Wordcatcher (39 page)

To walk without a care.
A Sunday stroll of a word. One of the most relaxed verbs in English, it comes by way of the French
sauntrer
, gloriously defined by Skeat as “to adventure oneself,” based on the Old French
aventurer
, to adventure or venture forth.
Saunter
stretches back much farther, to the 1,700-year-long tradition of walking to
la Sainte-Terre
, the Holy Land, in the footsteps of Helena, Emperor Constantine’s mother, who was in search of the Holy Cross. Her visit to Jerusalem is considered the first Christian pilgrimage, which sparked untold thousands of others to follow along the “glory roads.” During medieval times the route to the
Sainte-Terre
was steadily smoothed, like a pilgrim’s sandals, to become our gently swaying verb
saunter
. By Henry David Thoreau’s time at Walden, in the early 19th century, it was a rather suave way of describing a
contemplative
walk. Thoreau wrote, in his journal, “The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will
saunter
to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.” Uncharacteristically, Grosse snipes at the very idea of those
saunterers
: “An idle, lounging fellow … applied to persons, who, having no lands or home, lingered and loistered about … [in] the Holy Land, Saint Terre, as waiting for company.” The ultra-long-distance walker and early environmentalist John Muir writes of his adventuring through the American Holy Land of Yosemite, in California: “The last time I
sauntered
through the big cañon I saw about two [rattle-snakes] a day.” Companion words include the Spanish
paseo
, a leisurely walk, and “
suave around
,” the Red Sox slugger Ted Williams’s surprisingly elegant description of the way that classy ballplayers moved on the field.

Someone who is blamed for the sins of others
. Traditionally, a real goat, one that was allowed to
escape
, symbolically shouldering the sins of the community. Ancient annals tell us about the custom of the Day of Atonement, in which the sins of the people were ritually transferred to a goat that was then banished to the wilderness. Meanwhile, a second goat was sacrificed to the Lord, as the “sin offering.” Thus
scapegoat
came to mean a person who likewise shoulders the blame (from
blaspheme
, to speak ill of)—the sins of someone else—an echo of the apparently universal impulse to look for other people to slur, denigrate, or accuse for troubles we ourselves have caused. The terror of being thus accused is expressed well by none other than Rod Serling. “The tools of conquest,” he intoned, “do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, ideas, and prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. A thoughtless, frightened search for a
scapegoat
has a fallout all its own for the children unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”

A timetable; a wish list of things to do.
As Wilfred Funk reminds us, most of the words connected with writing have their roots, so to speak, in the bark of a tree, the surface of a stone, or in some cases, the leaves of plants. Modern usage prosaically refers to inventories and supplements, which hardly captures the word’s redolent essence, with its smells of the Nile, the Aegean, and French cafés. Our use of
schedule
arrived right on time in America, like a locomotive chugging into a station, during the punctuality-obsessed 19th century. What it carried was a train of associations, from the Old French
cedule
, a scroll, which came from the
Latin
schedula
, a small slip of paper, and
scheda
, a strip of papyrus, and the earlier Greek
skede
, a cleft or cleaved piece of wood. Thus, a
schedule
is a timetable written on a small piece of paper that we cleave to. The wonder-tracking naturalist Annie Dillard writes, “A
schedule
defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

To move closer, closer, closer…to the edge. Scootching
up to this word in a handful of
dictionaries
only provided me with the pallid meaning “to slide on over,” usually to make room for someone or something else. But serendipity struck recently on a visit to Ansel Adams’s cabin in Yosemite, where I plucked the memoirs of naturalist and legendary hiker John Muir off the bookshelves. By chance, Muir mentions a game he grew up playing in the north of Scotland called “
scootchers
.” According to Muir, it was a game in which kids challenged each other to
scootch
closer and closer to the point of danger, to advance slowly on a dare. In his case he and two friends
scootched
to the edge of a rooftop. Echoic of an action, possibly deriving from
scoot
, to move swiftly, possibly from
scout
, to seek out. Close cousins would be
scrooch
or
scrootch
, to hunch down, crouch. The episode of
The Simpsons
called “Insane Clown Puppie” features a hilarious Christopher Walken reading menacingly to a group
of cowering school kids: “Goodnight moon, goodnight,
moon
, goodnight cow, jumping over the moon. Please children,
scootch
closer. Don’t make me tell you again about the
scootching
. You, in the red, chop-chop!”

To search carefully
. An easy enough definition, but one that only begins to describe the tactile pleasure of looking closely, whether at
dictionaries
, advice, or cloud formations.
Scrutinizing
originally referred to looking closely at rags that could be pulped into paper, which brought a few pennies for the ragpickers. The word comes from the Latin
scrutinium
, a careful inquiry, and
scrutari
, to examine carefully, and
scruta
, broken pieces, trash, rags. Thus to
scrutinize
is look at virtually anything carefully, closely, like Calvin, in
Calvin and Hobbes
, who believes “there’s treasure everywhere.” Compare
speculate
, to hold a mirror up to. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never
scrutinize
or question.”

One who looks for trouble, sees sorrow everywhere.
A classic
portmanteau
, from
seek
, strive, and
sorrow
, to be sick with grief, which implies a curious pessimist, an adventurous glutton for punishment, or possibly someone who feels the necessity
of enduring the dark night of the soul. Dr. Johnson defined it as “one who continues to give himself vexation.” A candidate for one of the top ten words that need reviving. Who hasn’t felt oneself to be one’s own worst enemy? We’ve all known someone, perhaps a co-worker, who seems to go looking for trouble, but one word is swifter than five. One of the most heartrending usages is one of the earliest, in the 5,000-year-old Sumerian story of the king of Uruk, after his closest friend, Enkidu, has died: “Why, Gilgamesh, do you ever
[seek] sorrow
?” cries out the wise old man Utanapishtim. More recently, Edith Wharton wrote, “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only
sorrow
.” Composer Franz Schubert once reflected upon the deep-seeking sensibility in his work: “When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.”