A diminutive (from Latin deminuere–to make small) is a cute-ified word that expresses fondness or describes something little and perhaps feminine. In English, suffixes such as -ette and -y create diminutives. A drum major is the big guy wearing the giant hat at the front of the band. Majorettes are usually smaller and cuter. (Speaking in traditional, circa 1960s terms here.) Doggy is a sweet term for a dog, and Daddy implies a special attachment to Dad.
I’ve written about diminutives before, as in this post from way back in 2012. Latin has diminutives, too. A homunculus, for example, is a little man (from homo).
The Latin word for skin is cutis. You’re probably thinking of cutaneous and subcutaneous right now, meaning “referring to the skin” and “under the skin.” If you put a cute diminutive suffix on cutis, you get cuticula, which, you guessed it, gave us cuticle, the little bit of protective skin around our nails, a word which became prominent in English at the beginning of the 20th century.
Here’s how WebMD says to take care of your cuticles. Despite the word’s first syllable, no cutting allowed!
It’s disturbing to be writing about E. Jean Carroll’s 2019 memoir What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal the same weekend we attended a romantic family wedding. It was discomfiting reading the book in the Austin hotel room where we stayed, curled up in a chair during intervals between the rehearsal dinner, neighborhood explorations, and the wedding itself.
As Carroll’s title suggests, she is questioning the need for men and employing Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” idea (melting them all down for their chemical content) as an alternative to keeping them around. Carroll, now 79, hearkens back to the gutsy career girls of the 60s, 70s, and beyond. A beauty queen (pace Trump’s “not my type”), she was accustomed to fighting men off at every turn.
That’s why it’s hard to know whether to recommend the book and to whom. If you’re like me and obsessively following the New York defamation case against Donald Trump, fingers crossed for Carroll, you might want to read it. But be forewarned by author Dani Shapiro’s blurb on the front cover: “The most bitterly funny, fantastically furious book to explode out of the #metoo movement.” Funny and fantastic, but don’t forget the bitter fury.
Carroll organizes the book around the twenty-one most hideous men in her life (Trump is #20) and a tour of the country, visiting towns named after women. She cheekily asks people she meets what we need men for. Their answers are inconclusive.
Though she likes many men very, very much, Carroll shares some truly terrible experiences. She was abused by a babysitter and camp counselor, almost raped as a teen, molested by various famous men, and attacked by her then husband, yet she maintains a jarringly breezy style: the book is a very weird mix. Describing an ugly alleged encounter with Les Moonves, then CBS head, she admits she’s making herself sick. You’ll feel the same at times.
For all of her sprightly cynicism, however, E. Jean is a romantic at heart, as you can see from perusing hercharming advice columns, which ran for twenty-six years in Elle magazine. An Elle editor called her “modern, quirky, and cheeky.” Her quirky book jerks you from jokey anecdotes about her sweet dog, who came along for the ride, to ugly stories about the exploitation of women by (some) powerful men. It’s sui generis.
Consider this a recommendation and a trigger warning in equal measure.
Latin offers nouns in three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. As you may know, adjectives change their gender endings in order to agree with the noun they’re modifying: bonus puer (good boy), bona puella (good girl), and bonum consilium (good plan). Nouns have gender without regard to their meaning. The words for forest (silva) and tree (arbor) are feminine, while the word for leaf (folium) is neuter, and trunk (truncus) is masculine. These somewhat arbitrary genders must be memorized, but as Latin teachers for generations have been saying, once you’ve learned the genders of Latin words, you’ve also learned them for their French and Spanish derivatives.
In years past, I sometimes made sly comments about gender in my Latin classes. Nouns are stuck in a particular gender, I would say, but adjectives can go either way! A word that’s neuter, meaning “neither one,” can’t name a person, because people all have a defined gender, right? No neuter people, right? Hardy-har-har.
In one class quite a while back a student in her forties began stopping at my desk after class to chat. She shared with me that her adult transgender daughter had a female partner and that they had adopted a child. She told me that the adjustment to their daughter’s “new” gender in her adolescence had been difficult, especially for her husband, but that things were going well among all of them now. She seemed resolute in wanting to talk to me about these matters.
It came to me, belatedly, that this kind woman might be trying to raise my consciousness. From the beginning, I accepted her experience without any prejudice; I was open and encouraging about hearing about her family. But I had never questioned my little gender jokes, which had been going on for decades. Until gradually I did begin to question them. Gradually, I began listening to myself, and, gradually, I cut the comments out.
This all came to mind after reading “The Power of the Latin Neuter” by Margaret Somerville in the April issue of The Christian Century, sent to me by my friend Tricia. Somerville posits that creaky old Latin might actually have something to offer in the current debates about gender. Neuter actually means “not either,” the very definition of non-binary. She offers her students the option of calling themselves discipulum, a neuter ending on the word for student, if they want to identify as “not either.”
Similarly, she uses a poetic device called merism (from the Greek word for “divided”) to support her LGBTQ students and to broaden everyone’s perspectives. When we search near and far for an item, for example, we’re not looking near and then looking far. We’re looking everywhere in between. Merism is the device that implies everywhere-all-at-once by naming the extremes. In the elegant phraseology of linguist John Lyons, it’s “a dichotomized pair that conveys the concept of a whole.”
Somerville alludes to the Roman poet Vergil describing Rumor, personified as a “she,” wandering day and night, up to the sky and back down to earth, by which he means that Rumor travels everywhere all at once. Similarly, in Scripture, Somerville says, “God names darkness and light, day and night, heavens and earth, male and female. Surely, these powerful examples of merism were already opening the world to the totality of human expression.”
If anything is retro, one would think Latin would fit the bill. But here it is in 2023, relevant once again.
If you think you’ve already confronted America’s history with slavery, perhaps you should read Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.
Here are some things I learned from the book.
Frenchman Édouard René de Laboulaye, who first conceived of the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the United States, was president of the French anti-slavery society. In an early model of the statue, sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi placed broken shackles in the lady’s left hand to celebrate emancipation and the end of American slavery. On the finished 1886 statue, her left hand holds a tablet, and small bits of broken chain peek out from behind her robe by her feet. Historians theorize that the abolitionist theme would have alienated American donors to the cost of the pedestal. “Centering the story . . . on [the two nations’] friendship made for a more compelling pitch to those with money, many of whom opposed Black freedom,” Smith writes.
Countering the claim that Southern states seceded from the Union in order to preserve states’ rights and not to preserve slavery, Smith quotes from seven documents from various Confederate states explicitly mentioning slavery. For example, Mississippi’s secession document says, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.”‘ The Confederate constitution proclaims, “In all new territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress,”
James Roberts, who fought in the Revolutionary War and was afterward enslaved in Louisiana, asserted in a slave narrative, “From fifty to sixty head of women were kept constantly for breeding. No man was allowed to go there, save white men. From twenty to twenty-five children a year were bred on that plantation. As soon as they are ready for market, they are taken away and sold, as mules or other cattle.”
As you might imagine, much of this book is hard to read. But Smith, a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, leads the reader adroitly through eight sites relevant to slavery, including plantations, Angola prison, New York City (which slaves helped to build), Goree Island, off Senegal, from which thousands of captured Africans made their way to America, and others. Smith’s tone is engaging and readable; he’s exploring the history along with us.
Rather than circumscribing what American schools teach about the history of race, we should be disseminating books like How the Word Is Passed. For so much of Western history, Black lives seemed not to matter. Immanuel Kant, the famous 18th-century German philosopher avowed, “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.” To uproot that sentiment fully, there’s still so much work to do.
Idioms are not really idiotic, but they don’t make a lot of sense when taken literally. The two words have a common etymology. Idios in Greek means “one’s own, private, unique.” A Greek idiotes was a private person, that is, an uneducated workman or soldier, one who didn’t take part in public affairs like an educated man. You can see how the word came to mean “ignorant,” and developed into our word idiot. An idiom is a word or phrase peculiar to a particular language. English idioms are our own, private, and unique.
I always told my Latin students the following story in order to explain idioms. Our professor in my college French class asked us to write a paragraph in French describing something we had done over the weekend. As he read one student’s effort aloud in front of the class, he stopped short and then began sputtering and laughing over one hapless student’s attempt. When he regained control of himself, the professor explained that the student described a picnic with his family, during which they roasted hot dogs. Hot dogs in French momentarily struck my professor as “dogs in heat” (though the French actually have their own idiom for that). That’s where my professor stopped abruptly until he figured out the English equivalent intended by the student.
Wheelock’s Latin, our text at Cleveland State, introduces idioms with amabo te, literally “I will love you,” which means “please” in Latin. The book’s first example is adapted from the playwright Terence: Da veniam puellae, amabo te, which translates, “Give pardon to the girl, please.” Amabo te implies highly conditional love: Do this for me, and I will love you.
Idioms are vivid and useful, until they become cliches. That’s when we stop noticing how cool they are. “Read between the lines” was at some point startling, but no longer. “He ran off with his tail between his legs” originally created a word picture, but now it’s just trite.
Speaking of tails, Terence provides another of my favorite Latin idioms a few Wheelock chapters later. Auribus teneo lupum in literal English means, “I have a wolf by the ears.” It’s roughly the equivalent of having a tiger by the tail, or being on the horns of a dilemma. Thomas Jefferson once described American slavery as holding a wolf by the ears. He wrote, “We can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Tragic and telling that he saw the dilemma so clearly but never attempted to resolve it.
Fortunately, when nurses take my husband’s or my blood pressure, they simply say it’s good. When the occasional nurse quotes the actual numbers at us instead, we don’t pay much attention. High blood pressure is not among our health concerns. That’s why we don’t know what the numbers mean.
The subject came up today when we visited the doctor’s office. When the nurse left the room, my husband and I shared our profound mutual blood-pressure ignorance, causing me to look the topic up. If you know all too much about blood pressure, first of all, I’m sorry, and secondly, maybe you should move on to another blog, or skip down to the etymology at the end of this post if your expertise doesn’t extend to etymologies.
The top number in a blood pressure reading indicates the force exerted against your arteries when the heart beats. The bottom number shows the pressure between beats. A normal top number is ideally less than 120, and the bottom should be less than 80. Of course, your blood pressure can also go too low, but that’s a rarer problem. These numbers oversimplify because normal numbers vary by age and gender. as this chart shows.
I’m hoping that by looking this subject up one more time and writing about it here I will henceforth remember the normal numbers and their meaning. It seems like something an adult person should know, which is probably what you’re thinking.
As always, though, the words themselves are the interesting part. The top number is called systolic and the bottom is called diastolic. I knew that much but didn’t know the words’ meanings. The Greek root of systolic means “draw together, contract.” That’s your heart beating. As you might guess, diastolic‘s root means “expand, dilate.” That’s your heart at rest, between beats, the chambers filling up with blood to be pumped out with the next beat.
The English majors and poets among you might know that these terms also apply to versification. A systole is a long syllable artificially shortened (i.e., contracted) in order to fit the meter of a line, and a diastole is a short syllable expanded, like your heart at rest, into a long syllable.
I know thee well; a serviceable villain, — (Shakespeare, King Lear 4.6.251)
The bold type indicates long, or accented, syllables. The “a” in serviceable is a short syllable, as we normally pronounce the word. Shakespeare cheats here by putting it in a spot where he needs a long syllable to fit the iambic rhythm.
I know, I’ve gone too far. You’ve lost interest. Don’t worry about the literary terms. Let your takeaway be that Shakespeare himself wasn’t above cutting corners.
An abecedarium is an alphabet book, which we more commonly call an ABC book. The origin of the word, dating from the 17th century, is obvious from its spelling. It’s pronounced like the first three letters of the alphabet–ay, bee, see–followed by dairy-um. The slightly earlier, related word abecedarian refers to a person learning the alphabet, or, more broadly, anyone learning anything, i.e., a novice.
Because my twin grandchildren would be abecedarians, I created an abecedarium for them during the time my daughter was pregnant. It’s sewn from off-white canvas. Each letter is appliquéed to a page, along with an appropriate word. A is for, you guessed it, apple, and so on.
Because my sewing skills are primitive (you might call me a sewing abecedarian), this project saw me through many months of the COVID lockdown, from 2020 through much of 2021. As I worked, another safely solitary project glommed on to the first; I began chronicling what I was doing and what I was thinking. I was imagining those prenatal twins, gestating in New York City, while I was cutting out letters and troubleshooting sewing machine snafus in my Cleveland bedroom, and wrote them an adult book for the future, when they’ve fully mastered the alphabet.
The result, A Grandmother’s ABC, should be appearing in a few months. It’s in the last stages of preparation. This post is a heads-up. I’ll be sharing more about it in the weeks ahead.
Everybody knows that medical terms, including names for parts of the body, are frequently borrowed from ancient Greek and Latin. Often, the terms derive from what the body part looks like. The tibia, or shin bone, comes from the Latin word for “flute,” for example.
The hippocampus, tucked into the middle of your brain, helps move short-term memories to long-term storage and aids in controlling emotion. In 1587, when Giulio Cesare Aranzi discovered and named this little item, he had no idea of its purpose and so named it based on its shape.
The hippocampus looks like a seahorse. (Here’s a great photograph to illustrate.) Hippo, as you might know, was a Greek horse. (Hippopotamuses are water horses.) The –campus ending meant “sea monster.” The Romans borrowed this word from the Greeks, which gave it the Latinate –us ending and plural (hippocampi).
Maybe you think seahorses are too cute for the “monster” moniker. I’ve always found them to be creepy, as well as cute.
As I’ve said before, sometimes people ask me how I choose what I’m reading. The easiest answer is to mention my book groups, which choose about eighteen titles a year for me. (One group meets every month, and one every other month.)
I’ve now read Ann Patchett’s essay collection These Precious Days three times. One book group chose it a few months ago. The other selected it for this month, and I finished rereading today. The first time was when it came out in 2021, because I read everything Ann Patchett produces as soon as I can. It’s a testament to her writing that These Precious Days gets better with each rereading.
My “It’s a testament” sentence above reminds me of “To the Doghouse,” an essay concerning Ann’s love for Snoopy and “Peanuts.” Once, she writes, a “smart, zealous, young copy editor” at the Atlantic told Ann to cut out the “it” at the beginning of a sentence, which Ann defines as a “syntactic expletive that has no meaning.” The “it” is a place filler, in other words.
Ann wonders if the editor would have counseled Dickens to find another opening sentence for A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). The editor concedes that he would. And, she asks, would Snoopy have been allowed to write, “It was a dark and stormy night”?
“Not if he was writing for the Atlantic,” the young man replies.
The book is full of wisdom and grief and insight, but is also replete with amusing and witty passages like this.
After finishing These Precious Days, I stopped at the library to collect the books I have requested, some of which, I should say, I might not finish reading. I came home with a stack of five, recalling, as I always do, leaving the North Canton library as a kid with my sister and mom, happily weighed down with books.
Here’s how I chose the titles. Ann Patchett writes a whole essay recommending Kate DiCamillo, a children’s writer. I have heretofore read only Because of Winn-Dixie. Now I have Raymie Nightingale and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to look forward to.
I believe a YouTuber–either the Minimal Mom or Joshua Becker–recommended The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma, a self-helpy kind of book that may or may not help my self develop the habit of rising earlier in the morning.
Reader and friend Fran suggested I read Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller, an NPR science reporter. This memoir, subtitled A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, sounds like it’s in my, ahem, wheelhouse.
The last volume is called Shortcomings, a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. I don’t read graphic novels as a rule. As I checked this book out, I struggled to remember why I had reserved it. I often have this problem, especially if I’ve waited a long time for the book to arrive at my neighborhood branch.
With a little online sleuthing at home, I figured it out. I recently saw a Newshour interview with Randall Park (to Northeast Ohioans, by the way, the name of a very large, now defunct shopping mall), who starred in the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and, by the way, had a brief but funny role on The Office as a temporary replacement for Jim. Park has now directed the film Shortcomings, based on the graphic novel. That PBS interview inspired me to request the book.
Now I have five books to read, to add to those already waiting for me. Just as when I was a child, I sat in the library parking lot for a while, opening each book to look at the authors’ pictures and read the opening paragraphs.
We took a couple of weeks hiatus because our website was down. My friend Pete resuscitated us by updating some things (and I played hooky for a couple of extra days), and now we’re back and pretending it’s Wednesday, the day we talk about words and etymologies. (Thanks, Pete.)
The word bailiwick raised some questions in a recent conversation. When I wanted to verify the definitions of lunar eclipse and solar eclipse, Jewel, my beloved friend and esteemed editor, informed me that science was not her bailiwick. Perhaps it was in her wheelhouse, I suggested. When I asked what a bailiwick was, anyway, Jewel quipped that it must be a wheelhouse. Sadly for me, eclipses were in neither her bailiwick nor her wheelhouse. Lucky for me, the Lissemores came to the rescue, science being in their wheelhouse.
In my book about Father Dan Begin, I asserted that writing an entire book was not in his wheelhouse, an expression which provoked opposite reactions. One reader liked the expression but had never heard it before. Another reader recommended cutting it because it’s a cliché. What was a writer to do? Unfamiliar or too familiar?
Cliché or not, wheelhouse is one of those metaphors that most of us use without thinking. A wheelhouse is not a home for wheels, but denotes the part of a boat that shelters the person at the wheel. Pilothouse is another word for this space. The pilot, or steerer, is not concerned with the rigging and the stern and the gunwale. They are not in his wheelhouse. The wheelhouse is his or her bailiwick, in other words.
Bailiwick is a bailiff’s special domain. Wic-, an Anglo-Saxon suffix, means “village.” A bailiwick is the geographical area where a bailiff–an employee of a British sheriff–can make arrests and generally throw his or her weight around. Today’s court bailiffs have a smaller sphere of influence and may not even be aware that they have a bailiwick.
I would have surmised that bailiff derives from Anglo-Saxon, but I would have been mistaken. In Latin, a baiulus is a porter, and the verb baiulo means to carry a burden. A British bailiff’s job was frequently to deliver writs and summons, carrying those documentary burdens to and fro within his bailiwick.
Both wheelhouse and bailiwick describe your sphere, your area of expertise, what we might today commonly term your “comfort zone.” Comment below: What is yours? And which term do you prefer?
