Wordcatcher (20 page)

A sudden shining forth, a blazing insight.
This luminous word comes to us like light from a distant star. The Greeks saw the light first, as
epiphaneia
, a manifestation, striking appearance, from
epiphanies,
manifestation, and the earlier
epiphainein
, to display, from
epi
- on, to, and
phainein,
to show. This was the Greek word the New Testament used to express the advent or manifestation of Christ, and later used as the name of the Festival of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles,
Epiphany
, celebrated on January 6. By the 17th century it was used to describe the appearances
of other divine beings. Its current literary sense was established by Thomas De Quincey in 1822, and James Joyce in his famous short story “The Dead.” Joyce uses it doubly, setting the action in Dublin on January 6, the
Epiphany
, but also figuratively to suggest the sudden blaze of painful light and truth about the marriage of his two main characters. A modern, mythic example of an epiphany took place thousands of miles above the earth, as described by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “On the return trip home, gazing though 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious. My view of the planet was a glimpse of divinity.” Companion words include
phantom
, a vision, specter, or apparition;
pharos
, lighthouse; and
fantastic
, a display of the incredible. And then, whoops, there is the near
epiphany
sometimes called
presque vu
, French for “nearly seen,” a kind of epiphany-manqué, or frustrated light.

Hope
. But not just any pie-in-the-sky wish fulfillment. As the beloved French Provençal writer Jean Giono used it, there is a quality of hope that keeps the heart kindled and the soul intact, despite the degradations of life. Giono’s translator, Norma Goodrich, wrote that
hope
pervaded his novels and short stories, reflecting his own boundless but sober confidence in the future. Furthermore, she adds,
his use is more closely aligned with the feminine noun
espérance
, “designating the permanent state or condition of living one’s life in hopeful tranquility,” than the masculine noun for hope,
espoir
. Giono’s brand of hope sprang, she wrote, from literature and poetry. Compare the Portuguese
esperança
, and Spanish
esperanza
, and the related
aspiration
. Thus Giono’s careful, life-affirming use of
espérance
, stands in dramatic contrast to the often effete use of “hope,” what the 16th-century writer Robert of Gloucester called “
overhope
,” a much-needed word to combat the fatuous faith that the future will turn itself around without our own avid participation. The legendary Knoxville songwriter, playwright, and poet R. B. Morris cites a memorable use of the word from the mountains overlooking his hometown. “Up on the mountain, the word
hope
is used as the past tense of ‘help.’ It’s a fairly common phrase usage in the mountains, like ‘He
hope
me good’ as in ‘he helped me out.’ I’ve always liked the way it seemed to imply that to help someone was to give them
hope
.”

A brilliant comeback, witty response, quick rejoinder—that comes to mind too late.
Coined by the French philosopher Denis Diderot as he walked downstairs after a party at the home of Joseph Necker, wishing he had been wittier during dinner. Hence, “the spirit of the staircase.” A figurative expression, it refers to that universal feeling of wishing we’d had the
esprit
, the spirit, the inspiration, the
wit
to say just the right thing,
un bon mot
, a few moments before, at the party or in the business meeting. But words that lodged in your throat don’t come up until you’re on the way home, or as you’re on the staircase, leaving the room. The redoubtable
Oxford Book of Quotations
renders it as “An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room.” Companion words include the German
Treppenwitz
and Yiddish
Treppverter
, from
treppe
, steps, and
verter
, words, those you finally think of on the way down the steps and out of each other’s lives, and their distant cousin, the Spanish
ocurrencia
, a sudden, bright idea or witty remark, whether on the staircase or in the subway. Then there is
O’Hara’s Disease
, the great S. J. Perelman’s term for “the ability to remember all the cunning things I did last night.” Unfortunately, no one knows which O’Hara he is referring to. Once in a while someone tries to conjure up an English equivalent for these foreign expressions; sometimes they’re embraced, sometimes not. The American humorist Gelett Burgess, best known for coining the word
blurb
, also thought up
tintiddle
, defined as “a witty retort, thought of too late.” Not too late, though, if a few kind-hearted readers begin to use it.

A Portuguese song of sadness and longing
. One of two must-translate
untranslatable
Portuguese words (see also:
saudade
), the better to understand the complexities of human longing. When I lived in a 200-year-old stone house in Penedo, on the west coast of Portugal, in the early 1990s, a local Portuguese friend, Fernando, told me that the only way to understand the national soul was to know the almost excruciatingly nostalgic feeling of
yearning
for something once loved but now irretrievably lost. He described it as “the
melancholy
that lurks behind every happiness.” As may be expected,
fado
issues forth from Latin
fatum
, fate, on the collective as well as individual level. All extraordinary words fill a void, and
fado
is one such word, expressing the deep sorrow of Portugal’s lost national destiny after the Age of Discovery. This is reflected in mournful songs about sailors lost at sea, somber
dances about lovers wrenched apart, and lugubrious poetry about brave explorers, all performed by
fadistas
who infused their work with
saudade
. In Stephen Olsson’s documentary
Sound of the Soul
, a
fado
singer, Katia, explains, “
Fado
is the most pure expression of the Portuguese soul. And our soul, our
saudade
, stays in our soul, in our way of living all the time. And the faith is very strong. The faith that everything will be okay just believing in something bigger.” And she sings mournfully: “Forget the time and the pain, / and think only of our love / Come now, give me your hand, / Climb the mountain with me / Because when we love someone / No one can silence the heart / Climb the mountain with me / Because when we love someone / No one can silence the heart.”

A word in one language that looks similar to a word in your own—but isn’t
. False friends (
faux amis
) are pairs of words in two different languages that seem to be genuinely similar (“to agree or be friendly”) but are actually “strangers” because they are so different. The French
préservatif
sounds and looks like the English
preservative
, a chemical added to cereal to give it longer shelf life. In fact, it is their word for “condom.” The English
ale
in Finnish means “sale.” A
magazine
in English is a publication; but
magazin
in Russian is a shop.
Gorgon
is not the root word for
gorgonzola
, the legendary blue-veined cheese from the ancient town of
Gorgonzola, near Milan, Italy, but a stone-souled, snake-haired Greek goddess. The graphic
cocksure
isn’t a bawdy term for an overly confidant Lothario, but an allusion to, as Brewer describes it, “the cock of a firelock, much more sure to fire than a match.” Similarly, the old English word
undergrope
isn’t as naughty or improper as it first appears. Its proper meaning is “to conceive or understand.” A
urinator
is not a “urinal,” but “a diver, one who searches under water, according to Dr. Johnson.
Fakir
and
faker
are homonyms but not synonyms; the first is a member of a religious order of mendicants, and the second is a person who
dupes
others. And
teetotaler
doesn’t mean “totally tea” for those who’ve “given up the drink,” but has a stranger derivation in the stammer of a Lancashire temperance activist in 1830 who demanded “
t-t-t-total
abstinence.”