Wordcatcher (38 page)

Anguish caused by guilt.
The ancients personified the powers of conscience and
remorse
as the three Erinyes, a trio of sisters who relentlessly pursued guilty mortals. Those they caught were fated to suffer “lifelong misery,” as Isaac Asimov writes, for wrongs they’d committed. The career of this word began with the Latin
remorsus,
from
remordeo
, which splits into re, back, and
mordeo
, bite. Your conscience “bites” you “back.” Samuel Coleridge wrote, in his play
Remorse
, “It is as the heart in which it grows: If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, it is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, weeps only tears of poison.” Novelist George Moore adds, “
Remorse
is beholding heaven and feeling hell.” Thus, a painful word picture emerges: our inmost nature, our conscience, has a kind of
mordant
sense of humor, taking a bite of our soul to remind us when we are making bad.

A beautiful tribute.
The sound, act, and triumphant feel go all the way back to the Greek custom of taking “loosely sewed pieces or rags, strung together, Greek
rhapsodia
,
rhapto
, sew, ode, song.” Its earliest sense in modern Europe, recorded in 1542, was “epic poem,” from Middle French
rhapsodie,
from the Greek
rhapsodios
, a reciter of epic poems, gifted in
rhaptein
, the ability to stitch together the odes, from
oide
,
song. Over the centuries this ability to remember, sing, and inspire was so admired that
rhapsody
came to mean any exalted feeling or expression, a meaning that dates back to 1639. By the mid 1850s, it was used to describe “sprightly musical compositions.” Snarky times are suspicious of lofty expressions of art, and so
rhapsody
has devolved into
rhapsodic
, which in some circles can mean exaggerated
enthusiasm
. So if the meaning is still obscure, I recommend listening to Rachmaninov’s
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
, a work that stitches together the Russian’s passion with the Italian’s exaltation. In her essay “Building the House,” poet Mary Oliver writes, “Privacy, no longer cherished in the world, is all the same still a natural and sensible attribute of paradise. We are happy, and we are lucky…. We make for each other: companionship, intimacy, affection,
rhapsody
.”

An opponent in a contest.
During the Roman Empire a man who had water rights to the same stream as another was a
rivalis
, from
rivus
, stream or brook. Since competitions often arose,
rivalis
took on the meaning of competitor. People living across a stream from each other, or near each other on the same side, have often quarreled about fishing rights, the right to build a dam, or other privileges. Our English
rival
commemorates such competitiveness. In modern terms it refers to the competitiveness of neighbors, as do
rivalry
and
rivalrous
. Al Gore writes, “The heart of the
security agenda is protecting lives—and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will
rival
the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.” Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong: “Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but
rivals
, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.” Companion words include
nival
, which rhymes with
rival
but derives from the Latin
nivosos
, for snow. Its
murmuring
meanings include the tenacious power of certain plants or animals to survive underneath a pack of snow. It’s uncertain whether the word can also refer to people with the same capacity.

Wages, recompense.
After the custom in the Roman army to pay a portion of the wages to its legionnaires in the form of a daily handful of salt,
salarium
, from the Latin
sal
, an allotment known as their “salt allowance.” For the salt-crazed Romans, who constructed their towns near salt supplies and fought wars to protect them,
salary
came to mean wages in general. Look it up and you’ll discover the phrases “salt away,” an echo of storing salt as some might stuff their pillows with cash, “worth his salt,” for someone who has earned what he’s been paid, and “salt of the earth,” an unaffected, natural person. The
Via Salaria
was the first imperial road built, to convey salt from the port of Ostia. The Roman Pliny wrote in the 31st volume of his
Natural History
, “[In] Rome … the soldier’s pay was originally
salt
and the word
salary
derives from it …” Regarding the money she made as a writer, Dorothy Parker said, “
Salary
is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.” Two-time baseball MVP Frank Robinson said, in 2002, “We keep talking about the
salaries
escalating, and how they affect the future. Well, they’re still going up. It’s still up to the individual if he wants to stay around. Players have to be healthy and continue at a high level of hitting home runs. That’s what it is going to take, and I don’t know how many are willing to do that.”

Humorous in a bitter, biting, or mocking way; smiling grimly.
This contemptuous word stems from the French
sardonique,
adapted from the phrase
ris sardonien
, a forced or careless mirth, as Cotgrave (1611) defines it. It derives in turn from the Greek
sardonikos
, a bitter laugh. If this seems like an
oxymoron
(“sharp dullard or fool”), remember that it comes straight from a folk memory about the nature of bitterness itself. The
herba sardonia
plant from Sardinia is so foul-tasting that it caused “a convulsive movement of the nerves of the face, resembling a painful grin,” as Virgil described its effect in the
Eclogues
, enough “to screw up the face of the eater.” Companion words include
sardine
, plus
sardis
and
sardonyx
, two precious gems found in Sardis, in Lydia (Asia Minor), resembling, as Pliny writes, the onyx in fingernails. A close cousin of
sardonic
is
sarcophagus
, a carved stone coffin, from
sarco
, body and
phagein
, to eat, a visceral word picture of “flesh-eating” stone, no doubt
influenced by close observation of the effects of time on entombed bodies. We find a close cousin to the bittersweet
sardonic
in Byron’s “Corsair.” Of the corsair, who hailed from Sardinia, he wrote, “There was a laughing devil in his sneer”—
sneer
being from the Old German
snereen
, to cause a hissing noise, and Danish
snaerre
, to grin like a dog, show one’s teeth, which brings to mind the acrid response to eating
herba sardonia
. Somerset Maugham once said, rather bitterly, “Money is the sting with which a
sardonic
destiny directs the motions of its puppets.” And from Anne Sexton: “Either I’m just too paranoid or this is just my way of now playing the
sardonic
court jester instead of the ‘angry young man.’”

The constant desire that hurts, the irrepressible
yearning
for something that may not even exist.
This
untranslatable
but indispensable Portuguese word describes in two syllables what English can’t do in anything shorter than a dissertation: the longing for perfect
love
, the complete utopia, a perfect work of art, even a person who has gone missing, in war or tragedy. Still, the memory is deeply felt in the heart, though others would demean it as indolent dreamy wistfulness. When
fado
is consciously evoked in music, poetry, dance, and film, the feelings of excitement and passion live on as
saudade
, lingering like perfume, moving outward like ripples in a pond, which creates
saudade
, “a resigned,
bittersweet, existential yearning for something we would like to change or experience, but over which we have no control.” A companion word in English would be the
blues
, a fiercely honest musical expression of joy-pain and sweet- sorrowful, transformed by the artistry of a Ray Charles or Billie Holliday into a triumph, however momentary, over the inevitable sorrows of the human condition. The
fado
singer Katia explains, “
Saudade
is a very deep feeling. It’s when you miss someone or something or a place very, very hard.
Saudade
is the only Portuguese word that doesn’t have any synonym in any other language.
Saudade
makes us feel good and sad at the same time.”