Wordcatcher (23 page)

To trifle, waste, dodder, potter, stammer, falter, totter, kill time.
What we do when we’re procrastinating. Though people have been
fribbling
for as long as there were important things to avoid, the word didn’t enter the English lexicon until 1633. The 1913 edition of Webster’s isolates a
fribbler
as a frivolous kind of fellow. An idler. Companion words include
fiddle, fritter,
and
doodle
, truncated from “do little,” and the
wunderbar
German
Dudeltopf
, a fool, a simpleton, best remembered in the Revolutionary War ditty “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Despite the legions of famous doodlers from John Keats to Virginia Woolf, the implication is that those who are sketching in the margins of life are wasting their time. Thus, to
fribble
in all these cases is to kill time, which violates a central thesis in Western life, that people must use their time wisely (though the verb “use” betrays its own Calvinistic bias). You say “fritter,” and I say
fribble
. Fritter,
fribble
—let’s call the whole thing off.

A practice fly ball in baseball.
One of the great unknowns and so one of the most fun words to speculate about. It dates back to at least 1867, possibly to a similar practice in the game of cricket. For words like this we entertain all possibilities. A colorful one is that
fungo
refers to an early cricket exercise of tossing the ball up in the air, whacking it, then running after it. Hence, it’s “fun” to “go” hitting a ball and running after it. Fellow words do not include
fungology
, dating back to 1860, which is the study of mushrooms rather than balls thunked into the outfield. But they do include
fungo hitter
, a coach who specializes in hitting 300-foot-long fly balls to precise spots in the outfield, sometimes no larger than a silver dollar. It’s said that poet Robert Frost once told George Plimpton his dream was to hit a poem so high it would resemble a
fungo
that never came down.
Fungo
stories are as rare as good
fungo
hitters, but presumably what they have in common is a sense of awe and wonder for anything that reaches so high. Incidentally,
fun
is a word that seems to have been around forever but only dates to the 17th-century verb
fun
, to cheat or
hoax
, probably a variant of the early-15th-century
fon
, to befool, to trick,
hoax
, or turn practical jokes. Thus,
fun
came to mean “merriment, diversion, sport, make a fool of.” Cassidy makes a strong parallel case for the Irish
fonn
, delight, pleasure, song. Collecting its
false friends
is fun, too:
funambulist
, a ropedancer or tightrope walker, from
fun
, rope,
ambulare
, to walk.

A ferocious passion
. If you are in a
fury
, you are enraged because you’ve been touched by the Furies. If you are
furious
you are more than angry, which derives from
angr
, an old Viking word meaning the emotions that arise from realizing the injustices of the world, but less than
berserk
.
Fury
derives from the Latin
furia
, a violent passion, rage, madness;
furiosos
, furious; and
furere
, mad, enraged. The Romans translated the Greek name
Erinyes
, the three personifications of vengeance sent by Hades to punish evildoers, as
Furiae
. Later,
fury
takes on the metaphorical, embodying a woman’s rage. Companion words include
furtive, secretive,
and the frightening verb
furify
, to infuriate. A companion quote to consider, by Francis Bacon: “A man who contemplates revenge keeps his wounds green.” John Dryden wrote, “Beware the
fury
of a patient man.” Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
declaims: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an
idiot
, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

A vast group of stars; an assemblage of brilliant persons or things.
Named after ancient Greek sky gazers who named the twinkling bands of light in the night sky
galaxes
, from their word
gala
, milk. Later, astronomers in medieval Europe described the “light-studded path” across the sky as a
galaxy
, from the Greek word for “a circle of milk” and its Latinized form,
lacteus
, lactate, milky. For centuries, the Western world has been able to enjoy the origin story of the myth of Hera nursing the infant Hercules. Never one to know his own strength, the infant bit her nipple; when Hera pulled away from him her milk went spurting across the night sky, leaving the bright white lights we’ve since called the “Milky Way.” Companion words or usages include the Ford
Galaxy
, one of the most stylish sedans produced by Ford Motor Company, in the 1960s, and the famous text crawl at the beginning of the first
Star
Wars
movie, in 1977: “In a
galaxy
, far, far away…” When naturalist and mountaineer John Muir needed an exultant phrase to describe his tumultuous ride in an avalanche of snow down the side of a mountain in Yosemite he reached for a
galactic
metaphor: “This flight in what might be called
a milky way
of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced.”

Enchantment, a spell, a fascination; the illusion of beauty.
A mysterious attraction that evokes the exotic. This Scottish beauty has cast a spell for centuries, as if it were created through sheer sorcery, which in a sense it was. Originally,
glamour
was a magic spell, and
glamorous
meant “magic, supernatural.” It is a cognate of the Icelandic
glamr
, a legendary ghost spirit, as well as “a kind of haze covering objects, and causing them to appear differently from what they really are.” The Danish
glimmeri
means “glitter, false luster, glamorous, supernatural.” Charles Mackay wrote, “Once supposed to be from the Gaelic
glac
, to seize, to lay hold of, to fascinate, and
mor
, great; whence ‘great fascination, ’ or magic, not to be resisted.” In 1851 Black wrote, “When devils, wizards, or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to ‘cast
glamour’
over the eyes of the spectator.” During medieval times the word
glamour
described a certain power that modern people might call
charisma
. Eventually,
these magical associations adhered to language itself. Mackay recounts how a certain Lord Neaves thought that
glamour
was a corruption of
grammar
, “in which magic was once supposed to reside.” According to the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt,
glamour
was feared enough by the Inquisitors to be called an actual spell.
Glamour
is one of the more than 700 contributions of Sir Walter Scott, who introduced it in
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805): “And one short spell therein he read: / It had much of
glamour
might / Could make a ladye seem a knight.” Scott explained: “in the legends of Scots superstition, means the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality. … a special attribute of the Gypsies.” And who would know better than Marilyn Monroe about the silken cage of
glamour
: “I don’t mind being burdened with being
glamorous
and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and
glamour
, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real
glamour
; it’s based on femininity. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything.”

Glamour