Wordcatcher (9 page)

The quality or perception that pleases.
Some say
beauty
is the inner quality that brings
calm
to the observer. Others, like Stendhal, say it is “the promise of happiness.”
Beauty
is a
beaut’,
as we use to say of a
gorgeous
shot on the
basketball courts of Detroit, where I grew up. She dates back to around 1275, from the Anglo-Saxon
beute
, and Vulgar Latin
bellitatem
, the state of being handsome, from Latin
bellus,
fine, beautiful, used mostly of women and children. Companion words include
beauty sleep,
the rejuvenating rest taken just before midnight,
beautician, beauty parlor, beauty shot, beauty shop,
and
bonify,
“to make good or beautiful.
Callipygian
means “gifted with shapely buttocks,” such as those of prehistoric goddess sculptures.
Callisteia
was the name of a sought-after beauty prize won in beauty competitions in ancient Greece.
Callomania
is the delusion that one is beautiful, after the goddess
Callisto
.
Calligraphy
describes the ability to write
beautifully
.
Kalokagathia
is the harmonious Greek worldview that joins the beautiful (
kalo
) and the good (
agathia
). The subtle French
jolie laide
combines “pretty and “ugly” to describe an unconventionally attractive face you can’t stop looking at. The sublime Navajo
hozh’q
refers to the ultimate aim in life being the beauty that can be created by human beings. Shakespeare’s Romeo sighs of Juliet, “I never saw beauty until now.” Art critic Elaine Scarry underscores all the above when she writes, “Beauty is sacred.” “Beauty in art,” Charles Hawthorne told his art students, “is the delicious notes of color one against the other.” And in an old leather-bound book of travel poems at Ansel Adams’s cabin in Yosemite, I catch the tender dedication that Everett Dawson wrote to Ansel and his wife, Virginia: “
Beauty
has its roots in the fitness of things. May 27, 1930.”

Beauty

A wandering, lusting lover
. A lubricious Shakespearean term, from
A Winter’s Tale
, for a woman who swerves from the marriage bed. In 1753, Dr. Johnson defined a
bedswerver
with avidity, as one who “is false to the bed; one that ranges or swerves from one bed to another.” A playful euphemism for an adulterer from a time rife with bed references. Consider the lubriciously descriptive
bedganging
, a beguiling
bedventure
in which a lover seeks
a
bedworthy
partner, an
ibedde
, or
bedsister
, whom Herbert Coleridge calls a “concubine,” or a
bedfellow
, in “a bed of sin.” The male equivalent to a
bedswerver
was a
bedpresser
, a john-among-the-maids, knave-of-hearts, or belly-bumper. Companionable
bed
words include
curtain-lecture
, which Dr. Johnson defined as “a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed.” Memorably romantic terms from Old English include
hugsome
, huggable, and
kissworthy
, worthy of a kiss; and in hipster
slang
,
bedwarmer
, bed partner, and
bedroom furniture
, a woman, doll, or dame. Figuratively, essayist E. B. White described his
bedfellows
as Fred, his pet dachshund, as well as Harry Truman (in the
New York Times
), Adlai Stevenson (in
Harper’s
), and Dean Acheson (in
A Democrat Looks at His Party
). Recently, I caught up with
shrimping
, a clever coinage from Sarajevo writer Aleksandar Hemon, which he describes as “curling up in a fetal position” with a lover, which is a remarkably clever alternative to the Victorian
spooning
.

Bread
. Not only the most famous Phrygian word, but some say the very first word, period. According to Herodotus,
bekos
meant bread, and he then said why. In his
Histories
he tells the yeasty story of Pharaoh Psammetichus, who believed there was one proto-language, the source of all languages, like the mythic source of the Nile. To attempt to prove his point, he exiled two babies to a hut in the
mountains and left them there to live in silence, visited occasionally by a shepherd who brought them food. Eventually, the story goes, the children spoke. What they said was
bekos
, which the Pharaoh interpreted as meaning that Phrygian was the mother of all languages. Never ones to leave a colorful folk etymology alone, modern linguists connect
bekos
with the Albanian
buke
, also meaning “bread,” and to the eventual English
bake
. Companion “first” words include one that many of us devour with the
New York Times
Sunday crossword puzzle. A historian of dictionaries, Jonathan Green, recounts a study in
Chasing the Sun
about the search for traces of the earliest words common to all Indo-European languages. After the elimination of thousands of words, the true and noble survivor was the noble friend of bagels everywhere,
lox
.
Hmmmmm
, you say, and I say we’re on to something. Roy Blount Jr. cites Stephen Mithen’s work in
The Singing Neanderthals
, “that the first stirrings of language were
hmmmmm
.” All origin stories have the strange contours of poetry. The physician and etymologist Lewis Thomas speculates: “‘
Kwei
,’ said a Proto-Indo-European [PIE] child, meaning ‘make something,’ and the word became, centuries later, our word ‘poem.’” Incidentally, the oldest
phrase
in continuous use in English is the still popular “Woe is me,” which first appeared as “Woe unto me,” in the Old Testament, Job 10:15.

Ferociously out of control; displaying superhuman strength in battle.
In 1822, Sir Walter Scott raided the Old Norse language for the right word to convey the sense of utterly blood-thirsty warriors for his novel
The Pirate
: “The
berserkars
were so called from fighting without armour.” After the book was
published
,
berserk
became all the rage. Within fifty years the word shape-shifted into its figurative sense of deranged behavior, so that “to go berserk” became the English version of the Malaysian “running amok.” North Beach photographer Mikkel Aaland, whose family hails from Norway, told me what his uncle told him, “The
Berserkrs
were a Viking tribe so called because they wore bear,
ber
, skirts or garments,
serk
. They were known as ferocious fighters who went to battle after eating psychedelic mushrooms. They were known to tear the flesh off their opponents with their teeth, and so,
berserk
, uncontrollable rage, is derived from this behavior.” Howling like animals, foaming at the mouth, and biting the edges of their iron shields, the
berserkrs
spread terror from Ireland to Russia, and were frenzied champions when they returned home to plow their fields and tell their tales in front of the home fires. Why the bear skin? Some say donning the bearskin was sympathetic magic. If you kill the bear, wear its skin, you absorb its
fury
, display its courage and strength. In 1908, Kipling wrote in
Diversity of Creatures
, “You went
Berserk
. I’ve read all about it in Hypatia. … You’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life.” Companion words
include
anger
, from the Viking
angr
, their red-face response to injustices of the world; and Herb Caen’s “
Berserkely,
” or
“Berserkelier-than-thou.”

To confuse, bespudder, or discombobulate
. A 16th-century folk memory from the days when most people in Europe lived either in the forest or in towns surrounded by woodland.
Bewilder
derives from the Old English
be
, thoroughly, and
wilder,
to lead one astray. Figuratively, it means to be lost in the pathless woods, and by extension to lure an innocent into the wild. Scholars suggest that it’s a “backformation” from
wilderness
, whose roots are in
wilde’or
, the wild deer that once roamed the untamed land. Companion words include
bedevil
,
bewitch
, and the wonderfully clangorous
bewhape
, an archaic English word from the 14th century meaning “confused.” According to the charming Charles MacKay’s culling of
Lost Beauties
,
mask
surprisingly meant “
bewilder”
back in the 13th century, and the verb
maze
meant “to
bewilder
and confuse.” As for the old saw that men can’t ever admit they are lost, let’s consider the ingenious response of Daniel Boone when asked if he’d ever been lost: “No, but I was once
bewildered
for three days.” His kindred spirit of a more recent time is Isadora Duncan, who urged other women artists, “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you!”