
translations
, as in the passage, “
Wyrd
was very near.” As an adjective
weird
means ghastly, unearthly, witchlike; as a noun, fate or destiny, the sense that what will be will be. This haunting suspicion is personified in the Old Norse story of the Three Norns or Fates, who determined human destiny. Shakespeare made them out to be terrifying in
Macbeth
: “The
weird
sisters, hand in hand, / Posters of the sea and land.” The phrase conjures up the mythic image of The Fates, the three goddesses presiding
over mortals’ destinies, who were known to the Scots as the
weirds
. During the 15th century, Scots repeated a legend that the Fates or
weird
sisters had appeared to Macbeth and lured him to his fate. By dint of Shakespeare’s portrayal of them in
King Lear
, people came to believe that the
wyrd
in the
weird
sisters meant supernatural or uncanny.
Weird
assumes its modern sense of “odd, uncanny” in 1815, and this is how the novelist Barry Gifford used it: “The whole world is wild at heart and
weird
on top.” Helen Keller wrote, “To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of
fate
is strength undefeatable.” Thus,
weird
describes “how strange it seems the way things turn out,” or as is still heard in Scotland, “
Dree your weird
,” which means “Put up with your lot in life!”

The brother of thingabob, sister to jigamaree, second cousin to whipplesnizzit, and distant relative of widget
.
Whatchamacallit
is one of scores of terms that refer to indescribable everyday items. It’s an eccentric (from Greek
ekkentros
, out of center) family of words for things otherwise orphaned by their very namelessness, such as the stars you see when you’re dizzy (
phosphenes
), the flap of leather in your shoe (the
tongue
), the flared grip of wood on the end of a baseball bat (the
knob
), the ridge above your lip (the
philtrum
), the slight column of cartilage that separates your nostrils (the
columella
), or the flap of skin on the outside of your ear
(the
tragus
). More companions here than Garrison Keillor, including
doohickey, gizmo, jigger, thingamajig, doodad, thingummy, doodah,
and a gazillion more, such as
blivet
, a terrific onomatopoeic word to describe a useless contraption. You can imagine the eccentric basement inventor down the street asking you to see one. As one wag described it, a really useless invention would be a toothbrush for a chicken. Clever
rhapsodies
on the theme of gizmos you know but just can’t name.

To make a sometimes shrill, sometimes melodic sound by pushing the breath through the gap between the teeth or through the puckered lips. Whistle
comes from the Old English
hwistilian
, which probably imitates nature’s own
whistling
sounds, such as the wind, bird cries, the hissing of serpents, or the steam escaping from a teakettle. To
whistle
can mean to signal, like a train approaching a crossing; to summon, like the neighborhood call to kids for supper; to make music, like Otis Reading at the end of his song “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”; or to
flirt
, as in the
wolf whistles
from construction workers when a pretty girl walks by. Over the centuries, inhabitants of a few remote sites around the world have developed sophisticated
whistling
languages. According to Charles Berlitz, people who live in the “Village of the Birds,” nestled in the remote valleys of Kuskoy, in Eastern Turkey, “perfected a system of chirps, tweets, and twitters.”
At least three other “whistling villages” are known: Silbo, on La Gamora, in the Canary Islands; Aas, in the Pyrenees; and the village of the Chepang tribe in Nepal. For further instructions, you need go no further than the movie
To Have or Have Not
, and the scene where the sultry Lauren Bacall purrs to the startled Humphrey Bogart, “You know how to
whistle
, right? Just put your lips together and blow.”