Wordcatcher (17 page)

A cuss world; a mild expletive-deleted; no small escape valve
. Origin stories differ radically (from
radix
, root). The traditional but conservative derivation, issuing from the hallowed halls of
The Oxford Book of Word Histories
, traces
damn
back to the Old French
dam(p)ner
, from Latin
dampnare
, to inflict a loss on, from
damnun
, loss or damage.
Damn
, if there isn’t an alternative reading. Captain Grosse offers a far more picturesque source:
dam
, a small Indian coin, mentioned in the Genoa code of laws. Accordingly, the common English expression “I do not care a
dam
” arose, for “I do not care a farthing for it.” Not to worry. Recent research reported in
The Week
suggests that a little swearing after hitting your thumb with a hammer may be good for your blood pressure. It could just as well be called the “Professor Higgins syndrome,” after the speech teacher in
My Fair Lady
who falls hopelessly in love with
the fetching Eliza Doolittle, singing, “
Damn, damn, damn
, I’ve grown accustomed to her face…” Companion words include
damnation
and
damage
, plus innumerable euphemistic variations such as
darn, dagnabbit
, and the Appalachian euphemism
dad-burned.

A varmint of an adjective, a villainous word dressed up in a black hat and handlebar mustache, signaling cowardly, ignoble behavior.
Although
dastardly
may sound as if it hails from a 1940s Western shot in Monument Valley, it actually derives from
adastriga
, an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dwarf; a
poltroon
; a man infamous for fear.” Ansel Adam writes in his memoirs about his seventh-grade teacher who scolded him for reading Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
: “Shelley was a
dastardly
atheist!” If you’re wondering, as I did, whether there is a noun at the heart of the word, consider these lines by John Dr yden (not John Ford), who wrote, “
Dastard
and drunkard, mean and
insolent
; / Tongue-valiant hero, vaunter of thy might, / In threats the foremost, but the last in the fight.” Similarly, a certain George McDuffle alliterated this amazing apothegm: “He who dallies is a dastard, he who doubts is damned.”

An anxiety attack, personal pandemonium.
Obscure but useful, and dating back to 1713,
daymare
refers to sudden claustrophobic or crushing mood swings while wide awake. Today, we call them “panic attacks,” from
pan,
god of terror.
Daymare
is to nightmare as daydream is to nightdream. It is a circus mirror image, twisting, turning, elongating, foreshortening our worst fears. The Anglo-Saxon
daymare
derives from the old Sanskrit
dah
, to burn, and
mare
, horse, with possible influence from the ancient demon horse-god Mare. During medieval times the reigning belief about the cause of nightmares was that the spirit of a horse lay on the stomach of an anxiety-ridden sleeper. Dr. Johnson provides us with another of his inimitable definitions: “a morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” Thus, a
nightmare
is the mythic image that embodies the terror of being unable to breathe in the dead of night, and the torment of feeling crushed by psychological pressure, tormented by bad dreams; and a
daymare
is the mythic image of morbid fears that come like an incubus between dawn and dusk. In
Dracula: Dead and Loving It
, the silliest prince of darkness of them all, Leslie Nielsen, moans, “It is nighttime, so it wasn’t real. I was having a
daymare
.”

An oracular word, a divine proclamation, a piece of ambiguous advice.
During classical times
Delphic
meant divinely inspired
wisdom
and then reversed direction in modern times. Its origins are echoic, from the sacred site of
Delphi
, after the oracle who sat on her tripod in the Temple of Apollo. Her proclamations were famously ambiguous, even riddlic: “Thou Shalt Go Thou Shalt Return Never By War Shall You Perish,” For centuries afterward, the debate raged: Where does the comma go? The anonymous and ignominious Greek warrior who asked her the question chose to believe the comma went before the word
never
, rather than after it—and died in the battle he had been subtly warned about. Considering the curious fact that only seventy-three or so recorded utterances of the oracle have been identified, its hold on Western memory has been tenacious. To doubt its wisdom was inadvisable, as Aesop learned the hard way. When he mocked the oracle in one of his stories he was thrown off the cliff that overlooks Delphi. Thus, advice from Delphi was considered wisely ambivalent, revealing the
character
as well as the destiny of the one who asked the question. Companion words include
oracular
, from the Latin
orare
, to pray;
Apolloniac
, Apollo-like; and
Sibylline
, the Roman equivalent of
Delphic
, like the Sibyl of Montparnasse, Gertrude Stein.

Unplanned, unconnected, unsatisfying.
To be
desultory
means to jump around, meander from topic to topic without any rhyme or reason, a practice that makes it hard to finish anything. The backstory tells us why. The Romans called the circus performer who made the mob gasp by jumping from one horse to another a
desultory
, from the Latin
desilio
, to jump down, from
desalire
, to leap. Picture a cross between
Ben-Hur, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,
and
Indiana Jones.
The Roman orator Seneca wrote, “
Desultory
reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.” Since 1581 we have used the word in English to describe someone who leaps around in a conversation or speech. But the word has an upside, if you can stay with me for a moment. Consider the marvel of a fiercely focused horse-leaper, actually called a
desultory
, whose job it was to stay focused on the job at hand, an ability which also lent us the word
consultant
, as well as the word
result
, which is the consequence of an experience that “leaps back” at you. Companion words for the versatile
desalire
, from the Latin
salire
, include
sally
, to leap ahead (as in “to sally forth”) and the lascivious
salacious
, which originally referred to a male animal that lustily “leaps upon” a female. If you’re feeling slightly
jaded
about all these old words, remember that
jaded
is Middle English for a horse whose spirit has been broken, and has been crippled by old age.

A collection of words organized alphabetically, a collision of meanings, a river of origins, a garden of citations
. “The universe in alphabetical order,” in the marvelous description by Anatole France. Historian Jonathan Green credits Aristophanes of Byzantium with the compiling of the first
dictionary
, which he simply called
Leixis
, or
Words
, in 200 BC. So now we know that folks have been consulting them for at least 2,200 years, but they offer more meaning than meanings alone. Théophile Gautier read them to improve his poetry, Walter Pater regularly consulted them to keep his prose warm and marmoreal. Of all people, Mae West may have the most memorable line about one. After learning that she had inspired the name for a life jacket, she said, “I’ve been in
Who’s Who
and in “What’s What” but this is the first time I’ve ever been in a
dictionary
.” What would she have said if she knew her ample bosom had also inspired the name for what happens to a parachute when one of the lines comes across the top and it forms a giant bra? Finally, I find it boundlessly charming to discover that one of the very first
dictionaries
for young people was called the
Promptorium Parvuloru
—in English, “The Prompt for the Young” or “Treasure House of Words for the Young.” Thus, a
dictionary
doesn’t merely give us a little information about a word or two we are looking up, but it
prompts
us to think longer and harder about them. Writing in a letter to Fransesco Sastres (August 21, 1784), Dr. Johnson said, “
Dictionaries
are like watches: the worst is better than
none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” For some reason, in Spain and Mexico
dictionaries
are called “donkey-killers,” perhaps because of the mulish demands on them to carry great loads of meaning across treacherous lands of meaninglessness.