Planting trees, word by word
“Here’s what you can do: give me 50 words I can learn, one a day, when I’m planting.”
The request came from my son, just prior to departing for northwestern Alberta to plant trees this summer. I tried to help with the kit — boots, gloves, bug hats, sleeping bag — but was quickly rebuffed and put to my true task: “Give me some words …!” They began to flood in, words that a 22-year-old university student could literally implant into his head, one a day as he rammed seedlings into the ground, over a roughly 50day work cycle
Axiomatic … Antebellum … Balkanize … Ersatz … Maladroit … Unctuous …
I didn’t choose the lexicon; it offered itself. And suddenly it was popping up all around me: there was juggernaut in a news headline and in the sports pages, “The Jays committed an egregious error in the ninth!” a great opening to explain the connection to gregarious (the Latin root is gregis (flock or herd). Egregious stands out from the herd; gregarious seeks it.
Nostalgia came in on the flood, because words like martinet and boulevardier and risible and anodyne all came with memories attached, the latter being the name of the company of a film producer I once met. “Oh, I love writers!” she gushed. “They always know what anodyne means!” Well, I didn’t (“having the power to allay pain; soothing”) and I probably haven’t used it since.
And I recalled a key lesson. I was maybe 11 years old. I was hanging out with four or five of my pals and the tone, rare for boys that age, seemed quiet and reverential. I piped up: “Here we are, all sitting in holy matrimony!” What can I say? It seemed to fit. When the presiding mom corrected me, I turned a deep red and vowed to never use a six-dollar word without know its meaning, ever again.
Pulchritude … Platitude … Pedantic … Polemicist … Prescient … Preternatural … Perquisite …
It’s natural the biggies crowd a university list. That’s where we learn them, to be sharpened like arrows and stuffed in a quiver, ready to be loosed into the ribs of academic adversaries.
Perhaps with age we relearn the penetrating power, like crossbow bolts, of the short and concise: Crux … Cabal … Trite … Nettle (as a verb) … Vex/Vexing/Vexatious … and my favourite shortie, Jade, whose four little letters convey so much – a green gemstone; the colour of jade (jade green); an old, worthless or unmanageable horse; a disreputable, ill-tempered or perverse woman … to make weary from hard work or overuse, which makes one jaded.
With so many words, the meanings have shifted. Or, perhaps, I never knew them completely.
Concatenation and bailiwick and alacrity are all richer in meaning than I recalled. And asinine means stupid of course, but I didn’t realize it pertains directly to or like an ass, because donkeys were traditionally considered stupid animals, which they certainly are not.
From German we get many of the heavies: zeitgeist, which I reduced to “the buzz; the zone” after including the formal meaning; Weltanschauung (literally “world view”); doppelgänger (“double walker”); and caterwauling, which is not just the wailing of cats, but the howl of cats in rut. These are best delivered in full beard, gutturally, with a pensive scratch of the chin.
Definitions stick when cemented with a story and it was fun to relate that Byzantine derives from the city now called Istanbul, that labyrinthine came from the maze used to confine the Minotaur, and that Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian arose from the travels of a certain Gulliver.
Bacchanalian tells its own tale and quixotic has always been a favourite of mine (dreamy, impractical) even though few of us have read more than a snippet of Don Quixote, including me.
All good stuff to know. For good measure, I advised learning the distinction between Virtual and Veritable … Flout and Flaunt … Averse and Adverse … Flounder and Founder … Incredible and Incredulous …
But I drew the line at venting (to him, not you!) pet peeves, words that have been mangled in use, often, it seems, because of their suggestive sound. Hence “penultimate” fills the room as somehow “more than ultimate,” which is impossible, yet means “next to last.”
“Fulsome” sounds like “full of” or “effusive,” not “distastefully excessive in an oily or insincere way.”
And to say “the situation of the refugees is fraught” is dead wrong. Fraught with what? It means “filled; laden” and needs to be filled or laden with something.
In the end, the list exceeded 50, because I just couldn’t exclude: Cacophony … Chimerical … Disingenuous … Erudite … Immutable ... Lugubrious … Truculent … Avuncular … Avarice … Macabre … Supercilious … Antediluvian … Acolyte … Cerebral … Hyperbole … Ingenue … Malapropism … Non Sequitur … Nugatory … Thespian … Visceral …
Fill that quiver, young man. More spillovers are already piling up: Elixir … Pithy … Bowdlerize … Perspicacity … so I’m hoping next summer’s job begs for a list as well. It would be, you know, __________.