Wordcatcher (36 page)

Protean (Shape-shifting)

To go public with print.
Johnson’s
Dictionary
says it best: “The act of notifying to the world; divulgation; proclamation.” During the halcyon days of the Roman Empire public officials made regular announcements about state decisions, an act called
publicare
, to make public. The word moved from Latin to old French
publier
and ultimately to medieval English as
publish
, though it endured scores of different spellings. As
publish
, it has come to mean the dissemination of announcements or pronouncements, ranging from wills to weddings, laws to royal decrees. With the invention of Gutenberg’s press in the late 15th century,
publication
became synonymous with printing and distributing books or engravings. In
Why We Say It
, Webb Garrison cites one of the first
self-publishing
pronouncements on record, that
of Sir Thomas More, who felt reduced (as opposed to Walt Whitman’s sense of feeling expanded) by its necessity: “I am now driven to the business of
publishynge
and puttynge and boke in prints my selfe.” My love of
publishing
goes back to my first job on the hometown newspaper when I was a 16-year-old cub reporter, but I caught a novel version of the word and the idea at a 1980 poetry reading by Allan Ginsberg. That night he exhorted all in the audience to remember the original sense of the word when he said that every public reading of a poem was a
bona fide
form of
publishing
, taking the good word to the people. For the last word on getting
published
let’s turn to one of the least recognized, in her own time, of all great writers, Emily Dickinson, who said, “Publication—is the auction of the Mind of Man.” Of her 1775 poems, only seven were
published
in her lifetime, which flies in the face of the academic exhortation to “
publish
or perish.” Dickinson rarely
published
, but her poetry is imperishable.

A play on words
. For some, a
pun
is the height of cleverness, for others a punishment, like having one’s ears pounded—no mere coincidence, as that’s exactly the derivation.
Pun
devolves from the Anglo-Saxon
punian
, to pound. Skeat writes, as if mortally offended, “Hence, to pound words, beat them into new senses, hammer at forced similes.” To paraphrase Shakespeare, the lad doth protest too much. The
bard couldn’t help himself; he
punned
precisely 1,062 times in his works. The technical term is
paronomasia
, but
slang
words proliferate, such as
liripoop
and
quip
. Everyone has their favorites, such as the “unspeakable”
pun
by Confucius: “Seven days on
honeymoon
makes one whole week.” In his risible handbook
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This
, Jim Holt writes, “Shakespeare’s puns, while chucklesome, are invariably bawdy, even when they are being made by clowns:
Hamlet:
“Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”
Ophelia
: “No, my lord.”
Hamlet:
“I mean my head upon your lap.”
Ophelia
: Ay, my lord.”
Hamlet
: “Did you think I meant country [cunt-try] matters?” My punster father used to love to quote the famously droll Dorothy Parker’s “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think,” which she thought of when challenged to use the botanical word in a quipping contest at the Algonquin Club. Her notoriously quick wit was the mirror image of
esprit de l’escalier
,
what we might call
esprit de table
, the spirit of the table. Companion words include the querulous
quibble
, originally meaning to
pun
or play on words, and only later to have reservations about them.

In a word,
cowardly
. Possessing little courage, less moral fiber, hardly any strength, and almost no resolution. In a phrase, a cowering soul. The roots tell us what the word was originally trying to convey. The Latin
pusillanimis
,
from
pusillanus
, narrow, and
animus
, soul, evolved from the Greek
oligopsychosos
, small-souled, from
pusillis
, very weak, and
animus
, spirit or courage. A
pusillanimous
character is one who isn’t animated because their soul has shrunk, so they’re
cowering
, hence a
coward
, one lacking any semblance of courage. Several old European words complete the picture: old French
couard
and the Italian
codardo
, a hare, a skittish animal, and the Swedish
kura
, to sit quiet, all hunched up. Thus, to be
pusillanimous
is to be skittish, to shrivel in the face of danger, because one’s soul, the source of moral and physical strength, can’t catch up or is trapped—thus, a spiritless coward who doesn’t have the heart to face life. History is chock-full of infamous cowards who fully embody the word, even the lovable Cowardly Lion, from
The Wizard of Oz
. Jack London wrote, “Why, you
pusillanimous
piece of dirt, you’d run with your tail between your legs if I said boo.” Companion synonyms include
chicken-hearted
,
craven
,
faint-hearted
,
lily-livered
,
unmanly
,
shrinking violet
, all words with a tint of contempt because of the deep human desire to embody their opposites of strength, courage (heart), and
wit
(brains).

Alive, enlivening, ensouled
. MacKay clarifies the older meaning of the word, “alive,” in what he calls the “fossilized phrase” from scripture: “The quick and the dead.” “Look alive” is also synonymous with “be quick,” or
quicken
, from the Middle European “to become alive” and the earlier Anglo-Saxon
cwic
, alive. By the Middle Ages,
quick
became the
quickening
, a theological term for the moment the soul enters the body—by tradition, in a spiral motion through the whorls in the top of the head. By some arcane form of reasoning, the Church
calculated
this mystical moment as occurring at precisely forty days for a male fetus—and eighty days for a female. When I pointed this out during a reading for my
Soul: An Archaeology
, in Berkeley in the 1990s, a woman called out from the back of the room, “That’s because women take longer to warm up!” In “Messenger,” Mary Oliver writes: “Here the
quickening
yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand…” To be
quick
is so aligned with the life force that the expression “cut to the
quick
” came to meaning cutting to the living core of a person. Figuratively, if you say to somebody “You cut me to the
quick
,” it means “You’ve wounded me, you hurt my feelings.” Thus,
quick
means speed, soul, spirit, essence; to be
quick
means to
move
from your very center, a sense perfectly captured by
Sports Illustrated
’s consensus for the greatest coach ever, John Wooden, who admonished his players, “Be
quick
—but don’t hurry!”

Quick