words Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Confidence, gifts, words

Melanie says: “Here’s my Christmas gift to you a tad late. Hope you like :)”

Who is someone in your life who helped to give you confidence? How did they do it?

The first to come to mind was my second, primary high school girlfriend. Not only was she fearless, but her boldness was also infectious. I was a really “good” kid, and she was a lot more challenging of authority. I’ve been a troublemaker ever since.

Then three years after I broke up with the Okie, she called me pretty much out of the blue, and she needed her detective skills to find me. She helped me put my head back together, because my self-confidence was pretty shot.

If you were only allowed to give one gift in your life, who would you give it to and what would it be?

Abstractly, I always wished I had had the means to pay off my parents’ house.

Perhaps, what I most want for The Daughter is for her to feel love and self-confidence. Is that two things? Oh well.

What is your favorite (or top three if that works better for you) word to say aloud? (I think mine would be disputatious- there is something substantial, unusual, and intensely satisfying in enunciating it for me, but winnowing is also a fun word to say because it uses muscles that don’t tend to get as much of a workout in daily speech.)

I had a friend named Vito Mastrogiovanni, who died from AIDS in 1991; I LOVED saying Mastrogiovanni. Another high school friend: her first name was Lonna, and she had a last name I can’t spell, but it was pronounced soo-hoe-vee-ET-ski.

Dien Bien Phu.

In the non-proper noun category: Onamonapia – gotta say it fast! Sesquicentennial. And many words in French (Rapprochement) or Italian (Tortellini) or German (Wiener Schnitzel) or other languages.

In the fictitious word category: Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.

In general, I like repeated fricatives, such as vivacious.

Made me think of one of my favorite songs by the Monkees: Words.

Love ya!

And you.

N is for Nudiustertian

I always seem to remember where I learn words as an adult I hadn’t known before.

Nudiustertian pertaining to the day before yesterday; it has nothing to do with strippers and nakedness. I’ve also discovered that, in the same linguistic family, hesternal relates to yesterday, and hodiernal pertains to today.

“The OED goes on to gives its only example of the use of the word in a sentence from 1647, taken from the ever-popular The simple cobler of Aggawam in America, written by Nathaniel Ward. ‘When I heare a‥Gentledame inquire‥what [is] the nudiustertian fashion of the Court; I mean the very newest.'”

I love such specific words. I also like this one, which is similar in intent: antepenultimate means “last but two in a series; third last. ‘The antepenultimate item on the agenda…'” Chapter 8 in a ten-chapter book also qualifies.

Somehow, I had not known the word penultimate, meaning next to last, until I had read it in an intro to the comic book Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini. #19 was the penultimate issue of the original series, which means that #18 was the antepenultimate one.

I always seem to remember where I learn words as an adult I hadn’t known before. The word ersatz means “(of a product) made or used as a substitute, typically an inferior one, for something else.” I first saw it in a book about albums by the Beatles, plus the solo works. Ringo’s Goodnight Vienna, which features contributions of the other three on various tracks, was described as an “ersatz Beatles album.”

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

Tittynope, or ort, and poor Lazarus

The story is not describing the rich man in hell and damnation, but like the leadership of the synagogue in Jesus’ time, “Stiff-necked” people separated from God. Lazarus represents the world open to hearing the Word.

As is my wont, I checked out the Grandiloquent Word of the Day, which, for a day in late February, was tittynope. The term was SO peculiar that I had to check it in another source. And sure enough – “Tittynope: (noun) a small quantity of anything left over, whether a few beans on a dinner plate or the dregs at the bottom of a cup.”

My old friend Hadiya – she’s not that old, but… – asked if it was related to the word ort. I’d say, definitionally, yes.

Usually, orts. a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal. Origin: 1400–50; late Middle English; cognate with Low German ort, early Dutch oorete; compare Old English or- out-, ǣt food (see eat).

The girl in the Grandiloquent pic looks satisfied, but that’s not the image the word generated for me. Rather, it was perhaps a Dickensian beggar; nope, no food for you. Or even more so, that story of poor Lazarus in Luke 16:

19 There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.

OK, it’s less the story I read, but rather the narrative I’ve heard (my church youth group, twice), and participated in (1976), from Godspell. Here’s a random clip that I found on YouTube, and another clip.

And in looking for these videos, I came across this 30-minute description of how the story of the rich man and Lazarus has long been misinterpreted. Basically, the presenter, Jason Lucas, indicates that the imagery in the parables is speaking to the Pharisees (the “righteous” Jewish leadership) and the Gentiles (the “heathen” sinners) to suggest that God’s word is now open to all, not just the historically chosen people, spoken in code as so not to alert the Romans, who just want to maintain the peace, but is clearly understood by the Pharisees.

Before addressing that story, Lucas described a previous parable, the “Prodigal Son”, and noted that the older brother in the story is Israel, the long-chosen people, and the younger brother, who literally ate with the pigs, is the rest of the world, whose covenant with the father (Father) is even more exciting because it is new.

The Lazarus story, the video suggests, is not describing the rich man in hell and damnation, but like the leadership of the synagogue in Jesus’ time, “stiff-necked” people separated from God. Lazarus represents the world open to hearing the Word. Lucas’ point here echoes Simon Perry, who:

has argued that the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) refers to Eliezer of Damascus. In [Genesis] 15:4, God says to Abraham, “this man will not be your heir.” By locating Lazarus (an abbreviated transcript of Eleazar) outside the gates of Abraham’s perceived descendant, but then having him in Abraham’s bosom, Jesus is portrayed as radically redefining the covenant.

This take on the story makes a LOT more sense to me than the traditional interpretation.

I blame Miley Cyrus and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

I have a reasonably large vocabulary, I suppose. Some words, particularly newer ones, apparently elude me, however. Twerking and selfie have been added to the Oxford Dictionary of English recently, and I had been largely oblivious to both terms.

Oh, I had vaguely heard of twerking, when some white female celeb was accused of doing it on a video – I no longer know (or particularly care) who – a few months (or years?) ago. But it’s like the name of the second person I meet at a party where I know no one; it slips off into the ether of my mind. It wasn’t until the infamous Miley Cyrus incident on some awards show recently, that I don’t watch but got lots of coverage, did it finally stick. Oh, yeah, twerking: OK, got it.

Whereas I had never, to my recollection, heard, or especially seen, the word “selfie”, meaning “pouty self-portrait typically taken with a smartphone” until I read the complaint about the Rolling Stone cover of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being a selfie. Since that time, the term has become ubiquitous in my universe. I see it EVERYWHERE now, even in Chuck Miller’s blog. Geraldo Rivera took selfies, which I hope the NSA has captured. I’m sure my ignorance is a function, in part, of not having a smartphone. We have a digital camera, but I understand this trend to be a slightly different animal, gestalt-wise.

A buddy of mine suggested that her ignorance of twerk and selfie “sounds like a sexual hang-up, not a problem of limited vocabulary.” That MAY be true of me as well, especially in the case of the former, although realizing now that Anthony Weiner was taking selfies, maybe the latter as well.

Twerking seems to be in that straight line from Elvis the Pelvis to The Twist to the lambada, plus a bunch of other stuff I wasn’t paying attention to. (You probably DON’T, I mean DO NOT, want to watch this Twerking To Classical Music Via HUFFPOST. Told you so.)

Other new words:

“Dappy – silly, disorganised or lacking concentration: never heard of it. Is it a mix of daffy and happy?
“Digital detox – time spent away from Facebook and Twitter: never heard of this either, though the phenomenon of unplugging I was aware of.
“Girl crush – an intense and typically non-sexual admiration felt by one girl for another”: Is this the female equivalent of bromance? Pretty lame term, I must say.
“Vom – to be sick”: What? It looks like a word already in use, only a syllable longer. Ah, this story explains that it “saves two characters when twittering. Or tweeting. Whatever.”

[Yes, I have stolen this article. But at least it is from myself.]

G is for Gaslighting

“To manipulate events, as Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman to make her think she’s crazy.”

When I was living in Charlotte, NC for a few months in early 1977, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. The city was, in the words of my father “a big old country town”; BTW, it’s gotten much better there, IMO.

One of my few outlets was to go to the main library and read books and magazines, or see movies. One of the films I saw was Gaslight. It was the 1944 US version, not the 1940 UK take; both were based on a 1938 play, Gas Light. The iteration I saw “was directed by George Cukor and starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and 18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her screen debut.”

Without getting into the particulars of why: “Paula loses a brooch that Gregory had given her, despite its having been stored safely in her handbag. A picture disappears from the walls of the house, and Gregory says that Paula took it, but Paula has no recollection of having done so. Paula also hears footsteps coming from above her, in the sealed attic, and sees the gaslights dim and brighten for no apparent reason. Gregory suggests that these are all figments of Paula’s imagination. Gregory does everything in his power to isolate his wife from other people.” In other words, Gregory is trying to make Paula think she is going crazy, and nearly succeeds.

From these movies, and the play, came the term gaslighting, which “has come to describe a pattern of psychological abuse in which the victim is gradually manipulated into doubting his or her own reality. This can involve physical tactics (such as moving or hiding objects) or emotional ones (such as denying one’s own abusive behavior to a victim.)” I thought it was a nifty term, and have used it regularly since.

I am watching the game show JEOPARDY! which is my wont. Episode #6428, which aired 2012-07-25, in the category “GAS” UP (which means the letters GAS appears in the correct response). The $600 clue: “To manipulate events, as Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman to make her think she’s crazy.” I say “to gaslight”; none of the three contestants even rings in. Then I ask other people. No one seems to know this verb, except for my wife, and she only recognizes it because I’ve used it so much.

So I commit to you the word “gaslighting.” Use it in good health; don’t let it make you go crazy.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12