WOTD: Tooken

Tooken isn’t a word. This is what you hear from the prescriptive grammarians and their acolytes. If they have children, sooner or later they end up correcting them. Children use tooken naturally as they attempt to understand and internalize the “rules” of our language. But rules are made to be breaken. :)

It starts with take. This goes back to Old English tacan, adopted from Old Norse taka “to take” sometime between the end of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth, which is pretty late — almost too late to be called Old English at all. Before this very late borrowing, the usual Old English verb was niman “to take, receive, get”, a common word with a wide range of cognates among the other Germanic languages (cp. Old Norse nema; Old Frisian nima, nema; Old High German neman; Old Saxon niman; Gothic niman). It survived into Middle English as nimen, but it was more and more displaced by Middle English taken, táken (not to be confused with tácnen “to signify, betoken”, to which we’ll come back a little later).

The verb take has its own history. The verb originally carried the meaning “to touch”, where the Old Norse (and later Old English) sense of “take” came from the association of touching with the hands, i.e., getting a hold of, grasping, seizing. In the original sense, we find such cognates as Gothic tékan, Old Saxon *takan, West Tocharian täk, Latin tangere, etc. Modern English tackle and attack are clearly related. But take in its modern sense is specifically Northern Germanic.

The Old English verb, like its Old Norse source, is what we call a strong verb, meaning that it forms the preterite (i.e., past tense) with a change in the stem vowel, rather than by the addition of a suffix (in Modern English, –ed). For example, a strong verb speak, has a preterite like spoke, while a weak verb like talk, has a preterite like talked (instead of, say, *telk). In the case of take, the stem vowel, a, changes to a long-o in the preterite. In Modern English terms, we call this kind of verb irregular. Its past tense is not *taked, but took (OE tóc, ON tók). The participles, however, retain the root stem vowel unchanged. Thus, the past participle is taken < OE tacen. It’s worth noting that in Old Norse, the normal past participle (tekinn) does exhibit a vowel change; however, this is umlaut, not ablaut. In fact, the form takinn also occurs, though much less often. (If you don’t understand what I mean by umlaut and ablaut but would like to, start here.)

The point is that, in normal English (that is to say, prescriptive English), we should expect taken, not tooken. But tooken is a legitimate enough word, particularly in historical or dialectal use, in both the U.K. and the U.S. To begin with, the Oxford English Dictionary itself gives tooken as an obsolete past participle of take. Obsolete essentially means here that we ought not to use it, unless we don’t mind appearing old fashioned, but it is attested in the history of the language. That is, it wasn’t “wrong”, at least once upon a time. That’s very different from an accidental form that has never been in use. If a form was once in use, and we decide we no longer like it, well, that’s prescribing use, rather than describing it.

The form tooken also appears in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, both as the preterite and the past participle. For the former, Wright gives a quotation from the Devon dialect: “he tooken off his coat”. For the latter, he gives several examples, from Lanark, Yorkshire, Lincoln, Cheshire, Shropshire, Devon, Cornwall, etc. Except for the last two, these are all in northern England or southern Scotland. A couple of examples will suffice: “I’ve tooken a deal o’ pains”, “for fear I should be tooken faint like”, and how about this wonderfully rich one: “Hoo was tooken wi’ one on her feenty aitches an’ hoo tiped o’er”. But that’s barely English, you might object!

A short sidebar, while you collect your righteous grammatical indignation. Before I give a few more details and examples of the history and validity of tooken as a preterite and past participle of take, I should disambiguate it from a nonce word of the same spelling. It turns out that you can find tooken in Early Modern English as an antecedent form of the Modern English word token (remember, I mentioned Middle English tácnen above). Sir John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, translated parts of the Gospels from the original Greek into Tudor English. In his translation of The Gospel of Matthew (c. 1550), Cheke spells the English token with two o’s, as in: “And ye Pharisais and Sadducees cam and tried him, and required him to shew yem a tooken from heaven.”

In an 1843 edition of this translation, James Godwin (also of Cambridge, three centuries later) writes that Cheke “was desirous of […] correcting the orthography and pronunciation of English” and, moreover, of conscientiously avoiding words of foreign origin. “The introduction of these words was begun in the days of Cheke”, he continues. “But Cheke considered the English language to be sufficiently copious without them. In fact, he thought them intruders, and that the English language was degraded by being mixed up with other words and phrases, for which we were indebted to other countries”. Consequently, Cheke didn’t care too much for existing English translations and endeavored to produce some of his own, in which the native wordstock of English was properly showcased. To do so, he invented some words out of native English roots to take the place of recent acquisitions of Latin and Green origin; so, for example, where Wiclif (1380) has centurien, and Tyndale (1534) has centurion, Cheke substitutes hunderder; where Wiclif has apostlis, and Tyndale apostles, Cheke coins frosent (meaning “those sent forth); and where Wiclif and Tyndale have crucified, Cheke has crossed. Tolkien would have been sympathetic to the effort.

Even more unsettling, Cheke adopted some new rules for spelling English, designed (so he thought) to facilitate better pronunciation. One of his rules was to double a vowel pronounced long (dropping the final e, if there was one). For example, taak, Ameen, stoon, and so on. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. To give you a taste, here’s a lengthier passage:

On ye sabbot daí, at night, when ye first daieslight of ye week began to daun, marí magdaleen and an oyer marí cãm to look on ye graue, and loo yeer was a great earthquaak. For y’angel of ye L. cam doun from heaven, and cam yiyer, and rolled awai ye stoon from ye brinke and sat doun apon it, and his face was lijk lightening, and his cloying whijt lijk snow, and ye kepers did schaak for fear, and weer lijk dead men. (Mt. 28:1–4)

But back to the other tooken. Wiclif used this form in his own translation of the Gospel of Matthew. “But the five foolis tooken her lampis, and tooken not oile with hem: but the prudent tooken oile in her vessels with the lampis” (Mt. 25:3–4). This comes toward the end of the fourteenth century, as you saw above. To give another example, Saint Catherine of Siena used the same form in her Dialogues (1370): “And not oonly þat þei plauntid not ony good plaunt in her vyneᵹeerd, but raþir þei tooken up þerefro þe seed of grace.”

In his Middle English Vocabulary, Tolkien cites this form of the preterite (spelled with one o). Under tok(e), token, Tolkien directs readers back to take(n). The source to which Tolkien points readers is from The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, an alliterative romance by an unknown “journeyman poet”, based on the Latin Historia Troiana of Guido de Columna (1287). The word occurs in a passage in Book XXXI of the poem:

Thus tho lordes in hor longyng laghton þe watur,
Shotton into ship mong shene knightes,
With the tresowre of þe toune þai token before,
Relikes full rife, and miche ranke godes. (emphasis added)

[Thus those lords in their longing put out to sea,
Sprang aboard ship among their fair knights,
With the treasure of the town they had tooken before,
Rife with relics, and many fine goods. (translation mine)]

For those who fancy another fancifully Tookish Tolkien connection to the word, I’ve tooken up the subject before.

Probably the best known author to use tooken is Geoffrey Chaucer. A few examples: “And tooken awey this martir from his beere” (The Prioress’s Tale), “yet tooken they noon heede of the peril” and “And right anon they tooken hire wey to the court of Melibee, / and tooken with hem somme of hire trewe freendes” (both from The Tale of Melibee). Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, also used this form of the word.

So, you may say, it’s all very well and good to show that tooken was once a valid form, hundreds of years ago, but what has the word done for us lately? Well, as it happens, it’s still being used in dialectal forms. It’s true these are usually looked down on by prescriptive grammarians and those of us who have taken their suggestions as holy writ, but there is absolutely no reason to take a condescending attitude toward dialect. If you’re inclined to, I daresay you’re not a big fan of Mark Twain!

Speaking of Twain, he and his contemporaries were tooken with tooken too. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, tooken is conspicuous in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, a collection that sought to reproduce post-Reconstruction African-American dialect. Setting aside the controversy about their content, the dialect in these stories comes quickly to the fore. “Brer Rabbit,” says Brer Tarrypin at one point, “I’m dat tickle’ twel I can’t shuffle ’long, skacely, en I’m feared ef I up’n tell you de ’casion un it, I’ll be tooken wid one er my spells whar folks hatter set up wid me kaze I laff so loud en laff so long.” And another point: “Brer Fox talk so close ter de fatal trufe, dat Brer Wolf got tooken wit de dry grins” (emphasis added in both quotations).

In addition to the American South, tooken persisted in the Scottish North. To give one example, there is John Joy Bell’s Wee Macgreegor (1902), an early story of a familiar challenge: getting a small child to pose for a photograph. “What for dae folk get likenesses tooken?”, Wee Macgregor asks his father. In this case, it’s because his mother wants one to give to his grandfather. But “I’m no’ wantin’ to be tooken, Paw,” he complains. Typical. When he’s finally convinced, he asks, “Maw, wull I get ma likeness tooken wi’ ma greengarry bunnet on?” He wants to keep in on. Okay, so then, “Can I get makin’ a face when I’m getting’ ma likeness tooken?” No. In front of the camera at last, the photographer begins to count to three. Wee Macgregor can hardly sit still, then blurts out, “Am I tooken, Paw?”, to which his father replies, “No’ yet, Macgreegor, no’ yet. Ye near spoilt anither photygraph. Keep quate, noo.” The photos are finally taken, but when they arrive, Wee Macgregor is disappointed that the tassle on his cap, which is black, didn’t turn out red in the picture. He had specifically requested his father to tell the photographer to make it red! It’s a cute story about being flummoxed by new technology, a bit like Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss.

Six hundred years after Wiclef the Bible translator, there’s another man of a similar name, still using the word today: Wyclef Jean, the Haitian rapper and former member of The Fugees. In “Year of the Dragon” from his debut solo album, The Carnival (1997), Jean recalls “comin’ from Haiti, growin’ up in Brooklyn / On Flatbush got my first sneakers tooken”. And in the African-American dialect of today, we keep seeing tooken — Jay-Z, Lil’ Kim, Eminem, Black Eyed Peas, Lil’ Wayne. Some will complain that the use of tooken by rappers is of the “tooken isn’t a word!” variety — that is to say, it’s wrong. Some say that you can’t take advice about usage from rappers, because they’re on the fringe of language; they don’t get it; they never learned how to speak properly; etc. Actually, a great rapper is a genius with language, stretching it to the most imaginative limits. Complaining that rappers are wrong is just prescriptive grammar again.

Descriptive grammarians, on the other hand, would argue that since tooken is being actively used, then of course, it clearly is a word. We should merely document when, how, and by whom it’s being used. And if you’re still with me at this point, you’ve realized that it’s not new either; tooken has been a word for centuries. It may not be taught in school, but perhaps that’s just a kind of prejudice. The gatekeepers of language always have their reasons for keeping certain words — or certain people — out. Me? I say the more words, the better. Our children are right to try and force tooken back on us. Will it ever make it into the grammar books? Maybe one day — if enough of us are tooken with it.

WOTD: Collops

As attentive readers will know, I am currently reading C.S. Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid. This, by the way, is really wonderful. Brilliant, in fact. The best translation since Gavin Douglas’s 16th-century rendition into Early Modern Scots. The more of it I read, the more I lament that it is incomplete; it’s a must-read for admirers of Lewis and/or Virgil.

Anyway, I came across a pretty uncommon word in the Lewis translation — two rare words, actually, but one of them, collops, got me thinking about etymology. First, let me give you Lewis’s lines:

While they about their meal bestir them and lay bare
The ribs and draw the numbles out and at the flame
Roast the yet quivering collops of the fatted game [1]

Isn’t that a tasty translation? For the sake of comparison, here is Robert Fitzgerald’s rather more mundane rendering (no pun intended): “They skinned the deer, bared ribs and viscera, / Then one lot sliced the flesh and skewered it / On spits, all quivering […]” [2]. Both translations are pretty accurate, but Lewis’s is much more, well, visceral. The choice of “numbles” for the Latin viscera and “quivering collops” for frusta […] trementia verubus gives Lewis the edge, at least according to my aesthetic.

So, numbles and collop are pretty rare words. Editor Andres Reyes includes them in his glossary — a good thing, since most readers, including me, will not be familiar with either word — defining them as “entrails” and “a slice of meat”, respectively. The second word caught my eye. Can you guess why?

When I see an unfamiliar word, the first thing I try to do is determine its meaning from my knowledge of Indo-European etymological principles. Possible cognate forms swim into my mind, often revealing the meaning and origin of the word — but occasionally leading me down the primrose path. In this case, seeing that a collop is a slice of meat, what would you think of? If you’re me, it’s Italian scaloppe (think of veal scaloppini, a dish of thinly sliced veal), Spanish escalope, French escalope, all meaning a “cutlet, cut of meat”. The derivation is from Latin scalpere “to carve, cut”, cp. English scalpel. (One is tempted to think of the Native American practice of scalping, but this is a red herring. Back to this later.)

So this seems like an obvious etymology for English collop, right? Well, I think so, but my etymological dictionaries say no! Are they right, or am I? Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

One turns to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain (to paraphrase Tolkien). It says “derivation obscure” and gives only a couple of cognate forms, echoing an earlier scholar’s suggestion that the first element might be col– “coal”. Walter Skeat says the same, more assertively, giving the Middle English forms coloppe, col-hoppe, and (by way of analogy) the Swedish glö(d)hoppa “a cake baked over gledes or hot coals”. Ernest Weekley cites the same antecedent forms and also suggests the first syllable is “coal”, but the second (he says) is obscure. He gives the Old Swedish kol-huppadher “roasted on coals”, and he adds that the word originally meant “bacon and eggs”. Hmm. This agrees with Tolkien’s gloss in A Middle English Vocabulary, coloppes “collops, eggs fried on bacon”. And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology recaps all of the above, but again with an emphasis on bacon and eggs. The bacon, it would seem, is actually the collop (the slice of meat).

Is this right? Or is it possible that collop = “slice of meat” and collop = “dish roasted on coals; eggs and bacon” were once two entirely separate words, only coincidentally homonymic? It is extraordinarily hard to resist an etymology of collop from Latin, with those conspicuous and phonologically sound cognate forms in the Romance languages.

This also put me in mind of the word scallop. Might this refer to the “(slice of) meat” inside the bivalve? With the original sense being “cut, carve, slice”, if the word scallop is just as old as collop, then no, probably not — but, if collop came to mean simply “meat”, losing the sense of slicing and carving, and scallop is attested much later, then maybe. So I looked up scallop too. According to the OED, (e)scallop, (e)scollop goes back to Old French escalope “shell”, and it entered the Romance lexis as a borrowing from the Germanic branch, exemplary of which the OED gives Middle Dutch schelpe “shell”. Hmm, that’s plausible, but the first attested use of this word is a century later than collop, so my theory that scallop = collop could hold water too. At least as much water as could fill a scallop shell.

Couldn’t it? What do you think?

Oh, and back to the stereotypical Native American practice of scalping an enemy … It’s a funny coincidence that the verb scalp (i.e., to remove the hair from the scalp), arising through back formation from the noun, should also resemble the same root giving us scalpel, and suggesting cutting or carving. The noun scalp comes from the Germanic “shell” root I talked about above, suggesting the skull is your brain’s shell. This is analogous to Vulgar Latin testa “head”, with the earlier sense of an earthen pot, a shell, and even a shellfish. And this is the reason we have Italian testa, French tête “head”, but Spanish cabeza, German Kopf (cognate to Latin caput). This root also originally meant “a drinking vessel”, and I’ve written about it before.

It’s all a mess of metaphors and poetic diction, isn’t it? What a tangled web of words we weave when first we practice to conceive!


[1] Reyes, A.T., ed. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 51, ll. 210–2.

[2] Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1990, p. 11, ll. 288–90.

Word of the Day: Fart

I recently received a birthday wish that included the following charming observation: “Thou art an old fart […] but the most awesomest anglo saxon speaking one that I know.” I replied that fart was a word known to the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, like the words for many bodily parts and functions, it goes much further back than this. It turns out there are quite a few interesting things to say about this word and some of its relatives, so I decided — even at the risk of lowering our collective brows — to write a post on it. Rest assured: I’ll find ways to elevate the conversation again. (“Mr. Shakespeare, your cue in five minutes.”)

The Old English word for a fart is attested in only one form and only one place (that I know). That form is feorting — a bit surprisingly, this is a feminine noun. Yes, women fart too, though they usually won’t admit it. But if you want to look it up in any of the major Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, don’t expect to see the Modern English fart. Most bodily terminology has been glossed with euphemism, often in Latin. In the great Bosworth/Toller dictionary, feorting is glossed as crĕpĭtus ventris, which is Latin for a “chattering of the belly” — cute, eh? The Latin crĕpĭtus is an imitative word, from which we also derive the Modern English words crepitation, i.e., “a crackling (e.g., of the joints)”; and decrepit, i.e., “creaking with old age”. I did just turn forty, after all.

In John R. Clark Hall’s dictionary (even the revised edition of 1960, ed. Herbert Meritt), it’s defined with Latin pēdātio. This is actually the direct Latin cognate given in Ælfric’s glossary, but unless you’re familiar with this word, it’s not much help. It doesn’t appear in the average student dictionary of Latin, but it comes from the pēdĕre “to break wind”, a verb which can be traced back to the Indo-European root √pezd “to fart”, again probably imitative of the sound. This root also gave us the Sanskrit पर्दते and Ancient Greek πέρδομαι, with the same meaning. The word also passed far and wide, as farts tend to do, into Avestan, Lithuanian, Latvian, Albanian, Russian, Welsh, etc.

Among the Germanic languages, the word was also rather widely attested too — and anyone who has experienced a particularly noxious chattering of the belly will not be surprised at its reach. Though we can only extrapolate the unattested Old English verb *feortan, we have evidence of Old High German ferzan, Old Saxon fertan, Old Norse freta, and various forms in the later medieval languages as well, e.g., Middle High German, Middle Dutch, and of course Middle English. Chaucer, it must be said, leet fle a fart rather often in his verses. (But Norman Davis omits the word from A Chaucer Glossary, tsk tsk tsk.)

There are two surprising offspring of the humble fart. The first, thanks to our friend William Shakespeare, has become an old saw, though not many realize it ever had anything to do with breaking wind. Recall the ominous lines from the close of Act III of Hamlet: “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard” (III.4:207–8). Poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

A petard was a small bomb used to breach castle walls or gates. The word comes to us from the French pétard, literally a “farter”, in turn from Middle French péter “to fart”. The bomb had a long fuse — think of this image and you’re on the right track — which made a sputtering, “farting” sound as it burned down. The French word comes down from the Latin pēditum, in turn derived from the verb whose acquaintance we’ve already made above. Cognates include Italian petardo and obsolete Spanish petar.

The second surprising relative is the partridge — ironic, since one of my favorite etymologists (Eric Partridge) bears that surname. From Middle English partrich, in turn from Old French pertris, perdriz, from Latin perdix, from Green πέρδιξ, the partridge was so named because of the whirring sound of his wings. What a proud bird for such a lowly etymology! Cognates include Scottish partrick, Old Italian perdice, Spanish perdiz, Catalan perdiu, etc.

All of this from the sound of breaking wind. And since it’s Christmastime, if you’ll permit me: “And a partridge in a pear treeeeeeee … pffffftht!!” Excuse me! Okay, that was a new low for Lingwë.

Word of the Day: Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge

Okay, I know, my last Word of the Day was nearly five months ago! But however inapt the label is, let’s press on with a new one. Today’s WOTD is a “fair jaw-cracker”, to borrow a phrase from Samwise Gamgee, and quite deliberately so. According to musical legend, Richard Wagner didn’t particularly care for the saxophone, and so he dismissed the instrument as “sound[ing] like the word Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge” [1].

Apparently, Wagner coined this word himself. The British Telegraph parses it as meaning something like “nonsense sound factory tools”. But I think Wagner might have shot himself in the foot here without realizing it. If the sound of an instrument he hated could be so easily captured by the ordinary phonology of German, then what does this say about the phonaesthetic qualities of his mother tongue? More importantly, about the libretti of Wagner’s operas? If pressed, wouldn’t he have to admit that his operas sounded like a chorus of saxophones? :)

Setting aside debate about the beauty or ugliness of the German language, would any of my German-speaking friends care to take a crack at parsing out the individual parts of this remarkable word?

[1] I picked the word up reading Omniglot blog, but to give a printed source: Slominksy, Nicolas. A Thing or Two About Music. Westport: Greenwood, 1972 [first published, 1948], p. 30.

Word of the Day: Oligopsony

Okay, my last Word of the Day (so-called) was about four months ago! But however inapt the label is, let’s press on with a new one. Today’s WOTD is a recent coinage in the science of economics, first minted in the middle of the 20th century, and assembled out of trusty Greek roots — ironic, considering the state of Greece’s economy these days! It’s a pretty uncommon word (it isn’t in the spelling dictionary for Microsoft Word, always a fair guide), and in fact I had never heard it until recently. So how did it land on my radar screen? You might guess it was from reading the political and economic news, but while I do read a lot of that, I haven’t seen oligopsony there. No, I learned of the word reading Robert Burchfield’s excellent book, The English Language (OUP, 1985).

According to Burchfield:

oligopsony (from the prefix oligo–, Greek ὀλίγος ‘small’, in plural [ὀλίγοι] ‘few’, and ὀψωνειν ‘to buy provisions’) first recorded in 1943 in the sense ‘in marketing, a situation in which only a small number of buyers exists for a product’ […]. [1]

Other definitions emphasize that in addition to a small number of buyers, oligopsony often implies a large number of sellers. Now, this struck me as the mot juste, indeed parfait, for describing the situation in publishing scholarly books about J.R.R. Tolkien. A great many people are producing (or want to produce) them, but there aren’t nearly so many buying them. Indeed, I have it from several people in a good position to know that most monographs on Tolkien sell no more than a few hundred copies. That sounds like an oligopsonistic marketplace to me!

As a side note, Robert Burchfield has a direct connection to Tolkien himself — or had, I should say; he passed away in 2004. But long before that, he studied under both Tolkien and Lewis at Oxford. During Burchfield’s last couple of years there, Tolkien supervised his graduate work on “an edition of The Ormulum, a late-12th-century text the language of which requires knowledge of the early Scandinavian languages as well as, of course, Old and Middle English. Tolkien had the necessary erudition, and was an inspiring supervisor” [2]. His accomplishments were too numerous to list here, but a few of the most relevant for students of Tolkien:

• He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, as Tolkien had done decades before; and in fact, Burchfield eventually became Chief Editor, something Tolkien never did.
• He contributed an essay, “Ormulum: Words copied by Jan van Vliet from parts now lost”, to the Tolkien Festschrift, English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (eds. Norman Davis and C.L. Wrenn, Allen & Unwin, 1962). Burchfield’s essay runs on pp. [94]–111.
• Also in 1962, and in the year leading up to it, Tolkien completed his edition of the Ancrene Wisse with assistance from Burchfield [3].
• Over the course of roughly the same years again, culminating in 1966, Burchfield assisted C.T. Onions with The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Onions was one of the editors of the OED during Tolkien’s time there almost a half-century earlier, and he was one of the “Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” Tolkien gently lampooned in Famer Giles of Ham (the other three were Murray, Bradley, and Craigie).
• Finally, a point not relevant to Tolkien, but I can’t resist pointing it out: Burchfield was a Kiwi, just like another of my favorite etymologists of roughly the same years, Eric Partridge.

I highly recommend his book, The English Language. It’s different in many respects from similar books (such as those of David Crystal, Charles Barber, Bill Bryson, and of course, Eric Partridge). The Birmingham Post — paper of record in Tolkien’s old stomping grounds — described it as “so skilfully [sic] written that it must surely take a place among the best three or four books ever written about our language.” I certainly agree, but sadly, Burchfield’s book seems to have gone out of print. Well, scholarly books on the history of the English language are an oligopsonistic market. So it goes.

[1] Burchfield, Robert. The English Language. Oxford Language Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; revised and reprinted, 2002, p. 44.

[2] The Independent. “Robert Burchfield. Workaholic Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries.” 9 July 2004.

[3] See Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond’s Chronology for the years 1961–2.

WOTD: Hysteropotmos

I was thumbing through a copy of the World Dictionary of Foreign Expressions (which I picked up recently at a library book sale for all of $1), when an interesting word snagged my eye: hystero-potmos, defined as “[a] person who, after being presumed dead, surprisingly comes back home after a long period of absence. A person who, after being presumed killed in battle, escapes from captivity and surprisingly returns home” [1]. Readers of Tolkien will of course remember the following comical scene:

He had arrived back in the middle of an auction! There was a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, stating that on June the Twenty-second Messrs. Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes would sell by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire, of Bag-End, Underhill, Hobbiton. Sale to commence at ten o’clock sharp. It was now nearly lunch-time, and most of the things had already been sold, for various prices from next to nothing to old songs (as is not unusual at auctions). Bilbo’s cousins the Sackville-Bagginses were, in fact, busy measuring his rooms to see if their own furniture would fit. In short Bilbo was “Presumed Dead,” and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong.

.....The return of Mr. Bilbo Baggins created quite a disturbance, both under the Hill and over the Hill, and across the Water; it was a great deal more than a nine days’ wonder. The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years. It was quite a long time before Mr. Baggins was in fact admitted to be alive again. The people who had got specially good bargains at the Sale took a deal of convincing; and in the end to save time Bilbo had to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture. Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappeared and were never accounted for. Personally he suspected the Sackville-Bagginses. On their side they never admitted that the returned Baggins was genuine, and they were not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after. They really had wanted to live in his nice hobbit-hole so very much.

This was my immediate thought when I read the definition. Apparently the word survives today (just barely) in narrow legal parlance, used in just such situations as Mr. Baggins found himself! But the origins of the word go back to Greek (and later, Roman) antiquity. Variously translated as “later-fated” or “double-fated” (more properly, the latter is deuteropotmos), the component etymons (so says the WDFE) are ϋστερον “later, latter” + πότμος “fate, death”. (Πότμος, not to be confused with ποταμός “river”.) Now I’m not an expert in Greek, but my recollection is that the usual word for death is θάνατος (as in the poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant, which I still dimly recall from high school English :). Are fate and death really etymology linked, as suggested here? It certainly does makes sense.

The great Liddell / Scott lexicon of Classical Greek formalizes the connection. It defines πότμος as “that which befalls one, one’s lot, destiny, usu[ally] one’s evil destiny, a mishap, esp[ecially] like μοϊρα and μόρος, death”, following which are given a number of references to the literature, including Homer, Pindar, and Euripides [2]. Homer, of course, is the most obvious: what is Odysseus if not the archetypal hysteropotmos? The other two words given here, μόρος and μοϊρα, deserve a footnote. The first is defined by Liddell and Scott as roughly synonymous with πότμος, “fate, destiny, death”, and its etymology takes us, along with μοϊρα, to the proper noun, Μοϊρα “Moera, the goddess of fate [...] often in Hom[er] the goddess of death” [3]. Normally portrayed in the plural, as a Triple Goddess, the Moirae are the Fates, the “apportioners”, measuring out the lives of men. Once they became fixed at three, they were named Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the Spinner, Measurer, and Cutter of the thread of life. In the case of hysteropotmoi, perhaps Atropos was taking a well-deserved nap. ;)

I said πότμος was not to be confused with ποταμός, but I wonder, could there be a metaphorical relationship between fate and rivers? Liddell and Scott give no such indication in their entry for the latter [4], but rivers are full of mythological and liminal significance: the Styx (Στύξ) most of all. It makes sense to suppose they might share a common origin, but is there any evidence? Ah well, something for further investigation, I suppose.

The oldest reference I have found to the word hysteropotmos itself (apart from its use in antiquo) is in the Allgemeines Fremdwörterbuch, an 1829 lexicon of foreign words in German. The definition given there is, “ein Zurückgeschiffter, wiederbelebter Scheintodter, vom Tode Erstandener” [5]. If my scant German hasn’t failed me (and if I’m not misreading the Fraktur), this is, “someone who has come back, revived from being apparently dead, risen from death” — German speakers, please feel free to improve on this.

The word has been around for quite a long time, and it’s surprisingly useful (especially for describing the literary motif of the Zurückgeschiffter) — but the word has been all but forgotten. It is essentially dead. Perhaps this word itself should be brought back, made verbum redivivum, to become an hysteropotmos itself. That would be a beautiful irony, wouldn’t it?

[1] Adeleye, Gabriel G., and Kofi Acquah-Dadzie. World Dictionary of Foreign Expressions: A Resource for Readers and Writers. Eds. Thomas J. Sienkewicz and James T. McDonough. Wauconda, Ill: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1999, p. 171.

[2] Liddell and Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870, p. 1229.

[3] Ibid., p. 943, italics original.

[4] Ibid., p. 1228.

[5] Heyse, Johann Christian August. Allgemeines Fremdwörterbuch, oder Handbuch zum Verstehen und Vermeiden der in unserer Sprache mehr oder minder gebräuchlichen Fremden Ausdrücke [etc.]. Hannover: Hahn, 1829 , p. 361.

WOTD: Fitt

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost three months since my last Word of the Day — that really has become a misnomer, hasn’t it? But here I am with a new one, fulfilling the promise I made last year that “one of these days I’ll get around to something genuinely English, ab origine.” In today’s installment, I’m looking at the word fitt, familiar enough to most medievalists but probably unknown to anybody else. It’s a word I tend to take for granted, but it caught my attention again in couple of posts I was reading on the subject of Beowulf, here and here (and a tip of the hat to Unlocked Wordhoard for these). It’s a word of very limited use, part of a specialized academic nomenclature, but hey, when has that ever stopped me before? :)

So what exactly is a fitt? With its double terminal stop, it’s a rather strange-looking word for English, isn’t it? The word refers to a section of medieval Germanic verse, basically the equivalent of the Latinate canto. More on that in a moment, but first, to clarify the meaning and source of the word:

Like all the longer Old English poems, Beowulf is divided into sectional divisions that were in all likelihood denoted by the term fitt ‘fitt,’ pl. *fitta. [Footnote: This is to be deduced from the Latin preface to the Heliand, which states that the author ‘omne opus per vitteas distinxit, quas nos lectiones vel sententias possumus appellare’ (‘divided the whole work into fitts, which we can call “readings” or “passages”) [...] [1]

As you can see by the footnote above, fitts weren’t limited to verse in Old English but were also present in the literature of other Germanic languages, as in the Old Saxon Heliand. Fitts were sometimes delineated by punctuation, sometimes with numerals, sometimes by elaborately decorative initial capitals. Other times, one has to deduce where one fitt ends and another commences. Fitts often ended with general statements of summary, reflection, or wisdom [2], as for example in the advice concluding fitt 35 of Beowulf — sibb æfre ne mæg wiht onwendan þám ðe wel þenceð (“kinship can never aught pervert in him who rightly thinks”).

Coming back to canto, as many of you will know, this too is a word denoting a section in a long poem. It comes to us through Italian from the Latin cantare “to sing”. A fitt, it transpires, seems to show precisely the same derivation, but on the Germanic branch of the Indo-European Stammbaum. There, the immediate source would appear to be Old English fittan “to sing”. It appears to me not to be related to fitt “strife, stuggle”, though some have claimed it is. OE fitt “poem, song” is attested only four times, and it was not until Chaucer that the word fitt was used in the same sense as canto (in The Tale of Sir Thopas, there spelled “fit”).

But the more common OE word for “to sing” was singan; so where might fittan have come from? I think there are two possibilities, both metaphorical — and I’m not sure which one I favor:

(I) A phonologically similar Old High German word, fizza “yarn, skein, hank (of thread)”, suggests that singing could have been related to the spinning of a yarn (= a tale). Cognate to this are Middle High German vitzen and Old Norse fitja “to web, knit, weave”. [3]

(II) Alternatively, the Old Norse fet “pace, step”, secondarily “foot (as of a poem), a part of a poem” — one must assume related to fótr “foot” — suggests the possibility of singing while walking, measuring out a poem (or other oral literature) at or by the pace of walking, etc.

But these theories are really just speculation. Various dictionaries suggest the possibility of one or the other (or both), sometimes with certainty, sometimes not. In the end, I think we must admit that one can only go back so far before the vagaries of linguistic change become lost in the haze of history. Arguing backward, we just make the best fitt we can.


[1] Klaeber, Friedrich. Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. by R.D. Fulk, et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, p. xxxiii.

[2] Loc. cit., and xxxv. [The translation of the passage that follows is Benjamin Thorpe’s.]

[3] R.D. Fulk, one of the editors of the most recent edition of the Klaeber Beowulf, has an article on this subject: “The origin of the numbered sections in Beowulf and in other Old English poems.” Anglo-Saxon England 35 (2006): 91–109. There, inter alia, he talks about the possibility of a derivation from the OHG fizza.

WOTD: Hortus conclusus

This is a Latin term meaning “enclosed garden” — surprisingly useful in theology and literary criticism. The source of the trope is the Song of Solomon 4:12, which reads in the Vulgate: hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa hortus conclusus fons signatus; usually rendered in the language of King James, “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” Have a meander over to Wikipedia for some interesting background I will not repeat here, including the idea of the hortus conclusus as the Virgin Mary, as well as the literal enclosed garden that became a commonplace of the Middle Ages.

Moving from theological to literary usage, the hortus conclusus could describe the Garden of Eden; then later, literary reflections of that Garden (e.g., in Milton’s Paradise Lost). Still later, gardens at further metaphorical remove. To situate the term in Inklings studies, think of the garden C.S. Lewis in the extreme west of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew. Salwa Khoddam, of Oklahoma City University, has an excellent article on the subject, here.

In the world of Tolkien, think of the “enclosed garden” of Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings; or the antecedent gardens in Valinor, where the Vala Irmo held court; or even the hortus conclusus in/of “Leaf By Niggle”. It’s a rich image, with a long history and a nimbus of wonderful connotations and associations. I am reminded, too, of Tolkien’s etymological riddle from The Hobbit:

An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
“That eye is like to this eye”
Said the first eye,
“But in low place,
Not in high place.”

Gollum’s answer — “Sun on the daisies it means, it does” — recalls the hortus conclusus in which Gollum, with his grandmother, was nurtured in his youth. And a daisy, of course, is just the day’s eye. The “enclosed garden” of Gollum’s childhood was situated in the neighborhood of the Gladden Fields, along the Anduin River, which Tolkien tells us in his “Nomenclature” refer to the fields of irises (Old English glædene).

WOTD: Accidie

Accidie is often identified as or equated with Sloth (one of the Seven Deadly Sins). Here’s a little taste of Chaucer’s use of the word in The Parson’s Tale:

After the synne of envye and ire, now wol I speken of the synne of accidie; for envye blyndeth the herte of man, and ire troubleth a man, and accidie maketh him hevy, thoghtful and wrawful. […] Thanne is accidie the angwissh of troubled herte, and Saint Augustyn seith, it is anoy of goodnesse and joye of harm. [And the Parson goes on in much the same prolix manner for quite some while, not unlike myself, I suppose. :)]

In the century before Chaucer, Thomas Aquinas described the sin in his Summa Theologica, equating accidia (the Latin form; also, acedia) with torpor mentis (“a torpor of the mind”), which I think captures the sense of accidie much better than mere sloth. The modern sense of “sloth” (lower-case), implying laziness, seems too dismissive, and too insensitive. (And speaking of sloth, if you had only two toes, you probably wouldn’t get much done either! ;) Torpor, ennui, listlessness, and apathy are all closer to the intended sense than sloth.

Turning to the authority the Parson himself invoked, Augustine of Hippo dissertates on this and the other Deadly Sins in the City of God, but perhaps the best, most thorough description of accidie comes in Book X of John Cassian’s De institutis coenobiorum, written in the early 5th century (contemporary with Augustine).

The Latin accidia is not related to acidus “sour, tart”, nor to accidentia “an accident” (something that befalls one) — these explanations, common enough, are mere folk-etymology. It ultimately springs from the ancient Greek ακήδεια “indifference, torpor”, from α– “not” + κήδος “care”. Interestingly, κήδος eventually became the modern English “hate”. Accidie (the word, yes, but probably the need for the word too, hahae) came to Middle English with the Norman invaders, in the Old Norman French form accidie, acidie (from Old French accide, acide). The word was popular throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in Ecclesiastical use, but all but died out after that.

I say all but died out, because the Inklings and their circle clearly knew the word. John Wain, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, referred to “the cultured accidie in Oxford” [1]. Another Inkling, Charles Williams, used the word in more than one of his books (e.g., in The Figure of Beatrice, his study of Dante). W.H. Auden, a student and later friend to Tolkien, wrote a commentary on accidie. Though Lewis does not use the word in it, the Narnia novel, The Silver Chair, deals with the sin of “spiritual sloth” (accidie), and we may be absolutely certain Lewis knew the word. (I believe he may have used the word in his letters, but I will have to check on that; they’re not very, er, portable. :) I’m likewise sure that Tolkien knew the word. It is not in his Middle English Vocabulary, but the man knew his Chaucer, not to mention Aquinas and Augustine.

So. Accidie, then. Less critical than sloth, not so banal as ennui, and well suited to pointed or metaphorical use. Well suited, in short, to be brought back into “the parlance of our times”. Shall we bring it back? Or are we too lazy? ;)

[1] Qtd in Hooper, Walter. C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works. London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 74. [Published previously as the C.S. Lewis Companion and Guide.]

— Hat tip to Gary for the indirect suggestion of this WOTD. :)

WOTD: Plumb

It’s been a little while since my last WOTD; perhaps a better acronym would be WOTW or even WOTM. But as often happens, I was recently asked whether I knew anything about the origin of the word plumb — not the fruit; that’s plum — and as most often happens, I do know something.

Plumb is one of those surprisingly useful words. It can be a noun, adjective, adverb, and verb, with a range of apparently unrelated meanings — apparently unrelated, but as we’ll soon see, in fact connected by a central metaphor. As a noun, a plumb is a simple tool: a weight fixed to one end of a line. It’s used to determine depth or verticality. For depth, one drops the weighted end of the line in and lowers it until the weight touches the bottom; the length of the line meted out at that point is the depth of the hole, water, or what have you. To establish verticality, one simply lets gravity pull the weighted end downward, then one marks the line. Why is it called a plumb, then? The word comes from Old French plomb(e), in turn from Latin plumbum “lead”. If you remember your Periodic Table of the Elements, you’ll know that the symbol for Lead is Pb (= Plumbum). A plumb line is so called because the weight attached to one end is usually a small lead ball.

The word and some of its compounds (e.g., plumb bob, plumb rule, or plumb line) goes back at least as far as Chaucer. In his late 14th-century Treatise on the Astrolabe, he describes “a plomet hangyng on a lyne” as well as the use of “a plom-rule” “[t]o fynde the lyne meridional to dwelle fix in eny certeyn place.” The word also appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum, the first English–Latin dictionary (compiled in 1440).

Because one use for a plumb is to determine depth, the verb to plumb eventually took on a metaphorical shading, “to explore the depths, to examine, to probe” — as in “to plumb the limits of human understanding”. And because another use for a plumb is to determine verticality with precision and exactitude, an adjectival and adverbial use developed, meaning “perfect(ly), exact(ly), complete(ly)” — as in “plumb center”, “plumb crazy”, or “plumb done in”. This usage is generally more colloquial, regional, or rural.

Let me close by calling your attention to two or three related words. Everyone knows what a plumber is, but most people don’t realize that plumber and plumbing derive from an underlying reference to lead — as in a pipes made out of that metal. Lead for our drinking water?! Perish the thought!

And how about the verb, to plummet, meaning “to drop downward rapidly” — just as a lead weight does! And finally, the colorful noun, aplomb, meaning “confidence, poise, skill” — the very opposite of leaden, isn’t it? But it comes to us from the French à plomb “perpendicular” — perpendicularity, naturally, being a measure taken with a plumb.

So, till next time, I hope y’all found this post plumb int’resting. (Did I really just write that? *groan* :)

WOTD: Oubliette

I found my arms swathed down — my feet tied so fast that mine ankles ache at the very remembrance — the place was utterly dark — the oubliette, I suppose, of their accursed convent, and from the close, stifled, damp smell, I conceive it is also used for a place of sepulture.

— Ivanoe, Sir Walter Scott (1819)

This is a wonderful little word. An oubliette is a dungeon or prison cell whose only means of egress is through a trapdoor in the ceiling. For that reason, it’s usually deep underground, dark, cold, and made of earth and stone. It’s basically the opposite of the chamber in which Frodo was imprisoned in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, which was at the very top of the tower and could be reached only through a trapdoor in its floor, though I daresay one might still call that an oubliette.

The etymology of the word should be readily apparent to French speakers. It derives (fairly recently, too) from the French oublier “to forget”, which in turn comes from Latin oblīvisci “to forget” (and from which we derive the Modern English oblivion). With this etymology in mind, the chamber in the Tower of Cirith Ungol really would have become an oubliette if Sam hadn’t come along, and all the Orcs had killed each other off leaving Frodo all alone in the Tower!

With a slightly related etymology and meaning is perdition. Like oubliette, the word comes to us from Latin by way of French. In this case, it’s the French perdre “to lose” (which is not so different from forgetting), from Latin perdĕre, which means “to lose utterly; to destroy, finish, ruin” (more literally per “to an end” + dăre “to put”). Perdition refers more figuratively to eternal punishment in hell, which is rather what being lost or forgotten in an oubliette must feel like. I can’t help but think of the Man in the Iron Mask.

Are there opportunities to use oubliette metaphorically in the world today? Ever been stuck in an elevator between floors? I have, and I’d say it’s pretty close. A small, claustrophobic cell from which the only escape may be through a trapdoor in the ceiling. More rhetorically, one might use the word to describe a kind of figurative cul de sac in an argument, or perhaps a social or political trap into which one has fallen.

WOTD: Fingerspitzengefühl

So far, we’ve had Words of the Day derived from Greek and Latin. One of these days I’ll get around to something genuinely English, ab origine, but today I want to talk about a German one (hat tip to Mark Hooker for the suggestion). Of course, German and English are basically linguistic cousins; the further back you go, the more alike they look. Yet German, much more than English, is a compounding language — that is, it’s very common in German to glue a whole series of words together into a long, intimidating-looking construction. You may have seen some of these eye-splitting compounds before (here are a few, in case you haven’t). Such words capture remarkably unique, specialized, and/or subtle shades of meaning. And because such expressions would require much greater verbosity in English, many of these wonderful German words have been adopted into English. I’m sure you’re familiar with a few of them already — Zeitgeist, Schadenfreude, Weltanschauung, and my personal favorite, Quellenforschung. You should find all of these in any reasonably thorough English dictionary. Well, maybe not Quellenforschung.

Even less likely, today’s word, Fingerspitzengefühl — which you’d be hard-pressed to find in any English dictionary. It’s not in the Random House Unabridged, Webster’s Revised Unabridged, Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, or the American Heritage Dictionary. It’s not even in the Oxford English Dictionary (though I would guess it will end up in one of the supplements sooner or later). Despite that, one does find the word making its way into English, and not just recently, as in this notable political op-ed by William Safire from the New York Times, March 9, 1995. Safire’s loose definition is also a good starting point, where he describes Fingerspitzengefühl as “that combination of sure-footedness on slippery slopes and sensitivity to nuance familiar to mountain goats, safecrackers and statesmen.” More recently (2005), Safire wrote a language column about filling our “vocabugap” with foreign words such as Schadenfreude and Fingerspitzengefühl, where he refined his definition of the latter into the more succinct “sandpapered-fingertip sensitivity of a safecracker.”

The word literally means “fingertips-feeling” and refers to an intuitive flair, a sensitive touch, an instinctive feeling or sixth sense about things derived from delicate tactile exploration. The German-English Dictionary of Idioms: Idiomatik Deutsch-Englisch defines “Fingerspitzengefühl für etw[as] haben” as “to have instinctive tact, to have tact and sensitivity, to have a fine instinct for s[ome]th[ing]” [1]. The word is often used in the context of business and politics. We saw in William Safire’s opinion that former American president Bill Clinton lacked it. By contrast, Adolf Hitler was said to possess a surfeit of Fingerspitzengefühl, demonstrating an often uncanny “sense of opportunity and timing.” I believe the same could be said of Napoleon. It’s an essential qualification for diplomats and ambassadors, who need a delicate touch (such as can only be made by fingertips alone) for maneuvering through the dangerously tortuous workings of diplomacy. The Diplomat’s Dictionary would seem to agree, quoting Martin Herz:

What [...] makes a good diplomat, and thus a good ambassador, [... is] a kind of empathy which comes from years spent in cross-cultural communication, Fingerspitzengefühl (the feeling one has in the tips of one’s fingers) which is sometimes acquired by amateurs but is more frequently found among people who have had a great deal of experience [...] [2].

Moreover, if you don’t have Fingerspitzengefühl, you might be said (if I may borrow from Swedish) to have instead tummen mitt i handen “a thumb in the middle of your hand” — a rough analogue to the English idiom “two left feet all thumbs.”

Diane Shaw, Special Collections Cataloguer at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries offers another variation: “Specifically in relation to rare books, I believe ‘fingerspitzengefuehl’ means a person with a special knack for identifying true bibliographical treasures that other persons lacking this quality might overlook. It would be appropriate for the lucky man or woman who finds a book worth thousands of dollars on a $10 bargains shelf in a used bookstore” [source; and see here for another similar account]. I think I have that, or a touch of it anyway, to judge by some of my experiences with antiquarian bargain-hunting. I’ve been known to happen upon first editions at my local used bookstores for just two or three dollars sometimes, then sell them to collectors for $100-200. Certainly a better return than you’re going to get putting your money into IndyMac. :)

And finally, let me just suggest that when it came to that intuitive, delicate touch, that fine instinct for navigating tricky slopes among the towering egos of comparative philology in the early 20th century, Tolkien certainly seemed endowed with his share of Fingerspitzengefühl.

Your homework: see if you can find a way to slip this Germanic sesquipedalian into your everyday conversation. Good luck! :)


[1] Schemann, Hans and Paul Knight. German-English Dictionary of Idioms: Idiomatik Deutsch-Englisch. New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 241.

[2] Freeman, Jr., Charles W. The Diplomat’s Dictionary. Washington DC: National Defense University Press, [1993], p. 132.

WOTD: Obscurum per obscurius

Okay, this isn’t a single word but rather a phrase. But that’s perfectly acceptable for my occasional Word of the Day posts. Why? Because I make the rules. :)

You may find the Latin phrase obscurum per obscurius particularly useful in conversations about the subject matter of my blog. You are having conversations about my posts, aren’t you?! The phrase is used to describe an explanation which is even more obscure that the obscure thing it seeks to explain. It’s literally “the obscure by means of the even more obscure.”

A synonymous phrase is ignotum per ignotius, meaning “the unknown by means of the even more unknown.” This phrase may be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically in the second part of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. I won’t quote it, because it makes little sense out of context — and isn’t that the very picture of obscurum per obscurius? :) — but if you want to look it up, it’s about two dozen lines from the end of the tale.

I think you could safely apply the phrase to at least half of the posts I’ve written for Lingwë. Perhaps I should adopt it as a motto!

WOTD: Anacoluthon

Inspired by Omniglot, I’ve decided to start periodically posting a Word of the Day. However, unlike those on Omniglot, I intend to limit myself to English words. Well, more or less. I mean, how English are most English words, really? Case in point, today’s word: anacoluthon.

Not in most people’s vocabulary, I daresay. Nor was it in mine; I had to look it up. Rather amazingly, the spell-check in Microsoft Word apparently knows the word! So what does it mean?

Those familiar with Greek combing forms might be able to make a guess at the meaning, as I attempted to do — with some small success. The forms in question suggest a meaning along the lines of “not following, not on the path.” Another hint: the relatively common English word acolyte, with its meaning of “following, on the path”, is more or less antonymic to it. Some of you might also guess it’s a term used in rhetoric, grammar, or linguistics, as are so many of these direct Greek borrowings.

So what does it really mean? It’s a grammatical construction in which the end of the sentence does not match up grammatically to the beginning. For instance, “the professor was talking about — I couldn’t really understand him at all,” or “I warned him that if he continues to drink, what will become of him?” Technically speaking, such a thing should suggest a poor command of grammar; however, by giving it a sesquipedalian name, one can call it a deliberate rhetorical effect. :)

Does anybody actually use this word?! Well, how do you think I came across it? In June 1911, in the King Edward’s School Debating Society Report, the young J.R.R. Tolkien is described as:

An energetic Secretary who does not consider that his duties excuse him from speaking. Has displayed great zeal in arranging meetings throughout the session and considerable ingenuity in advertising them. He is an eccentric humorist who has made many excellent speeches, at times rather burdened with anacolutha. Made one valiant attempt to revive Beowulfic oratory. [1]

Since Tolkien was the Secretary of the Debating Society, I think one can presume this description was self-imposed, tongue in cheek. Certainly the use of the plural anacolutha, as well as the eponymic adjective Beowulfic, suggest Tolkien might have been the author. That he was only 19 years old makes the use of this rare word all the more remarkable. Or at least, it would be remarkable today. Can you imagine the word on the lips of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, for example? Their public speeches are certainly full of such anacolutha; however, I think it’s safe to say that any rhetorical effects were uninentional. ;)

[1] King Edward’s School Chronicle, Vol. XXVI, No. 187 (June 1911), p. 46.